Snippit is a media sharing and social networking app for iOS that is worth considering for its integration of music. Users pair short clips from songs, up to 10 seconds long, with individual photos that are then displayed in a public stream. Links to iTunes for track sales are included. I spoke earlier this week with co-founders Joe Grano and Sam Jurist about Snippit and how it might help musicians.
Some aspects of the YouTube ecosystem are difficult to assess such as the power of fanbases built entirely online. One indicator of the strength of YouTube-grown audiences is attendance at events featuring YouTube stars, up-and-comers and their fans. Playlist Live is one such event, with musicians included, that doesn't seem to get a lot of coverage beyond YouTube but has a full weekend schedule and a healthy list of sponsors. Beyond its health as an individual business, Playlist Live is a reminder that if something's working online it may well have offline potential.
The music business is about to get its own alternative currency, called Songcoin.
The alternative currency phenomenon is real, as weird as that might feel to those of us who would never consider shelling out cash for points to buy special pixels for that Farmville game we never really got around to playing. Bitcoin, despite the issues mentioned below, shows that alternative currencies can become quite real to certain people, which can then make them real enough in general, causing them to take on a value of their own outside the traditional financial system.
A lot has been written over the last few days since Zoe Keating released the latest in her series of personal digital music revenue reports which includes data from iTunes, Bandcamp, Amazon (physical and mp3), MediaNet, Rhapsody, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and SoundExchange. A new chart Statista produced chart offers an overview.
Brian Shafton, owner of RBC Records, has been deeply involved with both hip hop artist and label marketing and distribution. Both running a label and supporting artist-owned indie labels gives Shafton a full view of not only what it takes to break an artist but to maintain a career. In a recent interview, Shafton repeatedly noted the importance of social media to these acts.
Indie dance powerhouse Ministry of Sounds and Spotify have reached an out of court settlement. The label had sued Spotify claiming that it had refused to delete user created playlists that mirrored compilations Ministry had created for sale. A short joint statement issued today says:
The pace of information these days is astounding, as has been reported millions of times today by people all over the planet. It’s not easy to keep up.
The aptly named Pause magazine, released today for iPad, aims to take stock, four times per year, of the most important developments in music for that quarter (the premiere issue is “best of 2013).
From Paul Lamere, Director of Developer Platform at The Echo Nest.
The Echo Nest director of developer platform Paul Lamere has determined the recording artist that is most "distinctive" to music fans in any state - that is to say, their favorite artists, relative to the people in other states - and presented his findings in the map below.
Let's be honest, there are a literally thousands of ways to promote your music these days. Whether it's building a Twitter following, a Facebook dynasty, linking in with LinkedIn, air time on Pandora, Bandzoogle, Stereoposter, StoryAmp - the possibilites for self-promotion are endless. New platforms are arising constantly and can lead to great press for you and your music when you know how to use them, and Google Adwords is no exception.
None of them were as pretty or as functional as MacPaw Listen (free, iOS), which lets you play any of the music in your local or iCloud library without touching a single button, or looking at a single list. Albums and playlists are represented as blobs that you can swipe through with ease.
Avicii's "Wake Me Up" has become the most streamed track ever on Spotify with more than 200 million plays, passing "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons' 183 million streams. The song has been streamed on Spotify an average 850,000 times per day since its release.
Who am I kidding? I don't have a Google+ game to up. I'm just trying to maintain enough of a presence to reap some SEO benefits from Google Search. But others seem to be diving in and even apparently having good experiences. Maybe if you knew a few of the 15 "awesome Google+ tricks" Melanie Pinola recently shared you'd be leaving me in the dust too. Here are 5 of them to help up your Google+ game.
Kevin Arnold, founder of IODA Music and the Noise Pop Festival, unveiled a new service called OpenAura on Wednesday designed to give artists more control over how they appear online, while offering them a new way to make money.
How much money remains to be seen — but what is clear already is that OpenAura has a different vision for how to provide images to music services from anything we’ve seen.
David Lowery of The Trichordist has released his latest Music Streaming Price Index which compares the "per stream" and "per song download " rates paid by Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, Deezer and many other music services. It's enlightening and important data from what Lowery calls "the world of micro-decimal math."
This post explains how to automate your merchandise sales on Spotify and Beats Music and teaches how to do it in little to no time with little to no cost.
3 Tools You’ll Need to Automate your Merchandising on Spotify and Beats Music:
News of the outrageously expensive acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook has alerted the world to the fact that messenging is big business. One of the more unique revenue streams in messenging involves stickers, small graphic images that can be attached to a message or are sometimes sent as a message, which can be sold to users or distributed for free during marketing campaigns. Now Line is opening a sticker marketplace where artists can upload and sell stickers offering a possible marketing opportunity for musicians.
Zoë Keating recently released her full 2013 digital music revenue report that has become a trademark educational device and marketing tool. She breaks down sales and streaming revenue giving both numbers of downloads/streams and revenue per channel. YouTube is listed with almost 2 million streams and around $1248 in revenue. That detail stuck out for some and it's actually an indicator of one place where Keating may be missing out on revenue.
The most viral tracks on Spotify based on the number of people who shared it divided by the number who listened to it from 2/17-23 via Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Spotify.
UNITED STATES
1. The Chainsmokers, "#Selfie" (Dim Mak Inc.)
2. My Chemical Romance, "Fake Your Death" (Reprise Records)
3. Tegan and Sara, "Everything Is AWESOME!!! (feat. The Lonely Island)" (WaterTower Music)
Sometimes the most important thing we can do as professionals is take it back to the basics. When it comes to networking, personalized communication gets more miles than automated Twitter feeds. Your fans want to hear from YOU. James Hill brings us seven ways to help build bridges between you and your fans on MusicThinkTank.com.
As reported by The Verge, the new Pacemaker app for iPad released on Monday presents a beautiful interface for DJing tracks from Spotify, with “the ability to play two Spotify songs simultaneously for the first time.”
Beats Music has hired former Gang Of Four Bassist Dave Allen as its first Director Artist & Music Industry Advocacy. No stranger to music tech, Allen held positions in the early days of eMusic and at Intel; and has become a prolific industry pundit. He describes his new roll as Beat Music's ambassador, "reaching out to artists and the recorded music industry to find common ground and debate real issues and real problems, problems that can hopefully be solved without resorting to rhetoric that inflames rather than assuages doubts."
Gigmit is a fairly new gig booking platform based in Berlin but serving a wider region. They're bringing together promoters for local venues with artists and booking agencies who wish to get shows. But Gigmit offers more than just support connecting two parties, it's also a platform to manage one's related business with some distinctive features such as digital contracts.
Recent Comments