Spotify Looking To Add Video Streaming

Reports are that Spotify has been reaching out to top YouTube content creators and traditional media companies in an attempt to accrue content for a new streaming video feature. Although no specific date for the launch has been officially announced, many believe it will come by the end of the month.

The feature is said to be free and will take advantage of the existing advertising infrastructure that the company has set up for its streaming music service.

Spotify recently raised another round of investment said to be around $350 million on the basis of a total valuation of $8 billion. Speculation is that the introduction of video played a large part in raising the cash.

While it's difficult to make money with streaming music, video streaming (even if it's free) is another story, as more and more brands expand their advertising in that area. Of course, YouTube hasn't done too badly with that model either.

Another reason why Spotify might be going that route is from pressure brought by other streaming music services like TIDAL and Google Play, which also offer video. That said, Rdio also tried a video feature but abandoned it after 6 months.

Spotify also sees the upcoming competition from both Apple's new music service and from Google's Music Key, and views adding video as the best way weather the storm of their launches. That's also why we'll probably see a Spotify video launch sooner rather than later.

Whether the streaming service's new video feature will actually gain traction is another story.

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Grooveshark Won't Stay Closed

It didn't take long, but Grooveshark is back online just days after receiving orders to cease operations as a result of a lawsuit filed against it by the major record labels. The service can now be found at Grooveshark.io instead of ".com."

Apparently an employee of the company caught wind that the service might shut down before it happened and decided to back up the entire contents of the site and move it to a different offshore server.

As a result, he was able to reproduce the user interface, playlists and song catalog identically to the previous service.

In the short term this might not be that important, in but grand scheme of things it goes to show how difficult it is to shut down a pirate service.

Since Apple and the major record labels are trying to shut down the free tiers of the current streaming services, this serves as a warning. Piracy is going to rise again if those free tiers are eliminated, and it will more difficult than ever to close things down as pirates get more and more clever.

Grooveshark had about 20 million active users, which is about a third of Spotify. The difference is that the company never purchased a license to use the songs, or paid any royalties to artists and songwriters.

Considering how easy it is to get free music right now from legal streaming services, it does show that many people just don't want to trade their email address for the privilege of getting something free. It's a dilemma that we currently have live with in the business, but some form of this will probably always be with us.

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The Reality Of Using Google Plus For Promotion

There have been conflicting reports as to whether its worth the time to bother with Google+ when it comes to promoting your project. On one hand, the network has 2.2 billion profiles, of which Google says 500,000 are active per month.

That still pales in comparison to Facebook, with its 1.2 billion active users, but it's still ahead of Twitter, which has about 300 million.

But the Google+ user numbers are deceptive since you automatically are signed up to it if you have a gmail or YouTube account. Many people choose to ignore G+ entirely and just use the Google service they need at the moment, so many of those accounts lay dormant.

So is G+ worth spending the time on or not?

Stone Temple Consulting wanted to find out, so they randomly selected over 500,000 G+ profiles and analyzed how active they were. What they found was that only about 10% were active users in some sense of the word, with 90.1% containing actually no content at all.

Extrapolated out across the 2.2 billion user profiles, that means there were only 212 million active users. But after further looking at those "active" users, it was determined that only 50 million of those users had posted more than 5 times. An analysis of those users found that only about half of those posted in the last 30 days and only 8 million had posted over 50 times.

For such a reportedly huge network, Google+ doesn't have a commensurate amount of activity. Some of the activity that it does have is artificial in that YouTube upload notifications and comments and profile picture changes are automatically posted, but real live active users are far fewer than believed.

That said, if you know that's where your fans are, then that's where you should be as well. Google+ still has one of the best communication apps anywhere in Hangouts, which alone is worth spending time on the platform.

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I Hope Apple Kills Free Streaming, But Not For The Reason You Think

There have been multiple reports over the last few days that the Department of Justice is looking into the accusation that Apple is pressuring the major record labels to end their license agreements with music distribution services offering free tiers. The European Union has a similar investigation underway, so there must be some fire under all that smoke.

This comes before the speculated introduction of Apple’s new streaming service, which is widely anticipated for the Apple Developers Conference next month. Eliminating the free tier of the competition, especially Spotify, presumably puts Apple in a stronger position to regain its dominance in music distribution, a status that has slipped in recent years.

While Apple may be pushing hard for this to happen behind the scenes, chances are it’s a long shot and here’s why.

