The First Combined Streaming Radio and Cloud Music Service Launches

Popular cloud entertainment provider mSpot, Inc., today announced Radio Spotter Beta – the first digital music service to combine a cloud music and storage locker service with streaming radio. The service offers two new main features: Match the songs you’re playing from your personal online music collections, to similar music playing on hundreds of radio stations across the Internet; or, instantly select Internet radio stations you’ll like, based on music genres or your own artist searches. Radio Spotter puts the metadata in your music collection to work by matching whatever you’re listening to, and quickly adapts to offer new recommendations based on your changing preferences.

“Radio is still the easiest and most popular music discovery tool – people love its spontaneity and variety. Yet, it can take years to discover the best radio stations. We’re giving people a mash up between Cloud music and streaming radio: It’s a great way for people to find new music and enjoy their own – all in one service,” stated Daren Tsui, CEO and co-founder of mSpot.

To find out how mSpot Music works go to www.mspot.com

Your life: brought to you by Budweiser

Written by Aza Raskin:

Your life: brought to you by Budweiser

Your past actions are the best predictor of your future decisions. That’s why data about your buying decisions and demographic is so valuable: it enables companies to know what and when you’ll buy. Marketing has focused on influencing your future decisions because changing your past actions, or the memory of them, has seemed impossible. You can’t change the past. That’s no longer true. Marketers now have the technology to meddle with your memories. To find out how, let’s first step back to old-school product placement.

Dr Pepper comes to mind when I hear the word ” Spider-Man”. In the film, as Peter Parker learns to use his powers, he spies a can of Dr Pepper across the room and, after a few tries, gets to enjoy drinking the cold beverage that had been out of reach. Mass-media product placement of this kind works by association and memory. But this is a last-century technique. The goods and services famous people consume will continue to wriggle into our subconscious, but increasingly we live in a world where there isn’t one source of truth. The internet has diversified our communication channels. Narrowcasting is replacing broadcasting; our friends are replacing celebrities.

Read more here online or in print in the June 2011 issue of Wired Magazine magazine

Music Tourism in the U.K. Contributes $1.4 Billion Each Year to Economy

Tourists visiting U.K. music festivals and concerts contribute at least 864 million pounds ($1.4 billion) a year to the economy, highlighting the need for a live music tourism strategy, an industry group said.

Live music events across the country attract 7.7 million attendances by domestic and overseas tourists, who collectively spend 1.4 billion pounds during their trips, according to a report today from UK Music, a London-based group that includes songwriters, managers and record companies. Though just 5 percent of music tourists come from abroad, they contribute 18 percent of total spending.

Music tourists contribute at least £864m a year to the UK economy

DATE: 16 May 2011

UK Music publishes new research and calls for a “live music tourism strategy” to increase overseas visitor numbers.

UK Music has today (May 16th) published Destination: Music – the first study of its kind to scope the economic contribution of music festivals and major concerts to tourism throughout the UK.

Drawing on unprecedented access to more than 2.5m anonymised ticketing transactions, the report’s main findings are as follows:
Large-scale live music across all regions of the UK attracts at least 7.7m attendances by domestic and overseas music tourists. Collectively they spend £1.4bn during the course of their trip
This is a positive contribution of £864m (GVA) to the national economy and equivalent to 19,700 full-time jobs. lthough 5% of all music tourists come from overseas, they contribute 18% of total music tourist spending

From these findings UK Music has issued a list of recommendations to Government – including the implementation of a national live music tourism strategy, with the immediate goal of increasing the number of overseas music tourists.

The research follows the Government’s Plan For Growth, published alongside the Budget. This specifically identified the UK’s creative industries and tourism amongst sectors with the greatest potential to drive economic growth.

The Government’s Tourism Strategy, published in March 2011, included a National Brand Index Survey which ranked the UK as fourth in the world for being an “interesting and exciting place for contemporary culture such as music, films, art and literature”.

