How To Play Your Music To The Chinese Market

The music market is now made up largely of what we know as the traditional streaming services that we have become familiar with. We each have our own go to, to get that song that will please our body, mind and soul, at a moment’s feeling.

We each have access to the world’s catalogue of music at the touch of a finger. But we still have to look for it and the music still needs to be found. Like the Lord of the Rings, Precious wants to be found.

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The Dark And Light Sides Of Digital

Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd bassist and creative force, is a known detractor of the modern music industry. The Times Arts editor Alex O’Connell explains “Waters said how grateful he was to have grown up when an artist’s talent and hard work was rewarded financially - unlike nowadays.” 

Waters slams digital music providers, “When this gallery of rogues and thieves had not yet interjected themselves between the people who aspire to be creative and their potential audience and steal every f***ing cent anybody ever made and put it in their pockets to buy f***ing huge mega-yachts and gulfstream fives with.” He continues, “I blame the punters as well to some extent, a whole generation that’s grown up who believe that music should be free.”

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On-Demand Music Content Now Stands At The Center Of US Recording Industry

While some artists see streaming as a thorn in the marketing side of music business, the recording industry itself can look at it as its future and saving grace.

Indeed, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the country’s recording industry made more money last year at $7.026 billion from just $6.951 billion in 2014. The 0.09 percent increase was brought about mostly by sales coming from music streaming across various platforms such as Spotify, Tidal, Pandora, and iTunes.

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Become A Better Studio Musician: 4 Tips To Conquer Red Light Syndrome

My first real passion is drums. I started playing when I was 4 years old and studied pretty hard through college. I was lucky enough to have some incredible mentors and teachers along the way, from guys like Mike Shapiro (Sergio Mendes, Macy Gray, Justin Timberlake), Ralph Humphry (Frank Zappa, George Duke), and Craig Thatcher (October Project, Christopher Cross). But of all the lessons and ideas I picked up along the way, I’ve deduced that the single most important thing, as a rhythm player, is being able to confidently play while under pressure. With that, I’d like to tell you about the infamous “RLS”.

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Ian Rogers Beats It

The news of Ian Rogers’ departure from Beats 1 flooded the Internet on Friday August 28, 2015. After Financial Times broke the news of Rogers parting from Apple. This came as a surprise to many music industry insiders. Rogers has been said to be detrimental to the development and the future success of Beats 1.

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Legal Landmine: Playing Music at Your Business

Music offers the perfect audio backdrop for any store or business waiting room, either relaxing anxious customers or injecting energy into the lifeless. The right type of music can set the stage for the ideal purchasing attitude. However, music in the business world can be a bit of a legal landmine, with many seemingly innocent companies finding themselves guilty of stealing licensed tracks. Keep the following in mind as you navigate the complicated world of business and music

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Digital vs. Vinyl: Where It Makes A Difference

The vinyl-or-digital debate rages on and audiophiles of all stripes have strong opinions on one side or the other. Saying anything almost feels like a reopening of old wounds. Technically speaking, sound engineers record modern music in digital, so most would say that digital playback sounds exactly like they engineered it. Since the early 1990s at the latest, oversampling of the digital stream has driven the difference between an engineered, digital recording and digital playback far beyond the range of human hearing.

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Beginners Guide To Using Soundcloud

Soundcloud is a free to use website for uploading audio, and all you need to start is your email address or the usual Facebook/Google sign in information. I’ve noticed using a separate email is easier for bands and producers than your personal Facebook account, but if you are just using Soundcloud to listen to music and maybe upload some amatuer things for your friends, then Facebook or Google could be the way to go.

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The Next Era Of The Music Business

The music industry is about to change in a profound way as it turns to streaming as its primary distribution model.For labels, artists, songwriters and musicians alike, their financial lives may hang in the balance.

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Premiumization 101 for Musicians

Music is valuable for triggering emotions and shaping our mood, but the market laws are different. There’s no silver bullet on how to add scarce value to a musical composition in order to make it marketable. There’s a yet unexplored territory though, and it lies in the power of perception. Brands resist commoditization by skillfully adding value to what they offer, changing people’s perception. In other words, enter Premium.

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The Social Media Bandwagon: Everybody "Likes" a Winner

Mumford & Sons released their 2nd album Babel a few weeks ago. It’s hard to know what any listeners think of it. But one thing we all seem to know — Babel sold 600,000+ copies in its first week. That statistic was re-blogged and re-tweeted thousands of times, blindly hailing “the best debut of 2012.” Everybody {likes, re-tweets, +1’s} a winner.

Does a splashy debut lose significance as media transitions from the physical to weightless digital? We’ll get to that later. In any case, debut has replaced legacy as a benchmark of worth.

Artistic works that build their audience slowly and sustain it for long periods are becoming rare. Most works live and die with their debut. Open big or enjoy staying under the radar. In music, Adele’s 21 is the most recent outlier. No one saw it coming, and then nothing could displace it for more than a year. In the back catalog, Pink Floyd’s enduring hit Dark Side of the Moon returned to the Billboard Top 200 (at #156) for the week ending 21-Oct-2012. That’s 817 (non-consecutive) weeks on the chart (more than 15 chart-years).

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The Rise Of Vinyl

Sales of vinyl records are up in the United States and I have a theory on why some of us are going analog.

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Digital Piracy Vs. The Music Industry [Infographic]

The Music Industry has been struggling to battle the revolution of Digital Piracy for years, with countless musician’s speaking out against it.  This struggle has gone as far as the creation of a few ill-advised bills being proposed by Congress, known as SOPA and PIPA, to protect Hollywood’s movie and music industries from dropping drastic levels of revenue.  However, these laws were far from desirable, and the Music Industry still faces a challenge in battling piracy, despite the activists against it!

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Why You Should Give Your Music Away for Free

Digital music caught the record labels off guard and smashed their business to pieces, and from the rubble new economic realities are emerging. In this new reality, most independent artists, especially those who are just starting out, should give their music away for free. Sound crazy? Maybe, but hear me out. It boils down to 3 main concepts.

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