Fame House's Hisham Dahud was part of last week's IMS Engage in Los Angeles, a selection of “unmoderated conversations” between pioneers in the EDM space and prolific outsiders from different industries reaching in. Overseeing social media and acting as the official blogger for IMS Engage, this is his overview of the event. The International Music Summit’s (IMS) first major conference stateside, IMS Engage took place last Wednesday April 17th at the W Hotel in Hollywood, CA. The event drew in 250 people from all over the world including music artists, industry professionals, techies, press / media and local L.A. residents... Continue reading

The Upward Spiral is back! This episode catches the guys with writer, pundit and college radio GM Emily White, as she joins to discuss how lyrics are ripe for a richer multimedia experience, and whether streaming services need more music curation (as Jimmy Iovine implies). Plus recommendations for new music, gear, events and Vietnamese food! The Upward Spiral is a podcast about the new music industry featuring Kyle Bylin (Live Nation Labs), music industry consultant Jason Spitz (Former Director of Marketing at Topspin), and Hisham Dahud (Fame House). Along with special guests, the group discusses current events and issues that... Continue reading

Software engineer and musician Chase Farmer joins the conversation to discuss how music festivals are "ripe for hacking" in ways that can utilize technology to make for a better experience. Also, the gang chats about Beats' new music streaming service, Daisy, and possible implications for the streaming market and the overall music landscape. All this plus news on iHeartRadio, CNET, and more! The Upward Spiral is a podcast about the new music industry featuring Kyle Bylin (Live Nation Labs), music industry consultant Jason Spitz (Former Director of Marketing at Topspin), and Hisham Dahud (Fame House). Along with special guests, the... Continue reading

MTV has unveiled a new list that they call simply “MTV Artist to Watch”, a new artist / music discovery initiative and campaign that spans across all of MTV’s television channels and web presences. To kick off the campaign, MTV has revealed its selections for the 13 artists to watch in 2013, as well as a concert in New York. Every two weeks, MTV will select and then feature a new “Artist to Watch” that spans multiple genres including pop, EDM, hip hop and rock. The first batch of artists are (in alphabetical order): Alt-J, Joey Bada$$, Becky G, Robert... Continue reading

Over the next few days we'll be featuring our best and most popular posts of 2012. This one comes from Hypebot Senior Writer Hisham Dahud. The Pareto Principle, more commonly also known as the 80–20 rule, states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In business for example, 80% of a company’s profits tend to come from 20% of their customers, 80% of sales are made by 20% of the sales staff, and so on. For today’s music artist, this rule of thumb applies in a more indirect way in regards to... Continue reading

Over the next few days we'll be featuring our best and most popular posts of 2012. This one comes from Hypebot Senior Writer Hisham Dahud. As a musician, it is vital that you listen to your audience as much as you'd like them to listen to you. Sometimes that could mean going through a change. The Beastie Boys did it, Katy Perry did it, and the Black Eyed Peas did it among many others. At one point, these artists shifted their focus towards a newly refined target audience after realizing that their existing audience responded well to subtle facets of... Continue reading

Over the next few days we'll be featuring our best and most popular posts of 2012. This one comes from Hypebot Senior Writer Hisham Dahud. After a four-year journey that recently culminated with my college graduation, I write to you now as a full-time music industry professional – a senior music & technology writer for Hypebot.com, a lead digital strategist for Fame House, and I remain an independent musician myself building a creative venture of my own. My journey has been anything but straightforward, and there were plenty of lessons I learned along the way that I feel obliged to... Continue reading

Over the next few days we'll be featuring our best and most popular posts of 2012. This one comes from Hypebot Senior Writer Hisham Dahud. What does branding have to do with you as a music artist? In a word: everything. Your brand extends far beyond the logos on your website or merchandise items. Branding is about awareness, both of yourself and the public’s mental positioning of you. Being aware of what you are subtly and unconsciously conveying to the public is key to controlling the magnetism of your brand. But before you can begin to develop brand awareness, you... Continue reading

