By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm. We apologize for the linkbait headline, but it’s true: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak enjoys an upcoming app for iOS and Android called SoundWave. Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue even liked it enough to make sure the US and UK iTunes app stores approved it, and now that has happened. But why wouldn’t Apple approve Soundwave, which lets people follow each other’s listening habits by individual or geographical area? Well, because it does what we haven’t ever seen another Apple-approved app do: listen to your main iOS Music app and some streaming apps, and... Continue reading

By Chris Robley of CD Baby's The DIY Musician. Are you collecting all the royalties you’re owed from Spotify? If you don’t have a publishing administrator working on your behalf, the answer is probably NO. But I should make it clear upfront that this isn’t Spotify’s fault. It’s not like they’re holding out on you! It’s just one of those crazy things about how the world of music publishing works (or doesn’t) for indie artists. So which monies have you been missing out on? Read on to find out… Four ways you can make money through Spotify 1. The regular... Continue reading

Artist manager and label co-founder Emily White tells the story of her career in music. From her internship with Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls, to her time at Live Nation, and finally to founding her own management company and record label. White led with her positive spirit, business smarts, and can-do attitude. Hear her stories and learn from her music industry lessons in this Interview Series episode of the Upward Spiral podcast. Listen below: Also, listen to White's conversation about "thinking different" in Episode 25: Continue reading

(UPDATED) By Craig Hamilton, founder Harkive.org Can you remember the music services, technologies and formats you used 10 years ago? If, like me, you are struggling to remember, here’s a little help: You would not have used YouTube, or Spotify, or listened on a smartphone, or shared music choices on Twitter. Why? None of these products and services existed in 2003. So, what did you do? I was struggling with this question last year, and it became the germ of an idea that would eventually become Harkive. But more on that in a moment… At the same time as wrestling... Continue reading

Andrew Dubber is Professor of Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University. And other stuff.. Let’s rewind… In September 1995, the first consumer mp3 encoding software was released, allowing computer users to store digital music on their hard drives. At this time, typical hard drive sizes ranged between 500 and 1000 MB in size, so data compression was essential. While it took time and persistence (because of dialup speeds), it became possible to transmit these compressed files to other computer users around the world over networks such as IRC and USENET. In June 1999, Shawn Fanning, John Fanning and Sean... Continue reading

By Jeff Price (@TuneCoreJeff), Co-Founder of Audiam and Founder and Former CEO of TuneCore. For those artists not aware, Pandora has taken the gloves off completely and is out to beat the crap out of you to make more money. Pandora is an Internet streaming radio service that makes money just like AM/FM radio, through advertising. It's also a publicly traded company. All of its investors and shareholders want to make a lot more then they already have. They have a few ways they can do this. One is to be more innovative and valuable to advertisers allowing them to... Continue reading

Wes Davenport is a music marketer, blogger, and publicist based in Nashville, TN. He writes about ways modern musicians can thrive at wesdavenport.com. Follow him on Twitter @wesdavenport for more music industry insights. How much time do iOS users spend in different kinds of apps? Flurry, a mobile app analytics company, released a report that reveals how music, media, and entertainment apps stack up against the rest. While mobile music apps aren’t isolated from other entertainment apps, there are still strong takeaways for the music business. First, let’s look at how iOS users spend time on their devices. Music, media,... Continue reading

Artist manager, label founder, and entrepreneur Emily White shares a TON of great insights! Hear her unique perspectives on listener habits, music industry success, and staying true to yourself. This is a great conversation; maybe one of the best episodes we've ever had. Check it out — and stay tuned for an Upward Spiral interview series where Emily discusses her long and fascinating career in music. Enjoy! See Emily's guest posts for Hypebot: Emily White: Young Mr. Hines Emily White: The Case FOR Artist Management Emily White: Why Commission Based Teams Are Awesome For Musicians & Why You Should Want... Continue reading

