We haven’t written about HiNOTE before, but it sounds interesting: a messaging app that enables artists to send personalised videos to fans. The post Personalised-video firm HiNOTE bags a pair of hip-hop legends appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Last year music analytics company Chartmetric made its first corporate acquisition: of startup Onesheet. Now it’s launching it fully. The post Chartmetric’s Onesheet launches its tool for digital one-sheets appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

There’s news of an inventive new Daft Punk activation on Snapchat, in aid of the 10th anniversary of the ‘Random Access Memories’ album. The post Daft Punk unlock some new memories with Snapchat AR features appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

It will soon be quicker to write about which digital services DON’T have a promotion for the new Ed Sheeran album. The post Peloton wants to get its members walking with Ed Sheeran appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

TikTok’s latest music feature is a very early test at this stage, but an interesting one. It’s called ‘Work with Artists’. The post TikTok tests new feature to connect TikTokers with music artists appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Fresh from becoming the majority stakeholder in their own vinyl-pressing plant, Metallica have been letting loose a variety of interesting digital marketing campaigns. The post Metallica’s latest campaigns: Playlists, Roblox, ASL videos… appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Users are turning to external apps to make slicker, or more complex videos, using advanced editing features.  The post Video editing app Capcut powers extra-viral TikTok videos appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Found·ee has added a new feature called ‘Automated Follow-up Remarketing Audiences’ which we think could prove useful for music marketers. The post Found·ee adds ‘Automated Follow-up Remarketing Audiences’ feature appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

What’s changed that warrants a Wavo Tools update? It now offers two discrete ways for music marketers to engage with the platform. The post Tools :: Wavo – 2023 profile appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Every December, our final Sandbox report of the year highlights the best, most original and most impactful music marketing campaigns from around the world. The post Call for entries :: Music Ally Sandbox Marketing Campaigns of the Year 2022 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Co-founder Hamish McKenzie pointed out that the platform also supports podcasts, videos and audio narrations. The post Substack says it’s more than just a newsletters platform appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Besides spawning a roster of virtual artists, League of Legends publisher Riot Games has been building itself a music compilations business. The post Riot Games launches its third ‘creator-safe’ Sessions album appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Artist apps are still a thing: witness Coldplay’s new Android and iOS app, released for the band’s ‘Music of the Spheres’ tour. The post Coldplay launch an app for their Music of the Spheres tour appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Music distributor DistroKid has a new off-shoot: DistroVid. As the name suggests, it’s focusing on music videos rather than audio tracks. The post DistroKid beta tests a music video distribution service appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Spotify is testing a new feature that will enable listeners to ‘pre-save’ albums in the weeks before they are released. Its first test launched today with British artist Florence + The Machine. The post Spotify tests on-platform pre-saves with Florence + The Machine appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Music Ally’s Rule of Web3: your NFT marketplace or metaverse doesn’t *really* exist until Snoop Dogg is selling something on it. The post Snoop Dogg drops Death Row NFTs amid streaming takedowns appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The online exhibition of Bob Marley artifacts, produced with Tuff Gong, includes biographical content and more than 2,500 images – many of them previously unseen. The post Google Arts & Culture launches a Bob Marley online archive appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan has been blogging about what new features the company has planned for the rest of 2022. The post YouTube’s product boss talks Shorts, shopping and NFTs appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

VRTCL is one of the companies that sprang up to help labels and artists make the most of TikTok and other social platforms, launching in 2019. The post Create Music Group buys influencer marketing agency VRTCL appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The latest stage for the Rolling Stones is a set of 12 stamps issued by the Royal Mail in the UK, in a partnership with the band. The post Rolling Stones become latest band to star on Royal Mail stamps appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Smart-links firm Linktree has announced a deal with ecommerce company Shopify, which will help its users to sell their merch and other products from their links. The post Linktree boosts its shopping features with Shopify deal appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Fave has been working with label Atlantic Records to identify some of Mars’ keenest fans and get them involved in its new community from the start. The post Fave adds another fandom community: Bruno Mars’ Hooligans appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

‘Things Take Time, Take Time’ according to the next album by Australian artist Courtney Barnett. What doesn’t take much time is messing about with some of the tracks on it, courtesy of a neat ‘Stem Mixer’ site launched in advance of the album. It offers up three of the album’s tracks in their individual stems: drums, bass, […]

The big streaming services love a pop-up installation partnership with a major artist. The latest example is Amazon Music teaming up with Coldplay to launch ‘The Atmospheres’. It’s an “intergalactic audio-visual experience” that will touch down in London, New York, Tokyo and Berlin (unsurprisingly, in the four countries that are Amazon Music’s biggest markets) for […]

It will be working with artists Lil Pump and KSHMR to sell ‘S-NFTs’ – a term they’ve coined to describe NFTs sold as ‘securities’ under US financial regulations The post Opulous to sell ‘S-NFTs’ for artists Lil Pump and KSHMR appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

SyncVault is launching a ‘music promo platform’ specifically focusing on YouTube Shorts, with the aim of rewarding YouTubers for using music by its label clients in their short videos. The post SyncVault launches music promo service for YouTube Shorts appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Next Big Sound was one of the first big third-party music analytics services, crowned as a winner at the MidemNet Labs (as it was known then) contest in 2011. The post Pandora shuts down Next Big Sound analytics to focus on AMP appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

A blog post yesterday explained how independent artist mehro has used Discovery Mode. His team turned it on for two tracks in August for the three weeks leading up to a new release. The post Spotify explains how indie artist mehro used Discovery Mode appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

FaZe Clan is one of the bigger brands in the esports world, with its crew of professional gamers competing in tournaments and creating online content by the boatload. The post Esports crew FaZe Clan signs its first emerging music artist appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Fans of artist Bonobo are abuzz after a teaser campaign was launched by label Ninja Tune for his new music. It kicked off on Monday 27 September. The post Ninja Tune launches a mysterious Bonobo teaser campaign appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Since the earliest days of blockchain hype in the music industry, electronic music artists have often been the first to experiment with the technology: particularly those that are most tech-savvy and who control their rights. There are two new examples this week. First, trance legend BT is releasing what’s being described as “the world’s first […]

