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Quick Hits: The “Dashboard Era” of the music industry; radio & podcasting

Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web:

The “Dashboard Era” of the music industry: Sam Potts, head of radio promotion at Columbia Records in the U.K., authored a thoughtful piece in Medium in which he argues for a culture change in record labels. He coins the phrase “Dashboard Era,” when the consumption of music is included in every step of the discovery and fan-attachment process. Data, though not a new commodity for major labels, is not sufficiently integrated in day-to-day operations as conversational currency. “We are now competing with tech startups who are much better at using data than us, companies that are potentially coming to eat our lunch.”

What radio thinks of podcasting: In the Jacobs Media blog, Fred Jabos canvasses digital leaders in radio to ask what they thought of last week’s Podcast Movement conference. (See the RAIN News wrap-up here.) Shannon Kelly, Buzz Knight, Drew Horowitz, and over a dozen others dish out their impressions of the Chicago event which was attended by 1,400 podcasters and other category stakeholders. Some compared the creative enthusiasm for podcasting to the energy of FM radio decades ago.

Brad Hill

One Comment

  1. What Sam Potts might be missing is that some of his own direct competitors are investing in tech companies. Universal’s parent Vivendi has made some interesting investments late last year. So they seem to be aware of what he’s talking about.
    Perhaps Potts is demonstrating another example of why Sony needs someone to investigate and motivate synergy. Potts may not be aware, but Sony is a major tech company, or at least was once, before other leaner newer companies started kicking its butt. It seems to me there are probably people somewhere within Sony who could handle some of the issues Potts is talking about. But instead, Sony Music will probably end up buying a streamer rather than creating one from within. Which one is cheaper? It depends.

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