Month: September 2015

About Social Media and Internet Advertising | AdLand

Our friends at AdLand recently posted this story “Nice ad you got. Be a shame if no one saw it.” They detail how social media sites like YouTube and Facebook are becoming more and more aggressive in leveraging their platforms to require payment for engagement.

Bands take note, these platforms are charging you to reach the audience you built for them…

The article is a must read, a small except below.

In 2012, GM stopped advertising on Facebook. It took its 40 million dollars elsewhere. When Facebook started reducing organic reach it became even clearer that social media is not the bargain, or effective juggernaut it was purported to be.

Consider that analog media print for a moment. You spend money to place an ad in GQ, and it goes in GQ’s across the country. There is no guarantee someone will buy the magazine, of course, but if they do, there is a good chance they’d see your ad. If Facebook owned GQ, you’d place an ad in it, and then Facebook would hide 90% of the magazines unless you paid them to put the magazine featuring your ad on the magazine stands.

So we live in the digital age where media channels like Youtube and Facebook seem only effective if you pay for views to inflate your numbers (and likes if you’re even more smarmy). And remember, a vast majority of Youtube videos (ads or otherwise) do not go viral. Then in Facebook’s case you’re dealing with a a quasi-Mafia-style practice of paying them to “boost” your post to an audience you worked hard to cultivate.

PLEASE READ THE FULL STORY AT ADLAND:
http://adland.tv/adnews/nice-ad-you-got-be-shame-if-no-one-saw-it/1541959236

by Trichordist Editor

Guest Post: A response to Michael Geist’s Defense of Bootleg Beatles Records by Canadian Music Publishers Association’s Executive Director, Robert Hutton

Music Technology Policy

[This post by Canadian Music Publishers Association Executive Director Robert Hutton is reprinted with permission from the CMPA’s Sept. 3, 2015 newsletter.]

We recently read the article posted by Michael Geist to his website earlier this week on the matter of Stargrove Entertainment’s legal action against parties allegedly impeding their sale of recordings which were, at the time, in the public domain in Canada.

We are frequently asked by our members and international partners to offer some counterbalance to Mr. Geist’s views and have been reluctant to do so until now, feeling that it is best not to feed the flames or enter into something that is not based on facts or fairness.

CMPA has no interest in or ability to comment on a legal action. We have no position in the matter, nor can we. We are not going to comment here about the legal aspects of this case.

However…

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by thetrichordist

Spotify Per Play Rates Continue to Drop (.00408) … More Free Users = Less Money Per Stream #gettherateright

Down, down, down it goes, where it stops nobody knows… The monthly average rate per play on Spotify is currently .00408 for master rights holders.

PerStreamAvg_Jun11_July15

48 Months of Spotify Streaming Rates from Jun 2011 thru May 2015 on an indie label catalog of over 1,500 songs with over 10m plays.

Spotify rates per spin appear to have peaked and are now on a steady decline over time.

Per stream rates are dropping because the amount of revenue is not keeping pace with the  number of streams. There are several possible causes:

1) Advertising rates are falling as more “supply” (the number of streams) come on line and the market saturates.

2) The proportion of  lower paying “free streams”  is growing faster than the proportion of higher paying “paid streams.”

3) All of the above.

This confirms our long held suspicion that as a flat price “freemium” subscription service  scales the price per stream will drop.  As the service reaches “scale” the pool of streaming revenue becomes a fixed amount.  The pie can’t get any larger and adding more streams only cuts the pie into smaller pieces!

The data above is aggregated. In all cases the total amount of revenue is divided by the total number of the streams per service  (ex: $4,080 / 1,000,000 = .00408 per stream). Multiple tiers and pricing structures are all summed together and divided to create an averaged, single rate per play.
by trichordist

Please Vote for “The New Artist Rights Grassroots Advocacy” Panel at SXSW

Blatant Trichordist self-promotion alert!  Please consider voting for “The New Artist Rights Grassroots Advocacy” panel in the SXSW Panel Picker.

We think this will be a great panel with the triumvirate of David Lowery, Blake Morgan and Chris Castle talking about how you can get involved with true grassroots artist rights advocacy.  As far as we can tell, there’s no other panel like it at SXSW.

The panelists will also discuss their experiences with artist rights advocacy, the #irespectmusic campaign, Pandora, artist pay for radio play, testifying before Congress, comments with the Copyright Office, Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission.

You can vote for the panel at this link before the deadline on September 4 (Friday).  We’d really appreciate it. We’ll let you all know how the voting turns out.

Thanks!

by thetrichordist

With advertising on WDBJ-TV murder clips, YouTube sinks to new low | VoxIndie

It’s no secret that YouTube slaps advertising on pretty much anything without regard for subject matter or ownership, but making money off of last week’s on-air murder of WDBJ-TV reporter Alison Parker and her cameraman Adam Ward is a new low. A source tipped me off to the fact that a number of opportunistic (and shameless) YouTube “partners” have uploaded and monetized clips of both the station’s live broadcast and the video taken, (and uploaded to Twitter) by the deranged murderer as he executed the two journalists during a televised live-shot for the morning news.

READ THE FULL POST AT VOX INDIE:
http://voxindie.org/with-advertising-aside-tv-murder-clips-youtube-sinks-to-new-low/

by Trichordist Editor

News from the Goolag: What if You Make a Deal with Spotify and It Turns Out to Be With YouTube?

Music Technology Policy

We’ve all heard from numerous sources that Spotify is in the middle of renegotiating their license agreements with at least the major labels.  What has gotten less attention is YouTube’s interest in buying Spotify.  Spotify’s exit to an IPO is getting cloudier by the day as another tech bubble bursts in Wall Street alongside a volatile stock market, one should not rule out an acquisition of Spotify and who better to do it than Google’s wholly-owned YouTube subsidiary.

Remember that we saw this July 21, 2014 story in Re/Code by the highly credible tech journalist Kara Swisher:

Omid Kordestani, who has just temporarily replaced Nikesh Arora as chief business officer of Google, is joining the board of Spotify, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

In addition, sources said, one of the search giant’s former execs, Shishir Mehrotra, will become a special adviser to CEO Daniel Ek and the company’s management.

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by thetrichordist