When it comes to the issue of “fine arts,” rap, country, rock and DJ-based music are not considered real music in Chicago, and believe it or not, that’s actually a good thing. Small venues that hold 750 or less in Cook County aren’t subject to a 3% admission fee tax because what goes on in […]
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Talk about a sore loser, it looks like Spotify is punishing artists who do exclusives with Apple Music. According to an article in Bloomberg, the service is manipulating search results so that those who provided Apple Music with an exclusive on a new release don’t appear in the top ranks of searches after their music […]
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I’m very pleased to have Pro Tools Expert founder Russ Hughes as the guest on the latest edition of my Inner Circle Podcast. Russ had a successful career in multiple aspects of the music business, but started a small blog dedicated to helping Pro Tools users. The blog has grown into a group of sites […]
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For the longest time new music was released by most record labels in the United States on Tuesday, which made a lot of sense. Tuesday is usually a slow news day, so it was (and still is) pretty easy to get the word out without having to wade through the noise, plus it gave record […]
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There’s been speculation for some time that Amazon was going to launch it’s own streaming music service to rival that of Apple Music and Spotify. While such a service could be formidable indeed, another me-too platform might not shake up the streaming landscape much. That could change if Amazon is able to launch a lower-priced […]
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Here’s the music industry news roundup from the week of August 25th, 2016. It’s a little more diverse this week, but there are a few blockbuster topics (Spotify never fails to excite). Let’s get into it. Spotify’s label deals are now out of contract. The company is going month to month, and trying to negotiate a lower […]
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Japan is a pretty small country compared to the United States, but when it comes to the music business in has a big lead in at least one category – retail music stores. In what may be a startling revelation to some, Japan currently has around 6,000 music stores while the US only has 1900, […]
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Colin Leonard is one of the hottest mastering engineers going, and he’s so busy that he can’t get to all the work he’s offered. So he’s created a new online automated mastering process called Aria that uses his analog signal path to the do the job. That’s right, it’s online automated analog mastering! On podcast […]
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Many artists and bands have found Twitter a great place to promote themselves and their music, but that just got a lot more difficult with the implementation of some new features. New Twitter features include Notifications settings and especially a Quality Filter, which will mean that an artist’s strategy for using Twitter will have to […]
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The music industry has always operated under the premise that music content made up about 40% of YouTube’s traffic, a figure that has bothered everyone considering how little revenue it’s generated as a result. No comes data from Pexeso showing that figure may be way off. The company found that music-related content on YouTube amount to just 4.3% of […]
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Here’s the music industry news roundup from the last week. As always, streaming and streaming services are in the news, but so are a number of huge artists, as well as some cool speculation on the future. Let’s get into it. Apple Music is seriously getting into song lyrics. Reports are that it’s hired a new team […]
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Although vinyl doesn’t contribute all that much to the bottom line of the music business, it’s still a hot trend and growing at a pretty good rate. That said, a new study in the UK has found that vinyl buyers there are distinctly different from those in the US. The study by YouGov found that […]
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Video games have huge budgets these days and much of that is dedicated to audio. This week on Episode #122 of my Inner Circle Podcast we’ll talk to Alex Benyon, who’s worked in a variety of audio jobs on huge game titles like Guitar Hero Live, DJ Hero and Call of Duty. In the intro […]
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Social media constantly evolves along with how we use it, especially for promotion. That means that the way something was used a few years ago might be different today, and that’s certainly the case with hashtags. Here are a few hashtag do’s and don’ts as they apply to promotional use today. Do: Use hashtags on Twitter, […]
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Believe it or not, the pioneering hip-hop group De La Soul’s music from their first 6 albums have never been available digitally. It’s never been on iTunes and it’s never been on a streaming service, and it looks like it’s not going to be in the future either. The reason? In the early days of hip-hop, […]
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