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Viewing All "music industry" Posts
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Ask 100 musicians what ‘success’ means and you’ll get 100 different answers. Some nuanced and smart, some pointlessly nostalgic and impossible. But your journey is yours, and you need to start by asking the best questions you can.
Find other people - musicians, thinkers, academics, ‘industry people’ - who care about art, who care about you, who care about the journey - and use them to get better at asking questions. That’s the only journey that matters.
Steve Lawson (p. 28, “The 360 Deal”)
(Source: wilkinsky.us)
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Effective musicking is built around making contacts, strengthening and maintaining those contacts in sincere and organic ways. Try to be the face of what you are trying to do, get out and tell people what you are doing and sell what you’re trying to do. If you get a good response you might be onto a winner, if people don’t care, what you’re doing might not be interesting enough. Ask yourself the difficult questions, ‘why should people care about what I’m doing?’
Stephen Hutton
(Source: wilkinsky.us)
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As human beings we are storytelling animals. We continually share stories about the experiences we have and the people we meet. What stories do you want people to tell about you? What do you want your legend to be? You were rude? You were late? You were unrehearsed? Be self-aware. Try to see yourself as other people do. Craft your legend through how you act and what you do.
Ed Waring
(Source: wilkinsky.us)
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ASAP Rocky’s album, “Long.Live.ASAP”, led by a single with an unprintable title, sold 139,000 copies in its opening week. Those sales gave it a healthy lead over this week’s No. 2 album, which is also new but couldn’t be more different: “Kidz Bop 23” (Razor & Tie), the latest in a popular compilation series that has toddler-friendly versions of pop hits, like Rihanna’s “Diamonds” and Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” It sold 78,000 copies.
The most interesting contest this week, though, is on the singles chart. “Thrift Shop,” by the independent rap duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, is the most-downloaded track, with 341,000 downloads, and the song also rises one spot to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, which in addition to sales also incorporates radio airplay and online streaming. Close behind, though, is Justin Timberlake’s comeback song, “Suit & Tie,” which sold 315,000 in its first week out and rocketed 80 spots to No. 4 on the Hot 100. (The quirks of Bllboard’s chart rules are partly responsible for that big leap. The song was released just after midnight on Jan. 14, too late for its early sales to count, but not too late to allow two days of airplay.)
(Source: The New York Times)
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On December 21, 2011, The Weeknd released his third project, Echoes Of Silence, for free online, just as he did with the two before it. But that isn’t stopping fans from buying the music they already have. This past Tuesday, the retail release of the series hit stores in the form of Trilogy, which features mastered versions of all of the tracks on House Of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes, along with a few new songs such as ”Twenty Eight,” ”Valerie” and ”Till Dawn (Here Comes The Sun).” While some people may not see the point in spending money on music they have—for the most part—been listening to for the past year or longer, according to Hits Daily Double, a lot of people do. In fact, the XO fan base is showing so much support for Trilogy that the 30-song album is expected to sell between 95,000 and 105,000 units in its first week on the market. [more]
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Chief Keef’s debut, “Finally Rich,” failed to make the top 20 selling only 50k in the first week. He missed his own video shoot for, “Hate Being Sober,” and was rumored to have had his tour cancelled. Is Chief Keef to blame for the poor sales?
(Source: realtalkny.uproxx.com)
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Marketing through music is a relatively new advertising theme. That being said, experts in neuroscience and emotion studies are being called upon more and more as sales consultants in a variety of venues including hotels, restaurants, and major retailers. Previous studies have shown increases in sales in resultants when the right music is carefully selected; one test conducted by marketing professor Ronald E. Milliman exhibited an 11.6% sales increase when up-tempo music was played during the lunch hour.
(Source: hypebot.com)
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Mike Doughty, a frequently awesome musician who may mostly be known for his work in the band Soul Coughing (though his solo work after that is even better), has always been known for creative attempts at navigating the new music world. He’s frequently said that the original Napster saved his career and he’s been willing to embrace new media and new models in the same somewhat experimental way that he crafts music. The latest offering is somewhere between a business model experiment and performance art (and, honestly, when the two blend together, that’s often a good thing). He’s written a song called “Dogs/Demons” which is not being released on any album or online in any manner. The only way to get it is to pay $543.09 and he’ll record you an entirely personalized performance directly into a voice recorder and send it to you.
