Tired of missing out on gigs from your favourite artists? Buying tickets at a premium after you miss the official site runs out? Trawling through Myspace pages and gig listings to find out who’s playing where in the next year, only to find venues have sold out before you’ve even heard a gig is on?
Songkick will solve all these problems for you. They have a plugin for iTunes and for Last.FM that will analyse your music library or your top listened bands and compile a list of when and where they’re gigging in the foreseeable future, and will send you alerts when gigs come up close to you for your listened artists. They also provide direct links to ticket vendors, with a price comparison for each, so you’ll always know first, and never pay over the odds for a ticket.
From the artist’s perspective, you can also add concerts to the online database, so that your listeners are automatically updated when you list new gigs. Just make sure that we distribute your music to last.fm when you sign it up to our digital music distribution service, so that your music can be discovered on their streaming service.
Internet radio has had a couple of boosts recently, first the deals that Pandora struck with Ford and Pioneer to get their service into thousands of car dashboards, and now web radio/streaming service Jelligettingfunding from a group of tech savvy investors including Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, Zappos.com COO Alfred Lin and Apollo Group founder Peter Sperling. Jelli streams music online through its own ’stations’ 24/7, and already has content deals in place with a large number of FM and AM stations, mostly through a partnership with Triton Digital, whose air-transmitted station affiliations leading into 2010 now exceed 5,000 – up 50 percent from a year ago. Jelli’s system allows users to upvote or downvote songs on a particular channel, the most popular of which get onto the playlist and go out in real time. This has been proven to work on the web, and now Jelli are taking over slots on air stations, such as San Francisco’s 105.3 fm. Users do have to be logged in to vote on tracks though, so if you’re in the car listening you need to have someone to put your votes in using your iPhone…
Remember back in October, when EMI were negotiating a deal with Grooveshark, then changed their mind and decided to sue them, then broke off the pursuit of their lawsuit and instead signed a licensing agreement with them? The press releases (via All things digital) went something like this:
1:
Recently, EMI Records chose to abandon the template we’ve built with the help of other major copyright holders and opted for their traditional intimidation tactic of filing a lawsuit as a negotiating tool. We find the use of this negotiating strategy counterproductive, as Grooveshark has been willing to conclude an agreement with EMI Records that is economically sustainable for both EMI Records and a start-up company the size of Grooveshark.
2:
“EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing have collaborated with us to create a mutually sustainable deal which represents the future of digital music,” says Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino. “We will continue to deliver the best music service on the Internet to our users, and we will expand our capacity to strengthen fan-to-artist connections through our technology.”
“We think services like Grooveshark offer great music discovery options for fans,” said Mark Piibe, EMI Music’s Global Head of Digital Business Development. ”In turn, Grooveshark offers a new revenue stream for our artists and will help us learn more about how we can better connect different types of fans with artists.”
The mixed feelings about Grooveshark’s operation seem to extend outside the EMI boardroom – Universal are now suing Grooveshark for copyright infringement on some big artists from their pre 1972 recordings, including Marvin Gaye, The Jackson 5, The Who and Chuck Berry. Why they’ve chosen these particular artists to make a case on is unclear, but the case is seemingly strong: if Universal are withholding the copyright to the tracks that Grooveshark is playing then they have no choice but to either prevent access to the tracks that are in question, and make reparations for past breach that are acceptable to the label, or fight the court case. The long term effects of this case will be interesting to see. Grooveshark have been allowed to operate relatively unmolested by the big labels while other services, like Seeqpod, have been forced out, so why have Universal decided to apply pressure at this point? Are they thinking like Grooveshark suspect, that they can bully their way into a deal with the streaming service without having to give away a rock bottom streaming royalty rate?
Big numbers fly back and forth in one of WMG’s recent SEC filings – they took a bath on the quick turnaround deal they did buying Lala and selling it again almost immediately to Apple. They will obviously have taken advantage of their brief ownership to Ctrl + C the technology involved in Lala’s service, so keep your eyes peeled for a proprietary store in the near future. Hopefully for them, the value they managed to take out of the company was equal to the $11 million difference between what they bought it for, and the $9 million they sold it to Apple for. The accounts department can’t be too unhappy at the moment, as they’ve signed cheques to the directors for nearly double their 2007 income – $14 million in various different forms, salary, bonuses etc.
Music streaming service Spotify is trying to build a viable strategy for US entry. Currently the ‘freemium’ phenomenon is active in Europe only, and is trying to tinker it’s platform into a fully balanced, financially viable form before allowing it’s user base to expand at the incredible rate they saw before they limited sign-ups to invitation only. In the brief period between the end of ‘08 and September of this year during which they opened the floodgates, they upped their roster to 5 million users, roughly 2% of which havesigned up to the premium service, happily shelling out £9.99 a month for ad-free streaming, access to tracks offline and on hand-held devices (synching with desktops/laptops rather than streaming live on mobile broadband). Their costs can currently be estimated to outstrip their revenue, so they’ve got to find a way of enticing more of their free users onto the paid for platform, which they can principally do by adding value to the paid for package, reducing the price (which they may consider to be a mistake, given the huge amount of music that people will still stream), or just waiting for loyalty to induce a purchase (we all love them here in the RN office). An interesting point to consider is that the major labels that have signed deals with Spotify have also been given equity equal to roughly 18% of the company, so a win for Spotify is worth more to them than building on Apple/iTunes success in the long run. From a consumer’s point of view, I don’t think a better deal could possibly come along; all the music in the world for the price of a single CD purchase a month, available to put in your pocket on your phone (for which you’re probably paying £30 a month already), seems like a silver bullet to me, generating revenue for the industry and keeping costs down for the user while cutting the pirates out of the loop. I know free is very tempting, but as most music pirates are supposedly music lovers (I enjoyed the contradiction between the IFPI and the Daily Mail’s bubblegum reading of this survey), I’m hoping that the majority will see the light. Take the money you would have spent on the terabyte hard-drive to fill up with stolen music this year, and use the money to pay the premium subscription fees and fill your ears with lovely legal music instead. There’s also the possibility of Spotify expanding into video; I for one would throw the TV out, and stop paying the license fee if I could cache music TV and film in a Steam type model. We’re one of only a handful of distributors giving our artists the opportunity to get music onto Spotify, so we really hope they can balance the model and expand their user base, making more moeny for our contributors. I’m hopeful; their advertising team is still fresh and new to the problem, and bound to increase revenues as time passes, and further innovation and the addition of bells and whistles to the premium service will only become more enticing.
