How Streaming Is Changing Music (Again)

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Beyoncé made history with her album Lemonade, which was streamed a record 115 million times in its first week. Just one week later, Drake broke that record when his album Views was streamed 245 million times. The age of streaming music has arrived in full force, displacing both physical sales (e.g., CDs) and downloaded songs (e.g., iTunes). As streaming has taken hold, U.S. album sales, both physical and digital, have plummeted from a peak of 785 million in 2000 to just 241 million in 2015. The change comes from people switching from purchasing full albums, either online or offline, to listening to individual songs through a streaming platform such as Spotify, Tidal, or Pandora (where one of us works, full disclosure).

This shift has the potential to reshape both the music people listen to and the music that artists create. For example, will the concept of albums survive in the age of streaming, or will artists simply release their best singles? (History buffs will note that the concept of recorded albums is itself relatively new.)

As music fans, we wanted to get a sense of the evolving music landscape. Looking at the academic research on the topic and our own data set of 2,400 top-selling albums from 1992 to 2015, two patterns about music quality emerged.

The “Long Tail” Is Easier to Find and Cheaper to Make

Digitization has brought new strategic challenges, and falling revenue, to the industry. Yet it has also brought new opportunities to a wider variety of artists. By reducing search costs, the digitization of music makes it easier to discover new artists and albums.

Despite early concerns that falling revenue (and online piracy) would reduce the availability of music, research by economists Luis Aguiar and Joel Waldfogel shows that the number of music products created between 2000 and 2008 tripled. Skeptics may worry that quantity is coming at the expense of quality. Music quality is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and some people surely think that music has been on the decline since the death of Tchaikovsky. Focusing on the narrower context of recorded popular music albums from 1960 to 2007, Waldfogel created metrics aimed at capturing the quality of music, such as whether an album ended up on critics’ lists of all-time best albums and the extent to which an album continues to be listened to in future years. (These metrics capture things such as critical acclaim and staying power in the eyes of listeners, focusing on how new and older music compare.) The data suggests that the quality of music has actually improved in the digital age. It is easier to find and less costly to release new music, leading to unpredictable successes from artists who might not have been discovered or produced an album in an earlier era.

While music is still an industry associated with superstars, a greater variety of artists are producing best-sellers over time. Looking at the data, the sales going to the top 100 albums has dropped by about 20% over the past 20 years — nontrivial gains for other artists.

With subscription pricing and the ability to easily skip among artists (as opposed to per-album or per-song charges, which were the norm), streaming pushes users to listen to explore new artists. This has the potential to reduce the concentration of the very top artists and albums, while also helping music lovers find what economists refer to as the “long tail” of the industry. In other words, it’s easier than ever before to find an artist like Julia Nunes, a ukulele player doing cover songs of pop bands who was first discovered through YouTube.

Average Album Length Has Changed Over Time

The quantity and quality of music are not the only things that are changing. In 1992 cassette tapes were the predominant form of consumption in the U.S. and albums averaged about 12.5 tracks. The rise of compact discs brought about better functionality to skip around to different tracks and to know what song you were listening to. (Hidden tracks also suddenly became not so hidden.) As compact discs became the norm, the number of songs per album increased, averaging 15.8 at its peak in 2003.

Around this time, online music started becoming popular and album length began to fall — today it’s about 14.17 tracks. It has been holding steady for about five years but may still be in flux, as artists are figuring out how to adjust to the streaming age.

While many factors affect album length, this raises the potential of adjusting creative content in response to new modes of distribution. When albums are less popular relative to, say, song downloads, albums might become shorter. “Filler” tracks, less popular songs that are not released as singles, serve a diminished purpose. For example, all 12 tracks on Lemonade debuted on the Billboard Hot 100.

What’s Next?

For the industry, these changes raise strategic questions, not only about contracts and pricing but also about which types of artists will thrive and what content artists should be producing. Artists like Drake and Beyoncé show that the concept of an album is still relevant, in part because of innovations such as the visual album. Beck’s 2013 book of sheet music, Song Reader, was innovative in a different way, leading fans to post their own versions of the album online. For example, there are now dozens of versions of the song “Old Shanghai” on YouTube, on instruments ranging from a toy piano to a ukulele.

The Chainsmokers show an alternative path to the album. First known for their 2014 hit “#Selfie,” the band has foregone full-length albums and instead released 10 separate singles and official remixes, which have sold 2.6 million downloads and been streamed over 600 million times on Spotify alone.

For artists, it is a time of reflection and increased strategic options. And for music lovers, it is time to sit back and listen.

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Facebook is finally hiring a head of news

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Facebook may be cleaning up its image with journalism.

