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Tag: Spotify

  • Beats Music buys Topspin and leaves Spotify in an awkward spot

    Beats Music buys Topspin and leaves Spotify in an awkward spot

    beats-music-300x256Streaming music service Beats Music has acquired D2C firm Topspin. The company announced the deal in a blog post from its CEO Ian Rogers – formerly boss of Topspin – this afternoon.

    “The acquisition brings a team of talented people who have spent years working on building and fine-tuning the artist-to-fan connection into the Beats Music experience,” Rogers wrote. “Topspin + Beats Music combines music discovery and direct relationships between artists and fans in a revolutionary way.”

    Rumours of the deal have been bubbling within the music industry this week, and we’ve heard from multiple sources that Beats is paying a relatively low price for Topspin – one source suggested it may be as little as $1.5m.

    Topspin has been one of the most prominent companies helping artists manage their direct relationships with fans, as well as selling their own music and merchandise, including deals with Beats Music and Spotify via its ArtistLink platform to show merch within their profiles on the streaming services.

    A Beats-owned Topspin is likely to have ramifications for Spotify, although the volume of speculation in recent days will surely have had the latter company making alternative plans just in case.

    “Topspin partners, please know we’ll be honoring the agreements made by Topspin and assigned to Beats Music,” wrote Rogers. “Since ecommerce isn’t our core business, we’ll be working with the Topspin team to find the best possible partner to handle Topspin’s ecommerce and fulfillment in the coming weeks.”

    Topspin mirrored these promises in its own blog post: “or existing Topspin customers, there will be no immediate change. We will continue to operate both ArtistLink and the Topspin Platform without any interruption to either products’ service,” explained the company.

    “You can continue to use ArtistLink to manage your presence on your MTV artist page or publish your merchandise offers into Spotify. Both of these integrations will continue to operate as-is after Beats Music acquires ArtistLink. There will also be no changes to ArtistLink’s Promo Exchange or advertising service.”

    Topspin hasn’t had the best last 12 months, with senior executives departing – not just Rogers, but SVP of product and marketing Bob Moczydlowsky, who left for a role at Twitter – and a recent batch of layoffs described as a restructuring process.

    The company is understood to have been looking for a buyer in recent months, and found it in Beats. The deal could be seen as a hail mary from Topspin, and a necessary move by Beats to avoid a key element of its service either going out of business or falling into the hands of a rival. However, Rogers suggested a more positive approach.

    “We’re committed to establishing Beats Music as a conduit for the artist-fan relationship, a platform where artists have a voice, and a provider of useful data and analytics on how fans interact with artists and their music,” wrote Rogers. ”This acquisition puts our money where our mouth is.”

    Fonte MusicAlly!

  • Interview: Billy Bragg on Spotify ‘talking playlists’, YouTube and artists’ rights

    Interview: Billy Bragg on Spotify ‘talking playlists’, YouTube and artists’ rights

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    The latest curator on Spotify is Billy Bragg, who announced plans this morning for a series of ‘talking playlist’ radio shows distributed through the streaming music service.

    The first goes live tomorrow: a collection of 14 tracks and Bragg’s spoken-word explanations of what they are and why he picked them, with new shows to follow at monthly intervals.

    Talking to Music Ally, Bragg said the project initially came from discussions around putting out his new album on Cooking Vinyl, when the label’s digital team suggested he make some Spotify playlists of his favourite tracks.

    “I thought ‘bugger me, this seems like another load of work’, it’s like doing bloody homework!” says Bragg. But as he put together half a dozen playlists, it made him want to get to grips with the streaming service a bit more.

    “I hate technology coming along that I’m on that I don’t understand. I remember when my first DVD came out, and I didn’t even have a DVD player at the time. So I started engaging with Spotify a little bit, and thinking that while it’s a great way to access music, you don’t get much other than just the music,” he says.

    “I’m someone who likes to know a little bit more: who wrote the songs, when the song was made… Maybe I’m an old geezer in wanting that context!”

    Bragg tells the tale of digging out some old boogie-woogie records from his basement recently – the fruits of being in the right place at the right time in an East Ham junk shop a few years ago, with artists like Cow Cow Davenport and Louisiana Red – and then discovering that they were all on Spotify.

