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.
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Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Yonder: On The Rise Music Streamer You've Never Heard
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By Mark Mulligan of MIDiA and the Music Industry Blog
Back in 2012, a music service that had raised $174 million in funding closed without yet having launched to consumers. That service was Beyond Oblivion, a company that intended to transform the music market with music bundled into handsets and phone packages at no extra cost to consumers. Five and half years later, Beyond Oblivion’s founder is finally seeing his latest iteration of the bundled music service model gain traction. Yonder, his new(ish) company, has started off 2018 with a million monthly active users (MAUs) under its belt, with the majority of that growth coming in the fourth quarter of 2017. Yet Yonder is not on many people’s radar, in large part because it is building its business in markets that are off streaming’s beaten track.
Yonder’s main market is Bangladesh, which makes up just over half of its MAU base, followed by Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It even has tens of thousands of users in Nepal and the Maldives and plans to roll out to markets such as Myanmar, Cambodia, Iraq and Ghana in 2018. These are not markets famed as booming digital music markets, and they’re certainly not priority markets for any of the top streaming services. So, in many respects Yonder is competing around, rather than with the likes of Spotify.
Low ARPU markets
But there is more to it than just that. These are markets with mostly large populations and very low GDP per capita and mobile ARPU. In many of these territories mobile ARPU is significantly lower than the cost of a western streaming subscription. For example, total mobile ARPU in Bangladesh is around $4 a month. This makes fitting the economics of a streaming music bundle into a tariff challenging in the extreme. The standard wholesale tariffs record labels provide streaming services in these regions struggle to fit these wafer thin margins. So, making music bundles work needs a very specific and localized approach. The same principle applies to localization, with music programming requiring a much higher degree of local specialization than many other markets.
More than one way to skin a cat
2018 will likely see a slowdown in music subscriber growth in many western markets. In the meantime, majority of the 9.99 price points will be addressed. Ad supported and discounting will be key to sustaining growth in these markets, but the scale of opportunity for digital music lies in emerging markets. 2017 was the year we really started to see Latin American markets begin to make their mark, while China established itself as a major contributor to subscribers, if not revenue. Services like Yonder are important for the music business, not just because they address new markets but also because they represent another approach. The 9.99 AYCE model will remain the core opportunity, but sticking too tightly to it will limit the scope of the wider market.
Yonder’s model is not without challenges – not least the concept of making premium music feel like it’s free to its users – but it represents one of what should hopefully become a wider selection of alternative paths to making streaming pay.
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Spotify's “This is:” Playlist Series Is A Hidden Gem
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Guest post by John Miranda
One of Spotify’s under-appreciated gems is the “This is:” playlist series. Each one is dedicated to a different legendary artist, chronicling the high points of iconic discographies. This is: Kanye West. This is: Lorde. This is: Randy Newman. Yes, the last one is very much real and very much worth a listen.
Since the dawn of the streaming era, services such as Spotify have promised to build a comprehensive Alexandrian Library of modern recorded music. This is exciting, not only because of the endless flow of new music discovery opportunities, or the ability to find every song ever released on-demand at your fingertips, but also because of the way that such services inherently facilitate the canonization of great works, catalogued forever in the digital music archives. “This is:” fully delivers on the latter, creating digital capsules which will teach future generations, in so many songs, why Talking Heads, Missy Elliott, and Toby Keith were noteworthy artists in certain times and places. Furthermore, fans new and old can get a big picture overview of a famous creator’s contributions to the art form, discovering new favorites and remembering the classics. “This is:”, as a series, is one of the most fulfilling products of the streaming revolution.
Some of the playlists are basically anthologies, which mix an artist’s radio hits with acclaimed album tracks and fan favorites. This is especially the case with iconic rock artists like Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Prince, Billy Joel… These playlists typically run at about 50-70 tracks. So it’s a lot more than a greatest hits record in digital form. More like a primer course for new listeners who want to understand the ins-and-outs of a classic artist’s legacy. Or a feel-good refresher for diehard fans who want to relive the soundtrack of years gone by.
