Christian P. Pewitt Blogs: August 2017

Thursday, August 31, 2017

Mortgage rates today, August 31, plus lock recommendations

Mortgage rates today are driven by movements in financial markets worldwide. When the economy heats up, bond price drop, and rates increase. When the economy pulls back, interest rates tend to fall.

from Mortgage Rates, Mortgage News and Strategy : The Mortgage Reports http://ift.tt/2vIkxOq

How lender pipelines and policies affect your mortgage rate (and what to do about them)

What determines the your mortgage rate when you buy or refinance a home? The lender's pipeline (amount of business it has) is one factor. But one that you may be able to ignore.

from Mortgage Rates, Mortgage News and Strategy : The Mortgage Reports http://ift.tt/2x8L1ft

Applying for a mortgage in 6 months: What should you be doing now?

Before applying for a mortgage, a little preparation can get you a better rate, lower fees and fewer hassles.

from Mortgage Rates, Mortgage News and Strategy : The Mortgage Reports http://ift.tt/2vHyvjD

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

HARP Refinance Is “Not A Scam”, Says Government; Program Ends In 2018

The Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) expires at the end of 2018, and the government wants you to know that you may be eligible to refinance today.

from Mortgage Rates, Mortgage News and Strategy : The Mortgage Reports http://ift.tt/2woUzQX

Best Instagram Practices For Indie Artists

While the importance of Instagram can be elusive or confusing for some, the platform relevance in the music industry is undeniable. Using the platform effectively can be a challenge for many indie artists, so we here look at some of the best practices to employ in order to get the most out of the platform.

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Guest post by Hugh McIntyre of the TuneCore Blog

[Editors Note: This blog post was written by Hugh McIntyre. Hugh writes about music and the music industry and regularly contributes to Forbes, Sonicbids, and more. Speaking of photos, be sure to check out Hugh’s piece on getting fans to take more photos at your shows!]

Of all the major social media platforms, Instagram might have the worst reputation for “mattering,” as some people would put it. It can be difficult for many people to grasp the importance of an app where people post pretty pictures of where they are and what they’re doing, if not simply selfie after selfie.

Well, if you haven’t realized it yet, this is the world we live in. You had better just accept it and learn to be good at the things that the world has deemed important if you want a job that relies on you being even somewhat well-known. I’m not suggesting you need to start spending all of your time curating your Instagram, but if you want your profile to grow and you want to be heard (and seen), you’re going to need to learn a thing or two about the world’s most popular photo-focused application, and you’ll want to at least put in a modicum of thought before every post.

Here are six best practices I hope you keep with you at all times:

1. Use At Least One Hashtag

I could go on for pages about how best to use hashtags, where to apply them, when they are most appropriate, and which ones will bring the most people to your photo, but that is another article entirely. Instead, right now I’ll keep a laser-like focus and simply say this: you should be using hashtags, and even if that makes you nervous, you should at least be adding one to everything you post on Instagram.

For the moment—this is my avoiding getting into the very lengthy discussion about hashtag etiquette I mentioned above—just know that using at least one properly-chosen hashtag will help you in a number of ways, and there isn’t really any good reason not to tack one on. Make sure it’s appropriate, fits the image, and isn’t too long, and soon enough, you’ll see at least some newcomers find your image and perhaps even like it and follow you. It certainly doesn’t hurt, right?

2. Be On-Brand

Deciding what your Instagram page will look like should tie-in with your brand, and therefore it shouldn’t be too difficult to decide what that means. If you play death metal, you might want to think about keeping the photos you upload relatively dark. If you produce high-energy electro-pop, perhaps you’re interested in bright colors and explosive hues? Folk-pop that evokes feelings of longing could lend itself better to certain filters and effects you can easily locate on the app.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter what you choose, and you can feel free to be creative here, but think carefully before committing to something, because once you’ve started cultivating your brand, you should really stick with it. At times that may become difficult, but maintaining a cohesive brand is helpful in all manners of marketing, and it’s often the most successful marketers who make it big.

3. Engage

A lot is said (and written) about what to post, when to upload, and maintaining your brand, but I don’t often see enough pieces emphasizing how to engage with your friends, fans, and even strangers on Instagram. It may sound like brand speak (who actually says “engage”?), but it’s the best way to describe what I’m talking about.