    “This to me is really really interesting. There seems to be a lot of this music on Spotify, so I think there’s a space in the streaming universe for someone to use this resource to introduce younger listeners into this great old music,” he says.

    Bragg’s ex-manager, Pete Jenner, had apparently been suggesting for a while that he make his own radio show to distribute online, playing some of these tracks. “We got a little bit foxed about how to get the rights and how to pay the artists,” he says. “Until Spotify came along, I wasn’t able to work out how to do it. But then we thought if I could just record MP3s into GarageBand on my desktop, and send them to Spotify, they could ingest them in, string them together and make them into a radio playlist.”

    This idea has been tried before, although it didn’t quite take off at the time. UK-based music distributor Kudos Recordslaunched a service called Playdio in 2010, intermingling songs with DJ’s spoken-word intros in Spotify playlists. It’s surprising that nobody else has had a crack at the idea until now.

    Bragg will earn royalties from the spoken-word tracks – an interesting business model for curators on streaming services – but says the talking is about much more than money.

    “It’s the context of the songs, and why I appreciated them. I always like to hear DJs enthusing on the radio for the same reason: that’s a service you get off 6Music with someone like John Cooper Clarke, who was DJing at the weekend. His enthusiasm sparks my enthusiasm,” he says.

    “The digitisation of music has made music much more accessible, but what we’ve lost a bit is the filters, like John Peel. The great thing about him was you’d listen in, and half of it was godawful, but half of it was amazing and would change your life. That’s what’s needed on streaming services.”

    Bragg has already recorded his first few Spotify shows, which he says will include a mixture of old gems and contemporary songs that have caught his interest.

    “Some of it you just bump into. Like Junior Parker, who recorded Mystery Train before Elvis Presley. In the 1970s, he did this really weird strung-out soul version of The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, which is really weird – almost like ‘Marvin Gaye Sings The Beatles’,” he says. “The idea that Junior Parker, who had this rocking R&B career and then went on to do this… that’s the sort of thing I’m trying to do.”

    It shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed Bragg’s career that he’s very keen on the fact that artists (or their descendants, of course) get paid for the plays on his new show. Given the backdrop of a year or more of some artists criticising Spotify – and streaming in general – for its impact on musicians’ income, it’s a subject worth discussing.

    “To me, it’s a very important thing. It’s becoming harder to make a living through selling records, but as other means of income for artists start to come online, we should be engaging with them rather than trying to hold them back,” says Bragg, although he makes it clear he’s not criticising any specific artists for their views.

    “I’ve read a lot of the reports of artists who have spoken in opposition to Spotify, and I can’t really find much objection other than that they don’t seem to like streaming. To me, that doesn’t make sense: it’s not down to us to like it or not. If people are finding that a convenient way to listen to music, and if there is potential for artists to get paid, I think we should be engaging with that rather than turning our back on it.”

    Bragg has already spoken out in Spotify’s defence in recent months, suggesting in November that artists should be asking their labels pointed questions about their streaming payouts, rather than attacking the services.

    “If there are low rates of remuneration on Spotify – and they are low compared to what we got from selling records – if we are going to talk about those things, let’s be frank about where the problem lies. Let’s not attack the platform: they’re making a lot of money, but they’re paying out a lot of money too,” he says.

    “It’s where the money is going to: the people who are collectively referred to as the rightsholders. If artists are rightly going to talk about the lack of money that’s getting to artists from digital – and it’s not just about streaming, it’s about all digital income – then we need to talk about how we speak to the rightsholders and get a fair deal.”

    For Bragg, the debate needs to move on from simply dividing musicians by whether they’re pro or anti Spotify. “There is money to be made there: alright, maybe not the millions that some artists made in the 20th century, but it’s still the difference between sucking up a shitty day job and being able to make a living as a musician,” he says.

    “That’s why I’m angry about this thing. I’m not trying to pick a fight with other artists over Spotify. I’m saying to young artists ‘don’t sign your rights away’. I see some things that artists write – particularly artists who made really good money in the old days – that sound a bit ‘poor pitiful me!’. Our real concern should be young artists coming in, and how they’re going to make a living. Streaming can play a part in that. We should be saying to the rightsholders that we need a new business model that supports artists.”