The hip-hop “This is:” playlists are usually different in that they incorporate way more collabs, guest appearances, and remixes. “This is: Notorious B.I.G.” contains as many post-humous tracks from compilation releases like Duets: The Final Chapter and Born Again as it does classics from Ready to Die and Life After Death. This is not necessarily the case with hip-hop artists like Kanye West, who have enough studio albums to fill up 40+ track playlists. But it is common for many of the hip-hop “This is:” playlists to extensively feature guest appearances and reworked tracks. Maybe because, while rock is about playing the hits, hip-hop has always been about remixing and rethinking preexisting music, incorporating samples and building upon a mountain of internal lyrical and musical references. Regardless, many of the hip-hop “This is:” lists feel like they are from a totally different series than the rock and pop lists.
Other legendary artists with much smaller studio discographies, like Fugees, Frank Ocean, and Joy Division, simply have their entire catalogs on the playlist. These playlists are not the most relevant, though. The “This is:” series is most fitting to artists with lengthy and diverse recording careers.
Who is missing from the “This is:” series? Well, plenty of notable artists. The musical universe is a big place. This is a very ambitious project on the part of Spotify, and it will take awhile for them to build a truly comprehensive collection of playlists including all popular music artists who have achieved enough critical or commercial success to earn the status of “”icon” in a certain genre or sub-genre. Among my favorite alternative bands from decades past, The Replacements and Guided by Voices are conspicuously absent. From the all-time lists of hip-hop’s most influential names, “This is: Big L” and “This is: The Pharcyde” are yet to be released. The series seems to have a surprisingly strong grasp on the importance of punk through the decades, with “This is:” playlists for Bad Religion and NoFX. But the Dead Kennedys are missing. And no band deserves a “This is:” to capture its evolution like Against Me! (the exclamation point is part of their name, but is intended in this sentence nonetheless).
Spotify also resists the temptation to engage in viewpoint discrimination or too-cool-ism when curating the series. “This is: Limp Bizkit” and “This is: Nickelback” are both serious and thoughtful playlists. Any remaining fans of those artists will surely be pleased.
You can even find “This is:” playlists for Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven, though there does not appear to be an official playlist for Bach. Anti-Baroque bias strikes again.
And of course we are missing the notable artists who have withdrawn from Spotify for business reasons, like Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, and Taylor Swift, and the few holdouts who are still absent from all streaming services, like Tool, King Crimson, and Garth Brooks. Maybe one day. And thankfully, the playlist designers have restrained themselves from creating an unnecessary “This is:” for the band Sparta.
Overall, the “This is:” playlists are one of Spotify’s best original features, and deliver on a major promise of the streaming revolution - the canonization and preservation of great artists’ repertoires for future generations to discover and appreciate. When these streaming services build catalogs which are literally meant to encompass all the recorded music in existence, the opportunities are boundless. There is so much potential to discover a meaningful song in the streaming age, so many chances to find a needle in the digital haystack. And now Spotify has provided a shortcut, giving us curated lists of the greatest songs from the greatest artists.
John Miranda is a NYC-based attorney, musician, and media producer currently working on Album Tracks, a mini-doc series focusing on the music history of various cities, genres, and scenes. He also writes about music and digital media.
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Emergence Of Blockchain Technology For Music
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Guest post by Mo Jalloh of Zimrii
The emergence of BlockChain Technology has been described as the greatest technology invention since the dawn of the internet, but for a good many people the concept is still quite alien.
This is especially true when this opportunity is related to the music industry.
To begin, we can come up with a definition of what it is:
“The BlockChain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.”
A good analogy is this: picture a spreadsheet that is duplicated thousands of times across a network of computers.
Rather than having each person have a different version of the spreadsheet, causing confusion, each person has the same version and when a change is made, the change is replicated to each spreadsheet. Everyone will have same version of the truth
When we examine data in the music industry and the correct data that allows for the efficient evidence and payment of royalties, it’s clear the music industry over the years has suffered from a fragmented data landscape, which prevents the accurate collection of data related to music plays.
BlockChain technology has the potential to develop a system which alleviates these issues so that there is correct attribution of right to copyright holders
What BlockChain Will Mean For Musicians
The emergence and development of BlockChain technology heralds a new era in the progression of the music industry where technology is being used for the exchange of fair value between two parties.
