How are you feeling? First day back at work? Did you indulge in a last-ditch celebratory fling last night? Decompressing from a glut of cheery holiday music and New Year’s jubilance? Healing Music Radio is the ticket to post-holiday recovery. Continue Reading
SoundHound released an upgrade to its Android app, adding the ability to throw a tagged song into a Spotify playlist. Long-time users will say “Finally!” to the app refresh, which brings this essential feature in Android up to parity with SoundHound for iOS. Continue Reading
Universal Music Group has entered into a new partnership with Havas Group to form the Global Music Data Alliance. This data-centric entity will use Havas’ algorithms to analyze information about UMG artists, from ticket sales to streaming counts to social media stats, to look for new revenue opportunities. In particular, GMDA will examine behavioral data to better understand the relationships between artists, fans, and brands. Continue Reading
Audio ad-representation firm AdLarge continues a recent streak of news by announcing an exclusive national advertising sales-rep agreement with Hotspot.fm, an Internet radio app. Spokespeople for Hotspot.fm told RAIN News that the app is recently launched to the U.S. market. Continue Reading
TiVo and iHeartRadio announced a new partnership that will bring the music platform to the video and TV recording service. The radio application is slated to roll out to TiVo Roamio, TiVo Mini, and TiVo Premiere devices “over the next few weeks,” according to the press release. Continue Reading
Roger Lanctot is Associate Director of Strategy Analytics, and a thought leader in the connected-car space. In this guest article, he discusses the value of AM/FM radio on the dashboard. “Cars may be losing their CD players, but cars will definitely have radios in 2015. The only problem is that you may not be able to find the radio…” Continue Reading
Radio Disney has taken another step in the digitization of its programming, integrating Ford’s AppLink code in its mobile app. The result is integration with Ford’s SYNC dashboard, which gives drivers easy control of the app without touching the mobile device. As with other SYNC-enabled apps, Radio Disney’s product will be automatically located by the Ford system when the driver plugs the smartphone into the dashboard. Continue Reading
RAIN is pleased to present 43 predictions from 21 thought-leading guest futurists: Continue Reading
Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web: Amazon Prime may roll out in India; assessing Azoff’s ammo against YouTube; in-car listening as public performance? Continue Reading
Continuing the year-end roundup, BPI released data about sales and streams in the UK. The industry group reported a doubling in number of streams to 14.8 billion songs. Streaming accounted for 12.6% of music consumed in the nation in 2014. Continue Reading
Nielsen SoundScan released its 2014 year-end figures for both music sales and streaming in the U.S. Streaming totaled 164 billion songs, up 54% from the 106 billion songs streamed the previous year. According to the Wall Street Journal (paywall), the overall music consumption didn’t change extensively between 2013 and 2014 based on an equivalence where 1,500 song streams or 10 individual song downloads count as an album sale. Continue Reading
One of this year’s emerging stories for the business side of music is a shift toward artist patronage. In Patreon’s first year, donations totaled just $259,000. This year, fans gave $10 million in support of a wide range of creative ventures, according to Polygon. Continue Reading