✖ Smarter Playlists: automate your music discovery, playlist strategy, and library organisation
And: Ditto Music's new blockchain artist financing; LEGO's white noise strategy; OpenAI GPT-3 writes sea shanties; Eventbrite for vaccination appointments
Smarter Playlists is a powerful tool to automate a lot of the work that goes into making Spotify playlists. In today’s post I show you how it works and give 6 practical examples of automation:
Filter New Music Friday playlists from around the world into a playlist for scouting new music;
Scout label playlists for unknown talent;
Using genre playlists to create a fresh weekly playlist;
Turning a huge playlist into a daily updated workout playlist;
Focus on work with a low BPM playlist with music you already know;
Quickly reorder a playlist of appended albums.
👉 Smarter Playlists: automate your music discovery, playlist strategy, and library organisation
TECH
💸 Distribution and label services company Ditto Music has announced a blockchain-powered ‘decentralized finance’ initiative for artists called Opulous. It will give musicians access to low interest loans by using future royalties as collateral. Details on MBW.
📃 Warner Music Group is a launch partner for music licensing platform Adaptr. It gives app developers access to WMG’s catalogue for a transparent and predictable monthly fee. I’ve hammered on about this point for a while: if we want to see more development and investment in new music experiences, it’s important to drive down the opacity and unpredictability with regards to music licensing (otherwise music’s digital experience is largely relegated to it being a loss leader for tech giants who don’t have to worry about the cost).
📈 Sony Music has bought AWAL and Kobalt Neighbouring Rights from Kobalt Music Group. Tim Ingham breaks down the financials of Kobalt and the outlook of its $500M-a-year publishing business.
🎧 LEGO has launched a ‘white noise’ playlist consisting of the soothing sounds of LEGO blocks colliding or clicking together. The playlist is actually an album and has been released to ‘over 15’ streaming platforms.
🦜 This is a serious newsletter read by thousands of music biz professionals. Our data reveals pros care mostly about one thing: TikTok sea shanties. Ahoy! So enjoy this sea shanty about Joe Biden’s inauguration, written by OpenAI’s GPT-3.
CORONA
🆓 PRS for Music recently introduced a controversial tariff for livestreams. They have now amended the tariff and small-scale events will be covered by a free license for the duration of Covid-related restrictions.
🎫 Eventbrite is mostly known for selling concert tickets. Now, Eventbrite is being used for vaccination slots in Florida and it’s not going well.
🛸 One of the largest trance music events in the world, A State of Trance, has just sold 55,000 tickets to 92 nationalities in under 4 hours for its September event in The Netherlands. Will people be ready to attend events after the pandemic? Definitely. Will the pandemic be over by September? Definitely not. The organisation’s FAQ does take this into account, allowing for resales of tickets in case fans aren’t allowed to leave their country, and refunds or saving the ticket for a future date in case The Netherlands doesn’t let travellers in.
💉 In Serbia, Exit Festival is planning to go ahead with its early July dates. Their optimism is driven by the country’s high vaccination rate: currently 15% of the population is vaccinated every month.
🤯 Berlin’s CTM Festival teamed up with Club Matryoshka to throw a Minecraft-based virtual club event with the likes of Mary Anne Hobbs, ZULI, and many others. It was spectacular and I highly recommend you rewatch the stream to see what Minecraft as a medium can be.
Jobs
Every week, Christina Osazuwa (WMG’s Director of Data & Insights - Global Marketing and founder of Measure of Music) creates a round up of new openings in the music & entertainment business on LinkedIn.
This week:
Part 1 | UMG, TikTok, SME, Ultra, Platoon, Listen.
Part 2 | WMG, Amazon Music, Snap, AWAL, more.
Part 3 | Merlin, LEGO, Patreon, SiriusXM, more.
Click on each part to open the relevant LinkedIn posts.
Patreon
I want to extend a huge thanks to all the Patreon supporters:
Tony Rengel, Martin Nedvěd, Nicolás Madoery, Andraž, Henry Prince, Christian Ruhnau, Jason Fahlstrom, C.Y., Kalam Ali, Bo Plantinga, Pete Cohen, Casper Schadt, Maarten Walraven-Freeling, James Keene, Dick Huey, Deenah Bassiouny, Lukas Hermeling, Cherie Hu, Keagon Voyce, Carlo Kiksen, Nur Al Habash, Carson Lee, and Pietro Fuccio.
Thanks for being a part of this! I really appreciate the support. For now it helps me to cover the associated costs. Eventually, it will allow me to spend more time on MUSIC x and to invest more into the development. My immediate goal is to make MUSIC x feel more like a network, which I’ll be doing through monthly member profiles (coming later this month!) as a start.
If you can afford it and would like to support MUSIC x on Patreon, the MUSIC x SUPPORTER tier is €5 / month (you can also pick two other tiers).
Music
This morning I’ve been bouncing to my new daily playlist of Jersey club, Bmore and Juke. It updates automatically daily, based on one big source playlist (here’s how I did it).
✍️ Today’s newsletter was written by Bas Grasmayer.
✖ MUSIC x: founded by Bas Grasmayer and co-edited by Maarten Walraven.
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