    Bragg praises the growing number of independent labels who’ve spoken out about their policies of splitting digital revenues 50/50 with artists, while the label his new album is coming out on – Cooking Vinyl – has been one of the trailblazers in the area of ‘artist service’ deals, where artists retain their rights.

    “I always advise artists to retain their rights,” he says. “We live longer, and our careers run longer: I own my rights, and there’s every chance of me being able to continue doing this in my 60s and 70s as a result. I’m still making a living, and that suggests you can keep a career going!”

    The interview draws to a close with a discussion of YouTube – which caught a lot of flak at the recent Midem industry conference from artists and labels alike – and how it compares to Spotify and other streaming audio services from an artist’s perspective.

    “If we’re going to speak out about the paucity of payment from streaming services, if we’re pissed off at Spotify, we should be marching to YouTube Central with flaming pitchforks! Not to mention the acquiescence of the industry, which I feel is really disturbing,” said Bragg earlier in the conversation. Later, I tell him about YouTube execs getting heckled during Midem sessions, and ask him to expand on his views.

    “I’d rather the industry was heckling YouTube than picking on kids downloading my music. If the shift is that the industry’s anger has moved from kids enjoying music to multi-national corporations making billions of dollars, I’m 100% behind that. That’s where the problem is,” he says.

    “Somebody’s making a lot of money out of distributing music. Our problem is that the deals rightsholders will subsequently do with those corporations like YouTube will undoubtedly be covered with non-disclosure agreements, and we are unable to see what the deals are, how they’re benefitting.”

    He continues: “In the old days, the industry was scrabbling around trying to stop kids downloading stuff because they were losing money. Now they’re still losing money, but YouTube are making money, so their attention is bound to go that way. Let’s hope that in the whole process, artists have enough opportunities to put their voice in, so we can get a fair deal from rightsholders.”

    originally posted at musically.com

  • Jac Holzman: From vinyl to apps to what comes next (Q&A)

    Jac Holzman: From vinyl to apps to what comes next (Q&A)

    Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra and Nonesuch Records.(Credit: Getty Images)

    Jac Holzman is legit.

    His track record in the music industry stretches back nearly 65 years — that’s the lifespan of about 12 iTunes — to when he founded Elektra Records out of his college dorm room in 1950. He went on to sign acts like the Doors, Carly Simon, and the Stooges, but don’t mistake him as a label exec lost in a bygone era.

    As waves of technological change have washed over the music industry, Holzman worked to stay ahead of the break, testing how the conjoined worlds of music and technology could enhance each other. He was served as the chief technologist at Warner Communications (later Time-Warner) and developed Warner Music Group’s e-label, Cordless.

    His latest project is an encyclopedic app delving into the history of the Doors, something he built with a small team from scratch over the last 16 months. Having harnessed the popular consumer technology of today to rekindle the fanbase of a band formed half a decade ago, Holzman looks back at the music industry’s response to other technological changes and discusses the changes he’d like to see in the future.

    The following is an edited Q&A.

    Q: What is in the Doors app? 
    Holzman: This is the new box set. The idea was to tell the story of a group, whose audience has been growing rapidly — 6 months ago, the Doors’ Facebook friends were 10 million; it’s now up over 15 (million). A lot of this is younger generation. We have assembled the entire Doors story, which you can approach from many different angles. There are over 1,550 pieces, and this is really about an experience. But there are other reasons to do this. Music has become terribly commoditized. We’ve essentially lost the album. In most cases, that’s not a real loss. But there are artists who have been incredible album artists. The album is a matching of context and content, and you’ve got to get them both right for those albums to be magic.

    In general, apps are tough, and they’re tough because to do them well costs real money. Sometimes what it would cost to do a standard album, but there’s no way in today’s “music should be free” climate that you can ever recover that. One of the things that encouraged me to do the app, and encouraged Rhino and Warner Music Group to support my little team, was to see what it would lead to. If you don’t start somewhere, you don’t get anywhere.

    You mentioned before that the Doors app — now that you’re at the other side of it, 16 months later — has been successful. How have you seen that success?
    Holzman: There was a kind of a dynamic flow to these things. While all of the so-called marketing is going on, you’re selling a lot of apps. Two weeks after the marketing is up, you’ve dropped considerably, but you stay steady. It’s not like it ever goes dead, because what you have then is the effect of people turning on other people. When we did the first update, we sold almost as many apps as we did originally. That was really interesting.