Throughout Music Ally’s history one principle has held true: if there’s a whizzy new digital platform of some kind, Snoop Dogg will be on it before 99.7% of other artists. The post Snoop Dogg is building a mansion… in virtual world The Sandbox appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

She glossed a wall, and she liked it! Katy Perry has been expanding beyond her core business of music with a partnership with paints supplier Behr. The post Katy Perry’s paint colours get a Spotify-powered spin-off appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The limited-edition version of the Echo Smart Speaker costing $229.99 appears to have already sold out of pre-orders, ahead of shipping in October. The post Amazon is selling a Billie Eilish-branded Echo smart speaker appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Beat Saber has been one of the bigger hits in the virtual reality games industry, selling 4m copies across various headsets by February this year. The post VR music game Beat Saber gets a 10-song Billie Eilish pack appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Halsey is the latest artist tapping AR technology to send fans on a treasure hunt. This one is in the US, and is a partnership with Verizon and FriendsWithYou. The post Halsey unveils an augmented reality treasure hunt in the US appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

There is no shortage of tools available for artists and labels to create ‘smart links’ for promoting their music and getting useful data on fans. The post Believe launches its own smart-links tool powered by Soundsgood appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Don’t worry, independent label Matador isn’t launching a podcast claiming that President Kennedy was actually killed by alien assassins, or that the medieval plague was started by a time-travelling Bill Gates practising for Covid-19. The history being revised in the label’s new podcast is strictly its own: a chance for artists to talk about their […]

Spotify is a dab hand at curating playlists for a wide range of moods and contexts, but labels are keen to get into that game too. Witness the latest project from the 4th Floor Creative team within Sony Music UK, which has launched a site for music fans called ‘Mood Playlist‘. The pitch: “Instantly make […]

Marquee is Spotify’s marketing tool for promoting an artist’s new album to people who’ve listened to them – the full-screen pop-ups that appear over its mobile homescreen. Now Spotify is beta testing a new campaign management tool for marquee in the US, which will make these ads (well, ‘sponsored recommendations’) self-service. The tool will take the form […]

Does anyone in the music industry have better anecdotes than Nile Rodgers? Now he can deliver them in virtual form, which may save him repeating the best ones over and over. Rodgers has been turned into “the world’s first voice-interactive portrait” through a partnership between the UK’s National Portrait Gallery, Universal Music and Abbey Road […]

Artist Yungblud is re-releasing a track from 2019 due to TikTok, but no, this isn’t because someone went viral singing along to it on a skateboard. Instead, Yungblud ran a duet contest on TikTok inviting fans to freestyle their own verse over his track ‘Parents’. One of the most impressive entries was from a young singer-songwriter […]

Fresh from launching in a number of African countries, Spotify is giving its flagship ‘African Heat’ playlist a new marketing push. That includes launching an #africanheatchallenge dance challenge on social media, billboards in New York and Toronto, and embedded video clips from artists including Focalistic, Fuse ODG, Olamide and Moonchild Sanelly. “For me, African Heat […]

After a fan-made music videos contest and the band’s official TikTok debut, the latest stage in Queen’s digital strategy has been revealed: a mobile game. It’s called ‘Queen: Rock Tour’, and launched today for Android and iOS. Universal Music is keeping it in the family too: the Vivendi family, since the game is by Gameloft, the games publishing subsidiary of UMG’s […]

A number of artists and festivals have experimented with the game Minecraft in recent years. One of the still-powerful things about it is the community of YouTubers and Twitch streamers making Minecraft videos, which reach big audiences. As part of what’s already been a really inventive (and long-lasting) campaign for the band, Glass Animals have […]

We’ve been writing about live-audio startup Clubhouse and thinking about the potential it might hold for musicians. Some artists are already diving right in to explore though. One example is Axel Mansoor, who’s already been one of the users to have their faces used as Clubhouse’s app icon. Since the end of 2020 he has […]

Fresh from inking a spangly new deal with Universal Music Group, TikTok is preparing to host a livestreamed concert by one of its key artists. Justin Bieber will play a full-length concert on TikTok on 14 February (yes, for Valentine’s Day) with a re-airing the following day. It’s very much a fan-service event too: Bieber will be […]

SoundCloud’s latest expansion is taking it into the buzziest areas of the modern media industry: gaming and esports. The streaming service is launching its own online gaming tournament, Player One, which will see eight popular musicians on SoundCloud competing in Fortnite for an audience watching on Twitch and SoundCloud. Rapper Rico Nasty is on board as […]

During the ‘live and livestreaming’ track at last week’s NY:LON Connect conference, one of the recurring points was the idea of geo-fencing virtual tours, with shows focusing on fans in a specific city or region. We expect to see plenty of experimentation with this in 2021, and artist Todd Rundgren’s upcoming tour is one of […]

Twitch continues to be a touchy subject for major rightsholders in the music industry, but Amazon’s livestreaming service is also forging partnerships with independent labels – particularly in the dance world. Defected Records, for example, which used Twitch for its online music events last year as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. Now Defected is planning six […]

SMS marketing platform Community first made it onto our radar in January 2019, after Ashton Kutcher had invested into the company and a flurry of high-profile artists started using the platform (like Eminem, Paul McCartney and Jennifer Lopez). Since then, artists wanting to make use of Community have had to join a waitlist and little […]

There’s a long history of video and social media platforms building detailed ‘playbooks’ – resources teaching the people using their services how to build audiences and make good stuff. TikTok is no different: it has just revamped its educational materials with the launch of the TikTok Creator Portal. Aimed at creators old and new, it promises best-practice […]

The latest artist to turn their artwork into a whizzy Instagram filter is Bicep. Signed to Ninja Tune, their new album ‘Isles’ comes out on 22 January, with the filter launching ahead of it – tap on this link from your phone to try it. It’s not just a fun effect though: fans creating videos with it […]

How many likes does your top artist’s or company’s Facebook page have? Who cares?! At least, that’s one of the messages coming from Facebook’s latest redesign of how its pages look and work. “We are removing Likes and focusing on Followers to simplify the way people connect with their favorite Pages,” explained Facebook in a blog […]

