Blog: Music - Page 24

Spotify has taken a minority stake in DistroKid . In itself, it may be a slightly left field but relatively insignificant move, except that it is in fact one small but important step on a much bigger journey.

A succession of conversations with record labels over the last couple of months has made me start to ponder whether we are approaching a tipping point in streaming era A&R. At the heart of the conversations is whether the growing role of playlists and the increased use of streaming analytics is making label A&R strategy proactive or reactive? Is what people are listening to shaped by the labels or the streaming service? To subvert Paul Weller’s 1980s Jam lyrics: Does the public get what the public wants or does the public want what the public gets? An old dynamic reinvented Radio used to be the main way in which audiences were essentially told what to listen to.

Facebook has announced its long mooted move into music. As widely anticipated the service offering focuses on using music to add context to social experiences. The official blog outlines two key use cases: Adding music to videosDoing live stream lip syncs in Facebook Live videos For now the roll out is limited, which will give Facebook the opportunity to hone the service and learn from the behaviour of a relatively narrow user group.

I write this week’s blog conflicted between the music fan who grew up on the album and the MIDiA analyst looking at the numbers (an eternal struggle). Alongside the feature-length film, the LP was one of the definitive artistic mediums to emerge in the 20th century, but it was also bound to the same business framework of many enterprises of the period; factory-powered mass production methods with the product demand side stoked by television and radio.

Arguably the most anticipated day in the history of digital music is upon us. By the end of it we will have the first hint at whether Spotify is going to fall at the Snap Inc. or Facebook end of the spectrum of promising tech IPO, or DPO in the case of Spotify.

In covering tech trends, we try to avoid chasing after the latest buzzwords at MIDiA. Artificial Intelligence certainly ticks the boxes of Gartner’s famed hype cycle model , i.e. technologies that attract VC funding and obligatory media headlines before falling into a trough of disillusionment, often never recovering.

Interesting things are happening at YouTube. In February 2017 it launched YouTube TV, a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service with live video and catch up incorporated into its core functionality.

The end of 2017 is shaping up to be a pivotal time for the video landscape in the US. Tomorrow, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) will vote on whether or not to remove the common carrier designation with which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are currently designated.

Shazam finally found a buyer: Apple. Ever since its affiliate sales revenue model crumbled with the onset of streaming (there’s no business in an affiliate fee on a $0.01 stream), Shazam has been trying to find a new business model.

News has just emerged that lip synching app Musical.ly is to be sold for between $800 million and $1 billion to Chinese companyJinri Toutiao, which also bought Musical.ly predecessor Flipagram. I’ve long held the belief that Musical.

On October 17th, YouTube made another significant step towards supplanting the TV industry with the free-to-view ad-supported release of a YouTube original documentary on music artist Demi Lovato, entitled Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated - Official Documentary .

OK, you’re going to have to bearwith me on this one, but let me take you back to 2nd century Rome… The Roman Empire was at the peak of its powers. Its borders stretched from Scotland down to Syria and across to Armenia, and throughout its dominions, Rome spread its culture, language, administration and military prowess.

Renowned for its natural diversity (at certain points of the year you can hike in the desert, ski and surf on the same day), there was one thing that unified the state of California on my recent visit last month.

The Financial Times has reported that Apple is planning to acquire The Culver Studios, a complex of film-making buildings in LA next to where Sony Pictures is based. The Culver Studios has a long history in Hollywood, with the likes of Howard Hughes and Cecil B.

For a brief moment last year, windowing seemed like the future of music streaming. Already common practice in the film-industry, the strategy was being touted as a way of utilising artist fan engagement to drive registrations (both freemium and paid) to streaming services, thus engendering the payment behaviours that would ultimately grow the industry.

The Daily Active User (DAU) is a common engagement metric, often used in gauging companies’ performance and value. In gaming, DAUs vary markedly across mobile, PC, console and social. The differences are seen in penetration rates, demographics, engagement and spending trends.

The Verge has reported that Spotify is trialling sponsored songs , tailored to users’ tastes, that are embedded in users’ playlists. Spotify tests a lot of things on subsets of its user base so this does not mean that this will necessarily be rolled out more widely.

Cultural trends are defined by technology and taste arbiters. In the modern era, increasing disposable incomes have transformed the majority of the world into consumers of services as well as products, and newly created audiences have gravitated towards emerging forms of media technology.