Don’t be shy when it comes to Instagram—it is social media, after all! Look for other musicians, artists, those in the music industry, and anybody else who you find interesting for any reason and follow them, like their photos, comment when they post something especially fun or beautiful, and message them if you’ve started to form any kind of meaningful bond.

You don’t necessarily need to do this with every single account, because that would become exhausting, but don’t be afraid to converse with people you don’t know. Strangers are just friends (and potential fans, in your case) you haven’t met yet.

4. Share Something Compelling

It is incredibly easy to tell the difference between a great Instagram account and a boring one. You don’t need to think about it or consider who the person is—just look at the content and let it speak for itself, which, by the way, is the same thing that can be said for music. Stop thinking it’s okay to just post selfies and pictures of your lunch and starting putting in some actual effort.

Yes, it may mean you need to stage an impromptu photo shoot from time to time, or actually plan some time to shoot some pics, but that’s what it takes these days to stand out on this platform. If you keep uploading beautiful images of interesting things, you’ll see your engagement grow, and that will likely coincide with an uptick in plays and streams of your tunes.

5. Be Consistent

One of the worst things you can do on almost any social media platform, be it Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or any of the others, is be inconsistent with your uploading. If you and your band decide to only post images on your Instagram account once a week, that’s your decision (and not one I necessarily endorse), but you should stick with that. If you like to upload more frequently, try to keep up the pace.

You don’t need to keep a strict schedule (unless you do something special on certain days of the week, for example), but don’t share what’s going on in your life almost every day and then disappear for two months, because people will either worry about you, or perhaps even worse, forget about you entirely.

6. Keep The Caption Short

I always personally become incredibly annoyed whenever I see someone has posted an image that clearly holds some significance with the equivalent of a paragraph of text beneath it. Instagram is perhaps the worst platform on which to spell something out with words, and the site itself makes it incredibly difficult to actually read anything.

There are times when it’s necessary to actually spell something out, and you may even be able to share an image with a good amount of text from time to time, but for the most part, keep the words off your IG page!

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To Survive, Spotify Must Follow Apple's Example

In the final lap of its race to go public, Spotify plans to hit the NYSE by year's end, but a number of uncertainties about the company's future remain, with some suggesting the company will need to take a leaf out of Apple's book if they hope to survive

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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski from Music 3.0

Spotify just bounded over it’s last major roadblock to going public with its new licensing agreement with Warner Music, and now it’s final hurdle is convincing the SEC that its direct listing is on the up and up. This means that the company looks to meet its goal of being listed on the New York Stock Exchange by the end of the year, but many questions about the process still remain.

The streaming music company is said to have chosen a rather unique direct listing rather than the traditional IPO, and while the obvious reason might be to avoid the high underwriting charges, it’s possible there’s much more to it than that. For instance:

• There’s no “lock-up” period to prevent early-stage investors and employees from selling shares in the months following a listing. That would make it much easier for many of the investors to cash out much sooner than they might have otherwise.

• IPO’s tend to make money for the institutional investors should the stock go up past the offering price. The company doesn’t see any of that, and Spotify sees the risk of a price jump without the wholesale investors on board versus a guaranteed price set by the underwriters as worth while.

• The company may be worried about how the stock might be received both by institutional investors and the public, since despite more than $3 billion in revenue the company continues to bleed more and more money. A direct listing means that any worry by institutional investors may be mitigated by the majority of sales made to less sophisticated retail investors.

It’s a complicated equation in that both Spotify’s investors and the company need to navigate, but not one without its minefields. Of course none of this would be an issue if the company was turning a profit, or even close to it, but currently the loses are going in the wrong direction and growing.

What to do? Perhaps the best thing would be for Spotify to pull an Apple and get into the hardware business with a line of branded smart speakers. The market for that product genre is just beginning and hardware can provide a far higher margin than music streaming. Yes, I know it’s easier said than done to get into hardware, and the tech industry is littered with big and small companies that have tried and failed (hello, Google). On the other hand, Beats managed to do it as a design and marketing company that turned out pretty well with far fewer resources than Spotify has. Just by mentioning the fact that a high-margin product was on the drawing board would spark major market interest, and could dramatically change the stock price.