We7 have a couple of exclusive albums available this week: the first from Joss Stone, is here on the Times website, if you don’t fancy being all conventional and going onto the We7 website. Next up is Shirley Bassey, Adrian Moles’ teenage idol, who’s ‘The Performance’ will be available from we7 and via a widget on the Guardian.co.uk music pages. The album and widget will go live on 6th November and features songs written by Take That’s Gary Barlow, The Kaiser Chiefs, The Manic Street Preachers, The Pet Shop Boys, KT Tunstall and Rufus Wainwright.
When you’re done with that, you can go listen to ‘Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, a Paris: Martha Wainwright’s Piaf Record’ from the sister of the aforementioned Rufus – I’m a fan of Martha’s ever since I saw her doing her funny leg thing at South By South West last year, inexplicably sexy…
Sky Songs is the new music streaming and download service from BSkyB which will be launching on Monday. Sky has been developing this music service for the past nine months and the service seems to be shaping up ok, but there isnt really anything to innovative here!
The Sky Songs service is not free to use, but it does have some decent features which might be useful to a certain type of client.
Sky Songs is web based
For most people services list Spotify aren’t able to be used at work, mainly because it is a downloadable application which most corporate IT departments tend to lock down. However, because Sky Songs is web based it should be a lot more accessible at work, unless your miserable IT department blocks the specific URL.
Sky Songs recommends music
Unlike services like Spotify, Sky Songs has the ability to recommend music too you. Once the Sky Songs interface is loaded you will see playlists created by its team of music journalists They range from introductions to new genres to topical playlists, such as memorial collections for recently deceased celebs. Sky Songs also includes a recommendation engine, powered by Gracenote, which will react to the songs you’re hearing with a decent suggestion of other tracks you might like.
You can mark your own favourites
With Sky Songs you have the ability to build playlists and then mark your favourites with a simple heart icon. Once you’ve picked a few favourites, the service will collate them for you, putting all your favourite artists in one place, as well as your most-loved genres and albums. Think of it as an auto-playlist generator, it’s much quicker than building a list of songs by hand, and means all your favourite sounds are just a couple of clicks away.
Sky Songs integrates with iTunes and Windows Media Player
Sky Songs doesn’t just stream music, you can use it to buy tracks to own too. They’re downloaded as DRM-free MP3 files, and will even drop into the correct place on your computer for iTunes and Windows Media Player to find them.
When you first set up your Sky Songs account, you’ll be asked which music management software you use. From then on, all your downloads will automatically appear in your existing music library, ready to be synced to your iPod, iPhone or MP3 player.
It offers more, for less
This is a biggie, and will certainly be the decider for some people: Spotify is already under pressure from cheaper streaming services, and Sky Songs increases the competition even more. It’s offering unlimited streaming from £6.49 a month which also gives you one £6.49 album or 10 tracks to download and keep. Compare that to Spotify’s £9.99 price tag, with no extras included.
Spotify has received a lot of press in the last few days cause they are planning to move their European only service into the US market. The story was broken over at Forbes and I think this could be a very big move for the music industry as a whole. Spotify is a free ad supported music streaming service which allows users to listen to anything in their catalogue as often as they want. Spotify offers a free service which is advertising supports, a day of free advertising and then also a full unlimited service. Users can also build and store playlists; so that if you turn on shuffle, after awhile it feels like a Pandora station with only your favorites or the iTunes collection you wish you could afford.
Ive used Spotify since private launch and it is so addictive and one of the best services I have ever used. Their currently library has over 5 million tracks with thousands more uploaded on a daily basis. Spotify has attracted more than 2 million users in the UK and another 4 million across Europe. The company also wants to let you take you playlists with you anywhere you want. An Android app is in beta and an iPhone app is being tested.
Key issues when entering the US market is:
Can they afford the crippling royalty rates that all the majors will want in the US? These rates already killed Spiral Frog and other services.
Microsoft UK executive already leaked that they are readying a launch of a competitive product that will be tied in with the Zune. However, it is Microsoft and they always seem to get new products wrong recently.
The economy needs to turn around because Spotify is 95% ad-supported. “If you look at the market today, who knows where it’s going to be in the next two, three years?”. Spotify founder Daniel Ek told Forbes. “We are doubling our revenues month-on-month–that’s a very good sign.”
Disclosure: RouteNote is currently a Spotify partner and will be allowing our artists to get their music onto the service in the coming weeks.
Tired of missing out on gigs from your favourite artists? Buying tickets at a premium after you miss the official site runs out? Trawling through Myspace pages and gig listings to find out who’s playing where in the next year, only to find venues have sold out before you’ve even heard a gig is on?
Music streaming service Spotify is trying to build a viable strategy for US entry. Currently the ‘freemium’ phenomenon is active in Europe only, and is trying to tinker it’s platform into a fully balanced, financially viable form before allowing it’s user base to expand at the incredible rate they saw before they limited sign-ups to invitation only. In the brief period between the end of ‘08 and September of this year during which they opened the floodgates, they upped their roster to 
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