It will lead to a new era of transparency and efficiency in a number of key areas which will enable musicians in the industry to feel more empowered and have a stronger voice in the determination of how they are rewarded and how successful they can make their music careers
It What Ways Can it Work?
These areas are some of the pain spots that musicians currently experience, namely:
- Speed of transmission of royalty payments
- Visibility and ownership of copyrights assertions
- Raising funds for production, touring and marketing
Speed of transmission of royalty payments
In countries around the world, copyright bodies are responsible for the collection of royalties on behalf of artists. While the PRO’s bodies serve a purpose, they are able to dictate the terms on which musicians will receive royalties in relation to timing, frequency and amounts
BlockChain Technology provides a more direct system for artists to receive their copyright royalties without the intervention of a third party. This means artists are in control in determining when those royalties are received and crucially, providing a mechanism for the distribution of royalties as determined by the artist.
Visibility and ownership of copyrights assertions
Due to the fragmented information on who owns which copyrights across the music industry, there is often the case where the rightful owners of copyright are not getting the correct amount of payment or in many cases no payment at all.
We believe that in this digital age, that this issue no longer needs to mean that musicians are not getting their proper rewards.
By using BlockChain technology to provide a central repository of copyright information, not just for music but across various forms of digital assets, these can be recorded as immutable and transparent across the industry.
This leads to the correct assertion of copyright for artists so there are no disputes as to the ownership, and by association the rights to receipt the correct royalty payments that are due.
Raising funds for production, touring and marketing
The use of cryptocurrencies or artists tokens is a growing and innovative mechanism for artists to tap into their fan base and reward them in a novel way or attract new fans to support the artist/band
DJ Grammatik began the first artist to explore the use of cryptocurrencies and in the process raised a six figure sum to enable him to continue to produce music for his fans and others
With artists offering coins to music fans, the fans then have a vested interest in supporting the artist as this is directly tied to the value of the coins purchased by the fans. The more the artists does well, the more the fans benefit and vice versa.
It leads to a dramatic new and innovative way to create relationships with two interdependent parties.
The music industry has many challenges and BlockChain won’t be the panacea to solve all those issues but in the areas where it will make a difference, we at Zimrii Music, believe it will have a profound impact.
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John Denver Estate Tries Patreon, Attracts Just 38 Fans
'“Welcome to the John Denver Patreon Page, approved by and run on behalf of John Denver’s Estate. We hope to build a home here for building his community and to preserve his artistic legacy. We’ll share monthly rewards including unreleased music, rare photos of John, images of memorabilia with accompanying stories, photographs taken by John in his travels, and more. Patreon members will receive exclusive offers and first notice of special projects and releases,” a rep from the musician’s estate said in introducing the Patron page.
If you’re not familiar with Patreon, it is a crowd-funding and patronage platform designed to support creatives. Fans can pledge monthly financial support and in exchange, receive access to exclusive content from an artist. The site offers tiers to allow creators to tune their offered content to match different levels of financial support.
"a virtual museum"
“Patreon is a Membership platform that makes it easy for creators to offer exclusive content to their fans in exchange for a small monthly pledge. We’ve decided to build a “virtual museum” of John’s work on Patreon so that his most dedicated fans can get access to his personal photographs, previously unreleased recordings, and other special content. The collection will be carefully curated and new content will be released each month. Patreon also serves as a community space, where fans can comment and share their experiences around John’s music and art,” the estate’s rep said in explaining the decision to launch the Patron page.
Denver’s page at present offers two tiers – a seven dollar tier that provides access to 10 songs or more per month of live performance recordings, and a twelve dollar tier that includes 10 songs or more per month of live performance recordings, as well as exclusive art and travel photos created by Denver while he was alive. As well, the twelve dollar subscription includes a calendar featuring Denver’s photography.
Just 38 Fans...
So far, the new venture does not seem to be a runaway success. Denver’s Patreon page, which offers $7 and $12 patron levels plus a $1 donation option, has recruited just 38 supporters.
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