Blog: Hypebot

Universal Music Group has agreed to license it's catalog to Apple's iRadio streaming music services, according to reports. Apple has apparently dropped requests that it be charged a lower rate in exchange for a share of ad revenue, and opted for the .125 cent rate that Pandora pays, according the the Financial Times. With the world's largest music group in board, negotiations with Sony, WMG and the indies should accelerate. Apple, Google and Amazon are all pushing hard to be the next to launch their own take [...]

FRIDAY 5.10.2013 M usic Business News & Views From Around The Web CLICK HERE Updated Continuously Under Hypebot's More News Tab Above

By Kyle Bylin ( @sidewinderfm ), founder and editor of sidewinder.fm , a music and tech think tank. I've never taken a strong interest in Pandora’s performance on the stock market, because  I mainly write about music products and behavioral trends.  What I've noticed, though, is how the company's IPO changed how media outlets talk about digital music services.  Rather than talk about the product features or listener trends, people often talk solely about the viability of the business model and debate whether the company can survive in an increasingly competitive [...]

A recent post on the Priceonomics Blog looked at "The Business of Phish" with a focus on the early years of Phish's steady development and the eventual emergence of Phish as an improvisationally-oriented jamband and touring phenomenon. Along the way they hit three touchstone concepts of contemporary tech and marketing that are well-illustrated by musicians at work. Rohin Dhar, whose wife is a fan of Phish, wrote about their business side for Priceonomics and, in the process, reveals how closely music and business can be intertwined. It's an [...]

The RIAA today made a rare change to the formula used to certify Gold and Platinum awards to include on-demand music and video streams. Services that will now count towards certification include Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, Muve, Rdio, Rhapsody, Slacker, Xbox Music, VEVO, MTV.com, YouTube and Yahoo! Music. Rather than put a value on music streams based on payout to rightsholders, the RIAA will count 100 plays as 1 sale. The benchmark for Gold and Platinum certifications remains unchanged: 500,000 sales for Gold, 1 million for Platinum and 10 million for Diamond. [...]

By Frank Woodworth ( @GlacialConcepts ) , Director of Business Development at  Thrillcall ,  a concert discovery and ticketing platform for web and mobile apps. The most interesting shift in listener habits to me is that YouTube has become the go to source for music discovery, and consequently an important source of revenue. In most of my conversations with labels and distributors YouTube is the number three source of revenue behind physical sales and iTunes. [...]

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm . Soundrop , a Spotify app that shares a big investor with Spotify, says it alone has the ability to scale listening rooms up so that thousands of people can listen to the same song together at the same time, using a secret sauce called Erlang — a hyper-efficient coding language developed by Ericsson for use on big telecom infrastructures (updated). Starting today, Soundrop will offer a new way to listen: individual rooms [...]

BeatStars, a retail and services site for beatmakers and producers, is hosting a series of free BeatStars Seminars on the web next week from May 13 to 17. Topics include distribution, live events, music creation, marketing and label operations with a variety of speakers. Hypebot readers can also have a free trial of BeatStars membership. BeatStars , described as a " digital production marketplace ," is sponsoring the series of industry sessions. BeatStars Seminars start each day Monday through Friday, May 13 to 17, at [...]

Nic Robertson is the managing director & co-founder of Jaden Social , a creative Digital marketing agency based in Sydney, Australia. You can connect with Nic here - @nicjrobertson . Good old Facebook. It seems like everyone knows how to use it these days; from those mischievous 10 year olds brazenly lying about their age in order to sign up, to the new breed of highly intelligent super-pets who’ve managed to set up their very own profiles, complete with a neatly cropped selfie, and then ever-so-casually added all of their owners’ friends. [...]

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm . The nicely -designed Twitter #Music app for iOS made a big splash when it was released a couple of weeks ago, quickly becoming the most popular music app in iTunes . Then, inevitably, once people who were interested had installed it, that ranking fell, leading, also inevitably, to a round of denunciation this week about how it was a flash in the pan. Indeed, Twitter #Music faces a bit of a [...]