It’s Christmas season, and heaven knows we all need it after the year that 2020 has been. It’s no surprise to see Mariah Carey’s annual climb up various charts starting early: ‘All I Want For Christmas is You’ is currently 73rd in YouTube’s global chart. Pandora has kicked off its Christmas 2020 ‘digital celebration’ and Amazon Music already launched […]

Bad news for anyone whose hobbies include masquerading as popular musicians on SoundCloud: the service is finally introducing proper blue-tick profile verification. Billie Eilish, Wiz Khalifa and Trippie Redd are among the first to get the checkmark, although SoundCloud turned the revealing of others into a day-long social marketing campaign with posts on its Instagram, Facebook […]

Vargas & Lagola is the artist name of Swedish duo Vincent Pontare and Salem al Fakir, who recently released their second album ‘Mount Alda’. To promote it, they’re doing a livestreamed concert on 25 November, promising “a holistic experience, a visual journey, where we trigger all senses”. Which is nice, but what’s really interesting about it […]

We’ve written about ToneDen a few times in recent memory: for a profile of its social and streaming marketing tools in November 2019, for example, and then a story in June this year about its ‘StreamLinks’ feature offering smart links for livestreaming events. Now the startup has been acquired by a company very much rooted in the live events […]

Earlier this month, we wrote about how online brand LadBible had put Craig David and KSI on people’s desks via an augmented reality music video. Now another part of the LadBible empire, music community Unilad Sound, has announced a big partnership. It’s joining Apple Music as an official curator, initially with four flagship playlists. ‘Certified’ will feature guest […]

We’ve had George Michael, Prince and John Lennon. Now TikTok’s collection of heritage artists has another entry: Queen. The British rock band now have an official TikTok profile, set up by their management with Universal Music Group/Hollywood Records. What’s more, 10 Queen tracks have been made available for TikTokers to use in their own videos. Sensibly, it’s […]

Sony’s new PlayStation 5 console went on sale in some countries last week, with a wider rollout this week. Right from the earliest model, PlayStation marketing has often had strong ties with music, and the PS5 is no exception. Already this month we’ve seen Travis Scott and Lil Nas X promoting the new console. Scott […]

Instagram started testing its TikTok-style ‘Reels’ feature in late 2019, before rolling it out globally in August this year. Now the feature is getting a big boost in Instagram’s latest redesign of its homescreen, with a dedicated tab rather than simply showing Reels content in the app’s ‘Explore’ screen. For artists who are using Reels, this should help their short videos […]

Long before Riot Games started creating virtual artists like K/DA and Seraphine, Japanese avatar star Hatsune Miku was playing stadium gigs. Now her creators are working on a big virtual concert based on her ‘Miku Expo’ tours. It’s called Hatsune Miku Expo 2021 Online, and will be a free show with at least 10 songs. […]

Alright, it’s officially Christmas season now – don’t @ us, the John Lewis ad is out – and Amazon Music is going in strong with its now-annual lineup of original tracks. This year it’s got Justin Bieber doing ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’; Mary J. Blige doing ‘Last Christmas’; and Carrie Underwood doing a brand new song called ‘Favorite […]

Games platform Roblox’s music ambitions press on: it’s working with Columbia Music and Lil Nas X on a concert this weekend. Well, it’s a bit more than a concert. There’ll be a pre-show event on Friday evening involving a Q&A with the artist, as well as the debut of a new video for his upcoming […]

If you’re the kind of person who shouts at people who put their Christmas decorations too early, look away now. Dolly Parton is doing a Christmas-themed livestream for Amazon Music… on 13 November. ‘Dolly Parton’s Comin’ Home for Christmas’ will be streamed live on Amazon Music’s Twitch channel and within its app, with a performance and […]

UMG’s Def Jam Recordings is teaming up with iHeartMedia and podcasting firm Double Elvis Productions for a new show that will feature emerging artists from the label. ‘Here Comes the Break’ is more interesting than just a showcase though: it’s a “serialised hip-hip music breaking podcast… that fuses a fictional scripted narrative with real artist […]

Fangage is the startup founded by Dutch DJ and producer Sam Feldt: a fan platform for musicians and influencers to promote their music and content; communicate with fans; sell merchandise; and build audiences. Founded in 2016, it’s been used by clients in the dance world including Oliver Heldans, Laidback Luke and Armada Music, attracting hundreds of […]

There’s a mini-flurry of augmented reality experimentation going on in music at the moment, outside the big platforms (Instagram, Snapchat) and not always by artists on major labels. RJ Thompson, for example, released his new album ‘Lifeline’ last week, complete with what’s being described as “the world’s first ever-evolving AR designed album artwork”. The idea: […]

Craig David all over your… desk? The British star’s latest collaboration, with KSI, has been turned into an augmented reality video for online brand LadBible. Fans can visit the microsite on their smartphones (here’s the link) and then point their camera at a space around them to pop up virtual versions of the pair performing […]

Music marketing platform Linkfire has announced its latest data deal, with YouTube Music. “In addition to seeing how many of your link visitors click through to YouTube and YouTube Music, you’ll be able to see how those clicks translate into streams on the platforms,” promised the company. It makes YouTube the latest service to sign on […]

Spotify is testing a new feature that will enable artists and labels to boost specific tracks in the recommendation algorithms for its radio and autoplay features – if they agree to a “promotional” (i.e. lower) royalty rate for those streams. Autoplay is the feature that automatically plays other songs when you reach the end of an […]

Startup Endel made its name with technology generating AI music to suit people’s moods and activities. Now it has announced a partnership with a high-profile human artist: Grimes. They’ve worked together on an ‘AI Lullaby’ that will be featured in Endel’s iOS and Mac apps until 23 December. Later this year it will also be […]

2020 has been a really interesting year for Universal Music Group’s various arms in China. From local signings like Linong Chen and Sunnee to a joint label with Tencent Music, via gaming songwriting camps and the small matter of $1.2m of Taylor Swift album sales in a few days on NetEase Cloud Music. Weaving these strands into the overall story of UMG’s China strategy […]

