Warner Music Group Collaboration with Shazam Creates Hybrid Record Label

By Zach Rickers

In February of 2014, Warner Music Group and Shazam announced that they would enter into a “strategic collaboration” in which Warner would have access to Shazam’s user data and Shazam would have access to exclusive Warner content.¹  Currently, when a user hears a song that they like, whether it is at a restaurant or on the radio, they can open up the Shazam application on their smartphone and hold the phones microphone to the speaker which will then analyze and identify the song title and artist that the user is listening to.²  Once a song is identified, the app logs data such as the time of day the song was “tagged”, the song being identified, and even where the song was tagged (if the user has location services enabled).³  This is the sort of data that Warner plans to use not only for A&R, but also for marketing and promotion purposes.

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Beats Music v. Spotify

By John Lahr

As of January 21^st Spotify now has a legitimate contender in the music streaming market, as Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s Beats Music steps into the ring. It is the culmination of eighteen months of development after Dr. Dre’s lucrative consumer electronics company purchased MOG in July of 2012. Entering with a soft launch in late January, the service announced its arrival in spectacular style with a Super Bowl advertising blitz featuring T.V personality Ellen DeGeneres. While Beats Music and Spotify have many similar features, both services have very different views of the future of the streaming marketplace, and different ways of communicating their vision to consumers.

Features Comparison

Like Spotify, Beats Music offers a library of over 20 million songs to choose from, the ability to create playlists and sync them to your mobile device for offline listening, and a radio feature¹.  However Beats offers far more advanced features for discovering music thanks to its “Sentence” radio and “Just For You” curated playlists tailored to taste preferences you give when signing up.

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Berklee Launches Independent Record Label

Students at Berklee College of Music can now learn the ins and outs of an independent record label through the college’s new label, Berklee Internet Radio Network Cooperative Records (birnCORE). birnCORE records some of today’s best independent artists who visit Berklee’s campus performance facilities, from the 200-seat Red Room @ Cafe 939 to the college’s state-of-the-art internet radio studio. Student engineers mix the albums to the artists’ specifications. Released digitally, birnCORE LPs are priced to sell at about $5.

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