Calling all startups! Enter the 9th annual SXSW Accelerator Live Pitch competition. An incredible 71% of SXSW Accelerator alumni have gone on to secure a collective $3.1 Billion in funding.
I've been proud to be a part of the SXSW Accelerator Advisory Board for several years now and here are this year's details:
Application deadline is Friday, November 11, 2016.
Competition takes place March 11-12, 2017 during the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas
As much as 23% of all CD's sold on Amazon are counterfeit, according to multiple investigations. We first reported on the problem two weeks ago after an alert was sent out by indie music trade group A2IM.
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Two weeks ago the The Association of Independent Music has issued an strong warning regarding a "serious counterfeit operation selling large numbers of CDs" using Amazon’s FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) system:
"It appears that this product is manufactured in China, but is almost indistinguishable from the genuine article to the extent that even the legitimate manufacturer cannot tell without very close examination.
The RIAA did their own investigation with staggering results. The record label trade group placed orders on Amazon in a range of categories from new releases to greatest hits. Out of the 194 CDs delivered, 44 or 23% were counterfeit - including 18 CDs in orders fulfilled by Amazon itself, not a third-party vendor. If the order was for a "greatest hits" package, the percentage of counterfeits jumped to 78%.
“Amazon should not be playing host to illegal items that would normally be found on the black market,”RIAA EVP Brad Buckles told theWall Street Journal.
Amazon has “zero tolerance for the sale of counterfeits,” an Amazon spokeswoman told the WSJ, and will be “working closely with labels and distributors to identify offenders, and remove fraudulent items from our catalog. We are also taking action and aggressively pursuing bad actors.”
So your friend is getting married, and you both play golf. It’s only natural that you’d decide to have a golf-themed bachelor party, right? Southern California is one of the best places to golf in... Read more
As Facebook has grown and developed, on the video side of things in particular, the time has come for the popular social networking platform to become properly licenesed, lest it risk alienation from songwriters.
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Guest Post by David Israelite, President and CEO of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA)
Facebook was built on sharing.
One of the most commonly shared things on Facebook is music. Specifically, covers of songs. Fan versions of hits have produced some of today's biggest stars, but -- there's one problem, Facebook hasn't licensed with any of the publishers who represent the songwriters behind that music. With views in the millions, it's time for Facebook to answer songwriters' friend request and properly license their platform. Otherwise, it may find itself de-friended by the music industry.
Since its launch in 2004, Facebook's timeline has been dramatic. Today the company is valued at around $350 billion, with analysts projecting that going to over a trillion dollars in the near future. In the U.S. alone, Facebook currently has over 170 million users.
One of the reasons Facebook has been so successful is because it allows talent to travel fast. Likes propel videos to the top of friends' and fans' feeds. In a recent snapshot search of 33 of today's top songs, NMPA identified 887 videos using those songs with over 619 million views, which amounts to an average of nearly 700,000 views per video. In reality, the scope of the problem is likely much greater because, due to privacy settings on Facebook, it's almost impossible to gauge the true scale.
Additionally, while we don't know the full extent of what is posted, we do know that engagement and viewership on Facebook often outpaces other social media video platforms. In fact, in a recent study of the popularity of copies of Adele's music videos, of the 60,055 copies of "Hello" found that while "Facebook had only 64 percent of the number of copies published to YouTube, Facebook still garnered over two times more video views than YouTube. On average, Facebook racked up 73,083 views per video, whereas each YouTube amassed an average of 23,095 views per video."
David Israelite, President/CEO, National Music Publishers’ Association
For these reasons, we wrote to Facebook in July of 2015, asking them to work with music publishers to ensure songwriters were respected and paid. At that time, Facebook was in the process of negotiating deals with major record labels in order to license the distribution of music videos, but had not yet approached publishers about also compensating songwriters. Unfortunately, over a year has passed and nothing has changed. Facebook has even added to its repertoire of broadcast capabilities. Facebook Live has launched, but due to the nature of live broadcasts, they are almost impossible to monitor. Today the live streaming platform produces millions of videos and billions of views.
Facebook's inactivity and unresponsiveness has left publishers no other choice but to attempt to remove the music that amounts to stealing from their songwriters. To aid in this effort, NMPA and our member publishers have sent thousands of takedown requests, but this is merely a drop in the bucket.