If 10 episodes of YouTube documentary about Justin Bieber weren’t enough for you earlier this year, we have some good news. The video service is following up its ‘Justin Bieber: Seasons’ series with a one-off 30-minute doc called ‘Justin Bieber: Next Chapter’. Fans can expect “an exclusive look at his life today – everything from […]

Sam Smith’s new album ‘Love Goes’ is out later this month, and they’re pulling out plenty of promotional stops around its release, including new single ‘Diamonds’. The latter is getting a web-based augmented reality music video in partnership with Spotify. Dreamed up by agency Powster, it gets fans to scan an image to pop up […]

Pretty much every major streaming service now has some kind of program to identify and promote emerging artists: Spotify’s Radar, Apple Music’s Up Next, Amazon Music’s Breakthrough, Deezer’s Next, YouTube Music’s Artist on the Rise… Two of them have announced their latest picks this week. Spotify has made teenage rapper The Kid Laroi its third Radar […]

It sounds like a supergroup for the ages, doesn’t it? But what George Michael, Prince and John Lennon have in common is that their estates and labels have been working with TikTok to bring their legacies into the world of short video clips. A licensing deal for Prince’s music plus an official TikTok profile came in […]

More evidence for the growing ambition of online concerts for bigger artists comes with Kylie Minogue’s ‘Infinite Disco’ event on 7 November. It’s the latest event from Driift, the company launched earlier this year by ATC Management, with investment from Beggars Group. The 50-minute show will blend tracks from Kylie’s new album ‘Disco’ with older hits, […]

We reported earlier this month on plans for Billie Eilish’s first livestream, the $30 ‘Where Do We Go? The Livestream’ concert on 24 October. Startup Maestro is the technical partner, and it’s been talking about a new partnership with ecommerce firm Shopify that will see merch sold during the event. Open to all artists using the platform, it […]

Apple Music is pushing all the boats out for the release of Bruce Springsteen’s 20th studio album ‘Letter to You’. There’ll be a week of radio shows on its new Apple Music Hits station, plus an album listening party and live Q&A, and a documentary on the Apple TV+ service, which drops on Friday alongside […]

Live radio is already one of Apple Music’s big differences to its streaming rivals. Now it’s trying out MTV-style music television, although for the most part without the VJs. Instead, Apple Music TV is a 24-hour channel broadcasting music videos via the Apple Music and Apple TV apps, as well as on the web. For now, it’s […]

Digital marketing agency Motive Unknown is spinning off a new company called Positive Subversion, which it describes as a “project and label management consultancy for independently-minded artists, managers and record labels”. It’s a partnership with former !K7 exec Siofra McComb, and has already signed up Run The Jewels (already a Motive Unknown client) and label Innovative […]

Electronic music label Monstercat has always been keen to get its music into games, with a series of inventive licensing deals and partnerships. Its latest is with Amanotes, the Vietnamese developer of ‘hyper-casual’ mobile games. The deal has already made some of Monstercat’s catalogue available within Amanotes’ biggest mobile game, Tiles Hop (350m downloads and counting) […]

Spotify’s now traditional end-of-year Wrapped promotion sees artists and listeners alike flooding social media with branded graphics on their stats. Now the streaming service is extending that idea for artists (and podcasters) with a feature called ‘Promo Cards’. It’s an online tool that they can use to create promotional graphics for songs, albums and artist […]

The ‘will streaming kill radio’ debate rumbles on, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet: radio airplay remains important for many artists, and tracking it globally remains a challenge. We’ve written about startups like World Airplay Radio Monitor (Warm) in the past, and now there’s a new contender: Maltese startup Radio Tools. It’s analysing the music played on more […]

Last month we wrote about the plans to hold an album launch party for artist Ava Max in gaming platform Roblox. So how did that go? Well, according to the public stats, the ‘Ava Max Heaven & Hell Launch Party’ has generated more than 2.4m visits from Roblox players, with nearly 49,000 people marking it as a favourite. […]

In August, Dua Lipa launched her #DuaVideo challenge on TikTok, inviting fans to submit videos based on makeup, animation or dance using her ‘Levitating’ single. The promise was that the best creators would make it into a music video for the track. TikTok says that the contest generated more than 150k videos which were watched more […]

We knew that Tidal and Facebook’s Oculus were working together on plans for some virtual reality concerts. Now we know who’s playing the first one: Charli XCX, who’ll be performing within the Oculus Venues app this Friday (9 October). It’s the first of a series of six concerts organised by the companies, each of which will see […]

Deviate Digital are seeking a PPC & Social Media Advertising Specialist to join their growing team based at Tileyard Studios in Kings Cross, London.  Deviate Digital was founded by Sammy Andrews in 2017 and has been named a leading digital advisory agency to the entertainment industry by the Sunday Times. Their client list includes internationally […]

In February this year, Spotify launched a beta ‘Songwriter Pages’ feature offering more visibility for songwriters on its service, including their own profile pages and playlists of recordings of their works. Today, it’s expanding that with video on some of those pages. Songwriters Mike Dean, Raye and Cautious Clay are the first to get the treatment, with videos in their ‘Written By’ […]

Channels like ChilledCow and Chillhop Music can do it. Hollywood star Will Smith can do it. Even Pepsi can do it. So why can’t Four Tet? He can! The ‘it’ in question being ‘looping lo-fi chillout music streams on YouTube’ of course. Electronic artist Four Tet has what appears to be a 12-hour loop that began streaming on his YouTube channel […]

It’s about to turn 25 years since the release of Oasis’s second album ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’, which several members of our editorial team are in firm age-related denial about. The band remains on hiatus thanks to ongoing tensions between its founding brothers, but celebrations are afoot on YouTube. This Friday (2 October) there’s […]

Korean music company SM Entertainment has announced a partnership with Marvel Entertainment, with K-Pop group SuperM first to benefit – just in time for the release last Friday of their debut album ‘Super One’. There’s a range of dual-branded merchandise available from the SuperM online store: t-shirts, hats, luggage stickers, and special packages with the album and various […]

