Warners the record label has been referred to by many names over the years and it’s been hard to keep up. Warner Bros Records, Warner Music, Warner Music Group, WMG – we all knew who it was but the official name could be confusing. Plus, was the company related to Warner Pictures? When someone said […]
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My guest on the podcast this week is David Kalt, who launched the super popular gear site Reverb.com in 2013 after growing frustrated with the process of buying and selling guitars on eBay. To get it started, David raised more than $47 million in funding from investors ranging from Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen and country star Brad Paisley […]
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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