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.