Spotify Begins Original Music Series

Spotify may soon find itself under siege thanks to the introduction of iTunes Radio the other day, but an initial response might bring at least some music fans into the fold. Yesterday the streaming service launched an original documentary series called Spotify Landmark which will feature significant moments in music history, and is built along the lines of Behind The Music.

The first episode is "The Real Story of Nirvana's In Utero," and it debuts on the 20th anniversary of the album and a week before the album's deluxe reissue. The audio-only program features lots of behind the scenes stories from Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, producer Steve Albini, Curt Kirkwood from The Meat Puppets (who toured with the band), and comedian Bobcat Goldthwait (who opened for the band).

The site doesn't require membership, but it does require that you sign in to Spotify to hear it. It launches the series of smaller clips that play sequentially.

One of the things that both smaller cable channels and Netflix discovered is that they can compete with the big guys if they have compelling original programming. Landmark probably won't cause a major shift to Spotify, but it's a start in their fight against Apple.

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I'm inviting you to a free 60+ minute telephone seminar I'm offering next Tuesday, September 24th with a group of my music industry friends like Dave Pensado and Paul Ill who currently work with hit artists that have recorded some of the classic songs that you hear on the radio every day.

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Top 10 Best Selling Vinyl Records

Amazon recently presented a report that stated that vinyl sales are up 745% since 2008. One of the reasons the company feels that sales are up that drastically is because of its Autorip service, which provides MP3s of the tracks of the vinyl album, so it's like getting two products for the price of one. Here are some interesting Amazon vinyl facts.

Best Selling Genres
Rock - 55.6%
Miscellaneous - 19.2%
Pop - 9.8%
Urban - 4.3%
Dance - 3.9%
Folk - 1.7%
Blues - 1.5%
Easy Listening - 1.5%
Jazz -1.5%
Reggae - 0.9%
Classical - 0.1%

The shock here is not that rock leads the pack, but how poorly jazz and classical sales are, considering that vinyl is a centerpiece of the listening experience of both genres.

That said, here are the top 10 best selling vinyl records of last year.

Best Selling Vinyl Albums In 2012
1. Blunderbuss - Jack White
2. Abbey Road - The Beatles
3. Babel - Mumford & Sons
4. El Camino - The Black Keys
5. Sigh No More - Mumford & Sons
6. Bloom - Beach House
7. For Emma Forever Go - Bon Iver
8. Boys And Girls - Alabama Shakes
9. 21 - Adele
10. Bon Iver - Bon Iver

The surprise here is that both Mumford & Sons and Bon Iver both had two records in the top 10, and that Abbey Road is still popular after all these years.

8 Tips To Getting Played On College Radio

Hypebot recently ran a great article by David Roberts and EricTheReDD about how to get your music played on college. David is the founder of the Sunshine Promotion company while Eric is the former general manager of WJSC-FM of Johnson State College, Vermont. While you can read the entire interview of the Hypebot website, I thought I'd distill the main points here.

1. Make sure that the title track has the ability to "wow." If that track sucks, it's tough to take the rest of the album seriously.

2. Send a pressed CD that's professionally packaged. CDR's don't cut it. In fact, send two; one for the music vault and one for a possible giveaway. Remember, the liner notes will be read, so take care in crafting them.

3. Make sure the songs are registered with Gracenote and have the proper ID3 tags attached so the info doesn't have to be input manually when transferred to the digital library. No Gracenote information may be enough to keep your songs from getting played.

4. Make sure you send a short press kit. Short is the operative word, keeping it to only a page about who you are and what's on the disc.

5. Address your package to the music director. He will assign it to the appropriate DJ. Do not send to the program director, as he's in charge of scheduling and is too busy to deal with music. If you have the DJ's name that deals with your genre, it's okay to send it to him to directly.

6. A short personal note can go a long way. Something like, "Hey WJSC, thanks for the airplay" can get you extra attention.

7. Call the request line or the DJ and ask them to play your song. It really works and might even land you an on-air interview.

8. Don't take the shrink wrap off the package. If the CD gets smashed in transit by the post office, the disc stands a better chance of being playable, and there's less cleanup involved for the station.

