You have to hand it to Pandora – the company is still trying new things to differentiate itself from the competition. The latest feature is its version of Stories, a new format which marries music tracks to podcasts in a single playlist. Artists can use the feature as well by making a playlist of their […]
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My guest on the podcast today is CD Baby’s VP of international development, Heli Del Moral. Before coming to the company Heli worked in television as international director of marketing for ESPN and Univision where he won 3 Emmy awards, and numerous Telly, Promax and other honors for his creative efforts. In the interview we talked about the strength […]
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Over the last week Spotify has been in the news again regarding its contentious entry into the Indian market as publisher Warner/Chappell Music (WCM) tried its best to block the launch. This has turned what would have been almost a back-burner story into front page business news, but many don’t understand the significance for all […]
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If you speak with record executives, they’ll tell you privately that one of their biggest concerns is the fact that many artists are no longer interested in signing a recording contract. Thanks to the current DIY nature of the business and the fact that labels are more and more only considering “finished products,” artists no […]
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We’ve gone through a mighty change in the music business over the last 10 years, and it keeps on morphing and evolving every day. Since these changes are constant, many of the old school rules pertaining to success in the music business no longer apply. Here’s an excerpt from the latest edition of my Music […]
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Recently I posted about a group called Fastball having a difficult time collecting from the crowdfunding site Pledge Music. There appears to be many more that fall into that category as artists from Queensryche to Blacktop Mojo have since posted apologies on their social media pages because of Pledge Music-related payment and delivery issues. Variety […]
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Amphion loudspeakers have become a favorite of award-winning mixing engineers the world over, and founder and CEO Anssi Hyvonen is my guest on the podcast today. Anssi spent most of his life as a hi-fi enthusiast, but he got into building speakers sort of by accident. His speakers are very well respected by that community, but acceptance […]
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The 3 major record labels are all reveling in their good fortune, as streaming numbers and revenue are way up over the previous year. Indeed, Music Business Worldwide (MBW) estimates that it’s up more than $1.5 billion for the majors just from streaming. That may be all well and good, but physical product is still […]
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The streaming music service Tidal announced that it’s launching a new program called Tidal Unplugged intended to support emerging artists. The program is funded by a donation from venture capitalists and philanthropists Mark Lampert and Robert Nelsen in the amount of $1 million, and will kick off March 1st in Detroit. If selected, the Tidal […]
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It used to be that we were amazed when a video reached a billion views on YouTube, but did you know that there’s been 154 videos that have reached that mark already? In fact, more than 30 videos have reached 2 billion, and one is just shy of 6 billion views! The interesting thing is […]
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In what may be a game changer for the platform, SoundCloud has released that allows a user to share music with other online services like Spotify and Apple Music as well. The new feature is part of an upgrade to its SoundCloud Premier program. SoundCloud Pro and Pro Unlimited subscribers can now gain access to […]
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My guest on the podcast today is Ben Mendoza, who created UK-based Beatchain along with co-founder and musician Steve Jones to accelerate artist growth by using data science and automation. Ben has spent almost 25 years using software to improve decision making and automate time-consuming processes with leading expense management company MDSL, which Beatchain now brings to the music […]
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Who says that the major record labels are dying? Far from it, if the latest revenue figures from Universal Music Group (UMG) is any indication. The company brought in more than $7.1 billion last year, and much of its growth was attributed to streaming music income. Profits come from having hits and Universal certainly had […]
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The European Union’s Article 13 Copyright Directive which holds platforms like YouTube accountable for the infringement of user uploaded content is finally moving towards a final vote after some revision of text that now seems to appease all voting parties. YouTube has been lobbying heavily for the text to not contain user generated content (UGC) […]
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Last week there was a lot of press around why a 25 year old Dinosaur Jr. song called “Over Your Shoulder” appeared out of the blue at #18 on the Japanese Billboard charts. As far as anyone could tell, there was no reason for this song to appear on any chart since it wasn’t part […]
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