Over the next few days we'll be featuring our best and most popular posts of 2012. This one comes from Hypebot Senior Writer Hisham Dahud. As the recording and distribution of music becomes more and more democratized, and the already highly saturated music space continues to clutter up, one question undoubtedly remains: “Is now the besttime, or the worst time to be a musician?” Everyone reading this is already well aware that there exist far easier (and simpler) ways to earn a living other than pursuing a career as a musician. It is an unstable, uncertain, and high-risk endeavor that... Continue reading

Over the next few days we'll be featuring our best and most popular posts of 2012. This one comes from Hypebot Senior Writer Hisham Dahud. Mahatma Gandhi is the ultimate representation of what it means to be devoted. He inspired the world with his message of practicing peace over power, and of living in harmony to find ways to reconcile our differences. In doing so, the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against him. As an independent artist in today’s highly saturated music space, the odds aren’t exactly in your favor either. However, the following 10 fundamentals left behind by Gandhi will... Continue reading

This upcoming February, Digital Media Wire will combine their Digital Music Forum East and West conferences into one event in New York City, simply named DMW Music. The event is set to bring together influential music and digital media leaders to socialize, share ideas, do deals and learn about new technologies and services. DMW Music is also hosting their Industry Leadership Awards to honor music tech startups and trendsetters who’ve made a significant impact in 2012. The event’s first round of speakers has executives from companies including Google, YouTube, Warner Music Group, Sirius XM, Clear Channel, Pandora, Island Def Jam,... Continue reading

The Deep Dive is a new mini-podcast from The Upward Spiral. We've shortened our News segment in the regular podcast to take 10 - 15 minutes and "dive deep", analyzing a single news item from all different angles. In this installment, we dive into the news of Metallica's new label Blackened Recordings, and the fact that all their masters reverted back to the band from WMG. What does it mean for the future of the band - and the future of major labels, for that matter? Listen to us hash it out in this short, free-wheeling discussion. The Upward Spiral... Continue reading

In the wake of LiveNation.com’s recent relaunch and the coming of a new year, Hypebot felt it was important to check up with one of the most innovative and potentially disruptive forces brewing within the music and tech sector: Live Nation Labs. Lead by the entrepreneurial minds of Eric Garland and Ethan Kaplan, Labs aims to foster innovation within the ticketing and promotions superpower. The pair has been chosen to steer the ship of Live Nation’s web and mobile product development efforts and establish its own investment arm. Hypebot’s Hisham Dahud caught up with general manager and co-founder Eric Garland... Continue reading

Guest post by Valeria Bornstein of Fame House A new research project by social media analytics and software company Buddy Media analyzing brand interactions for Facebook’s Timeline for Pages reveals that the interactions between fans and brands have changed over the months. Previous research done on Facebook posts is no longer relevant in an age where Timeline is used for all Pages. This new research data makes it possible (and necessary) for musicians and brands to employ new strategies for optimal posting times, content and calls-to-action. Optimal Posting Times The new research indicates that the interaction rate for weekend posts... Continue reading

Nearly every music artist strives for recognition of some sort, whether that be owning a modest fan base of loyal supporters or striving to become an internationally known megastar. Hip-hop icon Jay Z certainly fits the description of the latter, and given his larger than life perspective of the world, it would be easy to assume that he’s living high on a cloud above the common folk. But in a video that’s been widely circulated around the web lately, the championed rapper and business mogul demonstrates that no level of success is reason enough to avoid remaining humble to people... Continue reading

Jason Feinberg, VP of Digital Strategy at Epitaph / Anti- Records, joins the conversation. As a veteran of the digital music space and an insightful teacher/speaker/writer, Jason has a lot to say about the state of the "artist hub". Hear his big-picture ideas and practical, useful advice. Plus, get recommendations for books, music, and portable speakers, and find out what kind of beer Kyle doesn't recommend. The Upward Spiral is a podcast about the new music industry featuring Kyle Bylin (Live Nation Labs), music industry consultant Jason Spitz (Former Director of Marketing at Topspin), and Hypebot's Hisham Dahud (also of... Continue reading