The company is looking to hire an “experienced news executive” for its Global News Partnerships team who can “be a public-facing voice of Facebook and its role in the news ecosystem,” according to a recent job posting

This development comes after months of Facebook facing scrutiny with its apparent incapability to combat fake news on its network. 

Facebook does have a news partnerships team already that works directly with news organizations to share features and solicit feedback. For instance, Facebook’s news partnerships team assists with Facebook Live videos and on boarding for Instant Articles (Mashable is a partner for both programs). 

It does already have leadership within that team. Andy Mitchell serves as the director of news partnership and has more than 15 years working in public relations and marketing for CNN. Patrick Walker leads Facebook’s media partnerships for Europe and recently spoke at a conference where he outlined the company’s news principles. 

Still, Facebook is looking to hire someone with at least 20 years experience in “news, with strong track-record and understanding across the business,” according to the listing. The person should have a “proven track record of building, initiating and driving new business and/or organizational opportunities.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Other major news distribution platforms have similar teams and public-facing leaders. Snap hired Peter Hamby, formerly a political reporter at CNN, to serve as its head of news. Peter Greenberger serves as the global director of news at Twitter, and Richard Gingras is vice president of news at Google. 

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Chute launches service for brands to find and manage influencers

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Chute on Thursday extended its visual marketing platform for the enterprise with the launch of Chute Influence, a service designed to help marketers find, vet, and manage influencers in their space. With this addition, the company is enabling its customers to not only conduct outreach to their users and consumers, but also those that might be able to impact sales across a topical and industry level.

Brands using Chute Influence will be able to find influencers based on their demographic, geolocation, affinity, and interests. Once someone has been identified, the system will provide an assessment based on “current relevance”, engagement, and growth trajectory. Brands can like and comment on influencer posts and also keep track of their content. Analytics is also provided so that posts can be compared by engagement versus those from the brands.

Chute Influence lets you track influencers and monitor their posts.

Above: Chute Influence lets you track influencers and monitor their posts.

Image Credit: Chute

“Influencers have become key for brands seeking to effectively reach audiences that are more separated and distracted than ever,” said Chute chief executive Ranvir Gujral. “Most marketers are managing their programs completely manually and have no real way to discover or vet these creators effectively. In the Chute platform, our partners are already able to find the perfect user-generated images for their needs — we wanted to make it that easy for finding creators too.”

If one needed to show the importance of creators, look no further than what Twitter and Facebook are doing, following in the footsteps of a program YouTube has long dominated. Customers are no longer swayed by just marketing messages from brands, but by those that they can relate to, and Chute believes it has the complete suite of tools necessary for brands to handle all aspects of that.

Chute Influence provides an analysis of the impact from an influencer's post.

Above: Chute Influence provides an analysis of the impact from an influencer’s post.

Image Credit: Chute

“After doing our own research, we found that [discovering influencers] was one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks for marketers in the space,” explained Greg Narain, Chute’s cofounder. “60 percent of marketers say they want influencer discovery to be automated. Plus, the top reason marketers aren’t tapping into influencer marketing is because they don’t know who to work with.”

Hunting down influencers isn’t a new concept, but it’s understandable for brands to figure out who they are and also difficult to keep track. There’s also no shortage of influencer search services ether, including Lithium Technologies-owned Klout, Little Bird, BuzzSumo, Traackr, and others. However, what Chute offers is not only a specific focus on visual content, but also additional resources to take further action in order to create impactful marketing campaigns.

Chute Influence includes a feature to engage influencer posts and request rights.

Above: Chute Influence includes a feature to engage influencer posts and request rights.

Image Credit: Chute

Since 2011, the Y Combinator portfolio startup has been focused on enabling brands to tap into user-generated content that’s shared on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, and other social networks. Its goal is to facilitate better storytelling that’s authentic and believable, highlighting the popularity among consumers.

Today’s release gives the company a well-rounded arsenal for brands to tap into the social space, not only for monitoring and displaying fan content, but also securing rights, deriving insights and analytics, monetizing it with ads, and more. In October, it released an all-in-one visual marketing suite for companies consolidating all its tools while incorporating some machine learning and image recognition. Now brands can discern which of their fans are more influential than others and reach out to see if they’ll lend some additional support to move the needle.

There’s certainly demand for services that Chute is providing as evident by recent acquisitions of its competitors. In May, Adobe acquired the social engagement platform Livefyre followed by Olapic’s purchase by Monotype in July. Investors haven’t been shy in putting money into other services such as Sprinklr, Spredfast (which also acquired Mass Relevance), and ScribbleLive.

“Our goal is to make tapping into authentic media of all forms effortless for our customers, so for us, it was a no-brainer to add these capabilities and services to our ecosystem,” Narain remarked.

