Yahoo To Introduce Its Own Version Of YouTube

AdAge has reported that Yahoo is about to launch a new video service geared to compete with YouTube. The company has apparently been approaching many popular YouTube creators with promises of larger revenue splits in an effort launch with some significant names and content.

The company has wanted to enter into the video business for some time. Last year it launched an unsuccessful campaign to acquire DailyMotion, and CEO Marrissa Mayer has stated several times that she felt the company needed to increase its video presence in order to succeed.

Like on YouTube, content creators can reportedly start their own channel, and will have access to a dashboard that enables them to publish across all Yahoo assets like the home page and Tumblr. The company isn't requiring an exclusive deal though, as anyone with a Yahoo channel can also post on YouTube or any other video platform as well.

There is a big stumbling block, however, in that Yahoo's current agreement with content creators states that the company be given a perpetual license to any videos that are shared on Tumblr, which effectively transfers the video's ownership rights to Yahoo. One would assume that this language will be stricken from the final agreement before the service is launched, since most veteran content creators would simply ignore the service if it remained as is.

While it's nice to have another service in the online video mix, don't expect too much from Yahoo Video. The company has a long history of screwing up good ideas, so the odds are good it will happen again.

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We're Spending Less On iTunes

One of the things that might have hastened the purchase of Beats by Apple is the fact that spending on iTunes is dropping rapidly. According to data supplied by Morgan Stanley, the average user spent $1.90 on iTunes in the first quarter of 2014. That's down from $2.90 from a year ago, and $4.30 from two years ago.

Apple doesn't care about this revenue source declining as much as the fact that it shows that music fans are getting their music from somewhere else, and that may be taking a toll on iPhone sales.

At its core, Apple is a hardware company that makes software to facilitate hardware sales. If the software isn't popular, then the hardware sales suffer. Beats Music may or may not prove to be a wise decision over time, but it does show that Apple is acutely aware of the the ultimate affect of music sales on its bottom line.

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The Ideal Length For Everything Online

If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you know that there's quite a science to posting, regardless of the online platform. Various studies have determined everything from the ideal tweet length to the best number of words to have in a blog post headline. The problem is that you usually have to search around the Web to find the specific information that you need to take advantage of any given service.

Until now, that is. A great article on the Buffer blog (thanks Dushyant Pandit for the heads up) puts all the information in one place and even provides a nice infographic on the subject.

You'll notice that my headline is the 6 words and fewer than the 60 characters as recommended, but this post is far below the 7 minutes 1600 words (1000 with graphic) that's been known to achieve the most interaction. Frankly, if I had to write 1000 to 1600 words, I couldn't post more than once a week because of the time it takes (my Forbes blog posts are usually around 750 words and that can take up to 3 hours to create), so like in everything, there's some tradeoff.

That said, in terms of the general guidelines suggested by the infographic, I've personally found them all to be effective.

If you're just posting personally, none of this applies to you. If you're posting in order to promote your brand, product or music, take note, because the numbers in graphic really work.

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A Peek At The Upcoming YouTube Mobile Features

Google is becoming more and more sensitive to YouTube video creators and has been hard at work developing new features to make posting more efficient. In this video preview of the upcoming YouTube mobile tools, you'll see some of the things they're working on, including:

• a community captions feature to help make a video more accessible overseas
• more royalty-free music available
• a way for artists to collect money from doing cover songs
• its own way of crowdfunding video creators (you can now link to Kickstarter and Indiegogo via annotations)

Musicians are receiving more and more of their income from YouTube videos, and anything that makes it more lucrative is most welcome. The real key is that you have to use the tools, including the existing ones, and not enough people are doing that yet.

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Apple Beats Winners And Losers

Now that Apple has officially announced that it’s acquiring Beats Electronics and Beats Music for $3 billion, the media speculation engine can finally begin to wind down. While that happens, let’s take a quick look at the prospective winners and losers in the deal.

Winners

Apple: In Beats Music it gains the infrastructure it needs to move away from music downloads into streaming, in Beats Electronics it gains an entry into a market segment where it had no presence (high-end audio accessories), and by adding Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine to the executive team it adds some sorely needed vision (see my previous post). 

Beats Music: It gets saved from swimming against the current of more established music services like Spotify and Pandora, which have a considerable head start. Although the company had some relatively deep pocketed investors in billionaire Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries and the Carlyle Group, that’s still not enough to compete with Apple, Amazon and Google in the long run when they enter the market.

Beats Electronics: Gets purchased at its peak or just beyond, so it’s saved from having to worry about market attrition. Plus it now gets to take advantage of the engineering and manufacturing expertise of Apple.

Tim Cook: Makes an attempt to fill a hole left in the company after the passing of Steve Jobs, which makes him look somewhat visionary himself.

