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Millennials on Millennials: Lots of Love, Lack of Loyalty
Millennials now make up the second-largest generation group in the U.S. They also now have disposable incomes, making them attractive to marketers and brands who are so eager to reach them, as this group is highly engaged, using multiple platforms for many hours on a daily basis.
Source: Millennials on Millennials: Lots of Love, Lack of Loyalty
12 Essential Apps for DIY Musicians and Bands
If you’re an indie musician, you probably need a bit of help. Apps like OffTop, Gigtown, Mixed in Key, and more are here to help you in your music career.
7 Sound Experiments That Hint At The Future of Interfaces
Hear that? It’s avant-garde UI.
Source: 7 Sound Experiments That Hint At The Future of Interfaces
If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture?
The platform offered a public space with monetization as an afterthought. Now it could simply be deleted.
Source: If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? – The New York Times
Why all new music sounds the same
THE CLICK – THE DRUMMERS from Greg Ellis on Vimeo.
“People are consuming the musical equivalent of McDonalds: processed, mass produced, and flavorless.”
Is Amazon getting too big?
A 28-year-old law student takes on the “Everything Store” by questioning whether antitrust law is ready to deal with a winner-take-all economy
Source: Is Amazon getting too big? – The Washington Post
See also The Yale Law Journal article: Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox
A musician’s take on the analog-digital divide
The Audiophiliac reviews Damon Krukowski’s new book “The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World.”
Source: A musician’s take on the analog-digital divide – CNET
Why Marx is Essential
What is extraordinary about Das Kapital is that it offers a still-unrivalled picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale. It firmly embedded concepts such as commodity and capital in the lexicon. And it highlights some of the vulnerabilities of capitalism, including its unsettling disruption of states and political systems. The election of Donald Trump, the vote for Brexit and the rise of populism in Europe and elsewhere can all be understood as indirect effects of shifts in the global division of labour — the relocation of key aspects of modern production away from Europe and the United States. That has been brought about by changes in what Marx identified as the capitalist enterprise’s incessant drive to expansion.
Source: In retrospect: Das Kapital : Nature : Nature Research
The Three Eras Of Paid Streaming
Streaming has driven such a revenue renaissance within the major record labels that the financial markets are now falling over themselves to work out where they can invest in the market . . . .
Source: The Three Eras Of Paid Streaming | Music Industry Blog
The SoundCloud You Loved Is Doomed
Amid rumors of bankruptcy, SoundCloud finds itself where many of its forebears have: slouching unsuccessfully towards scale and profitability.
“Take On Me” music video comes to life with AR
Pack it on up, everyone — someone just won ARKit. We’ve seen loooots of fun stuff made with ARKit already, but this one… this one is something special.
Source: Someone made the “Take On Me” music video come to life with AR and it’s glorious | TechCrunch
The Pendulum Swing Of Disruption
When a new technology disrupts a traditional incumbent, it normally does so by being 3 things to the end user:
- Cheaper/free
- Quicker
- More convenient
Napster, YouTube, Amazon, Uber, Netflix, all of these companies have done exactly this. Because they most often build market share and presence using external funding, such companies turn existing economics upside down with loss leading tactics. The result is that audiences switch in their millions and incumbents are left in tatters. Any old business that relies on scarcity economics will be swept away.
Source: The Internet’s Adolescence: The Real World Catches Up Eventually | Music Industry Blog
Music Industry Now Likes Streaming but Hates YouTube
Spotify, the world’s biggest streaming music service, is and always has been unprofitable. Maybe that’ll change in 2017? The RIAA cautioned people that the industry’s recovery from it steep losses in the mid-aughts “is fragile and fraught with risk.” Sales of CDs and song downloads are declining fast, especially as Apple more heavily favors its streaming service over iTunes. Digital music is hard.
