MUSIC INDUSTRY BLOG

Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that Google is preparing to launch a music service.  The project, in partnership with LaLa and the recently acquired iLike, is expected to surface during a Hollywood event dubbed “Discover Music!” on the 28th October 2009.  More details here.

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Boyce Avenue are on to something.

Never heard of them?  Neither have I.

Hoover, one the authors of The New Rockstar Philosophy, published a post about the group emphasizing how they positioned themselves on YouTube to draw millions of views by doing covers they knew the masses were searching for.

Boyce Avenue:

1. Published no less than 48 covers on YouTube by artists such as Taylor Swift, Matchbox Twenty, The Killers and other chart toppers.

2. Titled each video as the original would be titled, making each title ‘search friendly’.  For example, “Coldplay – Viva la Vida” not “Boyce Avenue  – Viva la Vida (Cover)”.  Needless to say, more people search for Coldplay than Boyce Avenue.

3. Included a mix of covers and originals on their YouTube channel.  Their cover of Coldplay’s Viva la Vida has garnered almost seven million views.  Naturally, some of those viewers went on to check out the group’s original material too.

4. They presumably tracked their progress and booked a tour in the cities where their videos were most popular.

Read the entire post on The New Rockstar Philosophy.

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The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company developing a range of powerful open APIs for savvy developers to tap into in an effort to make their online music services analyze and convert data into meaningful musical discoveries for their users.  The Echo Nest’s approach to “understanding” musical attributes and matching this information to consumer-facing musical properties is as much an innovation in technology as it is in concept.  Fans of Pandora, Last.fm, Jango and other streaming playlist services will appreciate the game-changing experience such applications provide – the almost flawless and automated comprehension of musical characteristics such as tempo, key, and time signature is mind boggling – and the recent partnership with Spotify, the streaming music service making the most waves at the moment, is testament to The Echo Nest’s music acumen.

Now, the Somerville, MA, based operation has unveiled an inspiring new service affectionately dubbed Fanalytics.  The solution, in this case, addresses a very real pain in a manner that’s easy to stomach: musicians and music marketers need to reach the most likely music authors, bloggers, and journalists to publish something about them – Fanalytics will search for and identify the most relevant points of contact.  Why is this valuable?  Because sorting through 30 million bloggers or so on the net to find just a handful willing to promote you is an impossible task, even for the seasoned media pro.  Furthermore, while the 3 million plus musicians out there along with their managers, agents, and pluggers pursue placement in just a handful of high-profile media sources, Fanalytics digests a tail of smaller, more obscure sources that their aggregate coverage may serve more exposure than that of a single, prominent editorial in, say, Rolling Stone.  Whether that’s fact or fiction in practice is, in my opinion, over shadowed by the gallantry of attempting to build technologies that connect more music makers with more music writers with more music fans.

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Music discovery and playlist service, Grooveshark, was selected as one of ten winners in CNET’s 2009 Webware 100 in the “Audio & Music” category, sharing the spotlight with the formidable usual suspects including iTunes, AmazonMP3, and Pandora.  This is indeed a privilege for the Floridian upstart which triumphed over CD Baby, iLike, Sellaband, Jango, and other well publicized and funded music dotcoms.  Nearly 630,000 votes were cast this year.

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“When we launched our free digital distribution service, we knew we would be able to provide our users with new possibilities to help them expand their own marketing. With Jango Airplay, our users can freely invest into getting radio promotions and establish unique social interactions with new fans to help drive music sales. We are very excited to be working with Jango to provide an effective marketing avenue to our users.” said Kevin Rivers, Founder and CEO of WaTunes.

“We designed Jango Airplay to give emerging artists an affordable and effective way to get their music proactively played to real listeners who like similar music. Thanks to WaTunes and affordable technology it is cheaper than ever to produce and sell music – but getting your music heard is the first step. We are very excited to bring WaTunes users in front of our 6 Million listeners. ” said Mattias Stanghed, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Jango.

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Just discovered a quirky new site for music and music video discovery called YouMusic.  Under the strapline, Make Music?  Find Fans!  Love Music? Find Talent!, the site crowd sources its content from artists and allows music consumers to rate what they hear and see.  There’s a music chart, gig schedule, contest and other community and artist opportunity bells and whistles.  I wonder how much the YouMusic.com domain is worth?

EMI began sending out invitations for EMI.com subscribers last Friday to try an extension of the label’s website at YourSoundCheck.com.  The platform, which I have not yet been able to preview for some reason, acts as a crowd sourced research initiative for EMI to learn about its consumers’ musical opinions and desires.  More on this if and when I gain access.

Spotify, the streaming music service, announced last Thursday that Paul Brown will take on the role as the company’s UK Managing Director on April 20th.  It appears as if Brown was headhunted from Pandora where he served as Managing Director International.  Formerly at Sony Music UK where he contributed to the company’s digital music expansion and currently a Non-Executive Director at artist funding site, Slicethepie, Brown is the ideal candidate to spearhead Spotify’s operations in the UK where the uptake to the service has been “phenomenal”, Spotify noted on their blog.

Presumably in response to EMI’s recent formal complaint and Warner’s lawsuit last year, SeeqPod filed for Chapter 11  with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California two days ago.  The music search engine which rolled out an attractive pay-for-play advertising programme for artists is liquidating its assets by selling its source code to developers for $5000, perhaps encouraging many services just like SeeqPod to emerge in the future.  Yet another sorry day for the music industry…

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When Sellaband launched in August 2006, it introduced music fans and unsigned artists to a revolutionary approach to meeting and collaborating with one another.  By providing a financial incentive at the very core of its proposition, the German upstart pioneered an investment platform that provided fans with a stake in their favourite artists’ assets, and artists with a means of raising capital for recording and distribution from the folks who care about them the most: their fans.  A seemingly far-fetched idea, the platform took off and, today, boasts an extensive fan funded artist base that has managed to raise over $2,200,000 collectively.  Although a handful of fan funded music dotcoms exist, including SliceThePie and TheNextBigSound, Sellaband is leading the trend that has yet to illustrate its full potential as an industry shifting force.  The company is now setting its sights on the US market with a high-profile endorsement from Chuck D.