February Tidbits and Treats

Here are some of the best articles I read over the past month. So i wanted to share!! Hope you enjoy.  Lemme know what you think...

Playing to Strangers

State Of Social For 2019 How marketers across the globe think about social media, what's working, how the industry is changing, and more. The State of Social is Buffer's annual report focused on the world of social media marketing, providing you with the insights you need to fuel your strategy for the year ahead. The 2019 results have landed! This year we heard from more than 1,800 marketers from businesses of all sizes, across a range of industries. Check out what we learned this year... https://buffer.com/state-of-social-2019
 

What Streaming Music Services Pay (Updated for 2018) Thanks to streaming music services, record labels reported record-breaking revenue last year.  In 2017, the ‘big three’ made an estimated $14.2 million a day from streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music.  Universal Music Group alone made $4.5 million each day last year. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/16/streaming-music-services-pay-2018/
 Major Labels Made $19m An Hour From

Streaming In 2018 MBW’s analysis claims that Universal, Sony and Warner generated $6.93bn of wholesale-revenue from streaming services last year, representing year-on-year growth of 30.8% – and around $19m an hour between the three of them that year. The analysis shows that Universal Music’s global streaming revenues grew by $864m in 2018, with Warner Music adding $396m and Sony Music $368m. https://musically.com/2019/02/22/major-labels-made-19m-an-hour-from-streaming-in-2018/
 

How to Promote Your Music Three big bombs went off in the computer industry in the 1990s. The first was the browser, our connection to the internet world. Next came tools, compressed video and audio for transmission over this new medium. Then, the music “sharing” site Napster was launched in 1999. From that moment on, the computer provided a single platform on which to record, distribute, and consume music. http://acousticguitar.com/how-to-promote-your-music/
 

Always Up-to-Date Guide to Social Media Video Specs Staying relevant and capturing your audience’s attention is a constant challenge for marketers. And now that brands rely on video content more than ever, it’s critical to use the correct social media video specs and advertising video sizes. However, we couldn’t find all the correct social video sizes in one place. So we decided to create a complete guide of every single social media video spec and advertising video dimension. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-video-specs-guide/

 We Asked Some Gen Z Kids How They Discover New Music Discovering music used to be simple, like picking up apples from the grocery store. You’d head to HMV or Tower Records or whatever big conglomerate stood tall upon your town and then grab the newest record from the chart section. Or perhaps you’d dive deeper, scouring the alternative racks or bookish vinyl shops in search of a suggestion from a sibling, or one of those freaks on the back of the bus. Maybe, once-in-a-while, you'd opt for something rogue because the cover art looked good. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/yw77gx/generation-z-music-discovery 

What Happens When You Create a Fake Music Record Label and Upload Bad Music to Spotify In October 2014, the album Election Music by Heinz Duthel was uploaded to services such as Spotify, iTunes, and Google Play. The album consisted of one electronic tune that had been modified thirteen times according to the voting results in different municipalities in the 2014 Swedish government election. The tempo had been adjusted on each track according to the number of voters in specific voting districts, so that a high number of registered voters corresponded to a fast beat, and a low number of voters corresponded to a slow beat. Specific instruments in the tunes had also been paired with particular political parties, making it possible to “listen to” local voting results and compare tracks with one another. https://www.salon.com/2019/02/17/what-happens-when-you-create-a-fake-music-record-label-and-upload-bad-music-to-spotify/
 

How to Release a Project In the Streaming Era on a Minimal Budget When I first started in the music business at 18, the term “mini-budget” was unheard of. Working in the major label system, even a small budget could quickly balloon to the six-figure mark. Sure, streaming was starting to rear its head, but it hadn’t fully formed and placed its inevitable grip on the music industry’s neck—yet. We were still sitting pretty in the center of the “good ol’ days” of the music industry as some of the OG’s like to call it. But the tides were indeed turning and they were turning fast.   https://djbooth.net/features/2019-02-12-budgeting-in-streaming-age-on-minimal-budget

 Tracklib Presents State of Sampling What’s the overall state of sampling right now? The Tracklib team dug deep into statistics from 2018's music to answer this question. A full overview like this has never been done before and we will make this an annual tradition. https://www.tracklib.com/blog/tracklib-presents-state-of-sampling/
 

Measuring Radio's Lag Behind Streaming Services For decades, everybody in the music business knew one thing for certain: if you wanted to break a new artist, you had to get their songs played on the radio. Radio DJs were the gatekeepers of the industry, offering up-and-coming acts a level of exposure that could change their careers almost overnight. Acts like Jay-Z and REM — among the most successful of the ‘80s and ‘90s — got their starts by forging powerful alliances with regional radio stations before ascending to national stardom. http://thedataface.com/2019/01/culture/streaming-vs-radio
 

