Liv Buli’s Weekend Reading List: Twitter, SoundCloud, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Napster???? Have A Party.
As she does (almost) every Friday, Liv Buli, the Data Journalist for Pandora's Next Big Sound shares what she's paying attention to, as she parsed data while also taking the cultural temperature. Liv often sees what matters before the rest of us; and shares it on Hypebot .
Anyone who owns LinkedIn stock was definitely doing this on Monday.
Seriously though, talk about an eventful week in music and tech. I feel like I have whiplash from reading my Twitter feed.
Everybody’s jaw dropped Monday morning when news hit that Microsoft would be picking up LinkedIn for a smooth $24bn (no big deal hah). Jokes about the site slowing down as it adopted Microsoft’s tech stack swiftly ensued, and anyone who owned LinkedIn stock saw it pretty much double in value. Boom. Way to start the week.
Then the next day I am aimlessly scrolling through my feed again, when I read that TWITTER INVESTED $70m IN SOUNDCLOUD WHAH? What the hell is going on?
And then Rhapsody was like — “we have news too!!”–and announced that they’d be rebranding as Napster now. Aw. Cute.
I am still not 100% clear on exactly what the Open Music Initiative will look like (Honestly, I don’t know if anybody is), but this collaborative approach to tackling rights issues has certainly piqued my interest.
So excited to say that Glenn Peoples has published his first (awesome) data journalism piece since joining the team at Pandora, comparing how country artists fare on Pandora versus terrestrial. TLDR? Better.
Spotify’s new playlist extender suggests tracks based on the tracks you are already adding to your playlist (or even just the title if you haven’t gotten that far yet).
And while I realize that my obsession with the Kardashian family is probably not shared by each and every one of you, this feature on Kim from Caity Weaver at GQ is a work of art.
If I were part of Kaleo’s team (Icelandic rock band. Second album dropped this week. It’s dope. Listen to it.), I’d be pretty happy about my stats over the past year.
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It’s Friday guys, so I know you have 15 minutes to devote to watching RHCP and James Corden carpool and karaoke. Total water cooler must.
That’s it for this week’s round up. The weather in Chicago looks like it is going to be fabulous (gawd I love summer), I hope that’s true wherever you are too!
Buli out.