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm . Austin, Texas-based guitar-slinger Ian Moore had a problem that no company in the 2013 digital music ecosystem could solve: He simply wanted to sell a song each day for 30 days as a package deal, with fans naming their own price for that music. He suggests $30, but you can pay whatever you want for the music offered in this ongoing experiment, until June 22. One might imagine that in this day and age, when start-ups all over [...]

THURSDAY 5.9.2013 M usic Business News & Views From Around The Web CLICK HERE Updated Continuously Under Hypebot's More News Tab Above

Digital sheet music startup Chromatik has raised $5.7 million of an $8.8 million Series A founding round, according to an SEC filing . Funders include Rustic Canyon Partners in the lead role, along with Plus Capital, Baroda Ventures, 500 Startups, and rapper/actor Will Smith. Baroda founder David Bohnett is the chairman of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and Rustic Canyon’s Nate Redmond, will join the Chromatik board. Bruno Mars, former Virgin Records co-chairman Jeff Ayeroff, and other industry heavyweights participated in a $1 million November 2012 seed [...]

Iconic jazz label Blue Note is partnering with music crowdfunding platform ArtistShare to create a new record label devoted to recording and releasing a new generation of jazz artists. Under the arrangement, UMG owned Blue Note will be involved in the selection of artists, add its logo and promotional support to the release, and if response warrants it, upstream the artist to the official Blue Note roster. While Blue Note/ArtistShare, will be acting as a farm team, artists will retain full ownership of the initial  master recordings; [...]

Dave Mathews Bands' digital project manager Jason Judy is joining  entertainment marketer Fame House as COO.  Judy started with the band 8 years ago, after a stint with Mathew's Red Light Management firm's direct-to-fan arm Musictoday. He'll relocate from Charlottesville, VA to Fame House HQ in Philadelphia. Fame House Clients currently include: Shady Records (Eminem's label), Ultra Music, O.A.R., Pretty Lights, DJ Shadow, Matisyahu, Richie Hawtin, STS9, and Loco Dice, among others. "We look forward to adding Jason to our team.  He has handled [...]

Jack Conte, known in part for his role in Pomplamoose, yesterday launched a patronage platform called Patreon that's designed to connect content creators with patrons. It's an interesting hybrid that combines elements of subscriptions, pledging and tipping and reconciles them with the sometimes erratic creative schedule of any working artist. Patreon is Jack Conte's effort to help creators with web followings get paid. He told Brenna Ehrlich, writing for O Music Awards , that ad revenue on YouTube is inadequate for smaller acts and that crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter [...]

By  David Dufresne  ( @DavidDufresne ), CEO of  Bandzoogle , a website builder and marketing platform for independent music artists. I think when Apple and Google finally launch subscription music services (or partner up with an existing one), and bundle them with each iOS and Android device sold, this will be a huge game-changer. It will definitely be the tipping point towards massive adoption of on-demand music access, and it will accelerate the downfall of music ownership. [...]

Ethan Schiff is an artist manager. He’s on Twitter @ethanschiff and blogs on creative music entrepreneurship at www.SchiffBlog.com . Although the music industry is evolving, it is still hard for artists to get out of the “pick me” mindset, which has been drilled into bands’ heads through a combination of the traditional record business model and endless stories of A&R scouts signing bands in dirty bars. I often hear artists declare from day one that their goal is to get signed to a label. The [...]

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm . On Monday, the U.S. Senate approved new taxes on digital and physical goods sold on the internet, including apps and digital music. This probably comes too late to save your local record dealer , but it probably wouldn’t have saved him or her anyway. Still, when more of the economy is online these days, a tax of some kind makes sense. Why should Other Music pay a tax on vinyl, when massive public companies like Amazon do not? [...]

By Brandon Chiat , co-founder, Marquee  a live music discovery and rewards application. There’s a new buzzword being thrown around by marketing teams. SoLoMo , which stands for Social-Local-Mobile, refers to the integration of social, location-based, and mobile marketing tools into new customer acquisition platforms. Most everyone is familiar with the common SoLoMo platforms like Foursquare and Groupon. What you may not be familiar [...]