If you haven’t been paying attention, Spotify recently settled a lawsuit over unpaid mechanical royalties to songwriters. The suit maintained that the company didn’t have the license to play some of the music available, while Spotify claimed that it didn’t have the information to adequately disburse the payments. Instead of fighting the lawsuit in court, […]
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It wasn’t that long ago that the recorded music industry was completely in the doldrums, knocked down to less than half its peak business by a failing physical recording business that showed no signs of being replaced by downloads. Everyone predicted the worst as there was absolutely no faith that the fledgling streaming services could […]
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My guest for this week’s podcast is Gary Myerberg-Lauter, who has installed and maintained studios for major facilities and superstar artists. Gary’s worked at the famed A&M Studios during its heyday, set up a major portable recording rig for Bruce Springsteen, helped run LA’s famous Cello Studios then brought it back to life as East […]
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If you were to pick who the most popular artist was for your State, you’d probably be wrong if you’re over 25 or so. Business Insider wanted to find out about the most popular artist in each State so they looked at the Pandora Radio for a list of the artists whose Pandora “artist stations” […]
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Music hasn’t been a huge priority on the Facebook platform until now, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes to make you think that it will be in the future. The latest move in that direction involves Facebook acquiring rights management startup Source3, which specializes in analyzing branded intellectual property in user-generated content. But […]
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Through the years Google and other search engines have gotten a lot smarter, and the way we use them has changed as a result. In the past, if we wanted to search for a guitar repair shop, we’d usually have to know the name of the shop we were looking for first, like “World Guitar […]
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Remember back a few years ago when many in the music industry thought that we’d never get over the 100 million total paid streaming subscriber benchmark? Remember when they predicted that Spotify had plateaued at 30 million? Remember when they opined that streaming revenue would never make up for physical product and downloads? All those […]
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It’s fair to say that AES president-elect David Scheirman is a live sound expert, since he’s done everything from mixing bands like America and Electric Light Orchestra to designing sound systems for the New York Philharmonic and the Atlanta Olympics. He’s also spent time on the manufacturing side as well in executive positions at JBL […]
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Having grown up in Pennsylvania and returning there frequently to visit family, I can tell you with some certainty that the state isn’t exactly on the bleeding edge of radio. In fact, I’m always struck by the fact that it seems stuck in the 1970s, because you hear songs predominantly from that era most any […]
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A big problem for songwriters and publishers is that there’s no one place to go to find out who owns the all rights to a song and who the songwriters are. With some digging around the ASCAP and BMI sites will usually lead to the needed info, it becomes a lot tougher to do that outside of […]
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Our current Music 4.0 world requires new thinking regarding song releases. Here’s an excerpt from my Music 4.1 Internet Music Guidebook that outlines the new release schedule and it’s benefits. “If we go back to the ’50s, vinyl singles had a notoriously fast manufacturing turnaround time, despite the labor-intensive process required to make a vinyl […]
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Trying to figure out exactly how much a streaming service pays per stream is a moving target, since there are so many variables involved. That said, an interesting chart from Information Is Beautiful tries to average it all out to come out up with the current royalty payouts from each. Keep in mind that this […]
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Engineer Benny Faccone has won 17 Grammys for his work with Mana, Ricky Martin, Santana and Luis Miguel among many others, and I talked to him about that in depth way back in podcast #5. This time we discuss something that everyone can relate to – building your home studio. The difference with Benny is […]
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There’s a lot of money in music once you reach the top 1%, so it’s always interesting to see who made what and how they did it. Billboard took a look at the top 50 money makers of 2016 and found some interesting results. Here’s the top 10. 1. Beyonce – $62.1 million. Most of this […]
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Most songwriters try to be as inventive as possible but more often than not they fall into repeating patterns that were previously successful. This is demonstrated in a new study from Zippia that analyzed the counts from the musiXmatch Dataset, an official collection of lyrics from the Million Song Dataset. The company, which helps recent college grads […]
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