Urturn provides creative templates or "Expressions" for social media that shift the typical post and like exchange to an encouragement to take "your turn" and express yourself by combining audio and video elements in a shareable, postable form. It's been used for a number of music marketing campaigns since they started out in late 2011. Today they have two big announcements, the raising of a funding round of $13.4 million and the launch of their first mobile app.
Just a month after launch, Twitter's entry into the music space appears to have fallen flat. As if today, the app languishes as the 113th most popular free iOS music app. To provide perspective as to how poorly that means #Music is doing, several years after launch Spotify and Pandora remain #1 and #2; and something called Sing! Karaoke is the 9th most popular free music apps.
Pandora today announced the launch of Pandora Premieres, free stations that stream full upcoming album releases up to a week prior to going on sale. Pandora Premieres are updated weekly and will feature previews from both established and emerging artists across multiple genres.
As of this morning, only two albums were featured:
Launching today, concert recording and sales app Lively offers a simple way to record and sell live recordings immediately after the show. Available for Android and iOS, Lively is led by startup veteran Dean Graziano.
Recently, CNET reported on an extension for Google’s Chrome web browser that let people scrape songs off of Spotify’s web player, for free, and save the music as MP3 files. This was obviously fairly problematic and possibly illegal, as far as browser extensions go, so Google hastily deleted the app from its Chrome app store in short order, and then Spotify closed the loophole.
I’ve always been skeptical of how music startups view music listeners. There have been many times where I’ve read a press release or heard an elevator pitch and narrowed my eyes. The suspension of reality can be astounding at times. Music startups seem to think that people have an infinite capacity to discover music and spread their love for artists.
This is the preface for Divergent Streams, a collection of essays edited by Kyle Bylin (@sidewinderfm) and written by influential executives, startup founders, and thinkers in the music industry. Download a free copy of the e-book here.
I wanted something to read. Something that challenged me. Something that engaged me. Something that forced me to sit down and consider the writer’s
perspective. What I found instead were news stories about trivial developments, blog posts with big headlines but small insights, and numbered lists
lacking intellectual substance.
Recording music was a stupid idea. I sometimes daydream about what would need to happen in order for all recorded music playback devices to all stop functioning at once. And then, if people wanted to hear music, someone would have to actually play it.
Royalty payouts and the burden they impose have always been a strongly debated issue when it comes to Pandora. The company has pursued numerous routes to lower the cost of music streaming from listening caps to government lobbying — some of which have been more successful than others. In this interview panel on Pandora, four influential executives in the music and tech industry weigh in on whether they think Pandora can find a sustainable, profitable business model.
SoundCloud has hired Dan Gerber, previously the National
Director of Strategic Partnerships at Pandora, to head brand revenues. Gerber will start in June, and SoundCloud
will open it's first ever New York City office later this summer.
I've never taken a strong interest in Pandora’s performance on the stock market, because I mainly write about music products and behavioral trends. What I've noticed, though, is how the company's IPO changed how media outlets talk about digital music services. Rather than talk about the product features or listener trends, people often talk solely about the viability of the business model and debate whether the company can survive in an increasingly competitive landscape. The stock market appears to dislike any moment that a new music service debuts, because it raises doubt that Pandora can succeed. Once news that Twitter planned to enter the digital music sector broke, shares took a plunge.
Soundrop, a Spotify app that shares a big investor with Spotify, says it alone has the ability to scale listening rooms up so that thousands of people can listen to the same song together at the same time, using a secret sauce called Erlang — a hyper-efficient coding language developed by Ericsson for use on big telecom infrastructures (updated).
On Monday, the U.S. Senate approved new taxes on digital and physical goods sold on the internet, including apps and digital music. This probably comes too late to save your local record dealer, but it probably wouldn’t have saved him or her anyway. Still, when more of the economy is online these days, a tax of some kind makes sense. Why should Other Music pay a tax on vinyl, when massive public companies like Amazon do not?
By Brandon Chiat, co-founder, Marquee a live music discovery and rewards application.
There’s a new buzzword being thrown around by marketing teams. SoLoMo, which stands for Social-Local-Mobile, refers to the integration of social, location-based, and mobile marketing tools into new customer acquisition
platforms.
We didn’t think Tokyo could seem any more dynamic or exciting, but that’s what Japanese creator Tsubasa Oyagi sought to do with his recently-released interactive web app, Tokyo City Symphony. Combining 3D projection mapping with music generation, this visually stunning symphonic experience captures the innovative spirit of the city.
(UPDATED) Now that a myriad of services deliver 10-15 million songs to our pockets, simple and personalized music discovery has become the music tech's holy grail. To add to their discovery efforts, Spotify has acquired Tunigo, a music discovery app that scours Spotify's library and playlists; adding news, new releases, and an advanced music player.
Comedian Louis CK made a great point that’s worth revisiting (transcript), even if you’ve seen it before: that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” The disruptivefunnyman was referring to the way we complain about the world we live in, even as we enjoy unprecedented abilities and conveniences thanks to the preposterous degree of technological advancement over the past few decades.
Vine, the 6 second, string 'em together, looping video app for iOS made popular via Twitter's acquisition (which led to lots of media attention), has become an established media tool. This may pass but, for the moment, it's still fresh enough to be usable for music marketing and related creative activities. What you can accomplish with Vine may boil down to 3 things.
Microsoft’s Kinect proved that real people are actually interested in moving their bodies to motion-control stuff on a screen. Leap Motion, whose $70 motion detector is decoupled from a gaming console, could end up having a wider impact. It’s not just for gamers, and desktop and laptop manufacturers are reportedly looking at integrating Leap into their upcoming products.
When the Echo Nest added $17.3 million in funding last year, they promised aggressive international expansion. This week the music
intelligence provider announced three new European partnerships: WiMP, Viamo and Xite.
Are you paying attention to how your Facebook page and posts look on the small screen? If, not, stop reading this and pick up your smartphone, because Facebook's report to Wall Street yesterday showed more clearly than ever that mobile is crucial. According to Statista, more than two thirds of its 1.1 billion users
regularly access the social network on smartphones or tablets and almost a
fifth of Facebook's active users do so exclusively.
At this past weekend’s TVnext Hack event, a loose consortium of geeks, hackers, and businessmen from the television and technology industries gathered in a high-rise Boston office building to compete for cash and prizes by inventing and building technologies that add to the experience of watching television.
Songza has always been about quickly finding a playlist that fits your mood and taste. With today's release of Songza 3.0 for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, the fast rising music streamer has made that experience even simpler. “This app update coincides
with four new milestones for Songza," states Elias Roman,
co-founder and CEO of Songza. "We’ve just had our 6 millionth App Store
install and served over 560 million songs in the last 30 days. We’re now
reaching 4.7 million monthly active users who spend more than 65 million minutes
with Songza each day.” The company also recently completed a $3.8 million fund-raising round.
Google has announced that it's adding select app activity to search, and some of music's most popular services are part of the launch. In the coming weeks, if you Google a site or app on (and that app has integrated with Google+ Sign-In app activities),
you'll see popular and aggregate user activity to the right of the search
results. Searching for Songza, for example, will show the top playlists among Google users.
