2015 Predictions: Over 20 thought leaders look into the new year
Happy New Year!
RAIN is pleased to present 43 predictions from 21 thought-leading guest futurists: Continue Reading
Opinion & Features
Editor’s Notebook: My album of the year comes from 1991, and from YouTube
by Brad Hill
Streaming is the present and the future, but sometimes it circles back to the past. A story of music discovery in the newest major music service, illustrating that the streaming lifestyle has many dimensions. Continue Reading
Mark Mulligan: Why It Is Time To Make YouTube Look Less Like Spotify And More Like Pandora
by Mark Mulligan
Midia Research founder Mark Mulligan analyzes the “freemium” space by comparing YouTube (and its new Music Key subscription service) to Spotify and Pandora. YouTube has changed from a marketing tool to a full-fledged listening destination, the author asserts, and should be modeled more like Pandora than Spotify. Continue Reading
Bret Kinsella: New York Times Misled By Recording Industry On Internet Radio
by Bret Kinsella
When the New York Times referred to music consumption as a “culture of free,” XAPPmedia CMO Bret Kinsella took to his keyboard to compose a sharp rebuttal. “Don’t fall for the narrative,” he cautions. Continue Reading
Patrick Reynolds: London Calling
by Patrick Reynolds
Patrick Reynolds, Chief Strategy Officer of Triton Digital, and a featured speaker at RAIN Summit Europe, reflects on the Summit experience. Soundtrack provided. Continue Reading
Editor’s Notebook: Putting Beats in iOS won’t help much
by Brad Hill
Installing Beats Music as a built-in iOS app creates headlines, and is an obvious maneuver, but it barely lessens the challenge faced by Apple in the brutal music subscription space. It will not, by itself, move the needle for Beats or Apple. A crucial new effort is needed, and Apple has not demonstrated creativity in the music space for years. Continue Reading
YouTube Music pushes freemium model with whole-album listening
With the “freemium” model of ad-supported, semi-interactive listening under attack in some quarters, YouTube has formalized whole-album listening in its new YouTube Music section. The impact might be to raise consumer expectation of a highly interactive feature in a free, ad-supported service. Continue Reading
Mark Mulligan: 10 Thoughts On YouTube Music Key
by Mark Mulligan
Thought leader and guest contributor Mark Mulligan looks at just-launched YouTube Music Key, and digs into a series of questions about artist response, the fate of music video service Vevo, the potentially changing price point of music subscription, and a YouTube identity crisis. Continue Reading
Could the Taylor Swift publicity be good for Spotify?
When a global consumer service loses the most popular product in its catalog, it’s pretty bad news on the face of it. The seriousness of Taylor Swift’s much-publicized withdrawal from Spotify is perhaps reflected in the gravity and scope of founder Daniel Ek’s blog response yesterday. But crowd opinion, and thousands of news articles, might add up to good publicity. Spotify itself is uniquely asking Taylor Swift to return, with a “Come back, Taylor!” playlist. Continue Reading
Daniel Ek responds to Taylor Swift with comprehensive defense of Spotify
The decision by Taylor Swift and her label, Big Machine, to remove her entire back catalog from Spotify sparked a wave of debates and arguments about the pros and cons of the streaming music economy. Swift herself said in an interview with Yahoo that the reason for her action was her skepticism about streaming platforms. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wrote a lengthy blog post in an effort to clear up misunderstandings about the streaming ecosystem that have sparked many of the most vocal diabtribes. Continue Reading
Roger Lanctot: Denial on the Radio Dial
by Roger Lanctot
Roger Lanctot is Associate Director of Strategy Analytics, and a thought leader in the connected-car space. In this guest article, he discusses the competitive in-car triangle of AM/FM, Pandora, and Sirius XM. Continue Reading
Advertising Doesn’t Need to Fight the Machines
Many in the advertising world think of Big Data as a damper to the creative process and the cause of the “wind tunnel” effect. What they don’t realize is that Big Data is more likely to become marketing’s biggest ally than its mortal enemy. Guest column by Bret Kinsella of XAPPmedia. Continue Reading