Tagged: hypebot

According to Hypebot Three months after launch, Spotify has amassed 2.4 million monthly U.S. visitors says ComScore. That's a very strong start for a service that was initially invitation-only. Spotify is currently drawing an audience that resembles the traditional early adopter, according to Comscore.Nearly 3 in 5 visitors are male, 50% are between the ages of 18-34, and 24% are from households making at least $100,000 annually. Each of these demographic segments index significantly higher than average. That's significant because opinion-leaders often influence those around them. Well you can add us to [...]

Mark Mulligan has done a guest blog for Hypebot : How Zuckerberg Is Using Music To Keep Facebook From 'Doing a MySpace' Hmm. MySpace used music in a bid to stop MySpace doing a Friendster, but Zuckerberg is being a bit smarter: Zuckerberg's music strategy is simple: Make Facebook an integral part of the music experience without ever getting bogged down in paying to license the music from record labels. And, more importantly, without having the panoply of hosting to bother about. Still, if this does fail, he could always put [...]

Here are some highs and lows of music and moshing from round the fingertips. - Rolling Stone is streaming the new Telekinesis debut , which has some sweet melodies, rock crunch and some GBV-esque pop things going on from singer-songwriter Michael Lerner. - MTV Networks and Rhapsody have partnered to give music fans two free months of music. - So Much Silence has the goods on new music from Phoenix band Kinch , and the release of a song from a hopeful [...]

Hypebot posted a great video today of a TED lecture by Dr. Jeremy Silver that took place in 2009...

Have you ever got music library envy, and felt that your stack of digital music files might be on the light side? Tidysongs reckons it's 7,160 tracks. A note of caution here: that's based on people who've invited their software to clean up said libraries. And people who only have a few tracks in their collection are less likely to bother paying for a service to tidy up - partly because they can still do it by hand, if they wish; partly because if you don't have that much music on your PC, [...]

With the recent launch of Ping, many artists, labels, and managers alike have been trying to utilize iTunes 10's Artist Profile. Artist accounts allow musicians to upload and create their own pages featuring their pictures, videos, tour dates, music recommendations and a lot more. Last week, Apple told Hypebot, "Those interested in creating Artist Profiles on [...]

Hypebot recently posted the top 7 reasons why artists resist social media: 1. I don't want to be pushy and over-hypey. 2. Social Media won't put any money in my pocket. 3. Social Media and Marketing takes too much time. 4. "Social" Media isn't "real" media. 5. Social media is just for young people. 6. Status Updates on Facebook and Twitter [...]

One of those moments where the majors behave so terribly, you could almost admire them: Warners' Atlantic imprint is trying to get fans to fund Natty's new album . Hypebot reports: To encourage fans to invest, Natty's offerings offerings include £8 for the EP, introducing Natty from stage for £70, a private acoustic concert in your own home for £600 - £5,000 (not sure why there's such a wide price range), all the way up to Natty remixing your track for for £1,200. Atlantic hasn't announced if they'll be taking their normal full royalty from Natty [...]

According to Hypebot , Apple have started to use their market share to - shall we call it bully? - to bully labels into not taking part in the Amazon Daily Deal. Alarmed at the prospect of Amazon effectively underwriting the cost of spot promotions on albums, Apple warned labels to not do deals with its rival. Billboard quotes anonymous music industry insiders who claim to have been on the wrong end of Jobs' boys turning up with a "nice artist here, shame if something happened to their visibility on the largest online [...]

This guest post by David Sherbow looks at potential artist revenue streams. David is the CEO of LiveMusicMachine.com and blogs MusicBizGuy Speaks. The artist music business model has been in flux for years. The record deal dream that most artists sought is no longer the viable alternative that it once was. The leveling of the music [...]

Duncan Freeman, the man behind Band Metrics, has added another venture, MusicScout. It's a free location aware mobile music smartphone app that enables you to express your thoughts about the band you're watching in real-time from the venue. The Android app is available now, and the iPhone app will be available once approved by Apple [...]