Remember that these tips come directly from someone on the front lines of college radio. They're pretty simple, and can make the difference between getting played or not.

The Clear Channel - Warner Music Deal: Not What It's Cracked Up To Be

It was announced last week that radio station group Clear Channel Communications and Warner Music Group (WMG) entered into a “historic” agreement where the label and its artists would finally be paid for airplay performances on Clear Channel’s 850 terrestrial broadcast stations. The United States is one of the few countries in the world where that hasn’t happened until now, as broadcasters have been resisting the notion for years, successfully fighting any legislation that promises to do so. Performance royalties are paid on satellite and digital radio streams however.

Although the terms of the deal haven’t been released to the public, insiders have intimated that Clear Channel will pay WMG 1% of advertising for terrestrial broadcasts and 3% for digital, which could amount to some $50 million over three years, including an up front payment. For that it receives a discounted rate on digital streams from the 22 cents per 100 streams it pays now to no less than 12 cents per 100 streams. WMG will also receive special product promotion from Clear Channel stations that would include album previews, interviews or other kinds of special broadcast segments, as well as artist appearances at events like the iHeart-Radio Music Festival. 

While there’s generally been praise for this agreement, I’m afraid I can’t be so kind, as it may not be all it’s cracked up to be. When looked at closely, it seems to provide possible downsides for all parties involved, especially the one generally missing from the conversation - the artists. Read more on Forbes.

Twitter's New Music Features

Everyone's getting caught up in IPO fever after Twitter announced that it was filing to become a public company last week. Almost lost in the announcement was two new music features that could actually have some bearing on the offering.

First of all is the new Verified filter, which can be set to only show users who have verified accounts by Twitter. This is primarily a feature that's useful for artists who experience a surge in popularity and find that their @mentions are getting out of control.

The filter sits under the Connect tab and will show only those users that have a profile with a little blue tick that symbolizes their public standing. This is said to be incorporated as a way to get Twitter's more high-profile users to personally interact more, rather than delegating it to their social media person.

The second new feature is the new Spotify app, which will deliver to Spotify users whatever is trending on Twitter, which could be a boon to up and coming artists breaking on Twitter but not on other forms of social media.

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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 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.

Major League Baseball Gets Into The Music Business

If there's one thing that I love almost as much as music it's baseball. From the time I was a little kid I was a Phillies fan, but I'll watch any game on television if it's interesting. That's why I found it intriguing when it was announced that Major League Baseball's Advanced Media division was teaming with AEG Live to produce and stream The Global Citizen Festival on the Great Lawn of New York City's Central Park on September 20th.

The festival, which will feature Stevie Wonder, John Mayer, Alicia Keys, and The Kings of Leon this year, is all about raising money for a variety of charities world-wide, so you'd wonder why MLB would want to get involved since it can't really make money. It turns out that all it wants is some experience in selling worldwide rights, which it can then directly apply to growing baseball outside the United States and creating a new source of revenue.

One would think that an event like Global Citizen would be a somewhat easy sell, based on the fact of the talent involved and the fact that it's a charity, but we'll have to see how successful they'll be in the end. The new global Red Bull Network seems to be an ideal potential licensee.

Lest it be thought that MLB Advanced Media lacks the technical chops to do the job, keep in mind that it was actually on the forefront of Internet streaming well before the other leagues and currently streams hundreds of out-of-market games via MLB.tv, plus it also operates its own television network. MLB has also indicated that it's looking to be involved in more music projects in the future.

Why Using Facebook Hashtags Can Cost You Views

Hashtags have become an important part of promotion on a number of social networks, most notably Twitter and Instagram. They're a great way to find more information on a particular topic, which makes them useful for user and marketers alike.

Recently Facebook instituted hashtags into its network with the hopes that they would prove to have just as much as an impact as on other networks. The problem is it appears that on Facebook, using hashtags is actually counterproductive.

EdgeRank Checker recently conducted a study of Facebook hashtags and found that both viral and organic reach decreased when a post used hashtags. Viral reach is the number of people who saw a post when it was published by a friend. Organic reach is the number of people who saw it from a News Feed or on your page. What's more, even engagement decreased for posts with hashtags.

