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
When Taylor Swift and her label chose to remove the pop singer’s latest album and back catalog from Spotify, they unintentionally sparked the emergence of some fascinating data about online music listening habits. First came Nielsen’s discovery that Swift’s YouTube streaming counts ballooned from the moment her audio streams dropped. Second, we now have data showing that she added the most subscribers on the video network during November. Continue Reading
Former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar and CTO Richard Tom are back to the video business with an intriguing property called Vessel. This service aims to offer early access to popular web video stars through windowing, showing their content to subscribers several days before the clips hit YouTube and other rival platforms. Continue Reading
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
An up-and-coming streaming service named Musx announced seed funding of $500,000, according to VentureBeat. It’s an iOS app designed for social sharing of music. Members can post songs from YouTube or SoundCloud. As has become common in these mobile apps, users can create their own playlists. Musx adds a collaborative angle, so friends can build playlists together. Continue Reading
In the latest move to bring order to the legal wild west of its video landscape, YouTube has added extra information to the YouTube Audio Library. This database now gives information about what happens when you upload a particular song to accompany your video. This means you can check whether the song might be deleted by the rights holder or if restrictions apply before uploading the audio clip. Continue Reading
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
Irving Azoff and his Global Music Rights PRO have intensified their scrutiny of the new YouTube Music Key streaming service. According to a written exchange between lawyers for both sides, Azoff has questioned whether YouTube has the appropriate licenses to be streaming the songs represented by GMR. The group asked for the roughtly 20,000 songs GMR represents to be removed, but YouTube has not complied. Continue Reading
In an initiative marked by repeated long delays, it is perhaps unsurprising that Music Key, YouTube’s new music subscription service which was supposed to start today, has been pushed back to tomorrow. In other Music Key news, it is widely reported that a rumored subscriber connection between Music Key and Google’s audio-only subscription service, All Access, will indeed happen. Continue Reading
Rio Caraeff will step down as CEO of Vevo at the end of 2014. CFO Alan Price will serve as the interim leader for the video hosting service while the company looks for a full-time replacement. Vevo has had a rocky year, and the launch of YouTube Music Key is also a potential risk for Vevo’s business. Continue Reading
eMarketer released estimates about ad revenue from YouTube — especially interesting as the video platform releases Music Key ad-free listening. eMarketer projects that U.S. video ad revenue alone would increase 39.2% to $1.13 billion. The company expected that the figure would continue to expand in double digit percentages to a possible $1.75 billion in 2016. Continue Reading
The launch of YouTube Music Key is an exciting development for the streaming music sector, but it the new service already has a very vocal and powerful detractor. Irving Azoff, a music industry veteran and leader of the recent Global Music Rights venture, told The Hollywood Reporter that he is prepared to remove the works by 42 of his clients from YouTube. The threatened move could see about 20,000 copyrighted works taken away from the fledgling service, as well as from the original YouTube video platform. Continue Reading