Aurous: The Streaming Service The Music Industry Fears

The music industry hated Grooveshark because it never paid for the music it streamed, and it was finally able to shut it down earlier in the year. Now a new service called Aurous has appeared, immediately drawing the wrath of the RIAA in the form of a lawsuit.

Grooveshark worked as a shell on top of Google, which basically searched the web to find the songs (most of them illegally uploaded) you wanted to hear. Aurous works the same way, but instead uses the Torrents to find illegally uploaded song files. It's similar to Popcorn Time, which does the same thing for movies and television shows and currently has those industries scrambling.

Aurous has in interface that's very similar to Spotify, and features ad-free streaming, which also means that the copyright holder, the artists and songwriters aren't getting paid. The service debuted an alpha version last week.

The music industry was quick to react, showing just how much the site is feared.

On Monday, the RIAA on behalf of UMG, Sony Music, Warner Music, Atlantic and Capitol Records, filed a lawsuit against Aurous and its creator Andrew Sampson for "willful and egregious copyright infringement."

The problem is that Aurous operates as a decentralized BitTorrent search engine, and the company can argue that it's not hosting any illegal content.

This will be an interesting legal battle that's only just beginning.

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Predicting a Country Music Hit

What would you do if you knew the formula for a hit? Would you follow it to the letter to take advantage, or would you do exactly the opposite to stay true to yourself? These are interesting personal questions that luckily we never have to ask ourselves because you can't predict a hit. Or can you?

Musicmetric recently released an interesting whitepaper called "Cracking The Code - Predicting a Country Music Hit" that can look at the sales and social metrics of a country song and reasonably predict if it will be a hit or not within four weeks of debuting on the charts. The research looked at 28 different metrics, including airplay, Shazam tags, Facebook likes, Soundcloud followers, online activity, chart positions, category, sales and other audience metrics. Of the 66 country music tracks that they looked at, 23 went to #1.

They found that the average #1 country single had:

• 3.5 times their usual weekly Facebook likes 
• 2.0 times their usual weekly YouTube plays 
• 1.8 times their usual weekly Twitter Followers 
• 2.0 times their usual weekly BitTorrent downloads 
• took 16.5 weeks from its first entry to its chart peak 

After looking at their model, the researchers found that they could predict with a 79% probability if a song would reach the top 20, 63% if it would the top 10, and 50% if it would go to #1.

While this isn't that helpful for songwriters, it sure is for record labels and publishers. That said, I don't think I'd want my promotional budget hanging on research that has even that much room for error, but it's still the closest we've come to hit prediction yet.

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Who Were The Most Pirated Artists In 2013?

Piracy is way down since the mid-2000's but it does still happen. Here's a list of the most pirated artists on BitTorrent in 2013, according to MusicMetric.com. I think you'll find few surprises in terms of the most popular artists.

rank	artists	est. downloads
musicmetric.com
1	Bruno Mars	5,783,556
2	Rihanna	5,414,166
3	Daft Punk	4,212,361
4	Justin Timberlake	3,930,185
5	Flo Rida	3,470,825
6	Kanye West	3,199,969
7	Eminem	3,176,122
8	Jay Z	3,171,358
9	Drake	3,139,408
10	Pitbull	3,138,308
11	One Direction	2,920,445
12	Maroon 5	2,857,652
13	Zed	2,828,764
14	Nicki Minaj	2,681,177
15	Adele	2,594,275
16	Avicii	2,562,151
17	David Guetta	2,441,235
18	Linkin Park	2,352,385
19	Pharrell Williams	2,336,996
20	Katy Perry	2,318,740

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Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

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

Moby's Latest Is Top Bundles Seller

Usually when you think about BitTorrent you think of piracy, but the service has been working hard over the last year to go legit with its Bundles offering. A bundle is a collection of free content files like an album, with a gateway to paid premium content as well.

Bundles are beginning to gain traction, with over 60 million downloads in 2013 and an impressive number of big name artists signing on. As you can see from the chart on the left, Moby topped the chart with almost 9 million shares, but other major artists like Kaskade, Linkin Park, Public Enemy and Madonna were also included.

The secret behind Bundle's success is that they're included with every uTorrent or BitTorrent application, so the numbers can add up quickly.

Bundles are still flying under the radar, so you might not hear much about them at the moment, but with numbers like the chart provides, it won't be long until this becomes a staple release format of artists everywhere.

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Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

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BitTorrent Traffic Lowest In 10 Years

You haven't heard much from either the film or music industry about piracy lately, and that's because piracy is far less of a problem that it's been in some time. For music, that's because of the rise of streaming services, while for video, it's mostly due to NetFlix and YouTube.

While the decline of piracy was somewhat empirical until now, a new report from Sandvine shows that BitTorrent traffic has fallen to 7% of all Internet traffic, down 20% in the past 6 months alone. To put it into perspective, 10 years ago BitTorrent traffic accounted for 60% of total network traffic.