(Source: techdirt.com)
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First Week Sales Projections for Bruno Mars, The Game & Big Boi
According to HITS Daily Double, Bruno Mars is expected to move 150k-160k units, The Game is likely to yield 85-90k whereas Big Boi’s long-player has sold 25-30k copies.
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The truth is that music discovery isn’t a problem, and it’s not a solution either. Music listeners don’t have trouble figuring out what to listen to; they simply don’t know what to listen to next. They have more than enough music, but not enough time to explore it. They enjoy re-listening to their favorite songs. Music startups believe that listeners like to discover music, because the founding members love to discover music. In search of a killer solution, they reduce an organic and serendipitous process to a robotic and deliberate exchange. Arguably, the only stakeholders that have a “music discovery” problem are the artists whose music isn’t being found. It’s assumed that masking this problem as a product and shipping the resulting solution to music listeners works, but it hasn’t. They still discover new songs they enjoy on broadcast radio and look up music videos on YouTube. Billboard says that music discovery creates “magical moments” that convert casual listeners to paying customers, but it never questions the demand for the trick or what it pays to be a magician. The only “magical” illusion that music startups have “mastered” to date is the “vanishing” act.
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Trent Reznor and Dr Dre to launch Spotify rival
Nine Inch Nails leader says music streaming service will use human recommendations above computerised suggestions
Services such as Spotify, which has 20m users in 17 countries, offer “millions [of] pieces of music … but you’re not stumbling into anything,” Reznor said. “What’s missing is a service that adds a layer of intelligent curation.” This new service, codenamed Daisy, will mix computerised tips with recommendations from “connoisseurs”, with the intention of “making it a platform in which the machine and the human would collide more intimately”.
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Spotify Shares New User, Artist Payment Stats
At a press conference Thursday, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek shared some new stats:
- 1 billion playlists
- 1 million paid U.S. users in 1 year
- 5 million paid worldwide
- 20 million free and paid users worldwide
Artists payments doubled in the last 9 months according to EK, who says that 70% of their income is returned to rightsholders. $500 million has been paid out so far, according to today’s announcement.
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Because what’s important now is not where or how you heard a track first; it’s that it’s heard repeatedly and by as many people as possible. It’s the opposite of hipsterism. Where hipsterism is about being part of the few in the know, the EDC scene is about being a part of the many. Insofar as it’s a scene at all, it’s one geared toward the universal coalescence that the focus group of the Internet makes possible. This is a youth phenomenon that has submitted to the fact that access to knowledge—the secret location, say, of a warehouse party—no longer sets one particular group off as a special vanguard. They’ve forsaken the secret-remote-warehouse culture for the understandable reason that it defines itself by whom it leaves out, and from the standpoint of lunchroom sociology, the Speedway feels downright utopian. Distinctions obtain, but frivolously: Whether you look cool at the door has been replaced by which subgenre you’ve allied yourself with. It’s less a scene than an indistinguishable panoply of micro-scenes. But it’s hard to tell if anybody worries that when you have so many “friends” that you’ll “never be alone again,” what constitutes friendship—its texture and specificity, its content—might have been diminished. In a world where the highest compliment you can pay a piece of music is to compare it to a virus, where the Internet seems to function as an all-encompassing and largely inexplicable lottery, it’s easy to see how the effortful things become secondary, and why we might just be glad to concede that we’re all athrum in these beats together.
The biggest thing in music this year? A supercharged version of something that nearly died in the ’90s: the rave. Gideon Lewis-Kraus reports from the Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-ight (and surprisingly polite) bacchanal where international DJs spin for 100,000 wasted hedonists scantily dressed in furry underwear
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iTunes 11: Be Very Afraid, Spotify...
“whether a song started as a download or not, paid or otherwise, may simply be a trivial detail for tomorrow’s music fan.”
(Source: wilkinsky.us)
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The YouTube Industry Has A Transparency Problem
YouTube, whose community is ironically stereotyped as oversharers, has business transparency issues. This transparency problem doesn’t come just from Google, it also manifests within the YouTube community’s top-earners and across the third-party businesses that have sprung up to leverage the giant video-sharing site. It’s hard to say who is worse, YouTube, or the video industry emerging on the site - known as “YouTube Networks.”
(Source: wilkinsky.us)