    But the Doors adding 5 million fans from the end of 2012 until today, is unheard of. And I think that we’re showing that enthusiasm in the streaming services.

    Jac Holzman at his 2011 induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame(Credit: Getty Images)

    The anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show is Sunday. I was curious about your perspective on these iconic groups like the Beatles — the Beatles catalog known for being more inaccessible than other classic groups — on the streaming services. What do they have to gain and have to lose by not being on a streaming service, by having an app or by not having an app?
    Holzman: Streaming services are part of the process of ephemeralization that Buckminster Fuller spoke about years ago. If you take a look at what technology has brought us, we used to have to listen to music at home or have it programmed for us on radio, then the iPod came and we could carry it around. Then iTunes made it possible to buy just individual tracks, further ephemeralization. Now you’re in a situation where you can hear whatever, wherever you are at a fixed price per month. That is probably the ultimate aspect of the ephemeralization. Do I think we’re going to stop selling physical product? Not for quite a while. Take a look, physical product is still greater than digital in many countries in the world. No, we’re going to have all of these mixed up.

    I think where streaming services have been weak is in introductions to new music. We need more trusted first filters. Interestingly enough, we used to have them, we had them on radio in the form of disc jockeys, in the early days of FM when the disc jockeys were more eclectic. We lack first filters, we lack first filters who we really trust. I think Beats has a real opportunity there to pick up on. Because Beats has structured itself and is proud of itself as a curated type of service. They launched it probably at the right time. It’s a work in progress but Ian and his people are really first rate so I have high hopes for them. Pandora was designed to sort of average out the things that you listen to and come up with things you might like, I must say that has that has never worked for me. They come up with some of the oddest stuff that has no relationship to anything I like. I gave up on Pandora, but I still use Spotify. I will audition a record, or two or three tracks from a record before I purchase it — but I still purchase a number of records.

    But the best first filters are friends, people who know your musical taste and talk to you about music. We need more of that circulating.

    You’ve talked about how as people pay less but have more access to more music, that’s a win for music.
    Holzman: It’s a win for everybody. It depends upon how you look at it. If you look at it from the vantage point of 1999-2000 when Napster was launched, it’s a disaster. If you look at it and say I am a record label, it’s not so hot either. Look at it and say: My role has changed, the role of this company has changed, and we are now a music rights management entity. We will manage our assets, and we will restructure our company so as to do that as efficiently as we can. Take honey. Pour some honey out on a flat surface and it’s a definable glob, but add heat to it, see how it spreads. That’s what’s happening. I don’t know what the numbers are going to be, but need to you spread it wider, you spread it thinner. The scalability and width is the important thing here, how big can you spread it, that’s what counts because the catalog becomes more valuable. How you call people’s attention to the catalog is another matter.

    You’ve also talked about opportunities missed during the Napster era, when it was such a fractious time. What other opportunities are the music industry taking of advantage of or missing?
    Holzman: It’s not an industry. It’s really not an industry and they’ve been fooling themselves for years. Napster was a wonderful opportunity to build a viable singles market over time because the loading speeds at that time were embryonic. Put aside the business proposition Napster offered the labels, instead of saying no to that, somebody should have said — and I would have I think if I had been working with Warner at that time — there is something in here. Look at what we’ve got, people can trade singles back and forth, we can monetize that modestly, it all goes through a central server so we can account for it. Had a couple of record companies made overtures to it and seen how the service could be worked, that was an opportunity.

    The Doors app(Credit: Screenshot by Joan E. Solsman/CNET)

    I don’t know how much further you can ephemeralize beyond streaming except maybe a yearly implant some place in your body that has all the collected music and is the size of a pinkie nail. I think streaming, you may find different uses for large companies or new companies. I don’t understand, for instance, why a label like Alligator hasn’t picked up on streaming just blues music for the blues fans. The people of Alligator are very smart, I just don’t know, but that would make sense to me, that’s where labels and label name has value today: if they’re particularly good on genre music. I think that that’s probably an opportunity in streaming, but again if the streaming services are going to do this they’re going to have to get the right people there to help them do it. And I think being able to do genre music intelligently probably will bring more people, more quickly to new music than in a general service.

