Amazon and Pandora to Gauge Music’s Value in the Internet Age

Luke Hemmings of the band 5 Seconds of Summer at the Pandora Summer Crush concert last month in Los Angeles.

How much are people willing to spend for streaming music?

For years, thanks to rigid pricing structures at streaming services, the answer has been stuck at $10 a month or nothing. But that model may soon be challenged by two giants of online media: Amazon and Pandora Media.

Both companies are set to introduce new versions of their streaming services in coming weeks, charging as little as $5 a month, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the process was ongoing. The plans will put pressure on incumbent players like Spotify and Apple Music and offer the music industry a major test regarding the value of streaming music — including the crucial question of whether discounts will be enough to entice people to pay anything when virtually every song is also available free.

Iggy Pop Thinks On The Future Of Digital Music

Iggy Pop, giving a speech at the John Peel Lecture

No matter which way you shake the piggy bank, if there is no clanking of coins, nothing will fall out. This can easily relate to many bands thinking they are owed a certain amount of money for their art, yet no coin is in the bank. Honestly folks, get over it. Fans just don't want to pay for music anymore when it can be streamed for free through youtube or a variety of sites. It is a sad case of technology quickly eliminating what was once common place in the past, but we must adapt or die off.

Could Beats Music Become The Industry Standard For Digital Downloads?

Can Beats Music become the new industry standard subscription model for a music service?

Find out more on Beats Music from Billboard

"Beats Music, the premium streaming service developed by Trent Reznor, Ian Rogers and the creators of Beats By Dre headphones, is launching on Jan. 21, with AT&T as the exclusive carrier partner, the company said. 

Santa Monica-based Beats will join a parade of competitors, including Rhapsody, Slacker, Xbox Music, Rdio and Sony Music Unlimited -- all vying to become the dominant subscription service in the U.S., the world's largest market for music. The stakes are even higher as the market for digital downloads showed signs of waning, declining in 2013 for the first time, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The field is likely to become even more crowded this year, with Google Inc.'s YouTube and France's Deezer expected to launch their U.S. services in the next several months.

User's Guide: How Beats Music Works

Beats Music, which was built partly from technology acquired in 2012 from the former Mog music service, aims to set itself apart with stylish design and human curation. The company a year ago hired Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, as its chief creative officer to design the service's look and feel of the service, with the goal of making it easy and fun to use. It also recruited Rogers, former Chief Executive of Topspin Media who also once ran Yahoo's music service, as CEO of Beats Music. And last summer, Beats tapped Julie Pilat, former Clear Channel veteran, to head up Beats' efforts to distinguish itself from the pack with a heavy emphasis on curation via radio-style programming. 

Many other companies have tried similar approaches with much success, most notably Sirius XM and Slacker. Sirius, for example, has cultivated dozens of radio personalities with ardent fan followings, the best example of which is Howard Stern. Its curated approach is partly what makes Sirius XM the country's biggest paid music service, with more than 26 million subscribers. Slacker years ago pioneered the practice of having DJ's program its many genre stations. 

"Our curated stations perform incredibly well, even when listeners have the ability to choose on-demand music," said Slacker's CEO Jim Cady. "Our premium subscribers spend more than 80% of their time listening to our curated stations, rather than creating their own playlists or listening to tracks on demand. We’ve also seen that heavily-curated experiences, like deejay hosted countdown stations, keep people listening up to three times longer than genre stations. Even the simple act of adding a deejay to a station can increase average listening time by nearly 20%." 

With all eyes on streaming music services as a source of future growth for the industry, Beats has ambitious plans to pour on the glamour, as it did with great success for the premium headphones market more than six years ago, leveraging deep relationships cultivated over the years by Beats' co-founder, Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M at Universal Music Group. In 2008, Iovine and Dr. Dre launched Beats Electronics. Its instantly recognizeable headphones were soon spotted on dozens of celebrities and rap artists, who extolled the headsets' ability to reproduce the heavy bass sound prevalent in hip hop music. "We built something that works for us, for me, our friends, Dr. Dre," Iovine said in an interview with Billboard. "We enjoy using it. It’s what we would like to have, and we built it to where we felt it could help others."

While Iovine and his executives work to add star power to Beats Music, AT&T Corp. will provide the corporate marketing and distribution muscle. The carrier has agreed to distribute Beats Music, offering AT&T customers a 7-day free trial of the service. Afterwards, the service would cost $9.99 a month. For customers who opt to sign up for AT&T's family bundle, the service would come with a 90-day free trial. Once the trial period runs out, Beats would charge $14.99 a month, but allow up to 5 people and 10 devices full, on-demand access to the service. 