Pandora, one of the first services to offer streaming radio and formerly the music industry’s archenemy, just released an on-demand streaming service that faces stiff competition from Spotify and Apple Music. Investors are pressuring Pandora to sell itself, just as the company started to be on better terms with the recording industry.
Some things don’t change, though. The music industry is still mad at YouTube for how little it pays artists:
Source: The Music Industry Kind Of Likes Streaming Now, But It’s Still Nervous
When Amazon’s Cloud Goes Down
The dynamics between public and private cloud tip a little more towards private cloud every time that there is an outage or with each new generation of IT technology that folks like Cisco Systems, Dell/EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei Technologies, IBM or Lenovo bring to the market. It is unlikely that businesses will halt their march to the cloud and move back to hosting all their applications on the traditional bare metal or virtualized server environments that had been popular for the last 20 years, but these episodes may cause people to think a little harder about data location and availability. This makes private cloud more interesting. Hybrid IT, gives businesses a combination of their datacenters, co-location and external cloud for hosting applications that could be traditional, virtualized, public cloud or private cloud.
Source: With Its Recent Outage, Amazon Web Services Is Helping To Sell Hybrid IT
Top 20 Internship Fields
This is high season for securing a summer internship, an essential talent pipeline for employers and steppingstone for students. Postings peak in March, with 30,443 advertised positions in March 2016 (if you don’t have anything by May, you’re probably out of luck). But before sending that résumé, take a good hard look at what’s on it.
Source: Top 20 Fields for Internships: Get Your Skills On – The New York Times
Live Music Trends for 2017
Sponsors spend $1.4 billion on the music industry in the United States each year, and that number is only going up. Instead of investing in large activations or stages at festivals, our experts predict that brands will focus more on building relationships with specific artists in the next year.
Source: 4 Major Live Music Trends Changing The Industry This Year – hypebot
New DJ Tech
Although selection may always be at the core of DJing, technology also plays a large part in how they practice their craft. Here we look at eight exciting new pieces of technology that are redefining the future of DJing.
Source: 8 New Technologies Redefining How DJs Play Live – hypebot
Spotify Playlists That Work for Indie Artists
Curated playlists are how many fans listen to and discover music; and a great way for independent artists to market their music. But which Spotify playlist deliver the most new fans? According to AWAL, the top five are:
1, Indie Pop Chillout
95,197 followers
By Spotify Canada
2. Your Office Stereo
51,703
By Spotify UK
3. Indie Pop!
604,307
By Spotify
4. Cill Mode:On
94,995
By Spotify Netherlands
5. Alternative R&B
533,620
By Spotify
Source: Which Spotify Playlists Get You The Most New Fans? – hypebot
The Age of Alexa
The overall play for Amazon, says Forrester Principal Analyst Thomas Husson, is to continue to make Alexa more useful with more smart home integration and more media capabilities. Why? The more people use Alexa devices, the more likely they are to spend money on Amazon. And so, unlike many rivals, it can afford to take a loss on the gadgets. “Amazon will increasingly subsidize Echo by bundling content (think music, video) with the device,” Husson says. “They can afford this since this is not core to their business model: the end-goal is to facilitate interactions.”
Source: Amazon Echo vs. Google Home vs. Microsoft Cortana vs. Apple Siri – Business Insider
See also: Amazon’s Alexa at CES 2017
Music Streaming Subscription Surge
In streaming’s earlier years, when doubts prevailed across the artist, songwriter and label communities, one of the arguments put forward by enthusiasts was that when streaming reached scale everything would make sense. When asked what ‘scale’ meant, the common reply was ‘100 million subscribers’. In December, the streaming market finally hit and passed that milestone, notching up 100.4 million subscribers by the stroke of midnight on the 31st December. It was an impressive end to an impressive year for streaming, but does it mark a change in the music industry, a fundamental change in the way in which streaming works for the music industry’s numerous stakeholders?
Source: Music Subscriptions Passed 100 Million In December. Has The World Changed? | Music Industry Blog