    So you would advocate that streaming music services…
    Holzman: Tailor themselves for what the audiences are out there. If you’re not a 42 Long, don’t send a jacket that’s 42 Long. You can tailor it, and that doesn’t mean people can’t jump across these things. If I were doing a streaming service, I would tailor the material. I’d have a general thing and then I would have maybe different programs done by very good people on a monthly basis. Now there is some of that beginning to happen, but I would like to see more of it, especially since, for people to come, they find an entry point, I found an entry in folk music, it led to electric blues, it led to world music, it led to rock ‘n’ roll. All of these paths end up leading you to a larger musical feast.

    This touches on the ongoing discussion about man versus machine. How valuable is data, raw data, on a large scale about how people are listening to music and where does that value just falls short.
    Holzman: They tried to formulize it. There was a company in Scandinavia that tried to formulize it, and they had these charts and graphs and emotional peaks and stuff. “If you build a song this way, it’ll be a hit.” Music that works touches people generally in ways that are unexpected, they hear something and they go wow. The wow factor is wonderful, the sheer joy that you can take a limited number of notes, and you hear songs that you never would have dreamed could have been written before. A piece of music may affect you more rapidly than any other entertainment, or informational form. Music is like a carom shot in pool, you know, where you go banking off the side of the table to hit another ball, that’s how music works. That’s how it works with me anyway. There are those that you hear where you don’t want them to stop, you’re in an emotional bubble with the song, or with that piece of music, and those are incredibly moving experiences. And I think have a great deal to do with what makes us human.

    “All of the technology is a means to an end. We are the end. And we just have to pay attention..”
    –Jac Holzman

    What is music if you look at it in the context of this day and age, of being such a technologically embarked upon process — I mean it’s always been that way, you’ve always needed technology to hear music and to make music, but today it’s more wires and batteries than it has been in the past.
    Holzman: That’s just a means to an end. All of the technology is a means to an end. We are the end. And we just have to pay attention. And surrender to it, let it take over, you don’t have to be on top of everything all the time. Music is best when you surrender to it, especially when you find something great. If you find crap, turn it off, but if there is something that intrigues you, give it another listen. Some people come to music from the lyrics, some people come from the melody or the arrangement or how it was recorded, but the more you listen, the more you appreciate, so listen to lots and lots of music, even if you’re only paying half attention. Something will seep into your system that you can use. And sometimes music can get you out of a really bad spot.

    But that’s another conversation.

     

    originally posted at CNET.com

  • Spotify Wants To Tailor Music To Your Heart Beat

    Spotify Wants To Tailor Music To Your Heart Beat

    spotify heartbeatWhat might be the perfect tune for dozing in the sun, for running along a stormy beach or, perhaps, the soundtrack to the first flush of true love?

    A new feature being discussed by the music service Spotify could use sensor’s on the listener’s body or in their smartphone to measure their heart rate and then use that to select appropriate music.

    The more data Spotify can collect on listener habits, the better the recommendations its algorithms can produce. As well as music, motion, heart rate, and temperature, Spotify could start to monitor sleep patterns, according to Donovan Sung , Spotify’s product manager for discovery and recommendations.

    “Maybe with motion sensors in phones, we can start guessing things whether users are running, biking or driving? Maybe the phone has a temperature sensor, or a heart rate sensor, we could guess whether the user is tense…” said Sung, talking to TechRadar.

    Sung explained that information provided by sensors could be used to automatically generate playlists based on activities such as workouts, driving, sleeping or late-night working, without user interaction.

    The service could automatically start playing pumping music when it is time to go for a run or peaceful ambient tracks for when sleep is required.

    “The more we know about you, the better the [recommendation] engine can be,” said Sung, who warned that overloading listeners with choice provided a poor user experience, and that a fine balance must be struck between quantity and quality of recommendations.

    Human editors, algorithms and social data

    Spotify’s recommendation engine is currently powered by a combination of human editors, algorithms, social data and previous listening history, which provide personal recommendations for users of artists, albums and tracks. These also inform Spotify’s shuffle play feature, which it unveiled in December 2013 and is continuing to improve.

    “Nearly half of mobile listening, if not more, is people listening to their own curated playlists,” said Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder at the time. “With shuffle play, you can now play any of your playlists for free. Spotify’s new mobile experience is music for anyone and the best experience and access in the history of music.”
    originally published on theguardian.co.uk