Blog: Hypebot

By Kyle Bylin ( @sidewinderfm ), founder and editor of sidewinder.fm , a music and tech think tank. Over the years, I’ve written about music blogging and interviewed music bloggers. It’s an interesting sector. Having grown up on a farm next to a town of 200 people in North Dakota, however, I can’t recall anyone mentioning music blogs or discovering music on the Hype Machine. The awareness of music blogs is so low that a friend of mine, who worked at a coffee shop, loved Young The Giant, and long-boarded to college [...]

DC based musician Mark Charles Heidinger and his project Vandaveer are known for an reflective alt-folk sound and memorable performances both here and abroad. For an upcoming show at the small but mighty Kirk Avenue Music Hall in Roanoke, VA (admittedly one of my favorite place to see live music ), the band produced a ridiculously simple yet very effective 6 second video for Twitter's Vine . Since Vine videos are embedable anywhere, this video can [...]

It's all abut serving the fan, and small drones is the solution for one music festival. Set to make their first appearance at the OppiKoppi fest in South Africa, these flying drones will keep festival goers from leaving the pit just to wait in line for the next brew. "The device is an 8-propeller helicopter that can be loaded with beer and flown over the festival, arriving at the GPS location of any person who orders… Once the drone arrives at its location, it drops its cargo and a single beer attached to [...]

An assortment of recent music videos were promoted or described as having racy material but, despite a selection that includes the old guard, David Bowie, the young contender, Jack Conte, and a crowdsourced world of cursors, an air of disappointment reigns. Certainly no attempts here to shock anyone that doesn't have their shock button set on automatic. David Bowie - The Next Day David Bowie's "Explicit" video that requires a YouTube sign-in to verify age has some blood but is far [...]

A few weeks ago YouTube released a creators guide for musicians who use YouTube. There are a lot of points worth noting amongst those 40 pages. If you'd like to know more about to get the most out of your YouTube music experience but don't have time to do all the reading, check out the 9 highlights Jesse Cannon outlines on Music Think Tank . Ask fans to remix, cover and create videos with your song involved that will help it to [...]

YouTube's new subscription channels, a cable tv for the web, launched yesterday with two music channels on board, Qello (HD concert films and music documentaries) and Rap Battle Network. They're two of the more interesting looking channels in YouTube's odd assortment that seems to be angling for Middle America. Hopefully we'll soon be seeing more music channels exploring this potential revenue stream. YouTube announced its new subscription video channels and described the initiative as a continuation of the YouTube Partner Program . Here are some highlights from [...]

In the new "Instumental Touch" tv ad for Delta Faucets’ Touch2O Technology, Wilco percussionist Glenn Kotche plays a a bevy of faucet  The spot shows of Delta's touch it and the water turns on and off faucet tech, but sadly, not much of Kotche's considerable skill.

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 [...]