The music service with more paid subscribers than any other is taking direct aim at Pandora and other custom music stream providers.
Today satellite broadcaster SiriusXM launched MySXM which, with some help from The Echo Nest, allows users to customize the mix of 50+ SiriusXM music channels.
The promise and potential of on demand music video gave birth to VEVO. Now, just weeks after launching it's first linear MTV-like online channel, VEVO.tv , the company is also going old school and working to distribute VEVO.tv via cable and sattelite. CEO Rio Caraeff, says the company also hopes to add more global markets with regional and language-specific programming.
Though research studies often conflict, recent research related to music listening habits make it clear that traditional radio, including traditional radio being streamed on the web, remains a dominant source of streaming music and music discovery. Yet pure play internet radio's audience is growing and younger people are gradually shifting away from traditional AM/FM radio to listening to such services even in autos. Aggregated data points indicate that musicians should continue to seek traditional radio play while exploring newer internet-based services.
Starting last June, Big Machine (Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw and others) and several other large independent labels struck precedent-setting deals with Clear Channel that bypass ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and SoundExchange. In exchange for smaller payments on digital play now, for the first time ever, these labels and their artists are directly participating in terrestrial radio revenue.
Though seldom discussed on most music industry blogs, college radio is an important part of the landscape for indie music acts. Though some stations are seeing hard times, others are thriving and music is often a key element in their success. Here are three stations that have made music news in 2013.
A recent feature in The Wall Street Journal describes the "Improbable Rise of NPR Music." For those of us who are long-time NPR listeners and, increasingly, web followers, the fact that NPR is a great place to discover music seems like common knowledge.
But if one thinks of NPR as primarily a source of sober news coverage and literary human interest features periodically enlivened by the humor of Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris, the fact that they have become a powerhouse for music discovery might seem a bit improbable.
Founded after experiencing of trying to book a trip from the UK to Coechella in 2011, festival booking platform Festicket has just raised $680,000 in new funding. Investors include France's Kima Ventures,
Jacques-Antoine Granjon of vente-privee.com, the UK's #1 Seed and
Playfair Capital, and NYC VC Windcrest Partners.
LiveMusicStage,
a new online platform for live-streamed concerts, is launching the Austin
Tech Talk Streaming Channel at SXSW Music. Music meets tech in live online broadcasts on Monday and Tuesday, March 11 and 12, just as the SXSW Interactive conference segues into
the Music conference. Interviews
will include execs from Spotify, Epitaph Records, CD Baby, GMR, TAG
Strategic, Masur Law, Tommy Boy Records and 7digital.
The Robinson-Patman Act was a law passed in 1936 in order to strengthen anti-trust law. It forbids one entity from offering the same good or service to two different competitors for different prices, thus allowing one competitor to maintain a decided advantage in the marketplace. It provides exemptions, for instance, one for qualitative differences (Boone's Farm and Dom Perignon are both alcoholic beverages, but no one would argue that they should be sold for the same price) or for things like volume discounts, happy hours, etc.
Radio giant Clear Channel today announced a direct deal with independent label, distributor and marketer Entertainment One Music to share revenue from digital and terrestrial
radio. eOne's music library includes more than 45,000 tracks from DJ Drama, Faith Evans, Pop Evil, Jake Miller, Black Label
Society, Joe Budden and others.
Depending on your point of view, its either another blow to collective digital bargaining and collection, or an innovative way to help internet radio become sustainable.
Clear Channel has announced another direct licensing deal, this time with dance music label Robbins Entertainment. Founded by veteran urban record exec Cory Robbins, company's artists included Afrojack, D.H.T., Cascada¹s and DJ Sammy.
MTV has unveiled a new list that
they call simply “MTV Artist to Watch”, a new artist / music discovery
initiative and campaign that spans across all of MTV’s television channels and web
presences. To kick off the campaign, MTV has revealed its selections for the 13
artists to watch in 2013, as well as a concert in New York. Every two weeks,
MTV will select and then feature a new “Artist to Watch” that spans multiple
genres including pop, EDM, hip hop and rock.
Media ratings and research firm Nielson is buying competitor Arbitron for $1.6 billion. Regulators will certainly look closely at the deal, which combines the dominate ratings resource in TV (Nielson) with radio's top ratings provider (Arbitron).
