Deezer and Samsung announced a partnership that would give buyers of Samsung’s Galaxy S5 phone a free six-month trial of Deezer’s subscription music service. The plan would work in selected countries only, where Paris-based Deezer operates the service. The Samsung deal takes a page from SiriusXM’s distribution strategy in cars. Continue Reading
RAIN Hotspots — the five most-read articles of the week. Pandora and Nielsen Audio dominated the week, with some Jason Calacanis thrown in. Our report of Calacanis’ keynote address at RAIN Summit West was the second-most read post. Continue Reading
Bloom.FM, an on-demand music app, report-tweeted it has been knocked out of the iTunes Radio ad rotation after spending 2,000 British pounds a month on commercials for its service. Bloom.FM spokespeople are enjoying their new image as a prospective iTunes Radio killer. Continue Reading
If integrated broadcast and webcast ratings is the holy grail of radio audience measurement, Nielsen Audio took a new step toward holistic metrics this week when SVP Farshad Family broadly described how it intends to track online radio streams. A three-pronged approach would deliver listening data. Continue Reading
In this guest article, IP attorney Angus MacDonald of the University of California analyzes the recently-released 2013 annual report from SoundExchange, and Pandora’s financial statements, to conclude that Pandora pays over 50% of SoundExchange collections to labels. What does this mean for U.S. regulations in the next royalty period? Continue Reading
Representing a 63 percent jump in the last year, music service Rhapsody now counts 1.7-million subscribers. Rhapsody International operates both the Rhapsody and Napster streaming-music brands in North America, Europe, and South America. The sharpest gains have resulted from Rhapsody’s distribution deal with telecom giant Telefonica Continue Reading
TuneIn has been adding a lot of live sports programming to its online radio listening platform lately, capitalizing on the popularity of play by play programming and loyalty of fans. Thanks to a partnership with WestwoodOne, TuneIn is offering a full compliment of NCAA tournament Basketball to its listeners this year. Continue Reading
We received a couple of phone calls indicating that our event page showed that tickets to RAIN Summit West were sold out. There ARE available tickets. the error has been fixed, but if you encounter any difficulty, please call 773-701-0821. Continue Reading
Gracenote announced that Deezer is adding its music identification tags (called track metadata) to Gracenote’s immense repository of music data. The result will be a connection to Deezer’s music catalog for developers, who can “hack” new user interactions with Deezer songs. an interesting deal for both companies. Continue Reading
Market-leading Internet radio service Pandora released its monthly audience metrics for March today, promoting year-over-year growth in its key metrics. the most controversial statistic is “Share of total U.S. radio listening,” which jumped to more than 9%. Listening hours grew also, while audience size remained the same. Continue Reading
Bryan Moffett is VP, Digital Strategy & Sponsorship Operations at National Public Media (NPM). We spoke with him in a pre-RAIN Summit phone conversation about NPR’s approach to its audiences via archived content, and the potential of its recently-announced launch partnership with XAPPmedia for voice-activated mobile ads. Continue Reading
This week, Rhapsody and its subsidiary Napster, and Rdio, have implemented Chromecast support in their apps. Now we can look forward to a series of similar announcements of music services leaping aboard Amazon’s brand new Fire TV device, launched yesterday. what does it mean for consumers? Continue Reading