Feargal Sharkey, Chief Executive of UK Music said: “I am hugely excited by the findings of this research. Its message is crystal clear: music provides a huge boost to UK tourism, it drives growth, it sustains thousands of jobs across all regions and it enhances our lives. I am optimistic that policy-makers will view this data and acknowledge there is even more we could achieve, especially when it comes to attracting overseas visitors. The rest of the world clearly recognises the importance of music to the UK. It is time we did similar.”

Creative Industries Minister Ed Vaizey said: “This report demonstrates the world-wide reputation the UK music sector enjoys and the contribution it makes to our economy. People are travelling to and within the UK to see our musicians and bands perform while many overseas festivals feature British artists among their headline acts. This underlines the fact that the UK music industry is one of the strongest in the world.”

Research on Destination Music was undertaken by Bournemouth University’s International Centre for Hospitality and Tourism Research.

Research leader, Professor Adam Blake said: “This is the first time that a comprehensive study of music tourism has ever been undertaken in the UK. The data on where music-goers come from confirms that large numbers of them do travel around the country to go to music events, and significant numbers come from overseas. However, it is important to note that our definition of a music tourist is hugely conservative, and that we did not analyse the vast numbers of non-ticketed or smaller capacity events. Subsequently, the true value of music to UK tourism will be much higher.”

The full report can be downloaded below:

UK Music Research – Music and Tourism – Full Report.pdf

Google Music to Launch Today — Without Licenses

Pitched from billboard.biz: By Antony Bruno (@AntonyNBruno), San Francisco

Proving unable to come to an agreement with all the major labels for the music service it originally wanted, Google is going to pull an Amazon and unveil a digital music locker service without any licensing deals at all during a keynote today (May 10) at its I/O conference in San Francisco, Google execs tell Billboard.

Called Music Beta by Google, the service will allow users to upload their music library to a personal online storage locker, from where they can stream and download files from Internet connected devices.

This is virtually identical to Amazon’s Cloud Drive, with a few differences. Most notably, the service is available on a limited, invite-only basis limited to U.S. users. Those wanting to use the service will have to request an invite at google.music.com, with priority given to those with the Motorola Xoom tablet and to attendees of the I/O conference. Additionally, Google is limiting the number of songs that can be uploaded to the music locker to 20,000. The service is free while in beta, and the company would not comment on what future pricing options it may have planned.

Clearly, this is not the music service Google wanted to offer. And Google director of content partnerships Zahavah Levine — who led the company’s negotiations with the major labels — made it clear who she feels is to blame.

“We’ve been in negotiations with the industry for a different set of features, with mixed results,” she told Billboard the night before the announcement was made. “[But] a couple of major labels were less focused on innovation and more on demanding unreasonable and unsustainable business terms.”

Sources tell Billboard that Sony Music Group and Universal Music Group proved the bottlenecks in this case. Google wanted to offer a scan-and-match style locker service — where instead of uploading different copies of the same track to store in a locker for each users, the service would scan users’ libraries and match the songs they own to a centralized server, paying rightsholders for each stream. Without the rights to do so, the message from Google is clear — either get on board or we’ll move on without you.

Driving the launch is the completion of Google’s new music player app, which will also be unveiled tomorrow. The app is for Android devices that anyone can download. It can be used to play any music stored on Android devices, but can’t access music from the cloud unless users are part of the beta.

Sources tell Billboard that the app was only fully backed about six weeks ago, and until that app was finished Google had no intention of launching any kind of music service — unlicensed or otherwise. Getting this music player out was obviously a priority for Google, so it could start establishing Android products as music devices in their own right.

While it may not be what Google originally intended, the beta music service shows flashes of what Google ultimately has in mind. For instance, the music app has an Instant Mix feature that creates a playlist based on a single song. The service analyzes the song’s characteristics (not just metadata) and pulls other similar songs from the users’ music library. Another cool feature is that the playlists created can be synched across devices. So playlists created on a user’s mobile phone will immediately show up on a tablet device or Google account online. There’s no need to transfer files between devices.