BandPage has just announced deeper integrations with several partners in their new Connect API, as well as new usage numbers for their platform. Musicians can now update Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud profile pictures right from BandPage, plus update their SoundCloud bio. The company has also announced that 100,000 extensions (widgets connecting musicians’ Bandpage profiles to their websites and blogs) have been used since the July launch of BandPage Everywhere plus other numbers. BandPage launched Connect a few weeks ago, which allows artists to instantly integrate their BandPage profile onto several social and music platforms across the web for free, including... Continue reading

Los Angeles-based startup Beastmode.fm has built a music discovery platform that not only sources content from some of the top music recommendations sites on the web, but also requires no licensing. Built around some of the top music bloggers, Beastmode aggregates content of 2,200 curated music blogs and free-to-play platforms including SoundCloud, YouTube, MixCloud, and Pitchfork into a single music player. Currently in public beta, Beastmode users consume content in one of two ways. They can either follow individual music blogs in an RSS-like experience, with new music added to the listening que as it’s posted online, or they can... Continue reading

The beautiful thing about music is that it can be either a social or an intimately personal experience, depending on how you choose to enjoy it. Music brings people together and can easily transcend any language barrier, but it can also bring us closer to ourselves and provide us with a soundtrack to our daily lives. One of the most powerful ways to facilitate an intimate listening experience is through the use of personal headphones – a technology that has come a long way since its inception nearly 100 years ago. Dating back to 1919, old battery-powered radio headphones eventually... Continue reading

UPDATE: The attack which effected thousands of blogs has been fixed, but illustrates how social openness can lead to security problems. "The more functional you make something, the less secure it tends to become," according to Roger Thompson, of ICSA Labs. "It appears that the worm took advantage of Tumblr's reblogging feature, meaning that anyone who was logged into Tumblr would automatically reblog the infectious post if they visited one of the offending pages," according to researchers at Sophos' Naked Security blog. Tumblr, a platform used by thousands of musicians and labels, has been hit with a nasty worm today... Continue reading

It’s official: Metallica has gone independent. Announced last Friday, the famed rockers have left longtime label Warner Music Group after 28 years, and were able to take ownership of all their master recordings with them, including all music and long form videos under provision of their renegotiated joint venture agreement with the WMG in 1994, where all masters revert back to the band as of November 30, 2012. The band also announced the formation of their own independent label, Blackend Recordings. From now on, every Metallica project from future studio albums to reissues will be released via Blackened. The label... Continue reading

Looking to alienate themselves from the stigma of being a detriment to the content industry, The Pirate Bay has just launched an entirely new website dedicated to promoting the work of independent musicians, filmmakers and other content creators. Called “The Promo Bay”, this website was built in response to the more than 10,000 artists who signed up for its initial conceptual roll out back in early 2012, but has now expanded to both promote and provide artists with details on where their content is being downloaded most in the world. If you ever visited the The Pirate Bay earlier in... Continue reading

Have you ever really stopped to think about that? Given all the possibilities for a given song to exist, with all the notes, chords and arrangements at our disposal, will we ever reach a point where we have one day heard it all? More so, it may surprise you to learn that the amount of possibilities for a song, while extraordinarily gigantic, is actually a finite number – meaning that we can one (distant) day reach the point of hearing nothing new. We as humans can only distinguish a certain number of tones, and since it only takes just a... Continue reading

We’ve shown you who the richest drummers are, the richest “EDM” DJs, and the richest hip-hop stars. Now, a new list has emerged detailing the top-paid musicians overall in 2012. While several of the names on the list may not come as a surprise, it’s worth noting that many of them also earn the bulk of their income outside of their music. But for all, it is in the leveraging of their own personal brands that causes them to rake in such huge sums of dough. Forbes magazines ran estimates that are based on total earnings from May 2011 to... Continue reading

Music discovery and social platform OurStage.com has announced OurStage Pro, a new membership service that pays artists for song spins through a rather unique revenue sharing program. Pro allows artists to get paid when fans listen to their music on OurStage.com, on their own site, or on social media. For $2 dollars per month, artists become OurStage Pro members and begin promoting their music on the website and through an embeddable player provided by the company to monetize their work. Whenever fans listen to the artist's songs on OurStage.com or via their remote player, any song that gets played at... Continue reading