Beats Music Launch Getting Closer

Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine's Beats "Project Daisy" streaming music service appears to be getting closer to reality. Not only does Beats Music now have a website (although there's nothing on it), but it's hired a number of high profile people as music "curators." It's also openly advertising for engineers and designers.

According to Billboard, among the new hires include:
   Scott Plagenhoef, former Pitchfork Media editor in chief
   Carl Chery, former digital content director at XXL
   Suzy Cole, a radio music director from Detroit
   Arjan Writes, Recording Academy music blogger
   Mason Williams, former Rhino Records A&R director
   Fuzzy Fantabulous, LA hip hop radio personality
   Ken Tucker, a country music writer

They all report to new hire Julie Pilat, a former top exec at Clear Channel.

As I've posted before, the big hook for the new service will be content curation, which Iovine believes is something missing from the other services. The human element promises to provide a better way to discover new music, something that's not only vital for the service but the music industry in general.

The new curators certainly are experienced in their genres, which is a good place to start. Whether high profile and experienced curators will be better than ordinary people steeped in their particular scene is yet to be determined, but it's a good place to start.

There's no date for the launch of Beats Music (or Project Daisy, or whatever it will be called), but it looks like it's not that far away now.

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Spotify Launches A Browse Feature

Spotify has long been criticized about its minimal way of searching for music. In an effort to music discovery easier, the service has introduced a new feature it calls "Browse," which is specifically designed to point users to music they might like.

Browse is a list of suggested playlists grouped by context and mood that are curated by real humans, not algorithms. This is a big change in that most music services try to build suggestions based around an algorithm that measures what you listen to. That has left big gaps in the useful suggestions, leading to a great deal of criticism by industry leaders and how ineffective these features really are.

It appears that Spotify's purchase of the music discovery startup Tunigo earlier this year brought in the necessary elements for it to be able to launch Browse.

What's interesting here is that Beats Jimmy Iovine has been a major critic of current streaming services, and claimed his upcoming Daisy music service would be the first to feature real people curating the songs on a service. Now it looks like Spotify has beaten them to the punch, although it's too early to tell just how well they will perform the task.

That being said, every streaming music service is now aware that human curation is a necessary element, if for no other reason than the competition will have it. It will be up to each to prove they can execute the feature well, but it can only mean an useful improvement for the listener in the end.

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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.

The Next Era Of The Music Business

Regardless if you're a musician or music consumer, your music life is about to change. Slowly but surely digital music distribution has been evolving from downloads to streaming, but that transition has been really picking up speed over the last 12 months. With Spotify leading the way thanks to reams of publicity, more and more consumers are finding that the joy of renting music beats owning it by a long shot.

While it's been long rumored that Apple has their own streaming service up their sleeve, several developments reveal the change that is about to come.

First is the fact that Jimmy Iovine's Daisy project (named after the first computer generated song) just received a $60 million injection from the likes of Warner Music Group's owner Len Blavatnik, Fort Worth billionaire Lee Bass and Australian financier James Packer. This is a serious investment by some deep pockets that know what they're doing and don't like to lose. Then comes word that Apple's Tim Cook recently took a meeting with Iovine to be briefed on the project. Does that mean a collaboration? We don't know, but at the very least, Apple has a good working relationship with Iovine, since he was one of the first to sign Universal Music onto iTunes back in 2001. Together they'd be a powerhouse, a true 1200 pound gorilla. Chances are that Apple will chose to go it alone and just stay at 800 pounds though. It doesn't need a partner, but if there's something there worth buying, they have lots of money.

Then comes word that Google has been quietly making deals with all the major labels for their own YouTube-based subscription streaming service to be launched later in the year.

If all this were happening a couple of years ago we would've looked to only one of these prospective services to be left standing at some point, with the others falling by the wayside. But this is a different time, with the streaming business far more mature thanks to the likes of Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, Slacker, et al. It's now probably possible that all of these new services survive if they're at least half-way decent in their user operation and offerings.

This is definitely going to be a big win for consumers, with nearly an unlimited selection of songs available for a relatively small monthly fee (not sure what the price point will end up being, but $9.95 keeps being mentioned). Consumers are quickly seeing the advantages of renting their music.

It will be a different story for artists and songwriters however. By now everyone knows how little the royalty can be from a stream, with stories abounding about income lost by the writer and artist. Although a full transition to streaming will be a godsend for the labels, with steady monthly income actually bolstering their bottom line, you can bet that not much of that will trickle down to the artists - at least at first.

It's not going to happen overnight, but within a matter of time, you'll see the entirety of the management and law categories of the music business devise a better way to get paid, and eventually force the labels to fall in line. And when that happens, it will trickle down to the DIYers who insist on doing it their way. To what degree this all takes place, we'll have to wait and see.

While this blog is aptly named Music 3.0, we're about to see the next stage of the music business. Welcome to Music 3.5!

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