Well, it sort of has, and sort of hasn’t. We’ll explain. Last week we reported on the marketing campaign around Jennifer Lopez and Maluma’s new singles ‘Pa Ti’ and ‘Lonely’, including a #PatiChallenge on TikTok launched with influencer Charli D’Amelio. Her video has been watched 24.4m times so far, but videos using the challenge’s hashtag have racked […]

The latest external playlist curator getting some love from Apple Music is independent dance label Defected Records, including its Glitterbox brand. It’s providing Apple Music with some exclusive DJ mixes and live sets, kicking off with a selection including sets from Ibiza in 2019 (Roger Sanchez, Gorgon City, Sam Divine) and from the recent Glitterbox Virtual […]

The final day of Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference had a practical focus on music marketing, with two panels of experts offering their advice. First was a ‘tips from the top’ session picking the brains of Sarah Ismail (regional marketing director, Greater China and South East Asia, Warner Music Group), Negla Abdela (head […]

Amazon’s livestreaming video platform Twitch was already looking to do more with music before Covid-19 struck, but the pandemic has fuelled a moment where lots of musicians are also suddenly keen to do more with Twitch – and livestreaming more generally. At Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference this week, Twitch’s VP of music […]

Can you make money from livestreamed music performances on YouTube? Japanese artist Reol certainly did: to the tune of $130k. YouTube’s director of Black music and culture Tuma Basa revealed the figure in his appearance at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference yesterday alongside colleague T. Jay Fowler, director of product management. Reol’s livestream […]

One of the K-Pop groups that have been smashing down global barriers recently is Blackpink, who you can expect to see splashed over many digital platforms in the coming week ahead of their new album’s release on 2 October. Two examples today: Blackpink have launched an ‘enhanced album’ playlist on Spotify, complete with some videos of Jisoo, […]

The new mobile game for K-Pop stars BTS has gone live. Netmarble’s BTS Universe Story was made available for Android and for iOS overnight, and is the band’s second foray into mobile gaming following last year’s BTS World. As we recently reported, BTS Universe Story is about tapping the BTS Army’s creativity: creating their own animated stories set in […]

Jennifer Lopez and Maluma have just released a pair of singles together: ‘Pa Ti’ and ‘Lonely’, and like a growing number of artists, they unveiled the music videos in a YouTube premiere, yesterday. However, they also held an afterparty (a #PaTiAfterParty in hashtag form) which saw J-Lo and Maluma chatting about the collaborations, promoting their upcoming movie […]

Gaming platform Roblox has more than 150 million monthly active users, and its head of music recently told Music Ally how keen the company is to work with artists and labels. Now we’ve got one of the first examples: pop artist Ava Max is holding an album launch party in Roblox later today (25 September). Atlantic Records […]

The latest distributor to announce a partnership with TikTok is TuneCore, which hopes its latest promotion will tempt more artists into putting their music on the social app. Between 22 and 29 September, TuneCore artists can upload a track to TikTok for free. This follows the deal signed with TikTok by TuneCore’s parent company Believe in July, […]

Artist Amanda Palmer has always been eager to explore new ways of connecting with her fans. The latest example is a weekly podcast, The Art of Asking Everything. It launches on 29 September with 10 episodes already lined up, and like some of the most popular artist podcasts (Jessie Ware, George Ezra etc) it will […]

BTS are no strangers to the gaming world, having starred in their first mobile game BTS World last year, with a follow-up (BTS Universe Story) about to launch. Now the K-Pop stars are heading to one of the biggest, buzziest games of all: Fortnite. This Friday (25 September) they’ll be premiering a new “choreography version” music […]

U2 are the latest heritage artist to be getting their archive of music videos spiffed up for modern-day viewers online. The band’s YouTube channel is relaunching as part of a collaboration between UMG’s Island Records, Interscope, UMe and UMC divisions and YouTube, with plans to spend the next year releasing remastered HD versions of U2’s music […]

Sure, you may like round-the-clock streams of lo-fi hip-hop on YouTube from channels like ChilledCow and Chillhop Music, but wouldn’t it be nice if their animated backgrounds were more branded? And in fact, wouldn’t the music be nicer if it had a few more lyrics about fizzy drinks? Fear not: Pepsi has you covered. It […]

As the physical live-music lockdown stretches on, artists are finding new spins on livestreaming. The latest example is Rufus Wainwright, who’s kicking off his ‘Rufus-Retro-Wainwright-Spective!’ series of streams in October. He’s going to perform each of his nine studio albums in chronological order, splitting each into two broadcasts (corresponding to ‘sides’ in a vinyl stylee). […]

Classical musician Wojtek released his album ‘Atmosphere’ in July, with fans made aware that it was produced and written ‘carbon neutrally’. Now he’s launched a website explaining how, with infographics showing how carbon emissions were neutralised during the making of the album, as well as some of the other ways Wojtek is trying to balance his environmental […]

Apple has a history of music-related livestreams: for example the broadcasts of its London iTunes-branded concerts back in the day. There’s something interesting happening this year around livestreams and artists though. We wrote about Apple Music’s virtual listening party for Victoria Monét in August, and now it’s repeating the trick for country star Keith Urban. 1,000 of […]

K-Pop stars BTS are already one of the big success stories of lockdown livestreams: their ‘Bang Bang Con’ concert in June pulled in 756,000 paying customers. Now they’re following it up with an even more ambitious event. ‘Map of the Soul ON:E’ will take place on the weekend of 10-11 October, with two broadcasts. However, […]

Spotify has been showing artists’ upcoming tour dates on their profiles for years, although data on how effective those listings are at selling tickets is scarce. With the live industry still shut down in many parts of the world due to Covid-19, the streaming service is taking the logical step of adding listings for livestream […]

A new tool to help managers and artists research Spotify playlists appears to be picking up some steam. PlaylistSupply was launched by a manager, Noah Motion, as a way for his peers to search for Spotify playlists relevant to their artist’s genre (or other search keywords), see their public data, and find contacts – email addresses included – for […]

A music industry trend isn’t a proper trend until it gets its own awards ceremony, right? If so, livestreams are graduating to the Big Trends league, because LiveXLive has announced plans for ‘The Lockdown Awards’ this October to “honour artists and entertainers who create content for fans amidst the pandemic”. Categories include Best Virtual Festival; Best Show […]

