Songs as Skills
Guest post by Benji Rogers Founder, dotBlockChain Media & Pledgemusic
“Alexa, please play the Moana soundtrack.”
That’s how my five-year-old daughter makes music play in our house (and yes, she says please).
Alexa then replies, “Now playing the soundtrack to the motion picture Moana by various artists on Spotify.”
Some version of this daily ritual is becoming more prevalent in households all over the world as voice control has become easier to use, and as Amazon, Google, and now Apple, march into the home.
What feeds the machine?
Twenty four years ago the music industry was blessed, or cursed depending on your point of view, with a digital music format called the MP3 (the WAV file format was introduced two years earlier). From that moment on music became files, and files go everywhere.
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Transparency
Transparency is a hot topic this year in the music industry. With continued calls from creators for better compensation from streaming services, the legacy obfuscation by various intermediaries between consumers and creators appears to be in the crosshairs. The recent leak of the Sony-Spotify contract has only compounded the pleas for more fairness in the music industry, especially in a world where big data can track micro-payments and creators should be able to have greater access to information about who is listening to their music and how much it earns. What is really happening here?
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Predictions and Resolutions for 2015
With 2015 upon us, there is widespread optimism about the music industry. Touring continues to grow, and a shift in the recorded music market away from ownership toward the subscription model has many believing that perhaps changing business models can breathe new life into a very disrupted industry over the past 15 years. Challenges stand in the way. Secondary ticketing continues to pose huge problems in touring, despite highly increased ticket prices. And streaming's business model is threatened by public reports of very poor artist payouts, leading major artists to pull content from the services.
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Berklee/Rethink Music Announce Partnership with Kobalt to Drive the Future of the Music Business
Boston/New York, November 18, 2014 – Berklee College of Music and Kobalt today announced an innovative collaboration for driving growth in the new music industry. Kobalt is providing a two-year grant for Berklee’s Rethink Music initiative to continue its series of global events and fund a study in conjunction with Berklee’s newly-formed Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE).
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Rethink Music Berlin, October 24th
All artists are entrepreneurs. All entrepreneurs are artists. At Berklee, we believe the two are synonymous, and as a result we recently launched our Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (ICE), which provides resources to help musicians and others in the music industry succeed as entrepreneurs.
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Have An Idea for the Future of Music? Join us at Sónar!
Win a full pass to the Sonar music festival and an invite to our special Rethink Music innovation summit at Sonar+D in Barcelona on June 12.
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2014 Plans
Rethink Music is pleased to announce events this year at Sonar+D in Barcelona on June 12, in Berlin on October 24, and Paris on November 21.
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Rethink Music in 2014
Rethink Music has announced a series of events for 2014, including Venture Days in Los Angeles and a repeat of our annual Venture Day in Berlin. We'll also be hosting Innovation Summits and Public Policy workshops in Europe and America later in the year. More information to come soon!
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The Power and Future of Music
2014 is finally here, and with it is lot of optimism for our economies and the overall health of the music industry. In the last few months of 2013, we saw the passing of the great Lou Reed, the announcement of a YouTube music subscription service that will integrate video (Goodbye Spotify? Where are you Beats?), and further funding for Applauze, an event recommendation service.
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