Ah, our old friends QTrax are at it again. Their form, you'll recall, is for making sweeping announcements and then quickly winding backwards when those plans are compared with the real world. Now, they've got to the stage where they announce press conferences only to pull them at the last minute. They were going to make a big announcement on Christmas Eve. Only they had to pull it because, erm, everyone turned into The Master. Or something. Hypebot reports: Apparently only one person is capable of speaking for the company or honoring its commitments [...]

Hypebot reports the launch of a new music store , selling downloads in America for 19 cents a pop. The store, TunesPro, says it can do this price because it's absorbing a loss of 39 cents a download. It says it's happy to do that because it's cheaper than advertising. It also tells Hypebot that it is offering legal downloads. In the comments section of Hypebot, anonymous sources are being cited suggesting that the last claim is as untrue as the first two are unlikely, but nobody seems quite sure. Even if [...]

News International announced pretty good profit figures this week, based mainly on the take from the Ice Age cartoon. To be fair, the company relying on making money out of dinosaurs is nothing new, and it's attempts to evolve are so far generating more duck-billed platypuses than leopards. The latest rumblings from MySpace aren't encouraging: as traffic to the site falls , the money flowing back from Google is scaling down in proportion. Indeed, the public's diminishing affection for broken page layouts and clashing backgrounds is going to cost NI $100million, reports Hypebot: We're still [...]

The team at QTrax continue to delight with what can only be a prankster's approach to business. The world has been watching for a couple of years as they send out releases announcing something or other, only for a clarification to follow in a few days that reveals that, actually, the deals with the major labels they said they had weren't in place, or it's taking a little longer to get the music on the system than they expected, or it's simply not possible to download the actual Tina Turner to dance round your living room. This week, [...]

Hypebot has got the details on Warners losses for the quarter , and the position isn't pretty: Total revenue decreased 9.3% and operating income from continuing operations declined 51%. Total losses from continuing operations swelled to $37 million from $9 in the prior year quarter. Twelve million dollars a month? It's hard to see how Warners could even manage to be spending that, much less losing it. But don't worry, Warners have a cunning plan: WMG improved its financial position during the quarter with a $1.1 billion offering of [...]

Emily White talks to Hypebot about Amanda Palmer and her audience: The attendance at those shows spiked in 2006 when a few Dolls songs were receiving airplay. Awesome, right? Well, now it's 2009 and we've returned to some of those markets. Many of those radio fans don't turn up anymore. Yet, the hardcores or "1000 true fans" are still there, just like they have been since they organically founded The Dresden Dolls back in the day. They still line up outside for hours, know every word of every song (whether or [...]

Umair Haque considers the numbers being thrown about right now: Let's use MJ's tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That's $12 million a year. I'm deliberately leaving out ads, endorsements, concerts, etc., to focus on the the structural problems in one industry: music. If the world's biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels' pockets. Did they make better music with it? [...]

Hypebot suggests that those who know most about Warner Music Group aren't seeing stock as an investment: But according to respected investment trade publication Barron's, insiders are "hearing a different tune" and last week unloaded $3 million in stock. Barron's points specifically to Vice Chairman of Strategy and Operations Michael Fleisher who on June 2nd sold 400,000 shares for $3 million, an average of $7.41 a share. Fleisher, who joined the company as CFO in 2005 still owns 766,207 shares. Now, it could just be that Fleisher needed some ready cash. [...]

Hypebot is an ever evolving idea: part news, part opinion and part open forum for all aspects of the new music industry. And as the August fourth year anniversary of the blog approaches, I've been thinking about making some changes and adding new features to make it Hypebot an even more useful resource. So, I'm asking you, my brilliant, creative and cutting edge readers: If you owned Hypebot, what would you do differently? For example, would you: Add a page [...]