1. Just the fact that the DOJ is looking into the allegation will stop this thing in its tracks. The major labels have never been bastions of fair and balanced dealings and the last thing that the big players in the industry want is the Feds snooping around. While they may or may not be complicit on this issue, who knows what else may be uncovered during an investigation? That means that you’ll soon get directives from high ranking music execs for their business affairs departments to drop this issue like a hot potato. 

2. Does Apple really believe that eliminating the free tier will actually increase its subscriber numbers? First of all, to assume that the next incarnation of iTunes Beats (or whatever it will be called) will have all Spotify users immediately want to suspend their subscriptions and switch to iTunes is delusional at best.

That’s assuming a lot considering that the company has a pretty poor track record of late with its music software. While the early editions of iTunes led the way in user friendliness, lately the app feels old and bloated, with features that are more like attachments rather than integrations. Likewise, iTunes Radio wasn’t exactly the runaway hit that everyone expected. Read more on Forbes.

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The Difference Between Content Creating And Sharing

Regardless if it's your website or your social media pages, the thing that keeps your fans coming back is new content. New refreshed content is also important in that it influences your search engine rankings, although there are a lot of other factors that play into that as well.

There are actually two kinds of content; content that you create and content that you share. Content that you create includes everything from your music, videos and posts about events, to posts about your latest news.

Content sharing covers all the content that you don't personally create, but think that your audience might find interesting. That includes links to 3rd party sites, trending news stories, music and videos from other artists.

Shared content has two purposes. First, it allows you to continue to post fresh material when the well of self-created material runs dry. Secondly, it provides a reason for your fans to engage and begin a conversation. The key is to use recent or trending material that people are interested in right now.

How do you find this material? We're bombarded with news everyday everywhere from Google or Yahoo News to friend's post on social media, and those are good places to start. Sites like What'sTrending are also good, but adding "trending" to the end of just about any news or social site (like Buzzfeed.com/trending) will give you a variety of topics that your fans may be interested in.

The idea here is that a combination of created and shared content is a way to keep things fresh, keep the search engines happy, and keep those fans engaged.

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Social Media PR Specialist Ariel Hyatt On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

I'm really happy to have my good friend online PR specialist Ariel Hyatt on my latest podcast.

Ariel started her career as a traditional music publicist but dove into social media soon after it started. As a result, she's become the go-to expert for online PR for artists, bands, musicians, and record labels, as well as authors and entrepreneurs.

On the show Ariel gives her take on the most important social networks, the best strategy for using them, and the differences between traditional and online PR.

During the episode's intro I'll discuss the new data showing the album format making a comeback, as well as the 5 simple EQ tips that you can use in any situation.

Remember that you can find the podcast at BobbyOInnerCircle.com, or either on iTunes or Stitcher. 

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Grooveshark Shuts Down

If you enjoyed the free online music service Grooveshark at any time of the 8 years of its existence, you probably wondered about how it was able to stay in business. The service was basically a way to search for any song, then play it from within the Grooveshark player on your browser.

The big problem was that the service didn't license any of the material it played or pay royalties either, and as a result, the service was hit with a lawsuit that could have resulted in the company owing the record labels as much as $756 million.

That legal battle was finally found in favor of the labels, and as part of the settlement, Grooveshark has been shut down immediately. The company had as many as 20 million users, who must now look for a new music service.

In a statement on the company's website, it admitted that it had "made serious mistakes." "We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service,” it reads. “That was wrong. We apologize. Without reservation."

What's more, the company's founders are forbidden from starting a new music service under the threat of a $75 million fee for damages.

The technology to distribute music is easier to create than obtaining the necessary licenses to make it operate, which Grooveshark unfortunately discovered way too late. That's a main reason why technologists and venture money have been discouraged from entering the business in recent years.

Is that stifling innovation? Maybe, but it's more important that creators get paid at least something for their efforts whenever possible. Now if you could only find a way for more of it to find its way into the pockets of artists and songwriters and less into the label coffers.

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Instagram @Music Community Tries To Succeed Where Twitter Failed

Instagram has announced a new community dedicated to music and musicians called @Music, in an effort to leverage the platform’s user interest in the topic.

Unofficially, music has always been a large part of Instagram, accounting for an estimated 25 percent of all the platform’s activity. Recognizing this, Instagram executives have instituted this official music category as well as a number of subcategories as well.

For instance, #LocallySourced is designed to cover unsigned artists and bands (which will be handled by a team of curators), #15SecondLessons will include short music performance lessons, and #DoubleTrack covers musicians interests outside of music. 