Who Do You Need on Your Content Team? Let’s play a game. Imagine you’re in a position to hire your dream content team to outsource some or all of your content marketing… Who do you hire? OK, I don’t mean the person, necessarily, but what are the roles you need to hire? The answer is… it depends! It depends on what you need and the skills of the people you hire. But I thought it would be helpful to talk about some of the roles you might want to fill. https://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/who-do-you-need-on-your-content-team-02167578
 

The Basics: How to Copyright Music in 2019 I know some writers who clutch their notebooks to their chests when they meet a fellow artist or who refuse to even play their songs out for fear they'll be stolen. Perhaps they've heard horror stories or had bad experiences themselves. For the most part, however, it isn't necessary to be quite this protective of your music – the vast majority of fellow artists you come across are honest with no interest in ripping you (or anyone else) off. At least, in my experience. http://blog.sonicbids.com/how-to-copyright-music-2019
 

How Rap’s SoundCloud Generation Changed the Music Business Forever A few years ago no one wanted to be called a “SoundCloud rapper.” The free platform for streaming and uploading music was associated with broke-ass rappers with dreams of hip-hop stardom. But with its low barrier to entry, more and more unsigned artists took to SoundCloud, where they didn’t need a record label or distributor to be heard like they did on major streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify. This up-and-coming generation also rejected the mixtape hosting powerhouses of the early 2000s, like DatPiff and LiveMixtapes, that refused to adapt their one-song-at-a-time release preferences. An emerging class of artists reacting to a changing music industry, these artists took control of their own destinies, releasing their own music on SoundCloud, succeeding at a pace that the traditional music industry couldn’t keep up with. https://pitchfork.com/levels/how-raps-soundcloud-generation-changed-the-music-business-forever/
 

Age of Abundance: How the Content Explosion will Invert the Media Industry Over the past century, technological advancements have massively reduced the cost and time needed to create and circulate content. Though this has liberated artists, consumers are now drowning in a virtually infinite supply of things to watch, listen to and read. The answer to a world where attention is the key constraint, not capital or distribution, isn’t Big Media – it’s the Influencer Curator. https://redef.com/original/age-of-abundance-how-the-content-explosion-will-invert-the-media-industry
 

Born Out Of Competition, Breaking Is A Natural For The Olympics Organizers of the 2024 Games in Paris have proposed adding breaking — that’s the term preferred by the dancers themselves, not “breakdancing” — as an official Olympic event. The concept got a trial run at the 2018 Youth Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where B-boys and B-girls from Russia and Japan won gold. If approved by the International Olympic Committee, which said in a statement that it wants to make the games “gender-balanced, more youth-focused and more urban,” windmills and head spins will reach the pinnacle of global sports. https://theundefeated.com/features/born-out-of-competition-breakdancing-is-a-natural-for-the-paris-olympics/
 

Blackstone's Byron Wien Discusses Lessons Learned in His First 80 Years I was scheduled to speak about the world outlook at an investment conference recently and shortly before my time slot the conference organizer said the audience was more interested in what I had learned over the course of my career than what I had to say about the market.  I jotted a few notes down and later expanded and edited what I said that day. I have since been encouraged to share my thoughts with a broader audience. Here are some of the lessons I have learned in my first 80 years. I hope to continue to practice them in the next 80. https://www.blackstone.com/media/press-releases/article/blackstone's-byron-wien-discusses-lessons-learned-in-his-first-80-years

For All Of You Wendy Day Stalkers
Wendy Day will be speaking at SXSW this year on Saturday, March 16th from Noon to 2pm at Hilton Austin Downtown in Rooms 400-402 (500 East 4th Street in Austin, TX 78701).  The topic is How To Make $50,000 Or More, In Music This Year and she's speaking with Kosha Dillz (who makes more than $50k every year rapping).  She will discuss her project "Do Better" with Lil Donald that made him faaaar more than $50k in the past year.
 
Wendy will also be speaking at MusicBiz.org's Conference in Nashville on Tuesday, May 7, 2019 at the new JW Marriott Nashville, TN (201 8th Street in Nashville, TN 37203).  Wendy is scheduled to interview Slick Rick and speak on a separate panel about funding artists' careers sometime on that Tuesday between Noon and 5pm as part of Lyric Financial's conference within a conference.

Thanks for making it all the way to the end. Check out WendyDay.com and Wendy’s YouTube channel that offers free how-to advice so you can make money with music! YouTube.com/ThisIsWendyDay