Jimmy Iovine: Makes the leap from the music business to big-time tech while cashing out from Beats. Now he’ll get to have a say in the direction of the tech giant, which may be the ultimate in industrial glamour these days.

Dr. Dre: Raises his status in the urban community by cashing out to become the first near-billionaire hip hop artist/producer, and is able to escape the music business if he wants. Read more on Forbes.

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Call Me On The Flo Guitar Enthusiasts Show Tonight

I'll be appearing on the Flo Guitar Enthusiasts radio show tonight at 8PM PST, so feel free to call in with any questions on the music business, social media for musicians, guitars or recording guitars. Also, enter to win a signed copy of my new Music 4.0 book. The call-in number is (323) 203-0815. You can find more info at floguitarenthusiasts.com.

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Billboard Twitter Launch Realtime Charts

Billboard Twitter Trending 140 Chart

Billboard has now officially launched its new Twitter real-time charts that rank popular songs shared on Twitter in the US.

The first chart is called the Trending 140, which shows up-to-the-minute ranking of songs share on Twitter in the US over the last 24 hours. The chart also has a weekly summary called the Twitter Top Tracks.

Another chart called the Twitter Emerging Artists chart ranks the songs shared by new and upcoming artists. Songs on the charts are measured by:

• the inclusion of a link on a tweet to listening platforms like Spotify, Vevo and iTunes.
• the use of hashtags like #nowplaying or #np or the artist's or song's name.
• the use of terms that signify a song such as "music," "song," "track," or "listen."

The Billboard Twitter charts are the latest in Billboard's transition from sales to social media to determine its charts. Other charts based around social media include the Social 50, On-Demand Songs and Streaming Songs. With music sales waning, this is perhaps the only way for the magazine and service to remain relevant.

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The Puzzle Piece That Apple Really Bought

Now that the announcement has been made that Apple’s acquisition of Beats Electronics has been completed for $3 billion, and that Beats co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will join Apple in yet unspecified executives roles, it’s important to take a step back and examine what has really gone down here. There’s much more than meets the eye.

As I alluded to in a previous post, there were just as many reasons for Apple to avoid the Beats deal as there were to make it. That said, just about everyone (myself included until now) has missed the big picture point of the purchase. The deal really isn’t about Beats music service or its headphone business. It’s all about Iovine.

Apple CEO Tim Cook realized that while he may be a great operations guy, he doesn’t have the market vision of his predecessor Steve Jobs (who could?). Music has been responsible for the resurgence and subsequent market rise and dominance of Apple, not so much from a revenue point of view (although the sales from music are substantial), but as means to an end to sell what really makes the company money - its hardware. Apple needs someone who is capable of looking into the future in a way that no one else at Apple has been able to since Jobs passed nearly three years ago.

While it’s too much to expect Iovine to be another Jobs, he has proved to be quite deft at navigating the minefield that is the entertainment industry - enough so to build a substantial billion dollar company in a mere seven years. This was done by seeing a hole in the market (high-end headphones), then recruiting the well-respected hip hop producer Dr. Dre to provide credibility and marketability to an underserved market. He then granted an exclusive manufacturing and distribution license to Monster Cable, a company perfectly suited to instantly provide widespread availability of the product. The distribution deal we terminated at the beginning of 2012, at which time Beats took the manufacturing and distribution in-house. All the hard work of establishing the brand had already been done. Read more on Forbes.

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Dae Bogan On YouTube Video Optimization

We all want our videos to be seen by the most people, but many times some basic posting mistakes can sabotage all the effort that's put into producing the video in the first place. Luckily it just takes some thought and a little extra time to optimize your videos so that they're more easily found online.

Dae Bogan has considerable experience in both music and social media marketing, starting out in event production for major brands such as Chipotle, Dell, Blackberry, Virgin Mobile and Def Jam, then as vice-president of marketing for Shiekh shoes and their Shiekh music artists program. His current company, Chazbo Music, provides in-store video music entertainment services by programming custom-curated channels for businesses, music and lifestyle. In this excerpt from my new Music 4.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age (the 3rd and latest edition of my Music 3.0 book), Dae explains some basic strategies for making sure that your video is seen by the most people.

"Today you really have to do optimization for search or it’ll be buried with the other 700 million videos on YouTube at the moment. If I had to give some advice, I’d say song choice is number one. Choose songs [if you're doing a cover song] that are relevant today by using the Billboard charts as a guide. Select a song that’s on the top of the charts today, then post a really good cover, then make sure the video title is appropriate by posting the original artist’s name, the song name, then your name. Make sure it’s tagged with the original artist’s name, the song name, as well as the record label name and anything else about it. If it’s a love song or a pop song, put that descriptive tag in. Sometimes people just search for love songs, so they’ll come across your video that way. Finally, make sure the video description is complete. 