Meanwhile, video traffic is high, with NetFlix and YouTube accounting for 50% of today's Internet traffic.

Consumers embrace technology that make things more convenient for them. In music, subscribing to a streaming service or watching YouTube is far easier than pirating. With video, see your favorite movie or program on NetFlix or YouTube is easier than stealing it. In both cases, having access has a lot more benefits than owning.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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.

The BitTorrent Bundle Gets Closer

It looks like the general release of BitTorrent Bundle is right around the corner. The new format is being spoken of in hushed terms within the industry because, on one hand, no one wants to admit to supporting BitTorrent, but on the other, everyone is intrigued by what its Bundle offers.

As I've posted in the past, the Bundle allows a creator to package a number of digital elements together in one file that can then be unlocked with a digital key that you provide to your users. That means that one file can supply audio, video, graphics and a store, and any or all of them can be unlocked using the proper key.

It's intriguing enough that even an artist like Madonna has been rumored to have signed on for an Alpha test for the release of her latest project, which is a film she's directed.

There's not much buzz about the Bundle at the moment, but it could turn out to be a game-changer when it comes to digital delivery. Watch the video below for a little more info, then check out some currently available bundles.

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

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook 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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The 9 Top Music Pirate Countries

We hear less about it these days because online music streaming has become the hot button issue, but there's still a good bit of music piracy that goes on all over the world. Musicmetric has compiled a report called The Digital Music Index that found that there were over 400 million illegal downloads after watching Bittorrent for the first 6 months of the year. They broke it down by country, and here's what they found.

1. US - 96.68 million.
Most downloaded artist: Drake

2. UK - 43.26 million.
Most downloaded artist: Ed Sheeran

3. Italy - 33.15 million.
Most downloaded artist: Laura Pausini

4. Canada - 23.95 million.
Most downloaded artist: Kenye West

5. Brazil - 19.72 million.
Most downloaded artist: Billy Van

6. Australia - 19.23 million.
Most downloaded artist: Hilltop Hoods

7. Spain - 10.3 million.
Most downloaded artist: Pablo Alberan

8. India - 8.96 million.
Most downloaded artist: Billy Van

9. France - 8.39 million.
Most downloaded artist: Sexion d'Assaut

I'm actually surprised at how low these numbers are. If you listen to the RIAA, they should be about 20 times higher, but here we have empirical data that shows that while pirating still continues it's not to the level that the music industry tells us.

Still, if you're a record label, it must be distressing that 400 million potential sales were left on the table. That said, how many of those would've been turned into a sale if piracy were eliminated? My guess is that it wouldn't have been even half of that total, and spread out world-wide, the potential revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to what major record labels deal with every day. If anything, this study shows that streaming music is beginning to take hold and piracy is decreasing.

It will be interesting to visit this again next year. I bet the numbers will be a lot lower.

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

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.

4 Things To Know About BitTorrent

Kyle Bylin had a nice article on Hypebot recently about the 5 things to know about BitTorrent stats. I'm going to repurpose that article a bit for this post in order to make a few points. If you don't know what BitTorrent is, then you're probably not illegally file sharing or moving large amounts of data, but it's a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol for distributing large amounts of data.

That being said, if you're a content creator or owner of any kind, BitTorrent can be one of your worst nightmares as your work can be freely distributed to anyone anywhere if they so choose. Here are a few things you should now about the service.

1) BitTorrent has over 100 million monthly users. That includes over 20 million active users that download over 400,000 files daily. That does not include what may be up to a couple million unofficial clients.

2) BitTorrent has twice as many users as Hulu and Netflix combined, but it's only has about half as many users as iTunes or YouTube. This puts things into perspective a bit when you realize that twice as many people are willing to obtain their entertainment legitimately.

3) BitTorrent still makes most of its money from its toolbars. This means that unless they figure out a different business model, they're leaving a lot of potential money on the table since there's really no other way to take advantage of this massive amount of traffic.

4) Surprisingly enough, the highest searched for music item was only #47 of the most searched items (that was Eminem). All of the top 10 searches where Hollywood movies. People may be still downloading your music, but I would worry a lot more if I were a film studio, although that doesn't say too much for the popularity of music these days, does it?

What does this all mean?
A) People still are willing to pay to a quick and easy user experience.

B) Music is in trouble because people are beginning to feel that it's not worth stealing.

C) BitTorrent makes a lot of money but it's not the huge cash cow that it should be, given the amount of traffic that it has. Services like this have a tendency to be bought for their technology, or disconnect from their audience to find a new business model, so don't be surprised if one day BitTorrent isn't there anymore or becomes something else.

Read Kyle's article on Hypebot here.

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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.

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