Beats would not disclose the terms of its arrangement with AT&T, including how the cost of licensing music during the free trials would be subsidized. 

For music services, carrier partnerships can be vital. Telecommunications companies such as AT&T have direct billing relationships with millions of subscribers and can tack on the cost of a music service directly on to their customers' cell phone bills. They also have extensive marketing resources that they can use to help push ancillary services, such as music. For AT&T, the benefit is in offering a product that would draw in users who will pay extra for a data plan to accommodate streaming music. 

In addition, Beats has partnered with Target Stores for a promotion that would give away 30-day free trials to customer who buys anything from the store's electronics department. The company has also started tucking vouchers for free trials into Beats Electronics' packaged audio gear. 

What Beats will not be doing anytime soon, however, is offer a free, slimmed-down version of its service -- something that Spotify, Rdio and services have started to do in order to get listeners to try their products in the hopes that they will convert into paying customers. So-called access models, where listeners pay to access large catalogs of music rather than purchase copies of music, is still a small, but growing portion of the industry's revenue. In 2012, it represented 15% of the revenue for music in the U.S., up from 9% in 2011, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, which is set to update this figure in the coming weeks. 

While streaming music is expanding, digital downloads declined on an annual basis for the first time in 2013. Sales of digital tracks fell 5.7% from 1.34 billion units to 1.26 billion units, while digital album sales fell 0.1% to 117.6 million units from 117.7 million a year earlier, according to Nielsen SoundScan."

Get To Know Spotify

Streaming music is here to stay and is the absolute future of the music industry. Folks enjoy speaking on their love of vinyl records, but they aren't buying them in huge volumes across the board. Rather, they are streaming more music through a variety of mobile devices allowing for quick and easy access. Have a read over all things Spotify to insure you can find those rare and notable tracks that you need at every social occasion.

Check out original post on Mashable

"Digital music might not have the same allure as sitting down to listen to a record on your turntable, but what it lacks in atmosphere, it makes up for in convenience — especially when you aren't home with your collection.

It's been five years since Spotify publicly launched and shifted the music industry's focus toward streaming as a way to combat illegal downloading. While the streaming business model is far from perfect, even the most casual music fan should test out streaming while it's still growing.

See also: How Spotify Engineered the New Music Economy

If you're just dipping your toe into the stream, follow our beginner's guide and soon you'll be listening to Spotify's massive library without the worry of losing precious hard drive space.

Signing Up

As with most services, you can register for Spotify by connecting your Facebook account for optimal social features, or create an account with your email address.

Pick the subscription that suits your music habits. The prices are in USD, but the tiers are the same internationally: No cost will get you desktop listening interrupted by ads; $4.99 per month allows for unlimited desktop streaming; users who pay the premium $9.99 per month can listen on all desktop (via desktop app or web player) and mobile devices with offline syncing privileges on mobile (Spotify Radio is the only free mobile feature.)

Users at the premium tier can also listen to music at a higher bit rate, which is essential for anyone who has quality headphones or earbuds.

Image: Spotify

Before you start listening, check your preferences and privacy settings to make sure you are sharing as much or as little with the world as you'd like. If you connected your Spotify to Facebook but don't want to broadcast your tunes on your News Feed, uncheck the Facebook sharing option. Leave the Spotify sharing section checked to show up in your followers' feeds — this amplifies Spotify's social music discovery potential.

This page is important because you can choose whether or not to make your playlists viewable to the public as soon as you start, or make it public on your own terms. Also, you can opt-out of Spotify showing your top artists and tracks on your public profile, if you aren't one to brag about such things. Plus, you can connect your Spotify account to Last.fm so your scrobbles stay representative.

Organizing Your Music

Library and Local Files

In the left sidebar, you will find your Collection. Here, you can access local files (go to Preferences to manage the folders from which Spotify can import files) and music saved to playlists. The Library section puts all of this music in one place. By accessing the files found on your hard drive, Spotify acts as a one-stop shop for listening to all your music, meaning you don't have to open iTunes or another player.

Playlists

Playlists are Spotify's main draw. You can create your own by clicking the New Playlist button, or following and subscribing to other users' playlists. Bookmark an album by saving it as a playlist, too.