For the most part, Facebook has remained passive in its approach and largely has left it to copyright owners to report cases of infringement rather than tackling the issue directly. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which Facebook has claimed provides it with "safe harbor" protection from copyright liability, Facebook is responsible for terminating the accounts of repeat infringers. But these whack-a-mole efforts have been proven insufficient and ineffective. Issuing takedowns and haphazardly removing accounts of serial infringers are not long-term solutions. More importantly, it is not what the music industry wants.
We have seen what Facebook may soon become in the form of YouTube. However, unlike Facebook, YouTube took steps to license with record labels and publishers. While the percentage they pay is only a fraction of what it should be, even that fraction today generates hundreds of millions of dollars for the music industry. Facebook would be wise to befriend songwriters and publishers as partners now -- not pursue the path taken by other digital services who now find themselves at odds with the creative community.
The publishing and songwriting industries do not want to discourage fans from enjoying -- and covering -- their songs. They don't want to take down videos or punish those who post them. Unfortunately, because Facebook has failed to license properly, it's been the only recourse. This doesn't have to be so.
Many digital music services have been down this road. Asking forgiveness instead of permission is a common path for tech companies. The reality is, songwriters and music publishers want Facebook and other tech startups to be successful, but creators cannot be a casualty of that success. Facebook has been warned, and now must face the music and work on a solution. The breadth of Facebook's influence is enormous -- and an industry-wide settlement would empower the platform to encourage the legal sharing of its users' talents.
Great artists and entertainers have been discovered by posting videos to social media and attracting an audience that eventually filled stadiums. This kind of organic, local-to-global music scene is vibrant and should be cultivated and grown. However, it can only happen if Facebook decides to recognize the important contribution of songwriters.
David Israelite is the President and CEO of the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA). Founded in 1917, NMPA is the trade association representing all American music publishers and their songwriting partners.
The next president has the power to shape the housing market for years to come. What impact will the candidates and the election itself have on the market?
from Mortgage Rates, Mortgage News and Strategy : The Mortgage Reports http://ift.tt/2e5zgZZ
The price of streaming music subscriptions is a contentious ongoing debate within the industry. Is $10 per month too much or too little. Would twice as many people pay if a subscription were half the price? It's a complex question that the industry has answered badly with pricing that means that a UK subscriber effectively pays twice as much as in the U.S.
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Spotify’s 2015 UK accounts painted a vibrant picture with both profits and above average Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). However, a little caution is required before assuming all the answers to the streaming market’s woes can be found here. Firstly, only a portion of Spotify’s costs are based in the UK. For example, much of the (more highly paid) exec team is in the US and much of the development team is based in Sweden. Such are the vagaries of financial reporting for multi-territory companies.
More importantly though, is Spotify’s higher UK subscriber ARPU (€6.47 per month compared to €5.20 per month globally according to the ever insightful Music Business Worldwide). On the surface this is clear success (and indeed the UK may well have a higher paid-to-free ratio). However, the main reason for the ARPU difference is the music industry’s fixation with non-discretionary pricing. 9.99 is 9.99 in the US, the UK and the Euro zone, even though each of those currencies have very different values. Especially now post-Brexit referendum.
At current exchange rates, the Euro Zone €9.99 is equivalent $10.86 and the UK £9.99 price point is equivalent to $12.18. Thus Euro Zone subscribers are paying 9% more than US subscribers while UK subscribers are paying 22% more. What makes matters even worse is that US per capita GDP (a measure of relative wealth of the population) is 55% higher in the US than in the EU and 27% higher than in the UK. So in effect that means a combined pricing ‘swing’ of 63% for the US compared to the Euro Zone and 49% compared to the UK.
In short, European subscribers are getting doubly hit by the music industry’s insistence on non-discretionary pricing for music subscriptions. While there are a host of commercial factors that can be cited in favour of the approach (e.g. it helps mitigate against currency fluctuations) there is zero customer value, unless of course you happen to be a US resident consumer.
Regular readers will know I am a long term advocate of a more sophisticated approach to subscription pricing (e.g. mid tier products and super-premium options) but before we get there, a first step should be to ensure that European music fans get a fair deal compared to their US peers. Or of course, we could try the alternative: increasing US subscriptions by 63% which would mean a $16.32 price point. Sounds crazy right? Exactly…