By Musician and Marketing Consultant Solveig Whittle (@shadesofsolveig). Vlogging is an increasingly popular communication medium, and I think it’s a largely underutilized way for indie musicians to communicate with fans, perform live, do interviews, build their YouTube subscribers, and share information about themselves and their lives. Musicians might even find it an unexpected source of additional income. What is vlogging, you may ask? Vlogging is a contraction of the phrase “video blogging.” Vlogging is what happens when you publish regular, serialized video episodes on YouTube and people “tune in,” or subscribe, to your YouTube channel to watch. Vloggers, some of... Continue reading

By indie rapper Kosha Dillz (@koshadillz). Most of my career and life, I would throw things against the wall from various different directions and they would stick. I made much of my career hustling and meeting the next person on to the next thing. I was never ever preparing for one specific thing, but I was always prepared to make the best out of the situation I was given. When it comes down to release day, and your office is your parents' counter top with a laptop, you need to be prepared! Unfortunately after I was deathly ill for a... Continue reading

By Michael Brandvold @michaelsb of Michael Brandvold Marketing. What do you do when you get a bad review of your CD? A really bad review. It is something every artist will encounter at some point in their career. How you handle it and what you get out of the review can say a lot about how professional you are. Back in the dark ages before the internet, around 1989, I was just out of college living in Chicago and working with a band called Defcon. The band had recorded some three song demo tapes with producers like Frankie Sullivan of... Continue reading

By Andy Young the CEO & Founder of Tunipop (@Tunipop), a platform to sell to fans while they listen to music. Young is also the inventor of a patent pending for in-stream contextual commerce in digital media. The contrast couldn't be starker. Sports merchandise retailer, Fanatics Inc., recently closed a new $170 million investment on a $3.1 billion valuation. Meanwhile, no merchandise is being sold against the billions of songs and music videos that are streamed every month in an industry that is desperate to find new sources of sustainable revenue. Fanatics exists because the sports merchandise marketplace is accessible,... Continue reading

By Liv Buli (@lbuli)), Resident Data Journalist for music analytics company Next Big Sound. An abandoned three-story brick building in the middle of a former brewery is a pretty sweet spot to make music. In a sprawling, though somewhat disheveled studio, the two young gentleman that have adopted the moniker Lemaitre, play and produce until the wee hours of the night, creating the funk-inspired electronica that is catapulting them from the small town of Oslo, Norway, to worldwide renown. But beneath it all – lies a keen sense of business savvy. With a music industry still adjusting to the current... Continue reading

By Matt Schlicht of Hipset Network. You may have been uploading videos to YouTube for years – hell you may even have been able to build up a decent fan base. You know the tips, the best practices, the best camera angles, how the audio equipment works, how to promote your videos, how to respond to the comments. That’s great. Live broadcasting is completely different. YouTube just gave the ability to live broadcast to every channel with over 1,000 subscribers. If you have a channel that falls into this category, I recommend you study up a bit on how to... Continue reading

By Miguel de Braganca from Berklee College of Music's Music Business Journal. The largest providers of capital in the music business, the major record labels, have been devastated over the last decade by the disruption of their core competency: selling recorded music and investing profits into the development of new talent. Global music sales have been contracting for over a decade, falling from $27.8b in 2000 to $16.5b in 2012.1 It doesn’t take an economist to explain the effect: there is less cash available to fund artists. Furthermore, talent development is a high-risk business. Traditionally, nine out of ten artists... Continue reading

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm. Erstwhile iTunes software designer and marketing leader Alec Marshall had a front row seat to watch music downloads chip away at the CD, starting in the ’90s. He says the streaming services replacing the download for many of us are not capable of returning recorded music revenue to its high water mark, either. His answer: a new kind of sponsorship that includes artist pages where user activity from social networks can be monitored, and sponsorship ads served, in such a way that he claims will earn them more money. All that changes is the... Continue reading

