Category Archives for "Commentary"

Artist Sponsorship Is Today’s Payola

Payola has always been part of the music business and many insiders feel that it’s the reason that some artists become stars, and some stars become superstars. Without money or favors changing hands between the record label and the radio station/streaming service, a song might never gain the visibility it needs to become a hit. […]

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Amazon’s Actually Losing Money From It’s New Music Service

amazon-losing-money

The major record labels are adamant about keeping the price of a music streaming subscription at $9.99 per month, regardless of the platform, so it was a great surprise last week when Amazon announced that its new Amazon Music Unlimited service was priced at $7.99 per month for Amazon Prime members. It turns out that the […]

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Don’t Be Fooled By Amazon Music Unlimited’s Price

amazon music unlimited

Amazon has finally launched it’s long awaited stand-alone streaming music service and it’s called Amazon Music Unlimited. On the surface it has a number of interesting features that differentiate it from the other major streaming services, but one has to wonder whether potential users will find them compelling enough to subscribe. Perhaps the service’s biggest […]

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YouTube Misses The Point With Its Lyor Cohen Hire

youtube

If you want to start a music label executive ranting and raving, just mention YouTube. It’s currently public enemy #1 to the music industry thanks to its relative intransigence over royalty payouts that execs and artists alike feel are way too low. That’s a good reason why Youtube may think its brand new hire of […]

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Is The Music Supervisor Killing Songwriting?

music supervisor killing songwriting

In my experience there are two kinds of songwriters. One writes completely from the heart as an expression of art, while the second does it more as a business, writing whatever the situation calls for. Neither is more noble than the other, they’re just different, and both require a tremendous amount of skill and passion. That said, […]

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Yeah, People Still Buy Songs, Especially When They’re 69 Cents

69 cents itunes

There’s an experiment going on in Apple’s iTunes Store that not many are paying attention to, but it just might prolong the download side of the music business for a few more years. It’s true that streaming is all the rage, with subscription numbers increasing at a steady pace while the download business is falling […]

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Will The New Cheap Tier From Pandora And Amazon Be Worth It?

pandor more skips

Ever since music streaming began in earnest, there’s been a mantra inside the music industry that’s gone something like this – “Until the paid subscription rate gets to $5 per month, streaming is never going to scale.” That’s only partially been true, as subscriber numbers have grown steadily at the now standard $10 per month, […]

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Goodbye MP3, We Hardly Knew Ya

Goodbye MP3

When it comes to technology, the music business has always been about convenience. It’s ultimately never about the sound or even a lower cost, it’s always comes down to what’s easiest to use. Still, it’s surprising to see the MP3 file format (or the “download” as many know it) accelerating so quickly towards the end […]

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A SoundCloud Demise Would Create A Void For Indie Artists

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is seeking a buyer, and that could make it much more difficult for indie music artists across all genres to have their music heard. The streaming music service is reportedly seeking a sale in the $1 billion range in a deal that could alter that part of the music landscape for a long time. According to […]

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Do You Really Need A Record Label?

Do you need a record label?

Here’s a very interesting video from The Economist that looks at the new dynamics of the record business and whether an artist really needs a record label these days. It’s a veiled advert for Kobalt, but frankly, that company is way ahead of the game when it comes to not only collecting artist royalties, but […]

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Where Music Artists Go Wrong On YouTube

YouTube where music artists go wrong

YouTube is capable of making people stars, and while that happens to exceptional content creators, most of them are not music artists. One of the reasons that artists don’t fall into the YouTube star category is that their general mindset is still set in the past. Here are the 4 places were artists go wrong on YouTube, […]

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Deezer Launches In The U.S., But Does Anybody Care?

Deezer-logo

After a year run up, the streaming service Deezer has finally launched in the United States. Spotify’s major competitor in Europe is now in the world’s largest market, but the question is, does it have enough to differentiate itself from the rest of the current streaming contenders in the space? The Paris-based service launched in […]

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Apple’s Publishing Royalty Proposal Is A Shot At Spotify

Apple's Music Publishing Proposal

Who says Apple’s music executives aren’t smart? In what may end up being a brilliant strategic move, the company discretely made a proposal to the governing Copyright Royalty Board to increase the song publishing royalty rate to 9.1 cents per 100 interactive streams, a significant increase over what is currently paid, according to the NY […]

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