Kidd Keo is a Spanish hip-hop artist signed to Warner Music Latina, and now the label has launched an official mobile game for his new album ‘Back To Rockport’. Released for iOS and Android, Back To Rockport – The Game is an endless-runner game in the same vein as app hits Temple Run and Subway Surfers. […]

For any aspiring filmmaker, the chance to have their work soundtracked by composer Hans Zimmer would be a dream come true. Now it will come true for five people. Zimmer has teamed up with Sony Music and YouTube for a contest challenging people to create original music videos for five of his compositions. A winner will be […]

Last month we reported on Riot Games, the publisher of esports game League of Legends, launching a new track for its virtual pop group K/DA. What we hadn’t spotted, then, was a cover of the group’s past hit ‘Pop/Stars’ by an influencer called Seraphine, which was released a couple of weeks ago. The post Riot […]

A moment of relief for TikTok executives: a music story making headlines, rather than the latest revelation about the company’s potential sale or ban in the US. TikTok is getting a “five-day premiere” of the new single from David Guetta and Sia, and it’s a useful pointer to how the app is developing as a […]

The latest artist to get their own Alexa skill for Amazon’s smart speakers is Tom Walker, for whom Sony Music UK has launched ‘No. 1 Fan Music Quiz’. It’s a daily quiz where Walker sets the questions (about his own “songs, musical training and celebrity friends”) and fans test their knowledge by answering them. The […]

Another day, another artist reaching a carefully-targeted audience via an app that isn’t a social network or DSP. Gen Z favourite Declan McKenna collaborated with music teaching app Yousician to connect with his fans via a private livestream and, perhaps more interestingly, via some lessons from the man himself. The thinking is simple: if you use Yousician to […]

Hot on the heels of announcing a big partnership with Spotify, the publisher of esports hit League of Legends is bringing its virtual K-Pop group K/DA back with new music. Riot Games launched K/DA two years ago as a group of avatar characters – each voiced by a real singer. Their debut live performance at the […]

The new Katy Perry album comes out tomorrow (28 August) and ‘Smile’ will be accompanied by its own promotional game. It’s a partnership with computing brand Dell – or rather, with its high-end gaming sub-brand Alienware. The game is called Katy Quest, and from the clip shared by Perry on her socials, it appears to be […]

It seems to be the week for music streaming to meet virtual reality startups. VR firm MelodyVR announced plans to acquire Napster, and now Tidal is making an investment in VR company Sensorium Corporation. It’s not a traditional deal though: Tidal has bought $7m in tokens issued by Sensorium – yes, that’s Music Ally’s blockchain […]

Dua Lipa is the latest major artist to launch a TikTok challenge, but in her case, she’s looking for fans to appear in her next proper music video. The challenge is #DuaVideo and runs for a week, having been launched yesterday with a video by Dua herself. Fans are being challenged to submit clips showing their creative skills […]

In March, BTS launched a new video series online called ‘Learn Korean with BTS’ – 30 three-minute lessons teaching their global fanbase how to speak the band’s native language. Now this has evolved into a physical package developed by the educational arm of Big Hit Entertainment, the band’s management company. The new product includes four textbooks and a […]

YouTube has revealed its latest slate of ‘originals’ – documentaries commissioned by the video service – for the UK this autumn. They include a four-part series about GRM Daily, the Black British music channel. ‘Together We Rise: The Uncompromised Story of GRM Daily’ will debut on 28 September, with interviewees including Skepta, Giggs, Stormzy, Julie […]

Soho’s swinging Carnaby Street (copyright: the 1960s) is getting a new boutique retailer from 9 September: RS No. 9 Carnaby. Otherwise known as a ‘world-first flagship store’ for The Rolling Stones. As part of their wide-ranging new deal signed with Universal Music Group in 2018, the band have worked with UMG’s Bravado subsidiary on the new […]

Generally, if we see a celebrity giving away money on Twitter, we assume they’ve been hacked and it’s a scam (and pro tip: if Elon Musk is giving away bitcoin, it’s NEVER the real Elon Musk…) But here’s the exception that proves the rule: Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion really have been giving away $1m […]

“Hey there, it’s Abel. How are you? So glad you could join me. I’ve been waiting for you. There’s a lot I want you to know,” The Weeknd told us this morning. Sadly it’s not an exclusive interview, but rather a new “personalised generative experience” launched for the artist by Spotify. Its ‘Alone With Me‘ […]

Netmarble is the South Korean company that launched the BTS World mobile game in June 2019, offering the BTS Army the chance to play manager to the K-Pop stars – complete with an original soundtrack album. The game topped app store charts in 25 countries immediately after its release, and by the first quarter of this year Netmarble’s financials revealed […]

If you thought getting concerts up and running again with four-piece bands was tricky, imagine doing it with an orchestra. The classical music industry has been hit for six by Covid-19 lockdowns just like the rest of the music business, but there are also orchestras figuring out alternative, digital models to start their recovery. The San […]

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, musicians offering livestreams have been exploring the different ways to make money from them. Paid ticketing has tended to be restricted to the smaller livestreaming companies, while on the bigger social/video platforms (Facebook/Instagram, YouTube and Twitch) it’s been more about free streams and revenue from virtual item sales and/or merchandise. So, […]

Back in May, we wrote about an inventive digital marketing campaign for the band Glass Animals, letting fans poke around a virtual computer desktop and create stuff with their assets. Now label Polydor’s ongoing campaign for their album ‘Dreamland’ has taken some new twists. Fans were asked to download an app called Trnio, which scans real-world objects and […]

Billie Eilish’s latest single ‘My Future’ has been streamed nearly 42m times on Spotify at the time of writing. That figure may be boosted by the latest marketing partnership between the artist and streaming service: a website called ‘A Letter to Your Future Self’. It encourages fans to “write a letter and send it to […]

Beck released his ‘Hyperspace’ album in November 2019, but now it’s getting reimagined in an interesting way: as a visual album called ‘Hyperspace: A.I. Exploration’. It’s a partnership with space agency Nasa, pulling in mission images, visualisations, animations and data, using several AI technologies (computer vision, machine learning and generative adversarial neural networks to be […]