Other features of Music Beta by Google include:

– Any Web-connected device with a browser or supporting Flash can stream music from the locker. Requires Android-powered devices with the app installed to download and play cached streams.

– Users who sign up for the locker service will get free music added, similar to how some mp3 players ship with sample tracks. Google negotiated rights to this free music with various rightsholders.

– All music available to each device is available in a single view, meaning users won’t see one list for music stored native on the device and another list of music stored in the locker.

– Audio quality for streaming files can be as high as 320kbps if the device and network supports it.

– Optimized for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) but any Android device version 2.2 or above can support it.

Levine stressed that many more features may be added to the service over time, and that Google will continue to seek licenses with the major labels.

“A large segment of the music industry worked cooperatively and was extremely helpful sorting out the issues of online licensing,” she said, giving particular credit to the independent label and publishing communities. “We certainly remain open to partnerships with the music industry for new features and functionality. This is the beginning of what we hope will be a long relationship with music and users and helping users engage with music and artist and fans.”

Getting Paid Through Publishing

With revenue from album sales on the wane, more and more artists are starting to explore synch licensing opportunities for film, TV and commercials. And for publishers in New York and Los Angeles, the focus is often on placing their writer’s songs on screen.

“We’re not the publisher for you, if all you’re looking for is covers [to be licensed],” says Jeff Pachman, general manager of Domino Publishing Company of America, Inc., which is based in Brooklyn.

The sister company to the vaunted U.K. label Domino Records, Domino Publishing was founded nearly five years ago with a goal of signing writers with repertoires that lends themselves to film and TV placement. Their stable of writers has a strong indie tilt and includes such acts as The Kills, Low, and Lightspeed Champion.

Gold Panda, the British producer and electronic artist who released his debut album Lucky Shiner last year, is one of the company’s recent success stories. Lucky Shiner received a wealth of buzz in the blogosphere and even garnered an 8.3 rating from Pitchfork. Gold Panda’s sound – a hushed melancholy techno with a strong hip-hop influence – is well suited to advertising and TV, as well as skateboard and snowboard videos, Pachman said.

“It’s probably one of the best received albums that we had the pleasure of working with this year in the licensing community,” said Pachman, adding that the company continues to spread the word about its synch potential.

Landing a publishing deal with a company like Domino is generally a writer’s best bet for getting synch opportunities. (The other option involves a master use agreement, where a record label –or other entity – owns the publishing for the synch rights only.)

Aspirant songwriters constantly ask this magazine how to go about getting a publishing deal. Though every case is unique, Pachman said Domino discovers a lot of its talent the old-fashioned way: by catching a band in a club, reading a review online, or buying a record in a record store. “I just spent $150 at Soundfix Records in Williamsburg [Brooklyn],” he says with a laugh. “I’m still doing that.”

And despite its moribund state, MySpace still serves as a way for industry executives to discover talent. Pachman says he still plugs the headphones into the laptop and logs onto the site.

One publishing executive says she relies heavily on word-of-mouth when it comes to signing new artists. “Most of the writers I’ve signed I’ve discovered via friends who are huge music fans but are not necessarily in the music industry,” says Mara Schwartz, senior director of creative services for film, TV, advertising and new media at Bug Music in Los Angeles. Other tips drift her way from journalists, club bookers and DJs. “Anyone that can determine what has genuine buzz and what’s hype,” she says.

Schwartz can’t recall a single instance where she signed an artist who sent in an unsolicited demo, so she doesn’t recommend going about it that way. When it comes to finding opportunities for her writers, much of what Schwartz does involves attending film screenings and finding out what projects are looking for music.

