Another week, another batch of industry news and long reads for our Monday Reading List. On this week’s list Pandora gets dealt another tough blow, The Economist theorizes on the age of music festival-goers, Bandcamp makes some changes in pay structure, and Music Business Worldwide says what we were all thinking about new streaming service/device the Electric Jukebox. Then, because here at Musonomics, we can’t ignore that hotline when it blings, artist James Turrell confirms that neither he, nor his woes, had anything to do with Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video.
Check out this week’s Monday Reading List after the jump.
Pandora is having a bad time. The music streamer will have to pay around $90 million to settle a case with ABKCO Music & Records, Capitol Records, Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings and Warner Music Group over Pandora’s use of music recorded before 1972. In other Pandora news, their stock dropped by 35%. How much longer can Pandora hang on?
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/23/pandora-record-labels-lawsuit-royalties-1972-music
This summer we ran a two-part series on the world of music festivals. We talked to George Wein, founder of the Newport Folk Fest, and the future of the festival looked bright, shiny, and lined with potential revenue for years. But this week The Economist ran a piece that shows that not only is the average age of headliners increasing, so is the average age of concert-goers. Which raises the question, is the festival industry really as future-proof as we thought it was?
Bandcamp has, for the most part, enjoyed a good reputation amongst independent artists. The site has always tried its best to align interests with artists, but their latest move has people questioning the company’s motives. Until now, all payments on the site were routed directly to artists, but now those payments will be routed through Bandcamp first, adding another 24-48hours of wait time before artists get paid. As you can imagine, most independent artists are not thrilled.
If you haven’t heard of the Electric Jukebox, a new music streaming device launched in the UK last week, there’s a good reason — the Electric Jukebox is curiously awful. Over at Music Business Worldwide, they took up the challenge of outlining exactly why the service is so strangely bad, with a few lol-worthy jabs thrown in for good measure.
http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/no-electric-jukebox-isnt-a-joke-but-it-probably-should-be/
Everyone’s hotline is blinging and there’s not much anyone can do about it. Drake’s newest video “Hotline Bling” is the internet’s latest obsession, and apart from Drake’s enviable dance moves, one of the things that has made the video so popular are the glowing neon backgrounds that so perfectly frame Drake’s flailing appendages.
Those backgrounds more than sort of look just like the work of James Turrell, a 72 year-old installation artist with a white beard as big as Drake’s ego. When the internet began pointing out the similarities between the video’s aesthetic and Turrell’s work, Turrell issued the following statement:
While I am truly flattered to learn that Drake f*cks with me, I nevertheless wish to make clear that neither I nor any of my woes was involved in any way in the making of the “Hotline Bling” video.
James Turrell ftw.
http://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/10/21/9587442/drake-james-turrell-hotline-bling-video