“Have you been listening to your favorite rappers since Day 1?” asks Spotify’s latest spin-off website, complete with a big red button tagged ‘Prove It’. Proving it involves signing in to Spotify to be told which hip-hop stars you were listening to early. “An exclusive group of fans that have been riding with an artist the […]

Muse’s live shows are famously spectacular when it comes to the staging, so it’s no surprise that the band’s new concert film is out of the ordinary too. Drawn from their ‘Simulation Theory’ tour in 2019, it will be released to IMAX cinemas on 17 August in full wraparound vision – yes, there’ll be lots of social distancing […]

Neil Young’s official archives site is getting rid of the ability for fans to log in using their Facebook or Google accounts. Instead, they’ll be asked to register their email address and a password to access the site. In an article explaining the decision, Young – who’s been a prominent voice in the run-up to this year’s […]

Music Ally is excited to announce more speakers and networking details for our forthcoming Sandbox Summit Global event.    New Speakers mxmtoon, Artist (US) The Future of Playlists Lizzy Szabo, Editor, North America, Spotify (US) Genreless Playlists, The Future of Playlists Tracy Patrick Chan, Head of Music Product & Engineering, Twitch (US) Focus on Twitch […]

Remember the controversy last year when Sony Music India claimed that its artist Badshah had broken YouTube’s 24-hour viewing record with his new video ‘Paagal’? After it emerged that views from Google ads were included in the total, YouTube did not accept the claimed record – and later changed its charts and 24-hour-record calculations specifically to exclude paid advertising views. […]

The music industry is increasingly excited about the potential for ticketed livestreams, but we can’t ignore some of the risks involved too. For example, British band Ride were forced to abandon their concert last night and apologise to fans who’d bought tickets to watch it online, after technical troubles at the venue. Ride: Live From […]

Julianna Barwick is the latest artist to release music through meditation app Calm, following in the footsteps of Moby, Above & Beyond and Kygo. Barwick, who’s signed to Ninja Tune, is releasing three extended versions of tracks from her latest album ‘Healing Is A Miracle’, with Calm getting a 30-day exclusive on the new versions. […]

The Covid-elongated European football season isn’t over just yet: the next three weeks will see the Champions League and Europa League tournaments play out their remaining rounds. Now one of football body UEFA’s key sponsorship partners Heineken has teamed up with dance label Defected Records to soundtrack the rejigged tournaments. They’ll be holding an eight-hour […]

Amazon Music has announced a new initiative called [Re]Discover, which it says will focus on digging into artists’ back catalogues. It’s kicking off with Bob Marley this month: there’s a [Re]Discover branded playlist drawn from his entire career, but also the launch of an ‘Official Bob Marley Store’ on Amazon’s main shopping service, bringing together music streams, […]

Apple Music is working with artist Victoria Monét on “an exclusive virtual listening party” taking place this Thursday (6 August) to celebrate the release of her new album ‘Jaguar’ the following day. The event will be presented by Apple Music’s ‘Today’s Hits’ playlist and hosted by Beats 1’s Nadeska Alexis. According to Broadway World, this is […]

Shooting music videos is possible but challenging within the social distancing measures of this Covid-19 pandemic. The latest example of an artist getting a creative way around those barriers is Noah Cyrus, as part of the ‘A Sony Collaboration’ series of projects. You may remember we wrote about a Nicky Jam TikTok video created through the scheme […]

One Direction and Goldie? Now that’s a collaboration made in musical heaven, possibly. Sadly they’re not working together (yet!) but they have both just got new websites to celebrate significant anniversaries. It’s 10 years since One Direction were formed during TV show The X Factor, and their 10 Years of 1D website offers an interactive […]

Twitch is building on its recent growth of music livestreams by launching its first ever ‘Music Month’. It’ll be spending August promoting some of the musicians who are operating on its platform, including featuring their streams on the service’s homepage and its own official channel. The latter will include a show every Friday called ‘Follow […]

UK firm Shodement has been building its ‘talent network’ since 2012, working on music projects and developing artists – the latter including investment, signing brand deals, booking live shows, managing releases and building fanbases. It also has a creative agency division working with big brands of all stripes, and runs events and festivals. Now it’s also in the […]

Fresh from striking an exclusive deal with Apple Music, the Verzuz battles series garnered its highest viewing figures yet from its latest episode. That’s the one where Snoop Dogg and DMX went head to head in a ‘battle of the dogs’ last Wednesday (22 July). Verzuz posted the stats itself, noting that the battle had […]

This should be received wisdom by now, but still isn’t: getting on streaming playlists isn’t a marketing strategy. It’s certainly part of a wider plan, but putting your faith entirely in getting a prominent slot on a playlist is a big eggs-in-one-basket mistake. And besides, in 2020, it’s all the other activity and your story […]

Ninja Tune-signed artist Actress has launched what we can term a “guess-to-unlock” campaign for new (and free) track ’88’. The British electronic act started it all rolling by tweeting a very simple message on 14th July. “Album on bandcamp in 24hrs,” he wrote. There was some speculation among his fanbase that this was going to be the […]

We’ve already reported on BTS’s successful ‘Bang Bang Con’ livestreamed concert in June. Now it’s been awarded an official Guinness World Record for attracting the ‘most viewers for a music concert live stream’. The official figure is 756,000 fans from more than 100 countries – and what made that even more impressive was that this was a paid livestream, with […]

British artist Lianne La Havas has just released her latest, self-titled album, and one of the marketing elements for it wants to encourage fans to get planting… virtually. The ‘Flowerbed’ website is exactly that: a digital flowerbed where fans can plant a new flower every day. They make those flowers bloom by signing in to Spotify […]

The longer this lockdown goes on, the more artists are finding different ways to experiment with the format of livestreams – and also to charge for them. Country star Tim McGraw is the latest example. He’s going to be holding a “unique all-live album premiere” event on 22 August, broadcasting from Nashville to tie in with […]

