It’s Monday, and that means it’s time for another Musonomics Monday Reading List. This week, we check in on the Grammy nominations, Bloomberg explains why Spotify is so desperate to cling to their freemium model, Facebook launches a concert ticket service, Adele feels “eh” on streaming, and Music Business Worldwide releases their shortlist of candidates for the MBW Young Executive 2015 Award.
This morning the nominees for the 2016 Grammy Awards were announced, and they are spread along predictable lines. Kendrick Lamar leads the pack with 11 nominations, while Taylor Swift and The Weeknd follow close behind with 7 nominations each.
The nominees for Album of the year are The Alabama Shakes’ Sound and Color, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, Taylor Swift’s 1989, Chris Stapleton’s Traveller, and The Weeknd’s Beauty Behind The Madness. Check out the entire list of this season’s nominees at grammy.com/nominees.
Coldplay’s new album A Headful Of Dreams still isn’t available on Spotify. Though the album will finally hit the world’s leading streaming platform this coming Friday, Dec 11th — Coldplay is just the latest big name artist to line up opposite Spotify in the battle against freemium. Over at Bloomberg, Joshua Brustein has penned a great piece that explains exactly why freemium is so important to Spotify’s bottom-line, and why they won’t give up on it very easily.
Facebook is trying all kinds of new things. The latest venture that the social media giant is beta testing comes in the form of a new ticket selling service, so far only available in the bay area. The service allows tickets to be found and sold through Facebook by partnering directly with small venues and artists. Those venues and artists reportedly get 100% of ticket revenue and Facebook has plans to expand not only beyond San Francisco, but beyond concert tickets to other types of entertainment events.
Adele sold another truckload of copies of 25 this week, and continues to be the prediction-defying, album-sales-machine that we’ve all grown to know, love, envy, and be mystified by. Oh, and she’s done all this without making 25 available via any streaming platforms.
When Rolling Stone asked Adele her thoughts on streaming, she gave this response:
“[Streaming] probably is the future, but, eh, there are kids I know who are, like, nine who don’t even know what a fucking CD is! I’ve got my CDs out on display in my house just to prove a point. Maybe CDs will have a massive comeback like vinyl did.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/17-things-you-learn-hanging-out-with-adele-20151130?page=3
Music Business Worldwide announced the MBW Young Executive Award nearly six weeks ago, and now we’ve got a list of nominees. The award is for meant to recognize the brightest up-and-coming talent across today’s global music industry.
You can check out the entire list of nominees at musicbusinessworldwide.com/music-business-worldwide-young-executive-2015-the-shortlist.
The 15-person shortlist was compiled by tallying confidential votes from MBW’s Advisory board. A winner and four runner-ups will be selected by 15o senior executives over the next few weeks.