So while hashtags are proved to work on Twitter, they have a negative effect on Facebook. Luckily most people don't post using hashtags yet, but brands do. If you're an artist or are in a band, you're a brand, so remember - no hashtags on your Facebook posts!

Irving Azoff Reinvents The Major Label

Last week it was announced that the Madison Square Garden Company (MSG) and music business mover and shaker Irving Azoff would enter into a joint venture called Azoff MSG Entertainment (AMSGE). In a move that could provide a peek into what the major record label of the future could be, it’s been reported that MSG agreed to pay Azoff Music Management $125 million and contribute a $50 million line of credit to the new company.

What makes this venture interesting is that the company will have four divisions; artist management, music publishing, television production and live event branding, and digital branding. Couple that with the many venues owned by MSG that could host concerts with the company’s artists, and you have a look at what the new world record major label looks like.

For the record, Azoff and MSG chairman James Dolan aren’t calling this a record label, but they don’t have to. It’s an outdated term for an outdated concept anyway. The traditional record label combined talent scouting, artist development, distribution and marketing, but each of those operations have changed substantially in the new millennium. Record labels now have fewer A&R talent scouts than ever, and in this one-failure-and-done atmosphere we live in, artist development is merely a nice term with little execution. Couple that with a dying brick and mortar music retail business and companies that market really well in media that mostly doesn’t matter nearly as much to music consumers as it once did, and you can see that something in the way the current music business is run has to change. Read more on Forbes.

Improve Your YouTube Analytics

One of the cool things about just about everything online is the analytics available. You can find out almost anything you want on any of the platforms that you're on. The problem is that usually no one set of analytics gives you the complete picture.

One of the newer YouTube analytics services is Strike Social, which looks across 100 different data sets of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to measure your channel's engagement and then presents you with a score. By watching how your rating trends over time, you can gauge how well your channel is doing.

The best part about Strike Social is that it's free. Like most analytics sites, if you want more precise  date, premium features will be available sometime in the future.

The Tale Of Two Nine Inch Nails Masters

Don't look now but Trent Reznor has done it again. Always ahead of the pack in some way, Reznor just took a stand in the the so-called loudness wars by releasing the new Nine Inch Nails album, Hesitation Marks, with two different masters; the standard compressed-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life master, and a less compressed "audiophile" version.

For those of you not aware of the battleground, the loudness wars are basically a result of the insecurity of record execs, artists, producers and audio engineers everywhere that if their song is played right before or after another that’s louder, the listener will somehow deem it inferior. As a result, there’s a constant battle that rages behind the scenes in mastering facilities everywhere in an effort to make every song sound as loud as possible, even to the point where a mastering engineer (the specialized boffin who puts the final audio sheen on a song mix) will get the job based on being able to make the song louder than a competitor.

This is a battle that’s been raging since the 50s, and has resulted in mastering engineers usually violating their own collective good taste and judgement in making songs as loud as possible just to keep working. After all, lose a loudness shoot-out to a competitor and you might not get chance at ...Read more on Forbes.

How To Search The Entire Twitter Archive

Tweets are almost like listening to the NPR in your car while you're commuting. Something really interesting might be broadcasted, but once you've heard it, it's gone. Worse, if you don't have the radio on, you might miss the conversation completely. There's no way to go back. Same with tweets; once they're posted, they're gone.

Except now they're not. Social analytics company Topsy now has a new search tool that allows you to search the entire Twitter history going back to when the company first began in 2006. That's 435 billion tweets!

Not only that, you can now search all social history of a person or topic, or just the links, photos, videos and influencers. All you do is go to Topsy and put your keywords in the search box, and you'll have numerous views of the results.

Why would you want to do that? Although you might already use Google Alerts to tell you when you, your band, or a topic is mentioned online, Topsy shows you a much more intricate picture of how the keyword was used. It's great for doing research on just about any topic, including who mentioned you their posts.

Want to know what your fans really think about you? Just put your band's name in search box. How about the response to an album or video? How about a gig? Research about a venue? How about a hashtag? You can find out a lot from this great research tool.

Topsy also offers more advanced analytics and more precise search with their Pro version, but don't underestimate the power of the free search tool.

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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 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.