Also at the end of the video there should be all the information about your social media, then ask people to subscribe to your channel. Now with annotations you can also embed links in the video as well. Those are ways to optimize the video so that at least some information is carried along with it. What artists forget is that once someone shares that video that a lot of the meta information that you inserted is lost. The description and the tags don’t come with it and the title isn’t visible. The only thing that you can see is what’s inside the video player, so by using annotations there’s a way to make at least some of the information available to the viewer.

Finally, release it at the right time. YouTube shows in their analytics what time of day is best. Look at when you have the most viewers or followers."

To read additional excerpts from Music 4.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age and my other books, go to the excerpts section of bobbyowsinski.com.

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3 Reasons Why Twitter Killed The Soundcloud Deal

Twitter has been trying hard to get into the music business, but keeps on coming up empty. First there was its ill-conceived #Music service which died on the vine about a year after it was launched due to low adoption numbers, and now the company reportedly has nixed a deal to buy the Berlin-based Soundcloud music streaming service. 

It was only last week that a deal between the two looked imminent, but the Twitter looks to have bowed to pressure from stockholders and the investment community alike, both of which took a dim view of the acquisition.

On one hand, Twitter-Soundcloud looked to be synergistic in may ways. Twitter has a large number of influential music celebrities that use the platform and have extremely large followings, so incorporating some sort of a music service seems like an ideal match. Soundcloud has roughly the same number of active users as Twitter, and any added users (there’s some overlap between the two) could possibly provide a needed boost in Twitter’s plateaued user numbers, which in turn could help it’s slowly dwindling stock price. That’s the theory, but as we well know, reality is frequently a different story, especially in this case. Here are three reasons why Twitter might have chosen not to consummate the deal.

Reason #1: User Attrition

While Soundcloud might look attractive because of its 250 million or so users and $700 million estimated valuation, it has it’s own set of problems. Like Twitter, there’s ongoing user attrition, especially with the DJ community, who are leaving for other services like MixCloud, MixCrate and Play.fm. 

One of the reasons is that Soundcloud uses Audible Magic technology to identify unlicensed songs, which then flags Soundcloud, who then issues a take-down notice much like YouTube does in similar cases. Unfortunately Audible Magic, or any other content identification service for that matter, isn’t perfect and many times users are directed to take down their own compositions. No one wants the hassle of having to defend their own material, and the three strikes and your account is cancelled policy forces many users to make the decision to jump to another service. Read more on Forbes.

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Was "Stairway To Heaven" Stolen?

Led Zeppelin is being sued for stealing parts of "Stairway To Heaven" from a song by Spirit called "Taurus" more than 44 years after the song was written. The estate of Spirit guitarist Randy California is preparing an injunction ahead of Zep's upcoming Led Zeppelin IV reissue.

All this stems from the fact that Zep opened for Spirit several times during their first tour of the States during which Spirit performed "Taurus" as part of their set, but why wait 40+ years to sue?

If you listen to the Spirit song below you'll hear some similarities to the intro of the song, but it's of a rather generic guitar pattern and nothing of the song's melody. I'd bet that this suit goes nowhere, but it does serve one purpose in that it got us talking about Spirit again, who were a great and very underrated band from way back when.

It's been estimated that "Stairway" has made the group $540 million over the years, so the 36 year old attorney for the plaintiff (who's younger than the song) is obviously hoping for a reasonable out of court settlement. The problem is that Zep obviously has deep pockets and it might not be as easy for that to happen as he believes.

So songwriters beware, there's nothing new under the sun given the 12 note scale that we use, so you're probably copying a previous song without even knowing it. That's enough to get you sued, but it's another story when it comes to actually winning in court.

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Skype Releases Its Version Of Hangouts

If Google+ has a killer feature, its Hangouts, which allows you to connect with up to 9 other people on a video conference call. Connect YouTube to it and now you have a Hangout On Air that can broadcast the conference to thousands more.

Hangouts are a nice feature, but far more people use Skype for their video calls. The problems was that if you wanted a multi-person call it would cost $8.99 per month for a premium subscription.

Skype has now seen the light and has introduced group video calling as part of the free package with anywhere from 3 to 10 participants (just like Hangouts), although Skype recommends a max of 5 for best results. The new feature is available on Windows, Mac and XBox platforms.

Another new and welcome feature is what's called "deep integration" that allows you to seamlessly transfer a voice call over to video chat. The performance of the platform on mobile devices is also said to be improved

Although Hangouts On Air is tough to beat for an artist, band or musician, Skype is definitely making headway with free group calling. You can't beat it for staying in touch while on the road, no matter where in the world you are.

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