Even if an artist scores a hit album, Schwartz says it is still incumbent on the company to aggressively market the artist’s songs for films. “There may still be songs that supervisors haven’t thought of for a particular scene, or they may not be that familiar with every track on the album, so I’ll have to steer them in a particular song’s direction.”

At Domino, many writers on the company’s roster are extremely particular about how their songs are licensed, Pachman says. So it’s important for Domino to establish what parameters exist for the artist early in the process.

Domino bills itself as a company with a writer-friendly approach. Pachman said a writer always needs to know exactly what’s happening on the screen or in the ad before making a creative decision [about synch licensing]. When working with artists, the writer always has the final say in how the song is used, according to Pachman. “I work for them. They’re the boss. It’s their songs and they should do whatever it is they want to do.”

Pitched from American Songwriter. Written by Caine O’Rear

FREE MUSIC CAN PAY AS WELL AS PAID MUSIC , YOU TUBE SAYS

As record labels, digital music stores, and music subscription services continue their struggle to convince music fans to pay for music, Google’s YouTube — itself a major repository of recorded music — claims that giving away music for free generates as much money for copyright holders as charging for it, with profound implications for freemium digital music services such as Spotify and the much-rumored Google music service.

According to what YouTube executives told Evolver.fm this week, YouTube can make as much money for labels as paid services, following a massive, 200-to-300 percent increase in the revenue it generates for copyright holders over the past year.

They said the growth was due to traffic increases, particularly on mobile phones; more profitable, optimized ad formats; the “Ad Word“-ization of video content (through which advertisers make videos that users “opt in” to watching); a new crop of curators who increase free music videos through blogs and social networks; more effective sales teams, particularly as part of Vevo (a joint venture between Google, major labels, and Abu Dhabi); and YouTube’s Content ID system, which allows music copyright holders to profit from infringing use of their songs.

“Our larger music partners on the site are making millions of dollars per month,” YouTube director of content partnerships Chris Maxcy told Evolver.fm. “The other thing that’s astounding is the growth in this. We’ve seen the monetization levels increase two to three times, just in the last year… Our label partners have been pretty pleased with that level, and we expect to see that growth continue. A year from now, I’m hoping we’ll be able to say ‘we increased revenue and RPMs another 2-3x.’”

Even now, says YouTube, its free music pays as well as, well, paid music. And Google could eventually get into that too.

Seven of the ten most popular videos of all time on YouTube are music videos, and another one (“The Evolution of Dance”) is music-oriented.

“We’re not tied to any one payment model, per se,” explained Phil Farhi, a product manager from Google’s YouTube monetization team. “We’ve been very focused on advertising so far, but there are users who will pay for content with their money, and users who will pay for content with their time and attention. We’ve been focused on [the latter]. What we’re seeing is that by really optimizing everything, you can make just as much money for a label as the others.”

Some don’t see the value of free music, he says, because they’re too focused on its price.
“These are the traps that people fall into: They look at price tags for advertising[-supported services] versus price tags for subscription or downloading services,” added Farhi. “But you really need to consider not just the price tag, but the scale of audience and views that you’re reaching with that.”

Offering something for free drastically increases the rate at which people consume it. This is basic micro-economics, and is to be expected. We all want a free lunch. What’s more surprising is YouTube’s claim that a well-optimized free music service generates revenue equivalent to that of paid services like iTunes.

“If you were to look at the numbers for Lady Gaga, the number of views she gets on YouTube versus downloads that she gets on iTunes, obviously, a single download on iTunes will pay her more than a single view on YouTube,” said Farhi. “But when you look at the traffic — the number of people that are coming back and watching her videos over and over again, watching her videos before they download the song, or discovering them on YouTube — you can see how that scale can compete with a paid service.”

The difference between offering music for free and charging for it has a special resonance as music is increasingly delivered by apps running on smartphones, computers and eventually televisions and car stereos. Small developers unable to negotiate their own licenses with the labels, but who nonetheless wish to integrate full-track playback into their apps, face a stark choice. They can either integrate YouTube videos for free (Discovr), or integrate a subscription service that limits non-subscriber listens to 30 seconds (MusicMapper).

