Streaming Is Killed The CD - And It's OK

Earlier this year, US-based supermarket chain Best Buy announced it will no longer carry music on physical support - CDs, mostly - due to its dwindling record sales. According to sources speaking to Billboard Magazine, the chain was making a mere $40 million a year from record sales, a sum that’s apparently too small to carry on. Best Buy plans to completely eliminate CDs from its stores by July 1st, the sources say, but it will continue to sell vinyl for at least two more years (albeit it will likely move them next to the turntables it sells).

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8 Reasons Why Artist To Fan Social Apps Work

The big social networks should be seen as the top of the funnel in converting your followers into dedicated fans. Here are the top 8 reasons you should use a GigRev Powered direct-to-fan micro-community platform to build a digital fan club and bring fans closer.

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How To Get Your Music On A Spotify Playlist (From A Band That Has)

How you get your music on a Spotify playlists is a hot topic. Most people expect there to be a simple, golden bullet solution. Who can I pay? Who do I email? From experience, the reality is quite different. In this article we’ll tell you the approach we took with The Daydream Club, an independent artist that has amassed over 40,000,000 Spotify plays and regularly attracts between 500,000 and 1,000,000 streams per month.

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5 Ways To Get On A Spotify Playlist

You’re ready to get on a Spotify playlist, right? But how do you do it when you have no followers, no connections, and you don’t know the first thing about how to make it happen.

I’m the queen of trying to find loopholes when everyone else says it can’t be done. Official Spotify playlist curators are unbelievably elusive and well guarded. They are also not the only way to make your way onto a playlist.

Below are five ways to get your song onto a Spotify playlist starting with two that essentially have no barriers and ending with the official playlists that require more strategy and savvy.

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Spotify: The Music Industry’s Life Support?

Recording Academy president Neil Portnow, does not believe that Spotify is out for anyone, but themselves. On Grammy night Portnow took to the stage to aim shots at music streaming services for making less-than lucrative deals with artists and musicians. Neil Portnow said, “Isn’t a song worth more then a penny?”

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Spotify Remains King, But Until When?

Spotify’s acquisition of Irish startup Soundwave just goes to show that it remains the ringleader of the music streaming niche. The company is fast-expanding amid the growing competition in the sector, seemingly leaving competitors Tidal, Rdio, and Pandora behind its shadows.

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Jason K Ventura’s Music Industry Predictions For 2016

The streaming business model will change across the board. The new models will have fairground for artists and labels alike.

Due to royalty rates and a rebellion of artists, streaming services will be forced to put limitations on music catalogs.

With prices at an all time low and stagnant music sales, touring will continue to be a cash cow for the music industry. Yet again, touring will be the bread winner this year.

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Pandora’s Box

Pandora’s CEO Brian McAndrews was featured in an article in Business Insider. McAndrews conjugates a story about a music industry executive that spoke to an undergraduate class of students at one of the top universities in the country. He never mentioned who the executive was or what university; to me the story was just that, a story.

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5 Ways To Integrate Playlisting Into Your Digital Marketing Campaign

 So you have a new track and you’re ready to release it. Great work! What’s your game plan?

There are many marketing avenues for you to map out before you’re ready to release, and each one is just as important as the next. In fact, it’s the decisions you make right now that will either launch your career to new heights, or simply simmer away into obscurity.

Out of the many avenues you are strategizing when it comes to launching your song, one you must consider spending some time on is the phenomenon of Playlisting - which simply refers to a list of songs compiled to represent a certain mood, genre, or event. Playlists are how music fans are discovering most of their new music these days, thanks to the current boom of streaming services like Spotify, Rdio, Deezer, Songza, and Pandora. In fact, Spotify users find, on average, 26 new artists a month through the platform. That’s pretty cool.

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Spotify's Clout

By Spencer Ritchie from Berklee’s Music Business Journal, thembj.org.

In the last four months three new streaming platforms were launched: Apple Music, Tidal, and Google Play Music. Others, among them YouTube, Deezer, and Rdio, still compete for market share. The Freemium camp, with Spotify, Google Play Music, and Pandora, collects revenue from advertising & subscriptions. The Premium camp, with Apple Music and Tidal, produces receipts exclusively from paid memberships. Spotify is the very embodiment of Freemium, and the release of Apple Music will undoubtedly be a big challenge—coming, as it does, from the largest company in the world, with a remarkable market cap of more than $700 billion.

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It's Time To Rethink Everything

As many of you who normally read my blog post know that I do not support the music-streaming model that is currently being used. I believe that streaming in the current business model is not sustainable revenue for the music industry. To date there hasn’t been any music streaming service that has yet made a profit. It’s easy math here, the record labels and artists spend big time dollars to produce, market, and distribute music. In turn they receive pennies to the dollar, this seems like a no brainer. No wonder why music-streaming services have not made a dollar.

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Taylor Swift Made The Choice To Not Fight YouTube

You may know very well the story of Taylor Swift going against Apple and Spotify because these two decided to stream artists’ music without paying them any, or very little, royalties. After Taylor Swift pulled her entire repertoire from Spotify and called Apple out for originally not intending to pay publishers, labels or artists during the free three-month trial, she finally made up with Apple. Following a quite restless time, Swift tweeted she is putting her album on Apple Music ‘and happily so’.

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Swimming Upstream

Since releasing my first digital album back in 2002, technology has played a crucial role in the distribution of the music I create. At that time, CDs were still the way folks listened to music but sales were definitely well in decline. Napster had scared the crap out of the music industry and was shut down for good. Mp3s were all the rage and there were these things called iPods that were changing the way people consumed their favorite songs and albums.

Thanks to archive.org and Creative Commons, I was able to distribute my music free of charge to my listeners without fear of the music being used for commercial purposes. I’d release a concept album that could be downloaded and enjoyed around the world. At the time, this was a novel idea for an independent artist.

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What Artists Should Know About ArtistLink

ArtistLink started as an extension of the Topspin Media platform, so that non-Topspin users could add content to the MTV Artists site. It’s well on its way to becoming the control panel for the music industry.

I encourage any artist with a release on Spotify to sign up for ArtistLink. All essential functionality is free. As of this writing, ArtistLink is basically four services rolled up into one. I’ll go over each, starting with the coolest.

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