Girl Talk

Remixes and mashups will not be subject to compulsory licenses anytime soon according to recommendations presented in a white paper released last month by the Department of Commerce (DoC). The white paper is the result of a 2-year study published by the Internet Task Force created to deal with our “Remix Culture.” The remix culture, as Lawrence Lessig states in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, utilizes multimedia as its language to communicate. It allows the consumer to quote content from various sources to create something from existing content that can be considered “new.” For example, sampling, taking short snippets from different songs to create a new song that can sound completely different from its original sources — a practice widely used in hip hop and electronic music. Remixing and sampling have become vital techniques and art forms in a new-look media landscape.

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Daniel Ek

Spotify has been known since its launch in 2006 as a music streaming service, but with a move into video content, the streaming giant looks to be broadening its entertainment offerings.

In a new partnership with Disney, ABCNews, NBC, Viacom, TED, and Vice, and others, Spotify has added video content to its library. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, originally made the announcement back on May 20th, but the update went live on iOS and Android in recent weeks.
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Crash The Super Bowl

Since 2006, Doritos and APM Music, the largest production music platform in the US, have run the Super Bowl ad contest, “Crash The Super Bowl.” The partnership engages online followers by offering fans and budding ad-writers the chance to create a Doritos ad spot — using APM music — and have their spot aired during football’s biggest game. Contestants choose from 21 APM tracks to feature in their commercial. The top three finalists, selected by online voters with input from advertising executives, have a chance to win $1,000,000 if their ad charts at number one in the USA Today polls.

Over the nine years that the contest has run, thousands have submitted their commercials to Doritos in hopes of seeing their ad during the big game, resulting in lucrative music licensing deals for APM and its music publishing and songwriting partners. But how did APM get drafted into such a lasting and successful deal with Doritos, a unit of Pepsico?
Continue reading “Doritos and APM Music “Crash The Super Bowl Contest” Marks 10th and Final Year”

From Adele to the streaming wars to a call for revision of arcane music licensing laws from the U.S. Copyright Office — in our final episode of the year Larry Miller talks with Neil Shah of the Wall Street Journal about the three most important music industry stories of 2015.

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Monday Reading List

It’s Monday again, and that means another batch of important information to catch up on. On this week’s Monday Reading List, Billboard.biz explains new changes to webcasting rates, Spotify considers allowing artists to withhold music from the free platform, Tesco starts selling vinyl in the UK, Paul Pacifico tells Music Business Worldwide why artists must be at the center of a new music business, and rumors swirl that the Beatles catalogue may finally be available on streaming services very soon.
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Monday Reading List

On today’s Monday Reading List: Music Business Worldwide tells us why this week will be so important for the industry, Taylor Swift and Apple join forces (again), a new study suggests that streaming might actually help record sales, and the RZA considers stealing back the Wu-Tang album that recently sold for millions.

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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.
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PM-jaunt

In the 1990’s, the concept of a functioning virtual reality (VR) system was still in many ways a science fiction fantasy — but that is no longer the case. Multiple developers, most notably Google and Oculus Rift (acquired last year by Facebook), have made VR into a real thing that could be as common as smartphones over the next decade — and VR could prove a valuable new tool for the music industry.

Continue reading “How Virtual Reality Could Change The Music Industry”