Tag: music

Why YouTube Plans To Launch A Spotify-like Service

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Re/code

Earlier this week at the Code/Mobile event, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki confirmed an ad-free music service is on the way as the company investigates paid video subscriptions. In addition, she also revealed that about 50 percent of views are coming from mobile devices — the limited local storages make streaming a favorable choice for consuming content. As viewers spread across digital platforms and moving towards streaming instead of purchasing content, launching a subscription-based service seems like a good move for the YouTube.

Is Vevo Morphing Into The Old MTV Channel?

Posted on by Lab Team

Besides its vast library of music videos and live performances, streaming website Vevo is betting big on original contents like artist interviews, news recaps, and more. Vevo claims that with pre-roll ads and branded content, original videos now accounts for about a third of the company’s revenue. At a time when MTV has long moved on from its music programming, it’s nice to see a new OTT service picking up the baton.

What U2’s Apple Deal Means For The Music Industry

Posted on by Lab Team

By now you’ve probably heard that Apple is giving away U2’s new album away for free via iTunes. But U2 is obviously no charity; Apple is licensingthe Irish band’s new music, for an estimated $100 million,  as a “free gift” to the iTunes customers, along with the right to use the lead single off the album in its upcoming global ad campaign. Apple gets an extra selling point and a promotional tool; U2 gets enormous exposure through mass sampling and “the world’s largest album launch;” iTunes users get free music. Apple’s move heralds a paradigm shift in the music industry, where merchandise and tour ticket sales replacing music sales as the main revenue channel.

Radiohead Releases New Work Exclusively Thru App

Posted on by Lab Team

Radiohead is no stranger to releasing new music in unconventional ways—back in 2007, the band made their entire album “In Rainbows” available to download on their official website without a price tag, asking fans to pay however much they wished. Now, the band is exploring new distribution channels by releasing their latest work exclusively on their PolyFauna app, which was launched back in February. The app was initially designed as a companion to their 2011 album “The King of Limbs”, but this new update seems to repurpose the otherwise one-off app with new possibilities. Unlike when Skrillex revealed his new album in branded app one week in advance to its official release, no announcement of a new Radiohead album release has been made at this point.

New App Blends Messaging With Music Sharing

Posted on by Lab Team

Following the long and proud tradition of burning a mix-CD (or mix-tapes for those of you who lived through the 90s) for your crush to express your intense feeling through nothing but power ballads, a new messaging app, whimsically named “La-La”, is enabling it users to send song snippets—and song snippets only—to each other. So far, it features a decent selection of licensed music by mainstream artists. But if you want to send an obscure indie-rock gem to that cute hipster you know, the musical messaging app also lets you to browse through YouTube to clip out an audio for sending.

In the larger picture, this could be seen as the newest development in messaging apps’ continuous effort to differentiate their products. Marrying music sharing with OTT messaging seems like a good idea in theory, but how to further integrate the music industry into the mobile messaging ecosystem remains unclear. Given the positive responses that previous efforts such as Yo or Tango received, however, it is certainly interesting to see if such creative approaches could catch the fickle eyes of younger generations.

Vimeo-owned Cameo App Looks To Music

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Cameo, the video-creation app recently acquired by Vimeo, just got its biggest update yet, with a deep Vimeo integration and a shifted focus onto music discovery. This update brought a complete overhaul of its interface, including a whole new soundtrack browser, genre sorting and an interactive preview feature. As the short-form video apps continues to be dominated by Twitter-backed Vine and Facebook-owned Instagram, this update of Cameo comes as a smart pivoting effort to differentiate itself from the rest. In order to compete with the market leaders, smaller companies could certainly use such branding strategy to help establish their products in this increasingly fractured market.

Amazon Rolls Out Music Streaming Service

Posted on by Lab Team

Amazon has been rumored to have been working on a music streaming service for some time now, and today Amazon debuted Prime Music, a music streaming service for Prime members that promises to house over a million songs from over 90,000 albums and playlists. So far, Universal Music Group isn’t participating in the deal, but it’s nonetheless a sign that music streaming services are becoming increasingly important to companies who want to keep users locked in to their media platforms. 

Music Industry Buys Into Shazam

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Shazam Entertainment officially announced that it’s landed a series of investments from many of the world’s biggest record companies, indicating that the music industry is looking at new and different methods of keeping relevant and present. Shazam, whose latest valuation was $500 million, said that Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment are each taking $3 million stakes in Shazam, which were purchased through a third party investor. These groups all also own a stake in Spotify, and have used the platform to push artists’ streams, and thus its likely we’ll see these music groups do the same on Shazam. 

Songza Recommends Music Based On Weather

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Music streaming service, Songza has partnered with Weather Channel to offer music recommendations tailored to local weather conditions. Advertisers have been using weather data to affect marketing budgets for some time, realizing it’s powerful impact on sales. For Songza, weather plays as much a role in mood as music, so it makes sense to incorporate that data when making music suggestions. As we continue to glean more insights from big data, look for even more sophisticated algorithms which will anticipate what media we want before we even know it.

Pandora Opens To Independent Musicians

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Pandora is the first online streaming service to open its doors to independent artists of all stripes. There will now be an online submission process for self-releasing artists across the Internet, allowing musicians with digital copies of their music to be broadcast on the network. In the past, artists on Pandora needed to have a hard copy of a CD with a UPC on Amazon, but now all that’s required is work digitally submitted through iTunes, Amazon/MP3, CD Baby, or Bandcamp. Pandora will screen the singles by hand. The catch is: in light of recent payment disputes, is the publicity of being available on Pandora worth the paltry paycheck?