Image: Spotify

You can also set up a collaborative playlist among friends to prep for that that perfect road trip or party. Right click on a playlist to check off the collaborative option and share the playlist with your friends. This alt-menu also shows the option to change the privacy settings to "Make Public" or "Make Secret," depending on your preferences.

Image: Spotify

If you want to stay up-to-date with a specific user's playlist, click the green "Follow" button on the bottom of the top title bar, and it will save to your side bar. You'll get a notification when songs are added to the playlist.

Play Queue

This option is ideal for when you aren't listening to an album, since queuing up a song via the right-click menu will place it after the track you are currently listening to, and will interrupt a record.
When listening to a playlist or playing music in the background, the queue is great for accommodating requests and spur of the moment sing-a-longs with friends.

Sharing and Discovering Tunes

In the last year, Spotify has significantly amped up its social and music discovery features to keep up with its competitor Rdio, which prioritizes social discovery.

Following

Image: Spotify

Spotify lets you follow friends, artists and organizations (follow Mashable's account here!) to see what your network is listening to. You will get a notification when artists you follow add music to their catalogues.

The social feed lives in the right sidebar, and at the top Spotify will make recommendations to follow, including Facebook friends or artists your friends enjoy. This feed will show what your friends are listening to right now, songs they've added to playlists, new playlists they've created, tracks they've starred, and playlists, songs and albums they've shared on Spotify.


If you didn't register your Spotify account through Facebook, you can still search for friends and organizations via the search bar.

Sending and Sharing Music

Image: Spotify

You can highlight your favorite music in Spotify's social feed by sharing via the button on artist, album or playlist pages, or the right-click menu. Write a message and check your connected social networks if you want to share to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, too.
The Send tab on the right of the box allows you to send music to individual users in a private message.

Discover

The Discover section is filled with custom recommendations based on your music history. If you are stuck picking out something new to listen to, you can get lost scrolling down this page.

Image: Spotify

In addition to suggestions of new artists deemed algorithmically similar to ones you already love, Spotify will remind you of albums and songs you haven't listened to in a while. Sometimes the recommendations don't feel right, but the algorithm can only improve the more you use it. Unfortunately, there is no option to reject or modify suggestions at this time.


If you are unsure you might like one of Spotify's suggestions, hover over the album art until a play button appears. Then click it and hold down to preview the song.

This will interrupt whatever you are currently listening to, but once you let go of the play button, your song will resume. It is not the smoothest listening feature, but it can come in handy, especially when browsing to make a playlist.

Apps

Spotify's unique apps can also help you find music when you aren't feeling inspired, or you'd like a change of scenery. Some apps will tell you the lyrics of the song you're listening to, others will provide you with a review, and a few will show you what is trending on the charts, web and social media.
We recommended the following apps: Pitchfork, This Is My Jam, Domino, Twitter #Music (formerly We Are Hunted), Any Decent Music?, Blue Note, TuneWiki and Billboard.

Radio

Spotify Radio functions like a typical Internet radio service. You can create stations by artist, song, album and genre, and upvote or downvote songs you love or hate. Spotify Radio is free to use on the mobile app, even if you aren't a Spotify Premium user.

Mobile

Image: Spotify

Spotify's mobile app is a pared-down version of the web player (tablet apps more closely resemble the web player), from which you can select playlists to download for offline listening, to save your data usage. This is only available for Premium users.

Another feature exclusive to the mobile app is Browse. This saves you the trouble of coming up with a playlist yourself, which is helpful when you're out and about while using Spotify on your smartphone.
Now that you've completed your crash course on Spotify, get streaming!

Mashable composite image: iStockphoto, akindo

Spotify Is Working To Make Music Discovery More Personal, From Mashable

The way we explore and enjoy digital music is going to become quite a bit more interesting in 2013, especially on the Spotify platform. I personally enjoy the service and use it to find new music or peruse older albums, I don't currently have loaded onto Itunes. The new features which are highlighted below from an article on Mashable will open up quite a few new possibilities and further cement how much Pinterest has changed the way we view information online.

Find out more tech and music industry info from Mashable

Spotify gets more personal in 2013

Spotify has plans to make music discovery more personalized and more social.

We've always classified discovery as Spotify's Achilles' heel. Because Spotify's catalogue is so large, finding new music or rediscovering old favorites is difficult.

