As 2016 shapes up to be a landmark year for VR technology, it’s time for artists to begin embracing 360 video technology. The cost of creating such content continues to drop, but the returns continue to increase, as the ways in which fans interact with live content continues to shift….
Category archives: Music Tech
How I Sold $66,000 In Tickets in Less Than 2 Hours with 1 Text
Here we explore an alternative method of advertising tickets to fans. Rather than using email or social media, this piece looks at how one band was able to use a mass of fan phone numbers in order to sell tickets via text, with incredible success. ________________________________ Guest Post by Nathan…
SoundCloud Is For Sale, But They’re Having Trouble Finding A Buyer
SoundCloud is finally starting to seriously monetize their content, but profitability is still just a distant hope. That sent the startup in search of funds; and in June, SoundCloud raised $70 million from Twitter in a $100 million funding round at reported valuation of $700 million. Now Soundcloud is for…
Spotify Starts Selling Your Fan Data Out Their Back Door [Chris Castle]
Spotify recently announced that it plans to start selling its free users’ identifiable information to major ad companies using pattern recognition and other data mining techniques to profile fans before packaging them for resale. _____________________________ Guest post by Chris Castle of Artist Rights Watch Spotify announced today that it is…
Pandora Adds Personalized Concert Notifications, But Ticketfly Events Get Top Billing [UPDATED]
[UPDATED] When Pandora acquired Ticketfly, the two pledged to use the power of the music streamer’s giant platform to drive ticket sales. Today’s announcement of concert notifications is a good first step, but it is also is reminder of the severe limitations of using a single data source to drive…
Yesterday Apple Reminded Us Of Why Spotify Is Not Even Close To Winning The Streaming Wars
With 100 million users (including 35 million paid), it’s tempting to declare Spotify the winner in the battle for streaming music supremacy. But remember this… competitor Apple, which has a market cap of $520 billion and $231 billion in cash, yesterday reported a quarterly net profit of $7.8 billion -…
SoundCloud Gives Creators An "Album" Option
Ever since SoundCloud cut its label deals and added a paid service, it’s sped up the pace at which its adding new features. Today they added the option to display groups of tracks as an album rather than just as a playlist. ____________________________________________ When SoundCloud started creators shared their work…
SiriusXM Tops 25 Million Paid Subscribers, 10% Revenue Growth
SiriusXM is on a tear, and recently the satellite broadcaster made an uninvited advance on Pandora. The music streamer rebuffed the overture, but they may want to reconsider. Their combined platforms plus Pandora’s ticketing and soon-to launch music streamer would make a powerful combination. _________________________________ Satellite radio broadcaster Sirius XM…
New Ticketing Tech To Open More Doors To Live Entertainment
The issue of ticket bots snapping up tickets before fans have a chance is one that has long been acknowledged in the industry, but rather than using an increasingly closed system to ensure fans get to more events at a reasonable price, Jack Groetzinger believes a more open system may…
An End To 4 Minute Music Videos: How Record Labels And Artists Can Fix Their YouTube Woes
As the artists vs. YouTube battle rages on, Mark Mulligan suggests that the real underlying issue is that the four minute music video, while it worked well for MTV, is no longer suited to a modern YouTube, and that artists need to begin creating lengthier videos, both to maintain user…