PR People – This Is What I Hate

As you might imagine, running two popular blogs and a podcast garners a lot of attention from PR people. I get about a dozen pitches a day and most of them I delete straight away. I have to say that at least a few times a day I hit the delete button with an extra […]

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You Know Radio Is Dying When Labels Cut Their Promotion Teams

Radio just isn’t what it used to be. Maybe that’s good and maybe its not, but for sure it’s changing fast. If you watch the news, you’ll get the impression that radio is still a big media player claiming a huge amount of the consumer’s attention. What isn’t indicated though is that most of the […]

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Amazon Music Makes Marketing On The Platform Easier With Hype Deck

In the ever-evolving landscape of music marketing, Amazon Music has taken a step forward with the introduction of Hype Deck. This new feature, which was just launched in January, may be a game-changer for artists and their teams as they can now more easily engage fans globally with customizable marketing assets. Let’s take a look […]

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3 Surprising Hit Song Trends That No One Expected

Analytics platform ChartCipher, which focuses on hit songs, recently unveiled three key trends that its measured on Billboard’s Radio Songs charts for the year 2023. All three are surprising in that they bucked the status quo, but that’s something that frequently happens with hit song trends. Let’s take a look at them. Songs Are Slower […]

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You’ve Never Heard Of One Of The Most Streamed Artists, And He Wants It That Way

We’ve all heard the stories about fake artists on Spotify and other streaming services, and every time a crackdown occurs some new ones just pop up to take their place. But now there’s evidence that it may be the same composer who’s behind a great many of them. The Swedish Dagens Nyheter (DN) recently ran […]

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A Proposed Living Wage For Musicians Act Could Raise Streaming Royalties For Artists

If you took a poll of indie musicians, I think the majority of them would say that streaming royalties are way too low. It always seems so unfair that each stream is only earning a small fraction of a penny, yet many superstars have so many streams that they still make some good money, even […]

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Surprise! There’s No Correlation Between Social Engagement And Content Consumption

One of the things that we’ve all been taught about optimizing our content for social media is that the more social engagement a post garners, the better. While that’s probably true to some extent, a new report from Memo finds that just because readers engage with your content it doesn’t actually mean that they’re consuming […]

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TikTok Providing New Ways For Artists To Make Money

TikTok – love it or hate it, but either way it’s a social force to be reckoned with. While music artists that use the platform hope for viral success, they’re not actually going to make much money from TikTok itself – most comes from users following up on the artist music and merch on other […]

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Don’t Look Now, But Music Videos Don’t Matter As Much As They Used To

It used to be that if you didn’t have a happening music video, your song wasn’t going to get any traction anywhere. Although MTV set the standard for label acts and their music videos in the 1980s, YouTube eventually picked up the slack in the 2000s after MTV moved to teen angst dramas. That said, […]

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Cassettes Are Back Again, But In A Big Way In Japan

I’ve written in the past about the imminent revival of the music cassette tape, and a mini-boom seems to come around every 7 to 10 years or so. Well, it’s happening again but this time things might be different, thanks to what’s happening in Japan. It appears that Japanese youth have taken quite a shine […]

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These Are The Challenges That Professional Music Creators Worry About Most

Last week I wrote about a new study that actually quantified how difficult it is to make it in the music business, and this post is an extension of that. The entertainment research company MIDiA did an extensive study on the state of the music business today, and outlined a number of common challenges that […]

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Now We Know Exactly How Difficult It Is To Make It In The Music Business

It’s always been difficult to make it as an artist or band in the music industry. You can go all the way back to the 1950s and it’s almost always a one in a million chance that an artist would break through. Even as the democratization of music creation has developed in the 2000s, it’s […]

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This Study Says That TikTok Isn’t As Popular As Everybody Thinks

We’ve all been led to believe that video sharing site TikTok is Gen Z’s social platform of choice, and every other generation is also falling in line. A new study by Pew Research has found that those assumptions are just that – assumptions, and they’re wrong. According to the study, more Americans ages 18 to […]

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Can Mngrs.Ai Be Your Music Manager?

For artists, bands, engineers, and producers, the hardest team member to find is a manager. It’s critical to find someone who will look out for your business interests, yet a good music manager is most likely really busy already. That means that a he or she probably will not be interested in you until you […]

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Universal Music Gets Tough With TikTok

The major record labels have been grousing about the meager royalties that TikTok pays for some time, but now Universal Music has decided to do something about it. The label is pulling its entire catalog from the service after the two companies couldn’t reach an agreement that ended in January. TikTok decided not only to […]

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