November is almost gone, and with it go memories of turkeys, pumpkin pie, and annoying family members. The last week of November was packed with notable industry news, like a German court’s anti-piracy ruling, or The Guardian’s look at Adele, Drake, and the one-album-per-year model. Also in this week’s Monday Reading List, a blog post about new music that sounds old, Nonesuch Records gets a new co-president, and SeatGeek launches a new marketplace.
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Just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last two weeks, Adele has a new album out. As Adele’s 25 continues to break records at every turn, the album is just about the only thing that anyone in the music industry is talking about — ourselves included.
Hold onto your butts, this week’s Monday Reading List is completely dominated by England’s all-powerful pop songstress.
What if artists have been thinking about streaming revenues in the wrong way? Steve Aoki thinks we should be thinking of streaming revenues as a type of “pension plan” for musical artists. In other music industry news from last week, Beats Music gets an official date of closure, Apple Music launches on android, Jean-Michel Jarre issues a statement on behalf of CISAC regarding the tragic events that took place last week in Paris, and a French photographer’s concert photos from the Eagles of Death Metal show that was attacked last week are released.
Adele’s highly anticipated album, 25, releases November 20th, but questions still remain. Will she release 25 on Spotify and other streaming platforms on the same day as the physical release, or will she bait more sales by staggering the release on streaming platforms?
Continue reading “To Stream or Not to Stream: Adele’s Question”
In this week’s reading list, The Guardian reviews John Seabrook’s “The Song Machine,” Facebook dips a toe into music streaming, The New York Times breaks down the emerging business of music curation, a rapper releases his album using Bitcoin, while two other rappers make a music video out of nothing but cats. What a time to be alive.
Professional musicians know that royalty payments and the concept of transparency are mutually exclusive. As we mentioned briefly in our seventh episode , “The Transparency Moment,” the current performance royalty payment system is antiquated and fragmented. Payments can take months to be sent out and usually arrive via paper check. Some payments don’t even reach rights holders because records of who owns what are incomplete or incorrect. Those payments are trapped in what David Byrne called the music industry’s black box. Black box lost revenues are said to be in the millions of dollars, but we might not be locked out of that box forever.
Continue reading “How Bitcoin’s Blockchain Could Fix The Music Industry’s Payment Problem”
On this week’s Monday Reading List, Adele steps up to the plate and smashes another record with her come-back single, The New Republic documents the rise and fall of college rock, a music CEO makes some comments on the music industry’s “Two-Class system,” and a Toronto indie-label goes up for sale on Craigslist.
At Musonomics, we often talk to more people than we can fit into an episode. As a result, some great wisdom gets left on the cutting room floor. While researching our latest episode, “YouTube’s Big Red Elephant is Loose in the Music Industry’s Room,” we got on the phone with Larry Mills, CEO and founder of We Are The Hits, a company that has devised a way for amateur artists to legally cover hit songs in YouTube videos and then share revenue from those videos with the rights holders of the covered songs — no small feat in today’s convoluted music industry. In this Musonomics Q&A, Mills shares some great insight on YouTube’s dominance, it’s importance to the music industry, and how We Are The Hits has tried to create an environment where everybody wins.
R. Yibing Guo Jia is a first-year graduate student in the NYU Steinhardt Music Business Program and a junior staff member here at Musonomics. Last week, she attended the CMJ Music Marathon in New York City. In this blog post, she shares some of her thoughts on the mini-festival that brings industry heads and indie fanboys alike to New York City to discover new music and learn about the business behind that music.
Being a college radio kid, CMJ Music Marathon has always been an exciting time for me. Those four or five days in early fall are like summer camp for music enthusiasts. This year, many things changed for CMJ. Under new leadership, the location moved from Kimmel in Washington Square Park to a trendier, less academic setting at Dream Downtown in Chelsea.
Season 2 of The Musonomics podcast kicks off today with the release of episode 8, “YouTube’s Big Red Elephant is Loose in the Music Industry’s Room.” We’ve talked a lot on previous shows about the streaming wars; Spotify vs Tidal vs Apple Music vs Deezer vs an ever-growing list of new faces — but there’s one streaming service whose user numbers dwarf the competition, and that streaming service is YouTube. In just 10 years, YouTube has become the biggest streaming service in the world.
Continue reading “YouTube’s Big Red Elephant is Loose in the Music Industry’s Room”
