✖️ Apple drives artists to chatbots 🍏 YouTube leveling the playing field? 🙈 AI will change your music strategy 🚨
Hi everyone!
The news is out: IDAGIO raised €8 million. I’m stoked to be on board for this phase and consider myself lucky every day that I get to work with this amazing team to give shape to classical music online. 🎻
Next week is the last MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE for 2017. I will be traveling around Cuba, where internet access is not a given, and I won’t be online much or at all until the second week of January. 🏝️
And what a crazy week: Shazam sold to Apple, YouTube is working on a Spotify competitor, Spotify’s share swap with Tencent went through, and Bitcoin just keeps on rising. 💸
Meanwhile, with your help, the list of female startup founders has grown to 22 entries! Boom. 💥
Have an awesome week!
Love,
Bas
P.S. Why not listen to my moombahton playlist while you read this?
From me, for you
Free competes with paid and abundant competes with scarce
There is no singular music business or industry. Everyone is playing by different rules and all those rules will be upended every time there’s a big shift in technology. From the record player, to the music video, to the internet, to AI and blockchain, music is the canary in the coal mine and you have to have a pioneer mentality or else you are falling behind every day.
www.musicxtechxfuture.com • Share
Streaming music
Last.fm was the only music social network that made sense
Inside the rise and fall of Last.fm, the social network that understood how online music worked and that resembled bits of Facebook, Songkick, Blogspot, and Spotify.
How YouTube is leveling the playing field for indie artists
CD Baby CEO Tracy Maddux: “The next time you hear an industry pundit decry the low per stream payouts from YouTube, consider who the source is and who is really threatened by access, transparency, diversity of art and competition for fans worldwide.”
Liz Pelly with an interesting thought piece about the streaming landscape, Spotify, and “the automation of selling out”. Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier:
“It is compulsory in our system, with the absolute commodification of everything, that [artists] become their own brand. The musician is more and more similar to the Instagram Star in that sense.”
Beyond streaming
Lele Pons is Instagram Stories' most-watched producer of 2017 & music's next star
I have been saying for a while that Instagram is the next big social network for music, and will fill a space that Soundcloud and others haven’t been able to fill. It’s doing that already, and we’ve seen nothing yet.
Viral buzz to sold out tours: how new artists are translating internet success to the stage
Underground artists have used the internet to build huge followings. Now, they’re figuring out how to bring that success to headlining tours of their own.
Would you buy a cut of your favorite artists' royalties?
Some perspective on crowd investment into music royalty rights via platforms like Royalty Exchange’s Royalty Flow.
Wide view
Apple's widened ban on templated apps is wiping small businesses from the App Store
Interesting news and could have an impact on “artist apps” - a service offered by more than a few platforms. They take templates, let artists customise, and then help you bring it to the App Store. Apple says: no more.
Likely outcome: more artist chatbots through platforms like POP, The Bot Platform, Chatfuel, and Octane.
Alpha Zero's "alien" chess shows the power, and the peculiarity, of AI
The latest advance from DeepMind behaves in a very surprising way. Expect other AI systems to be just as odd. (seriously - what’s happening here is really important and will impact music in more ways than we can imagine)
www.technologyreview.com • Share
VR pioneer Jaron Lanier on dystopia, empathy, and the future of the internet
Jaron Lanier is one of virtual reality’s most recognizable figures. He’s credited with popularizing the term itself. Interesting interview, which includes this link of a video in which Lanier plays music from inside VR: in the 80s!
Fun
100 cryptocurrencies described in four words or less
This list describes cryptocurrencies. Each gets four words. There are many. Some are landmarks. Some are scams. Hopefully this provides orientation.
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📰 Last week: Female music startup founders 👩💻 Spotify + Tencent share swap? 🇨🇳 Buying cats on the blockchain 🐱
Regular insights about the future of music, media & tech. Written & composed by @basgras.
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