Last week, we took YouTube to task for potentially damaging the music industry by providing users and app developers with a free, on-demand alternative to subscription services such as MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody or Spotify.

“You raised some interesting issues with respect to some of these applications out there,” YouTube director of content partnerships Chris Maxcy told Evolver.fm. “Our general philosophy is that we like to make our content as widely available as possible. We want to be the biggest entertainment platform in the world, and we think we are already. We want to make sure that we can get videos to people in a variety of ways… That’s the positive side, but whenever you have a goal like that, and you set your system up that way, there’s always the risk that there will be a small number of people in the world who abuse your good nature and the ability to get access to that content. With our APIs, the vast majority of developers are complying with our terms of service.”

YouTube’s API terms of service specify that developers who add full-track playback from YouTube can only make non-commercial apps, must show the videos, as opposed to stripping them out and only playing the music, and must include YouTube’s ads with those videos.

Songza, Muziic, and other services crossed those lines in years past, after which YouTube denied or threatened to deny them access to its API.

“I think applications integrating music is a great idea, and there are plenty of robust music services out there. I think it’s better for an application developer to… make sure they’re complying properly, versus thinking that they can temporarily and maybe inappropriately access our platform,” said Farhi. “They’re going to get shut down, and it’s going to be a bad user experience because the YouTube videos won’t play anymore one day.”

So, that settles that: If app developers push the YouTube integration too far, they’ll get cut off, and YouTube has shown that it’s willing to take such steps in the past. However, its contention that free music pays as well as paid music indicates that app developers would be wise to include both options: YouTube videos for music fans who don’t want to pay, and Rdio or some other subscription service for those who do.

Ultimately, the real beneficiary of the revelation that free and paid music can generate equivalent revenues could be Spotify, or even Google itself.

Farhi noted Spotify’s success on the Facebook platform in Europe, where users embed Spotify songs within their feeds that anyone can hear (the free version plays up to 20 hours of music per month). In addition, Spotify integrates directly with Facebook as a music sharing network. In the United States, however, Facebook users overwhelmingly prefer YouTube for embedding music, as any U.S. music fan on Facebook has surely noticed.

Spotify has long maintained that its allure lies in being able to monetize the free listening that some people are always going to engage in, through advertising, while those who are eventually willing to pay for extra features (smartphone apps, offline playback, higher sound quality, and no ads) can do so without switching to a new music service and losing all of their playlist, ratings, and friends.

If the lesson of YouTube vs. paid music services should teach the music industry anything, it’s that Spotify — or something like it, which finally joins the equally lucrative sectors of free and paid music — could boost overall revenue to a struggling recorded music industry.

(Story pitched from wired.com)

fanatic.fm – a music sponsorship platform where brands and bands can find each other

This is what the website tells us about fanatic.fm

www.fanatic.fm
twitter: @fanaticfm

fanatic.fm is a music sponsorship platform where brands and bands can find each other.

Musicians publish a new album with sponsorship from brands. No corporate sell-out – musicians take full control over choosing sponsors.

Brands sponsor a new album and win the hearts of enthusiastic music fans of the musician. Associating with new album release is a great way to create buzz.

Rather than having brands pay for advertising spots on music destination sites, brands set up a pool of funds for a branding campaign and “invite” only those musicians that they feel best portray their brand image.

Invited musicians have the right to accept or refuse the invitation, and a sponsorship relationship is formed when mutual consent is reached. (just like ‘friendship request’ in facebook)

The branding fund is then allocated among the invited musicians based on the number of plays. Both brands and bands have the incentive to engage their social media network to drive traffic to the newly formed relationship, creating a win-win scenario for both parties.

