Sofar Sounds Raises A Ton Of Money But Artists Don’t See Much Of It

What if you played a gig and lot of people showed up, paid good money to get in, yet you received nothing? How about if you received what amounted to minimum wage? Yeah, that’s happened to us all, and it’s okay when you’re starting out and just getting your performing chops together, but when you’ve […]

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Copyright Office About To Make Album Registration Easier

For many years the Copyright Office was behind the times, but it seems to be catching up. For instance, online copyright registration of your song is much easier and faster than the old paper/snail mail way. The Office is now trying to bring album registration into the 21st century as well. As you may or […]

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2 Quick Streaming Video Updates

Not everyone has a YouTube channel and not everyone has an Instagram account, but most everyone has one of the two. Here are a couple of small streaming video updates, and chances are yo’ll find at least one that’s interesting. YouTube First of all, in August YouTube will no longer show exact subscriber counts to […]

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The 50 States Of Music, Vintage Synth Acid Trip, And Music Consultant Rick Goetz On My Latest Podcast

My guest on the podcast this week is Rick Goetz, who has been a a major label A&R exec, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a bass player, and record label owner.  His label stints include Lava/Atlantic, Elektra, and EMI, where he’s worked with artists that include Kid Rock, Matchbox 20 and Sarah Brightman, and on television shows […]

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Amazon Becoming A Mobile Carrier Would Boost Its Music Interests

The latest rumors swirling around the wonderful world of Amazon this week is that it’s interested in acquiring Boost Mobile from T-Mobile and Sprint after their merger. There are loads of implications here, but one of the most overlooked is how an acquisition like this might affect Amazon’s music streaming service. Let’s explore the concept. […]

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Streaming Music Trigger Cities

When we think of cities that might have an influence on streaming music counts and trends we usually think of the large music towns of New York City, London, Nashville and Los Angeles. Nothing can be further from the truth however, as a number of “trigger cities” from places around the world you wouldn’t expect […]

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Warner Bros Has A New Name And Logo

Warners the record label has been referred to by many names over the years and it’s been hard to keep up. Warner Bros Records, Warner Music, Warner Music Group, WMG – we all knew who it was but the official name could be confusing. Plus, was the company related to Warner Pictures? When someone said […]

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Tik Tok, Singing While Playing, And Reverb.com Founder David Kalt On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

My guest on the podcast this week is David Kalt, who launched the super popular gear site Reverb.com in  2013 after growing frustrated with the process of buying and selling guitars on eBay.  To get it started, David raised more than $47 million in funding from investors ranging from Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen and country star Brad Paisley […]

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Tencent Music Makes You Pay To Stream Current Music – Will This Catch On?

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) owns the largest digital music platforms in China in QQ Music, Kugou Music and Kuwo Music, which are all doing very well at the moment according to its latest financial statement. While Western streaming services rely on paid subscriptions, Tencent is still trying to upgrade its free customers to paid tiers […]

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3 Reasons Why A Streaming Platform Rejected Your Music

There are more and more ways to get your music on a popular streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music. Most indie artists use a distributor like TuneCore, CD Baby or Distrokid, but some streaming platforms (Spotify) and now beginning to act as distributors to other services as well. That’s all well and […]

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These 10 Fake Artists Have Over 1 Billion Streams

It’s difficult enough for a legit artist to make it these days, but it’s particularly infuriating when fake artists get big streaming numbers. As pointed out in a previous post, Spotify hired a Swedish production music house to compose mood music for playlists like Deep Focus, Sleep or Peaceful Piano. The platform pays a flat […]

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NBC Supervising Sound Editor Robert Siciliano On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

My guest on the podcast this week is Robert Siciliano, who started as a music recording engineer, but by almost a quirk of fate got a temp job at NBC that turned into a career. In the interview we talked about making the transition to postproduction, the turnaround time for an audio job, dealing with audio that isn’t […]

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It’s Not A Major Label World Anymore

If you thought that you needed to sign with a major record label or publisher in order to have success, that’s no longer true and there’s a lot of data to prove it. No metric is more valuable in seeing this picture as market share. Indies have made great strides in this area in recent […]

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The Biggest Streaming Earners In 2019 So Far

It’s really easy to think that even the big music star streaming earners aren’t making that much, but they’re making more than you might think. That said, everything now is on a different scale than in the music business of yesterday. For one thing, a million streams or views no longer means much. You need […]

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5 Crowdfunding Myths Busted

Many artists and bands see crowdfunding as a major avenue to their musical success. As we saw from the recent Pledge Music debacle, that’s not always the case. But even failing platforms aside, crowdfunding is a lot more difficult than you might think. My friend Ariel Hyatt from CyberPR recently posted an excellent article busting […]

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