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”
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.
Welcome to the first installment of the Musonomics Monday Reading List!
Every Monday we’ll post a list of the previous week’s best reads. Amongst our curated list of the best music industry writing, you might find an explainer on the latest music industry merger, or a Q&A with an artist or an industry player of note — or maybe just a terrific essay penned by a music legend.
No matter what, our picks will always shed light on some unseen part of the industry, bring clarity to a hot-button issue, or provide a new perspective on an old problem.
Check out this week’s Monday Reading List after the jump:
There’s a new episode of Musonomics, and it’s all about transparency in the music industry — or the lack thereof.
