The Implications Of Euro BMW's Streaming Music

There's been talk for a number of years now how streaming music would eventually become standard in all new cars, but despite the predictions, it hasn't come to pass - until now. BMW just announced that their European Series 5 autos now come with access to mobil carrier Vodafone's Rara streaming music catalog, and it will be available in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands.

On the surface this only sounds like the next evolution of streaming music, but dig a little deeper and you find that the deal includes 3G access wherever you can get a signal without any extra charges, cables or devices. The trick to this is that each car has it's own embedded SIM, which means that the radio isn't the device, the car is!

For this you pay a flat fee of about $500 for the first year and $285 for each year thereafter, but that includes mobil voice and offline access as well. It's steep, but definitely cheaper than any alternative in Europe, especially if you drive the continent extensively and have to subscribe to a variety of services in different countries.

But the implications are many, especially back here in the US. Since so much of traditional terrestrial radio now depends upon drive-time listening, imagine the hit it would take should a version of Beemer audio hit the States. There's an entire broadcast industry that hasn't yet quite felt the evolutionary heat like music and television has, but that writing is on the wall.

Image what this will do for music discovery? While it's true that YouTube is the leader in music discovery online, radio is by far the leader across all media categories. The major labels still depend upon the radio infrastructure of yesterday to spread their new music and cultivate top 40 hits. Legions of listeners tuning out to listen to their custom streaming channels could finally turn this paradigm on its ear. Could this eventually lead to the final nail in major label (as we know it) coffin?

Sometimes the smallest event is all it takes to trigger a huge change. Could something like the 3G Beemer be the one that triggers the next?

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Teens Tiring Of Facebook

We've seen this coming for the last year or so, but now the trend seems to be in full swing - teens are tiring of Facebook and moving their social media lives to Twitter instead. According to new Pew research data, nearly a quarter of online teens now use Twitter instead of Facebook to keep up with their friends and celebrities. This is up from 16% in 2011.

Even though 60% use the privacy settings on Facebook in order to limit their interactions to only their friends, most seem to be growing more disenchanted with the service because of "oversharing" with adults, especially parents. What's more, roughly 50% had deleted their own posts, other's comments, or untagged themselves from photos, 75% had deleted people from their network, and 58% had blocked someone from contacting them.

But parents have their own concerns as well, as 81% are concerned about how much of their children's information is being learned by advertisers. That said, teens themselves were not worried about being targeted by marketers, and just 9% expressed concern about how their data was collected.

Pew also found that teens are pretty open about themselves in general when using social media.

• 91% post a photo of themselves
• 71% post their school name
• 71% post the town or city where they live
• 53% post their email address
• 20% post their cell number

This new data is not a good long-term sign for Facebook. Although it won't mean much in the near future, the teen of today is the adult of tomorrow, and by transitioning to a different social media platform than Facebook, is now growing comfortable in their own non-Facebook world.

The Internet is strewn with social networks that were king of the hill one day and seemingly gone the next (remember MySpace, Friendster, MP3.com?). Five years from now we may be looking at Facebook in a far different light.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media for the best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Live Gig Footage To Your Phone

As video technology has gotten cheaper and smaller, it's been a dream of many artists and fans alike to shoot every gig at a venue. While this sometimes happens with the venue using pro equipment, it actually happens anyway with many in the audience holding their phones up to capture the performance.

That's all well and good except it's a pain to hold your arms up for more than 5 minutes at a time, and the act doesn't make anything from the process (except for some additional promotion). Now a beta version of the Soundhalo app may take care of both situations at once.

Soundhalo takes the footage and audio from a production crew at the venue and delivers a fully mastered MP4 video straight to the cloud directly after the song. Fans can then pay to download the song directly to their Android phones one song at a time.

There's a lot of  upside here. First of all, the production quality (especially the audio) is better than what can be captured by a phone, the fan can get it immediately so it can be an impulse buy, and the band has an additional income stream.

If venues were smart about it, they'd build this feature into the price of each ticket, but I can see why that probably won't happen. One of the biggest problems of digital commerce is clearances, and live recording can be a hornets nest just waiting to be struck. What if the artist decides to play a song on the spur of the moment that's not under his or her control? There's not time for clearances if the song is available immediately after it's performed. The artist/publisher/Soundhalo also has to pre-clear everything before the gig, and anyone who's ever tried to do that knows that it always takes more time than it should.

S till, for a hungry up and coming band that owns that owns their own publishing gigging in a club, it's a great way to increase revenue (if only slightly) and capture a memory at the same time.

On a similar note, an app called Switchcam allows aggregation of phone camera videos. If your fans are going to record you, you might as well have access to it.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media for the best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

A New Media Format From......BitTorrent?

One of the big problems of the modern digital music industry is bundling, or more accurately, lack of it. Back when the business was a roaring success at the top of its game, the CD album (and before that the vinyl album) brought in most of the revenue. Sure, singles were a reasonable business (at least in the vinyl days), but the album was where the big money was made. Of course, that's all gone away in our current Music 3.0 world where the single song is the king.

Now comes an interesting new bundle that's not exactly an album or movie, but more of a combination of music, video, flyer and store. And it's all built into the same file. The only potential problem is that it's from the service that most creatives love to hate - BitTorrent.

Basically the BitTorrent Bundle is a file that acts as a graphic, telling you anything an advert normally would, but the other pieces can be unbundled as the user buys in. For instance, Ultra, the label that brought you such EDM artists as David Guetta, Tiesto, deadmau5, and Calvin Harris, is trying the new bundle with Kaskade.

The bundle acts as a virtual flyer over social media, and if someone subscribes to his mailing list they then unlock behind-the-scenes footage. Want to buy some music - it's already there. Make a donation, and see some video. It's all up to how to configure it.

The music business needs a new concept in bundling and potentially this could be it. The big problem, of course, is that it's from BitTorrent, which the industry (not to mention artists and songwriters) view it as a bastion for piracy. That said, they do have 170 million active users that you can immediately access.

The Ultra BitTorrent Bundle is a first alpha release, so we don't know what the bugs are yet, but on the surface it's a great concept. Check out this video for more info.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media for the best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

It's All About Song Skipping

Probably the holy grail of listening to music is the ability to skip a song when we get bored. It was pretty difficult with vinyl records, easier with CDs, and much easier with digital music. Of course, it's always been impossible with radio, but digital streaming brings us many possibilities.

One of the features siad to be in Apple's new iRadio music streaming service is the ability to skip songs, and apparently that's become a big problem for Sony Music. It's not that they're opposed to it, it's just that they'd like to get paid full rate even if a listener only played the song for a few seconds. Apple would naturally prefer pay a portion of the royalty using a formula that determines the royalty rate based on the amount of the song that's actually listened to.

Of course, whatever is hammered out with Sony will no doubt be applied to the deals with Universal Music and Warner Music Group as well, since it would be a shock if they didn't have a "favored nation" clause built into their agreements that would keep the compensation equal regardless of who got the best deal.

Yet another feature of iRadio is said to be the ability to rewind a song. As a listener, I love the thought of this feature since there are so many times that I'd love to repeat a section of a song to analyze it. The problem then becomes, how much is paid for each rewind and how is that rate determined.

It's funny how some things that we take for granted with music we own become an issue when it comes to streaming. That said, this is another reason why I think that much better days are ahead for songwriters and artists. The compensation may be small but the increased number of revenue streams should increase income substantially.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media for the best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.