The account, which was announced this morning on the Instagram blog, will update six times a week with an emphasis on unsigned acts. This might be deemed an unusual tactic as the music portion of Instagram is currently driven by music superstars like Beyonce (with 30.8 million followers and the platform’s most followed artist), Arianna Grande (30 million), Selena Gomez (28.9 million) and Taylor Swift (28.2 million). Read more on Forbes.

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Record Store Day A Big Hit

The annual Record Store Day was held last Saturday and, as always, it was a big hit, setting a 12 year sales high.

Indie record stores recorded 532,000 album sales for the day, which represented more than 21% of all physical sales and almost 12% of overall sales.

It was an almost 50% increase from the week before, and many record stores reported that this one day was equivalent to 2 weeks of normal sales. Many stores even said that it was their best sales day ever.

Half of the vinyl chart slots for the week were occupied by records released specifically for the event, such as The White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan in the #2 spot, and Bob Dylan's The Basement Tapes at #6.

That said, the best selling release wasn't a vinyl record at all. It was Metalllica's cassette-only release No Life Till Leather, which sold 3,000 units.

While the heyday of the record store probably won't ever return, there is still some enthusiasm for physical formats and the stores that sell them. If only every day could be like Record Store Day, the music business would be in a much better place.

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Some Interesting Names Are On IFPI's Top Global Recording Artist List

The IFPI recently released its yearly sales report and among the things it revealed was the top global artists for 2014 in terms of aggregate sales and streams. This includes all of the artists releases in every format from CD sales to YouTube video streams.

Although the usual hot music properties make the list (Taylor Swift is #1, followed by One Direction), what's interesting is the names in spots 4 through 7.

There you'll find some "classic" artists that you wouldn't expect, namely Coldplay, AC/DC, Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd.

Here's the list.

GLOBAL RECORDING ARTIST CHART 2014

1	Taylor Swift
2	One Direction
3	Ed Sheeran
4	Coldplay
5	AC/DC
6	Michael Jackson
7	Pink Floyd
8	Sam Smith
9	Katy Perry
10	Beyoncé

What this means is that many of the legacy artists still have a lot of sales life left in them, but it also makes a statement about some of the current music, which looks like it's not filling some obvious holes in the market. That is, progressive rock, hard rock, r&b and prog rock.

There are plenty of current acts that fit the bill, they're just not being discovered at the rate that they probably should be. Then again, these legacy artists are some of the best of all time and their music still endures.

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Why Do I Need To Use Hashtags Anyway?

Hashtags can be a confusing issue to artists and bands who are new to using social media as a promotional tool. I've posted a lot about how to find the best hashtags and the perfect number for different platforms, but it's time to get right down to basics. What's the big deal about hashtags anyway?

There are 3 great reasons why you should use hashtags whenever you have a chance.

1. Hashtags make it easier for people to find and follow discussions that are relevant to them.

2. They allow you to track the performance of an event or promotion.

3. The engagement of a post increases significantly when hashtags are used. For individuals it can be as high as 100%, while for brands it may go to about 50%.

Of course, this applies only when the right hashtags are used. When you make one up like #ihatetheservicehere, you probably won't get anywhere near the level of engagement as when using one that's trending or has been in use for while.

Either way, a post without a hashtag is like getting on stage without a sound system. A lot fewer people are going to hear what you have to say.

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2 Tests To See If Your Site Is Affected By The Google Algorithm Update

Here's something that could be a big deal to those artists, bands, musicians, producers, managers, labels and just about anyone in the music business that has a website. Google now rates your site on how friendly it is when viewed on a mobile device.

The reason why this is important is mobile friendliness is now a big part of the algorithm that ranks your website during a search. That means that if you have an older site that didn't take this into consideration and doesn't look good on a phone or tablet, it's going to fall in the search engine rankings.

It's difficult to keep your site updated with timely information (which Google also looks at), but it's even more so to keep up with the latest technology. That said, if you haven't updated your site for a while (more than a year), it's not only time you do so, but it's important as well or it will be harder for your fans to find you.

How do you know if your site is mobile friendly? There are actually two quick tests.

1. Bring your website up in your browser, then grab the right side of your browser window and drag it all the way to the left until it won't shrink any more. If everything is a jumbled mess and you can't read it, it's probably not mobile friendly.

2. The second way is much better in that it comes from Google itself. Go to this test site and insert your site URL and click "Analyze." Google will then analyze it and tell you if it's mobile ready or not. If it's deemed not-ready, you'll not only be told why, but how to fix it as well.

The good thing is that sometimes the fix doesn't take much, but sometimes it does mean you need a total update in the case of a site built using older programming techniques.

Either way, do the test now so you can keep getting the most people to your site.

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