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Instagram officially rolls out support for multiple accounts

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After months of testing, Instagram announced today that its latest update finally supports multiple accounts. Now, Instagram power users and brands will be able to link up to five accounts. Available in Instagram version 7.15 for both iOS and Android, users can link accounts through profile settings. From there, switching accounts is as easy as tapping the username and selecting the new alias. The app also comes with several new visual cues for users so they’ll never be confused as to which account they’re on. Additionally, the app supports push notifications for all linked accounts, provided that they have them turned…

This story continues at The Next Web

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Snapchat wants to put brand messaging all over your selfie

Looking for more ways to boost revenue within the company, Snapchat is attempting to monetize the company’s new lens feature by selling “sponsored lenses” to advertisers as early as the end of October 2015. Targeting major holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving and Black Friday for this type of advertising buy, Snapchat plans to charge advertisers as much as $750,000 to reach the entire Snapchat userbase for a single day.

As detailed by the Financial Times, Snapchat will be pricing “off peak” days, basically days outside of holidays, at a cost of $450,000. While both figures sound relatively high, the potential reach for advertisers is vast as nearly 100 million people use Snapchat every day.

Assuming just five percent of Snapchat’s daily active audience used a branded lens on one of the $750,000 days, that will only cost the brand 15 cents per user. If a branded picture with a lens filter is sent to another user, that would double the reach and reduce the cost even further.

Snapchat believes that branding selfies with advertiser messaging will be an effective way to reach the millennial and teenage demographics. Of course, the only way this plan works is if Snapchat users opt into using the branded lenses. It’s highly possible that users will ignore the lenses and avoid slapping logos or brand mottoes on their selfies. The most likely scenario of this actually working among users could be some form of low-key sponsorship, perhaps providing a silly effect, like rainbow-puking, and modifying a corner of the photo with a “Brought to you by brand” message.

Of course, this isn’t the only revenue that Snapchat is generating from advertisers. Launched earlier this year, Snapchat’s Discovery feature lets companies to purchase ad space to advertise content. However, demand for the product has waned over the last several months and the cost to advertise on the service has dropped considerably.

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Pinterest opens up developer sandbox for new apps and integrations

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Pinterest announced it has opened its developer sandbox, offering access to the company’s APIs for building new apps and third-party integrations. As a followup to the Pinterest Developers Platform debut earlier this year, the sandbox offers a suite of endpoints for building apps and integrations that enhance Pins and help people do more with them. Such endpoints help drive traffic to your site, provide users with personalized recommendations and more. Previously, developers needed to get access by Pinterest to start building with APIs. Now, anyone can start building Pinterest apps and integrations — they just need Pinterest approval to go public, according to a blog…

This story continues at The Next Web

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Twitter now lets 68M people in Indonesia buy data, minutes, and SMS packages via DM

Twitter announced a new partnership Monday that allows the 68 million subscribers of Indosat, one of Indonesia’s largest carriers, to top-up their phones through its direct messaging (DM) feature. The company lifted the 140-character DM limit in June, seemingly paving the way for new business opportunities like this one. Indonesia is known to be an emerging market that the microblogging platform […]

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YouTube subscriptions are coming

It’s not the first time we’ve heard the rumors, but sources speaking to The Verge say YouTube’s subscription packages are almost ready to roll: While much of the content on the video-sharing portal is going to remain free, users will be able to pay a monthly fee to access music videos and other types of premium content from the site’s biggest stars.

Despite having a steady stream of more than a billion visitors, YouTube reportedly still struggles to make a profit. It’s also facing pressure from the record labels who would rather not give away all of their best content for free, even if there are ads running before, after and alongside it. The obvious solution to both of these problems is a Netflix-style subscription fee for users who want the best that YouTube can offer.

Related: How to turn any YouTube video into an animated GIF

According to this weekend’s report, the subscription options are going to be in place before the end of the year. The Verge says that “multiple sources” have confirmed that the site is about to “get serious” about a paywall plan, with music videos and as-yet-unspecified premium clips first in line. Apparently some content could be made free for a certain amount of time before requiring a fee to view.

The music option will build on the existing YouTube Music Key, which the labels feel Google isn’t doing enough to promote — it offers ad-free listening, offline access and background playback on mobile, as well as everything that Google Play All Access has to offer as well. YouTube itself hasn’t offered any fresh comment on the rumors.

As for the other subscription package, it may be a way of helping YouTube hang on to its most popular vloggers in the face of increasing competition from Facebook. The biggest names on the site will have the opportunity to keep some videos available with accompanying adverts and then offer some exclusive content for subscribers only. YouTube has only just launched its Twitch competitor to attract fans of live gaming streaming.

[Image courtesy of Bloomua/Shutterstock.com]

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