The 12-12-12 Concert, an effort aid those affected by Hurricane Sandy held on Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at Madison Square Garden was the most widely distributed live musical event in history, accessible to nearly two billion people worldwide on television, radio and the Internet. In the U.S., that translated to 19.3 million TV viewers. The Nielson stats do no include internet views.
CBS paid a whopping $270 million for Last.fm in 2007. Since then, the media giant has failed to monetize the music service and seen competitors ranging from Pandora to Spotify grab the spotlight. For months, rumors have pointed to growing disillusionment within CBS. Now come the first signs of change, according to the official statement, "in response to various factors that affect our business differently in parts of the world". Key changes as of January 15, 2013 include:
Since late 2011, Clear Channel Communications has been quietly shedding radio staff from stations around the country, with the latest round of layoffs seeing hundreds of CCE employees cut on Dec. 6th.
Guest post by Liv Buli and Victor Hu for sidewinder.fm, a music and tech think tank. Buli and Hu work for Next Big Sound, a music analytics company.
Twenty years ago, as a music fan, you would hear a song you enjoyed on the radio, head to the record store to buy the album and wait until the band came to town to attend a concert. The music industry was based on a straightforward consumption model.
The first hearings on the controversial Internet Radio Fairness Act will be broadcast live today at 11:30 AM ET. Witnesses include producer Jimmy Jam, former eMusic CEO David Pakman, and representatives of Pandora, SoundExchange and the broadcast industry.
(UPDATE 3) With Congressional hearings set for Wed. 11/28, David Macias, president of Nashville based label services company Thirty Tigers, shares his views on The Internet Radio Fairness Act.
Somewhere up in heaven, Rube Goldberg is looking down,
thrilled with the method by which owners of recording and publishing copyrights
are paid for their use in the US (for those of you in the UK that want to follow
along, substitute Heath Robinson for Rube Goldberg). If a song is played on
terrestrial radio for a recording that I own, that radio station pays nothing
for its use, so the percentage of revenues terrestrial radio pays for the use
of that recording is, let’s say it together, ZERO. Now let us look at what
Pandora pays for the use of recordings. It’s estimated that they paid $136M [1] to Sound
Exchange for the use of recordings on gross revenues of $274m. As a percentage
of revenues, Pandora is paying 50 PERCENT.
Last night, the 40th Annual American Music Awards hosted by Ryan Seacrest were held at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. While there were few surprises among the winners of these pop and mainstream music awards - Justin Bieber as Artist Of The Year says it all - there was a noticeable shift towards a younger generation of hit makers.
Guest post by Joey Flores
(@earbits) of sidewinder.fm, a music and tech think tank. Flores is co-founder
and CEO of Earbits, an online music streaming service.
If you listen to Pandora, you may have started hearing commercials asking you to support the Internet Radio Fairness Act. It’s legislation proposed to
reduce Internet radio royalties to the level of other digital formats, like satellite
radio. Over the coming months you’ll hear others “advocating for artists” by keeping the rates high. As a strong advocate for artists, let me tell you why
maintaining the current rates is the worst thing that could happen to artists, consumers, and the future of music.
Hypebot’s Hisham Dahud is currently on
tour with CNTRL: Beyond EDM(on behalf of his digital marketing company Fame House), a 17-city college tour across North America educating
students about the origins and future of electronic music, with lectures and shows
at each city featuring some of the genre’s pioneers including Richie Hawtin,
Ean Golden, Paco Osuna, Loco Dice and more. These are his stories from behind
the scenes.
The Fan Guru is a recently launched startup designed to help musicians get on the radio. What they're basically doing is using ad buys to feature music in a form that fits the station's programming rather than sounding like an ad. It's an interesting approach and they're seeking artists to sponsor with applications due by November 10th.
Earlier this year Zoe Keating raised awareness of the peculiar reporting processes of ASCAP for performance royalties in live settings. Now TuneSat, a music detection tech company, is doing the same thing for television reporting. Claiming that a majority of uses of music on tv are not reported to Performing Rights Organizations and that those that are still rely on manual processes, TuneSat makes a strong case for artists investigating their services.
