Glen Campbell Dead at 81

Hits for the clean-cut crossover star included “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Gentle on My Mind” and “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

Glen Campbell, the boyish singer-guitarist whose perfect blend of country and pop made for such hits as “Gentle on My Mind,” “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Wichita Lineman” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” died Tuesday (Aug. 8) after struggling with Alzheimer's disease for years, his official website confirmed. He was 81. 

 

As SoundCloud, valued at $300m, books an uncertain future-could a major label have rescued it?

SoundCloud is about to be saved in the nick of time by a pair of investment funds – but the details of the deal, revealed today by MBW, have left some who rely on the platform deeply concerned about its fate. Very solid industry sources have told MBW that merchant bank The Raine Group and Singapore state investment company Temasek Holdings will each acquire stakes in the business imminently. Those stakes are understood to jointly amount to more than 50% of SoundCloud’s equity.

 

How To Get A Sync Placement

When it comes to negotiating a sync deal for your music, composing pitch emails requires massive effort and can often be frustratingly fruitless. Here we look at a few tips on how to set yourself up to receive a 'yes' from such negotiations.

 

Instagram testing new two-person live stream video feature

A two-person live stream proved to be both a product and technical challenge. The Live team had to figure out how both people would appear onscreen. Instead of using the FaceTime model, which makes one caller appear much smaller, Instagram wanted to make the broadcast a split screen since they envision these streams to be an equal back and forth between two people. Sarkar says this is something influencers have been asking for, as a way to communicate more directly and openly with fans.

 

RIAA’s Piracy Claims are Misleading and Inaccurate, ISP Says

Internet provider Grande Communications and the RIAA continue their fight in court. Much of the battle thus far has centered around evidence of copyright infringement. In a new filing at a Texas District Court, the ISP stresses that the RIAA's evidence is misleading, as it doesn't prove any actual distributions of the contested works. For more than a decade, copyright holders have been sending ISPs takedown notices to alert them that their subscribers are sharing copyrighted material.

 

Apple Music 'making no dent' in Spotify... but that's not the bigger picture

Research firm Edison Investment Research has put out a surprisingly-sharp note on Apple Music’s prospects of competing with Spotify, sparked by the latter’s announcement that it now has more than 60 million subscribers.

“Apple Music still making no dent,” claimed Edison, noting that Spotify is adding around two million subscribers a month in 2017. “Spotify remains fundamentally a better service… it uses the data that it collects from all of its users in order to make its service better. Apple also does this but Spotify’s AI in music continues to meaningfully outperform Apple’s.”

 

Negotiating A Music Producer Agreement: 7 Key Issues

Whether you’re a music producer, or a performing artist working with a producer, it’s important to discuss the terms of your arrangement with each other.

While it’s better late than never to formalize the artist-producer relationship, it’s easier to start the conversation before heading into the studio, and much easier before the music generates interest and money.

 

Why Does So Much Modern Music Sound The Same? [VIDEO]

Upcoming documentary The Click explores how technology is making modern music bland. Particular focus is given to percussion, where electronically produced beats have replaced live drummers, and those live drummers left are expected to play perfectly in time with the aid of a "click" or metronome.

 

RIAA and NMPA working on their own song-database project

One of the big challenges in any project to build a comprehensive database of music rights is the many cooks involved in such a recipe. Infighting, competition and mutual suspicion aren’t a smooth path to solving this particular industry problem. So you’ll be delighted to hear that the latest efforts in the US to build such a database are already sinking into recriminations.

 

Your Song, Your Money: A Breakdown Of Songwriting Royalties

The world of music publishing and royalties is a tumultuous and complex one, and being able to extrapolate where exactly artists earn their money from in all of it can be challenging. Here we explain precisely how it is that songwriters earn money from their compositions.

 

Spotify Could Be Forced To Pay Songwriters $345 Million

Spotify was recently hit with a lawsuit for $345 million plus after its failure to fork over cash on mechanical licenses for the Bluewater Music Services Corp. This is, however, by no means the first time Spotify has been hit with such a suit.

 

What are the Beautiful Secrets Behind the Vinyl Records?

his article takes a deep dive into the world of vinyl, exploring why vinyl is superior to a digital format, how one can maximize the sound quality of a vinyl record, several useful ideas for recycling a vinyl record, and more.

 

5 False Claims About The Music Industry That Can Harm Your Career

Whether it's about being to old to be successful or needing to move to the right city, we here look at five music industry myths, the belief in which can be greatly detrimental to you music business career

 

YouTube wants to fix its awkward relationship with the music industry

For the past few years, the biggest fight in the music industry has been against ad-supported music. Apple attempted to kill Spotify's free tier before it launched Apple Music; the industry has railed against what it perceives as low payments from YouTube for years; and SoundCloud, one of the most popular ad-supported streaming sites in the world, is on the brink of collapse. But the truth is that ad-supported streaming isn't going anywhere. Getting to scale, everyone acknowledges, requires bringing in users who might not pay at first.

 

Spotify Surpasses 60M Paid Subscribers, Now Adding 2M Per Month

Spotify has confirmed that it has surpassed 60 million subscribers. That's up from 40 million paid in March of this year; and means that the worlds top music streamer is adding an impressive 2 million paid users per month. As of June, Spotify's active users - both paid and free ad-supported - totalled 140 million.

 

The Three Eras Of Paid Streaming

Streaming has driven such a revenue renaissance within the major record labels that the financial markets are now falling over themselves to work out where they can invest in the market, and indeed whether they should. For large financial institutions, there are not many companies that are big enough to be worth investing in. With this in mind it is worth contextualizing where streaming is right now and where it fits within the longer term evolution of the market.

 

SoundCloud needs more than just money to survive

We’ve been talking about SoundCloud – the preferred platform for indie musicians, DJs and podcast creators around the world – being on the brink of death in recent times, ever since it laid off 40 percent of its workforce and closed two offices this month. Now, Bloomberg reports that the Berlin-based firm is in talks with two private equity firms about investing in the service in return for a majority stake in SoundCloud.  But if the company’s history has taught us anything, it’s that merely pumping cash into its coffers won’t be enough to keep the platform from going under.

 

Rep. Sensenbrenner: ASCAP-BMI Database Idea Misses the Mark.