Of course, one of the major problems that Spotify has (and this may eventually be its undoing), is the fact that it has one and only one product with music streaming. It lives and dies on that product. It’s competition (Apple Music, Google Play, Amazon Prime Music) has far deeper pockets, with music streaming being only a tiny portion of their businesses. Those companies can even offer music streaming as a loss leader with hardly any negative occurring to the bottom line.

That’s a lot for any company, even a market leader, to deal with, and it’s something that the market is quietly keeping an eye on. That said, Spotify has done all the right things to be listed by its target date, and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t happen. Now if only there was another product.

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RIAA Rebuts Songwriter Moral Rights Critics: 'We love metadato too!'

We share at the full text of an open letter from the the RIAA to songwriter groups in response to their criticism after the RIAA's filed a letter with the US Copyright Office regarding its study of Moral Rights for creators.

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via Chris Castle's Music Technology Policy

An Open Letter From The RIAA

August 23, 2017

Thank you for your letter explaining your concerns with the filing we made with the U.S. Copyright Office in connection with its study of Moral Rights.

To be frank, we are puzzled by your letter, as it appears to assume that we took a position we neither espoused, nor believe. But we’re glad for the opportunity to set the record straight and eliminate any misunderstandings.

First, let us be clear that we wholeheartedly believe that all creators of music deserve attribution for their work. As we said in our filing, we have every incentive to ensure attribution, because it’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s good business as well.

Although our member labels do not own the copyrights to musical works, and our focus is necessarily on the artists our companies represent, we fully support attribution for songwriters, and all the others who contribute to a musical recording. Indeed, we have supported initiatives over the years to improve attribution and will continue to do so.

The good news is that the opportunities for better attribution have never been more promising. Instead of hard-to-read fine print on discs and liner notes, music fans will be able to ask voice-activated appliances like Amazon’s Echo for the names of the songwriters of a recording. Public websites like Jaxsta will soon launch, providing a rich and in-depth array of information about creators. Such information may not fit on the small digital screen of a streaming service’s user interface, but it can be publicly and widely available in very convenient and accessible ways.

It is this form of attribution that was the focus of our filing with the Copyright Office – publicly visible identification, and not – as your letter suggests –metadata that may be included with a file but that is not publicly displayed to those listening to a music file or watching a music video. Even if all possible information were included in the metadata, that wouldn’t solve the attribution problem unless that information was also rendered on-screen in a form visible to the human eye. In other words, while metadata might be a means to an end, it is not an end in itself if the end is public-facing attribution.

Since it appears that you were focused more on metadata than public attribution, let us be clear: we do not oppose, indeed we support, including in metadata information about all creators of a musical recording, and we encourage the use of available mechanisms to give credit to creators. We simply believe that these measures should not be legislated, but rather should be voluntary, or based on freely negotiated contractual obligations, as they always have been in the United States.

We would welcome the opportunity to work with your organizations on voluntary mechanisms to achieve our shared objective – to maximize attribution for all creators.

Sincerely,

Cary Sherman and Mitch Glazier

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Mortgage rates today, August 30, plus lock recommendations

Hinder Sues Its Own Frontman

Members of the rock band Hinder have filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against their former frontman over the use of the band's trademark.

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According to The Oklahoman, a lawsuit, filed on Friday in federal court in Oklahoma City, alleges that Austin John Winkler used the band Hinder's trademark to bolster his solo career after he left the band in 2013.

In the lawsuit, Winkler's former band members say he violated an agreement he signed when he left the band that acknowledged he had "no rights in the (trademark), or to promotional use of the name Hinder, and accepting a very limited license for use of the mark under certain express restrictions." However, the members of Hinder allege that Winkler violated that agreement when promotional materials from tours in 2016 and 2017 showed Hinder's name in a larger font than Winkler's.

"Hinder has no ill will toward Mr. Winkler and would have much preferred to privately resolve this matter. Mr. Winkler, however, was apparently uninterested in such a solution," band attorney Blake Johnson told The Oklahoman on Monday. "Though they've now been forced to seek legal redress, the band is less interested in a monetary reward and more interested in protecting Hinder's valuable intellectual property and its brand and reputation.

An email to Winkler's publicist regarding the lawsuit wasn't immediately answered Monday, the Oklahoman said.

via CelebrityAccess

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