Musicians take 70% of the total sponsorship revenue and fanatic.fm takes 30%. And then musicians and us donate 2.5% each to charities that musicians select to help them change the world.

* RSS
* Random
* Archive
* Mobile

All good and well, it sounds interesting for sure. For now there are only just 7 bands and 2 sponsors affiliated with the website.

But in this age of time where record labels can’t be the banks they used to be and don’t have enough resources or staff left to pay for it’s surely not strange the brands seek to take over the role the record label once had.

The Music Bay: Pirate Bay Crew Instill More Fear Into The Music Industry

For years The Pirate Bay has been a thorn in the side of the music industry, but things could be about to take a turn for the worse. Over the past days rumors of a new project titled “The Music Bay” have been circling, and now a Pirate Bay insider has just confirmed to TorrentFreak that the major record labels have good reason to be afraid, very afraid.

A few years ago the Pirate Bay crew registered a domain name that until now hasn’t been very active, themusicbay.org. At the time it was registered there were plans to create the most efficient music sharing system ever built, but these were put aside as other projects needed more urgent attention.

In recent days, however, rumors started to grow that The Music Bay domain might be put to use after all. It is currently setup to serve ads for The Pirate Bay website, but this spring it could be hosting a special surprise for the music industry.

The currently active subdomain fear.themusicbay.org is currently displaying a “comming soon” [sic] title so TorrentFreak caught up with a Pirate Bay insider to learn more about the plans for the site. Although the Pirate Bay crew is reluctant to release any specific details, their intentions are obvious.

“The music industry can’t even imagine what we’re planning to roll out in the coming months. For years they’ve complained bitterly about piracy, but if they ever had a reason to be scared it is now,” TorrentFreak was told. “It will be a special surprise for IFPI’s 78th birthday, and we’re thinking of organizing a huge festival in Rome where IFPI was founded.”

IFPI is of course the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of the most active anti-piracy outfits and a long-time adversary of The Pirate Bay. Formed under Italy’s fascist government of Benito Mussolini in 1933, IFPI will turn 78 in April of 2011.

TorrentFreak did ask for more details about “The Music Bay”, but the above is all we are able to reveal at this stage. What’s clear from the conversation we had, however, is that the major record labels are in for a big surprise. More details are expected to follow in the near future.

Without any hard evidence all the above can of course be interpreted in a million ways. We simply don’t know what the announced project will be, who will run it and what it will do. For all we know the entire project is nothing more that a domain name, registered and used just for the purpose to put fear into the already quite paranoid music industry.

(source: Torrentfreak.com)

Foursquare Valued at More Than $250 Million, May Seek New Funding in 2011

Foursquare Labs Inc., the wireless service that lets users broadcast their whereabouts to friends, is valued at more than $250 million and will probably hold another round of financing later this year, its co-founder said in an interview with Bloomberg

The service, with more than 6 million users, “pulls in some revenue from big brands,” although it’s not yet interested in offering shares to the public, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai said in an interview
at the MIDEM music industry conference in Cannes, France, this weekend.

Foursquare, which Selvadurai said will probably have 10 million users by June, faces increasing competition from location-based services now offered by social media sites Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. Foursquare expects to profit by forming more partnership with local businesses and offering more recommendations, including places to have dinner or grab a drink after a music concert or show.

“Other sites want to keep you inside at the computer, while our entire goal is to get you out of the house,” Selvadurai said.

New York City-based Foursquare will probably double the number of its employees to 120 by the end of the year, he said. The company in June 2010 raised $20 million from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz, in a deal that valued it at $120 million, he said.

The site, which has advertising deals with companies like PepsiCo Inc., Safeway Inc. and Zagat Survey LLC, has 60 percent of its users in the U.S.

Twitter Chairman Jack Dorsey is a Foursquare investor. The mobile-payments company Dorsey started last year, Square Inc., shares office space with Foursquare at its New York location, Selvadurai said.

(the story was pitched from Bloomberg