Category Archives for "Music Industry News"
August 18, 2017
This Crowdcasting App Lets You Fill Your Gigs, But They Won’t Be Fans
Artists and bands that are just getting started or playing in a new location always have the same fret: Will anyone show up? Unless you’ve already received some sort of visibility either through your music or social media, the answer is usually that there won’t be as many people as you’d like, and that could […]
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August 17, 2017
- in Music Industry News , Tips by Bobby Owsinski
5 Ways To Get Fans To Buy Your Physical Product
Even though most of us have changed to listening to music via online streams, physical product is never going away. People still buy CDs and vinyl is a very hot commodity, even though the sales number aren’t what they once were. So what does it take to get people to actually buy your product? Nick […]
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August 16, 2017
A Track Of Nothing But Silence May Top The iTunes Charts
We keep hearing about the trickery taking place on both Spotify and Apple Music where artists are trying to game the system by posting album length songs of silence that repeat over and over in order to boost royalties. Thankfully, most streaming services are now on the lookout for these fakes, but there is one […]
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August 11, 2017
Why Make An Album When Nobody’s Buying Them?
We now live in a singles world, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the recent Nielsen Music Half-Year Report. Album consumption has taken a dramatic turn for the worse, as even superstar artists aren’t seeing anything near the numbers of the past. For instance, here’s the top 10 (for the U.S.): 1 Ed […]
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August 10, 2017
- in Music Industry News , Tips by Bobby Owsinski
How To Get In On Spotify’s $40 Million Songwriter Settlement
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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August 9, 2017
Warner Music Has Best Quarter In 14 Years
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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August 7, 2017
The Most Popular Artist In Every State
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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August 4, 2017
Facebook Acquires Source3 To Take Another Step Towards Music
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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August 2, 2017
Spotify Passes 60 Million Paid Subscribers
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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July 31, 2017
Radio Faces A Big Test In Pennsylvania That Will Affect The Country
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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July 28, 2017
ASCAP And BMI Create A Joint Song Database
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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July 23, 2017
Top 10 Music Money Makers, And Where The Money Came From
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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July 21, 2017
The Top 20 Jobs Mentioned In Song Lyrics
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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July 19, 2017
SoundCloud Being Archived By Indie Programmers
With the status of SoundCloud up in the air, artists everywhere are wondering what’s going to happen to their files if the whole thing blows up. The good news is that about 150 volunteer programmers calling themselves the Archive Team are taking action to make sure that none of the precious files are lost. The organization […]
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July 17, 2017
TuneCore Now Owned By Sony Music
If you’re an indie artist with your music distributed by TuneCore and you always wanted to be part of a major label, it looks like that’s now the case. Last week Sony Music sealed the deal to buy the French company Believe Distribution, owner of TuneCore, for a price between $355 and $444 million, according […]
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