Musical Paralysis Happens A Lot Younger Than You Think

Unless you’re a teenager, you’ve probably noticed that our taste for discovering new music stagnates as we age. Musical paralysis is real, and it disturbs many adults we feel their love for music has decreased as they age. There are a lot of studies that back that feeling up, but sometimes the best data comes […]

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Vinyl Records Are Bad For The Environment, But Evovinyl Is A New Eco-Friendly Option

We as a society made a lot of industrial-strength bad decisions decades ago before anyone was aware that they were going to be bad for the environment. Converting so much of our daily lives to items made and packaged with plastics was one of them, and that includes vinyl records. We’ve fallen in love with […]

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Not Many Artists Release Vinyl Even Though It’s A Hot Product

There so much in the news about how the vinyl records are such a hot product, and how there are more and more vinyl releases every year, but apparently that doesn’t apply to most indie artists. Distribution and label services company Ditto Music found that most artists don’t even bother with vinyl for a new […]

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National Recording Registry Inducts 25 New Recordings That You Probably Know

Every year, the Library of Congress National Recording Registry names 25 recordings as audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time based on their cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage. This year’s inductees include recordings from ABBA, Green Day, Blondie, Bill Withers, The Chicks, Bobby McFerrin, The Cars, and more. […]

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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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