For a time, Spotify was happy to relegate discovery details to the service's desktop apps. And while Spotify will continue to leverage those apps in helping users find new music, discovery will now be an intrinsic part of the Spotify service on all platforms.

The new features -- which will start rolling out in January -- are the most significant product upgrades that have hit Spotify since the service launched in 2008.

Check out this video to get a look at what the company wants to do.

The Follow Tab

The core to Spotify's new experience is what it's dubbing the Follow tab. Think of the Follow tab as Apple's ill-fated Ping service, but done correctly.

In a view that looks similar to Pinterest, users can get real-time info on music their friends and influencers are listening to.

More than just showing the activity of your Facebook friends, the Follow tab is designed as its own network of sorts for Spotify users you want to follow. 

The Follow tab will also be a way for influencers, celebrities and artists to share their tastes and song picks with an audience. Just as bands can share their favorite photos to Instagram, they can share their latest albums or their picks for what bands they dig on Spotify.

The Discover Tab

The second component to the next Spotify update is about music discovery. This tab will show users relevant artists and playlists based on what they have in their library, what the people they trust listen to, as well as listening history.

The Discover tab pumps in info from Songkick, Tunigo and Pitchfork to deliver information such as reviews, nearby concerts and related or similar acts.

Other New Features

Spotify is also rolling out some other improvements. One of the biggest is "Collection," which is just what it sounds like. Rather than having to create a playlist for every album you want to save, you can just add it to a collection instead.

Rival services such as Rdio and Rhapsody have used the collection motif successfully for years so it's great to see Spotify catching up.

Spotify will also introduce audio previews -- a way to briefly hear a new song before deciding if you want to move away from the song you're playing now.

Another big move for artists is that Spotify will now offer mobile push notifications for new album releases for artists' users follow. For us, this has huge potential for artists and labels who want to use Spotify as a promotional strategy to work alongside traditional retail and digital releases.

The Future is Now

The Follow features will first appear on the desktop version of Spotify in the coming weeks. In the new year, the mobile apps and the new web app will get the features as well.

When we spoke with the Spotify team, it was clear that everyone involved was excited about what the advent of true social discovery could mean for the service. With more than one million paying users in the United States and the support of artists such as Metallica, it's crucial that Spotify move quickly into personalization and discovery.

Will Streaming Music Ever Be Profitable - From Mashable.com

"Think of nearly any song and pull it up instantly on Spotify. Can’t get enough rockabilly in your life? Create a dedicated radio station on Pandora. In a streaming world, the era of music ownership is over.

Or is it? Despite their increasing popularity, these services are hemmoraging cash in the face of tough license agreements and mounting content acquisition costs. In truth, we’re still in a period of transition. People are consuming more streaming media than ever, but record labels, movie studios and TV networks are still figuring out how to license it profitably.

We hold out hope they’ll get it right, and that great apps like Pandora and Spotify live to tell the tale of how they got into the black. For now, we can only gape at these disturbing numbers, charted for us by Statista.com."

Link to original post on Mashable.com

Pandora's Content Costs Outpace Revenue Growth - Infographic from Pandora

Will music streaming ever be profitable - infographic from the New York Times

30 Years Of Music Industry Change, In 30 Seconds Or Less...

Remember when buying an album, the artwork was absolutely critical and had to be exactly right, as that was a fan's first impression? Umm yeah, we still think way, but damn how things have changed and will continue to evolve. Have a look at these infographics created by the folks over at Digital Music News. You can watch the gif animation play or click on the small graphics at the bottom to hone in on particular years.

Link to Digital Music News

If you liked our ten year recap, you'll love this. Each pie shows the revenue contribution from various formats, 1980-2010, based on RIAA revenue figures.  If you want to see it again, just wait a few seconds for the animation to start over.                    

      

This is US-based data, and each pie represents 100% of total recording revenue.     

And, here are the individual year source images, starting with 1980 on the top left and 2010 on the bottom right. Just pick a year and go, and download whatever you need.

Samurais, Blood Shed and Animated Movies From Rusty Knuckles

We have a HUGE new project in the works and 2012 is already stepping up to be our biggest year within Rusty Knuckles to date. Not only are we working on our first animated video but it is also for an amazing metal band that will be signing to our music label. Many details will be coming up and in a few days we will be showing a teaser video, but for now here are two images to get the ball rolling...

White pastel pencil on black paper for Samurai mask

White pastel pencil on black paper for Samurai mask - detail