Tencent Music Makes You Pay To Stream Current Music – Will This Catch On?

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) owns the largest digital music platforms in China in QQ Music, Kugou Music and Kuwo Music, which are all doing very well at the moment according to its latest financial statement. While Western streaming services rely on paid subscriptions, Tencent is still trying to upgrade its free customers to paid tiers […]

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3 Reasons Why A Streaming Platform Rejected Your Music

There are more and more ways to get your music on a popular streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music. Most indie artists use a distributor like TuneCore, CD Baby or Distrokid, but some streaming platforms (Spotify) and now beginning to act as distributors to other services as well. That’s all well and […]

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These 10 Fake Artists Have Over 1 Billion Streams

It’s difficult enough for a legit artist to make it these days, but it’s particularly infuriating when fake artists get big streaming numbers. As pointed out in a previous post, Spotify hired a Swedish production music house to compose mood music for playlists like Deep Focus, Sleep or Peaceful Piano. The platform pays a flat […]

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NBC Supervising Sound Editor Robert Siciliano On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

My guest on the podcast this week is Robert Siciliano, who started as a music recording engineer, but by almost a quirk of fate got a temp job at NBC that turned into a career. In the interview we talked about making the transition to postproduction, the turnaround time for an audio job, dealing with audio that isn’t […]

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It’s Not A Major Label World Anymore

If you thought that you needed to sign with a major record label or publisher in order to have success, that’s no longer true and there’s a lot of data to prove it. No metric is more valuable in seeing this picture as market share. Indies have made great strides in this area in recent […]

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The Biggest Streaming Earners In 2019 So Far

It’s really easy to think that even the big music star streaming earners aren’t making that much, but they’re making more than you might think. That said, everything now is on a different scale than in the music business of yesterday. For one thing, a million streams or views no longer means much. You need […]

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5 Crowdfunding Myths Busted

Many artists and bands see crowdfunding as a major avenue to their musical success. As we saw from the recent Pledge Music debacle, that’s not always the case. But even failing platforms aside, crowdfunding is a lot more difficult than you might think. My friend Ariel Hyatt from CyberPR recently posted an excellent article busting […]

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Rolling Stone To Launch Music Charts To Compete With Billboard

Ever since the beginning of the new music business, the Billboard charts have been the bible of the industry. Artists and labels vied for a #1 on almost any chart that the company presented, not only for bragging rights, but as a way to prove a product’s worthiness for a retailer to stock. Those days […]

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Microphone Builder Dave Pearlman On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

My guest on the podcast this week is Dave Pearlman, who after years as a touring pedal steel guitarist with everyone from Dan Fogelberg and Phil Everly to Pat Boone and Bobby Womack, opened his Rotund Rascal Studio in North Hollywood in 1979.  To save money on outside techs, Dave began to do repairs and modifications on classic […]

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Millennials Prefer Yesterday’s Hits To Todays

You hear a lot of complaints about music today being too computerized, repetitious, lyrically vapid, and/or lacking melody. I’ve always believed that each era has its own music that garners the same complaints (except for the computer “on-the-grid” part). It gets criticized when it’s new and revered when it becomes a golden oldie. That said, […]

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Social Media May Not Be Killing Teenager’s Brains After All

We all assume that teenagers and people under the age of 25 in general are doing massive harm to themselves due to all the screen time they give to social media. That may not be the case, as a team from Oxford University studied 12,000 adolescents and discovered that social media actually had very little […]

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Why Every Musician Should Have A SoundCloud Account

SoundCloud is the streaming service that gets no love. It’s not a big draw for music consumers, and many artists feel they don’t make enough money from it. If you’re a musician (and you don’t have to be an artist), neither of those are good enough reasons not to have an account though, and here’s […]

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Facebook Changes How It Ranks Videos

In a move that’s probably better for everyone but a select few, Facebook is tweaking its algorithm when it comes to videos. The move penalizes subscribers that use repurposed content and rewards video producers whose videos have both repeat viewers and longer watch times. There are 3 factors that will now determine how videos will […]

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The Most Musical Cities, Netflix Audio Upgrade, And Music Technologist David Frangioni On The Latest Inner Circle Podcast

My guest on the podcast this week is David Frangioni, who started his music career as a drummer, but soon became a pioneer in MIDI technology. This led him into the studio as an engineer and producer for dozens of top artists including The Stones, Ringo Starr, Aerosmith, Elton John, Sting, Carl Palmer, Journey, Styx, KISS, […]

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TuneCore Collecting $1 Million Per Day For Its Indie Artists

If you’re an indie artist, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re making at least some money from your recordings these days. The fact that TuneCore now has about $1 million a day being earned by its indie artists speaks volumes about how far the DIY musician has come in the last 5 years. Indie […]

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