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm. Recently, I conducted an interview via someone else’s Google Glass. For crying out loud. In this live, international interview (which you can see below albeit without audio, because I didn’t manage to capture it — again, my first Google Glass interview) Massimo Ciociola, founder and CEO of the popular lyrics service MusiXmatch told me about the company’s plans to introduce a Google Glass app that will display song lyrics on Google’s heads-up display, which is still only available to a couple thousand people in the world. In fact, MusiXmatch is already working on this... Continue reading

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm. Marissa Meyer has pledged not to screw up Tumblr and to leave it more-or-less autonomous, as part of Yahoo’s bold $1.1 billion acquisition of the company. Her pledge should mean that all the #music on Tumblr will be okay (unlike the porn), which is a good thing for music fans among the 4.8 million people who access Tumblr every day, which means Tumblr has roughly the daily population of Alabama. The acquisition should help Yahoo attract a more tech-savvy crowd, too, as well as boosting its bottom line as Yahoo inserts “Yahoo Stream Ads”... Continue reading

By Dan Servantes from Berklee College of Music's Music Business Journal. What do Tom Petty, Bryan Adams, Tom Waits, Kris Kristofferson, and Bob Dylan all have in common? They released iconic albums that generated millions of dollars and are now requesting copyright transfer termination from their labels and publishers. Thanks to the Copyright Act of 1976, artists have a chance to reclaim their song rights. Copyright transfer reversion is and will continue to be an issue in the music industry for years to come. There will be many examples in the coming years of how copyright reversion will ultimately play... Continue reading

By Taryn Anderson of Talenthouse. We came across YouTube's very own Creator Playbook Guide which explains various strategies for successfully using their services to get the most beneficial social media exposure possible. Here we will give you the rundown of the best strategies to help you raise your view counts and put you on the right track to becoming YouTube famous. Optimize Your Videos and Channel for Better Discovery The majority of videos watched are found through search results so artists should ensure that they’re making good use of their metadata. This includes the title of your video, the tags,... Continue reading

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm. Well, it happened — Apple has approved an iOS app called gMusic that has long allowed the iPhone crowd to access their Google Music locker, and now, as of Wednesday, lets iOS users access Google Play Music All Access from their devices. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because when we asked Google music chief Paul Joyce about what Google would do if someone made an app like this, he first responded that such an app would violate Google’s terms of service, and that the company would request the developer... Continue reading

By Anne Leighton writing for Michael Brandvold Marketing. (Dedicated to My Therapist) If you’re crowd funding, you’re doing something both for and about yourself, and there can be a lot of spiritual awakenings along that path to reaching your goal. Obviously goal setting and speaking up for yourself are big parts of the experience, but along the route you get to know both yourself and the people involved with your campaign. In general, life is about rising up to challenges, and you can choose to accept that fact and do it with an upbeat attitude or be a grump about... Continue reading

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm. Microsoft will launch a raft of new stuff today for the XBox at an event where it is expected to unveil a new gaming console. However, we already know about one piece of the announcement: an intriguing interactive live music show that will only be available to people who have Xboxes, called “The Music Room.” Essentially, it’s a live music app that takes advantage of the big screen and (hopefully) nice speakers you’re already using for gaming. What those reports fail to mention is that Microsoft’s The Music Room (video below) will be “beamed... Continue reading

By Ian Anderson of music crowdfunding blog Launch + Release. As a musician, you typically have no problem imagining how awesome your new idea is going to turn out… It’s sorta like picturing how your ex will suddenly take you back when they hear your song. Or how a room full of 500 people will want to raise their glass high while singing your chorus the next time you play. When it comes to crowdfunding, you probably start out with a few daydreams about how everybody and their dog is going to be flat out jacked to pledge to your... Continue reading

By Mita Carriman Esq. (@nymusiclawyer), NYC entertainment lawyer at Carriman Law Group and band manager. As an entertainment attorney who was once an indie artist myself involved in a few different artistic disciplines, I know that the bridge between law and art doesn't always seem straightforward. There's certainly a lot of gray area, which could lead a person to probably think that the law would be one way, when it isn't. Through my work, I've frequently encountered several myths regarding music law that I hope can eventually go away! While there are much more than 4, I found that these... Continue reading