British artist Ellie Goulding has a pair of new videos out for her new tracks ‘Brightest Blue’ and ‘New Heights’. They’re the result of a partnership between label Polydor and Vevo for the latter’s ‘Official Live Performance’ series, but what’s notable is their use of ‘XR’ technology, which blends camera footage with computer-generated content in […]

Metalcore band Underoath are the latest artist to do something more involved with livestreaming. Underoath: Observatory is a series of three concerts, each of which will see the band playing one of their albums in full, from a venue in Florida. Tickets for each show cost $15, while a three-show ticket bundle is $45. However, each […]

Amazon already owns one of the key livestreaming video platforms, in Twitch. Now its Amazon Web Services division is launching something that could help brands (perhaps including labels) to create their own-brand versions of Twitch. It’s called Amazon Interactive Video Services (IVS) and is described as “a managed live streaming solution that is quick and easy to […]

We’ve reported on Linkfire’s various partnerships to get conversion (or ‘attribution’) data from streaming services, so that music marketers can tell not just that fans tapped or clicked on smart links, but whether they streamed, followed etc afterwards. But this isn’t an idea confined to one smart-links company. Feature·fm has just announced the addition of […]

Pitbull is the latest artist looking to do more with livestreaming and video content, and he’s found a partner to help. He’s working with US firm LiveXLive in a “multi-year revenue-share content partnership” that will see Pitbull play a series of pay-per-view livestream concerts, while also launching a video podcast (or ‘vodcast’). The latter will […]

Apparently rumours on Twitter have suggested that music artist Jason DeRulo earns around $75k for every TikTok video that he posts. Complex went to the horse’s mouth to establish whether it’s true, asking DeRulo about it in an interview. “I think it’s tacky to say what I do make from them, but it’s far more than […]

Warner Music Central Europe has created a stream-to-unlock initiative to push ‘100Tausend’ (‘100 Thousand’), the new single from German artist Mike Singer which is released on 17 July. Users going to a page on his website pick their streaming service of choice and then they have to play ‘Paranoid’ (the first single from the new […]

Spotify Singles has been combining artists’ re-recordings of their own songs with covers of other musicians’ tracks for some time. Now Apple Music is getting in on the idea with its new ‘At Home With Sessions’. Emerging British artist Arlo Parks is the first to feature, reworking three of her own tracks. As the name […]

Artist Ashnikko’s breakthrough last year was fuelled by TikTok, when her track ‘Stupid’ went viral. Now, for her new track ‘Daisy’ she is prioritising the platform – this time with Apple’s music hardware brand Beats by Dre on board as a marketing partner. That means a music video with prominent placement for the new PowerbeatsPro headphones, […]

If you’re a regular reader of Music Ally, you may have spotted that we have some Animal Crossing fans on the team. We’ve seen a couple of music marketing campaigns make use of the latest version of the game, Nintendo Switch title Animal Crossing: New Horizons – pop artist Alice Chater turning her music video […]

Spotify’s latest campaign to create personalised playlists for listeners is called Soundtrack Your Workout, aimed at people who are exercising. On the new website, they choose a workout length (from 15 minutes to two hours); choose to include only music, only podcasts, or a mix of the two; explain what exercise they’re doing (yoga, running, […]

Veeps! Another new livestreaming startup for artists? Actually, no, this one’s been around since 2017, and was founded by Benji and Joel Madden from rock band Good Charlotte. It’s a platform for ticketed livestreams, and the latest artist to sign up is a biggie: former One Direction star Liam Payne. He’s going to be launching […]

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about livestreamed concerts during the Covid-19 lockdown, it’s that fans relish interactivity: at its simplest level seeing an artist read and respond to comments in between songs. Genius is going further though: it’s launching a new “performance-oriented livestreaming and experiential platform” called Genius Live, with lots of interactivity. Wiz […]

Is there any country in the world where BTS aren’t big? They’re certainly big in Cape Verde: their ‘Black Swan’ track has gone to number one in the country’s iTunes chart. Why are we writing about this? Well, this was the 103rd country where the track had topped the iTunes rankings, breaking Adele’s record of […]

His mammoth Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour might be on hold for now, but Elton John is making a series of archive shows available exclusively on his official YouTube channel. The series premieres on Friday (3 July) with the stated aim of raising $500k in donations for the Elton John AIDS Foundation Covid-19 Emergency Fund. Each […]

BandLab is one of the most popular and longest-established online tools for creating music and collaborating with other musicians, although its parent company has diversified into physical instruments and music media – including buying magazines like NME and Uncut. Now it’s getting into digital distribution for independent artists, with a tool called ‘BandLab Albums’ and […]

During the Covid-19 pandemic, a lot of musicians have been thinking about doing more with live-video platform Twitch. But what should they do? Live performances, DJ sets (even though there are issues here), fan Q&As, playing games… All these have been tried. Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park has been using Twitch to broadcast his actual creation […]

This one is going to get the K-Pop stans roused up. In April 2019, BTS broke the record for one-day video views on YouTube, with the 78m views of their ‘Boy With Luv’ video trumping the previous record-holder, ‘Kill This Love’ by fellow K-Pop group Blackpink. Now the record has been broken again… by Blackpink! […]

Imagine if 2D was four times better, or if 3D was, ahem, 2.67 times better. That’ll be 8D! And it’s 8D that Finnish artist Artem, who’s signed to Warner Music, is exploring with his new music video. We should stress, 8D isn’t about extra dimensions, but rather about a recently-developed way of recording and editing […]

‘Marquee’ is Spotify’s tool that pops up in its mobile app suggesting that people listen to a new release by an artist that they like. In the US and Canada, it’s currently being beta-tested as a paid advertising slot. Now Spotify has launched a new web page promoting the feature itself, including some stats on those […]

In May we reported on Marshmello teaming up with creative-software firm Adobe on a ‘Be Kind’ campaign, getting fans to create a short video based on his new single. Now the company is launching a new contest with Lady Gaga based around her latest album ‘Chromatica’. Gaga is providing her own assets for the competition: photos, illustrations, logos, icons […]

Livestream music concerts can air globally, but that doesn’t mean they have to. We’re seeing a growing number of artists experiment with geofenced online concerts, which can only be viewed by fans in a particular part of the world – sometimes as part of virtual ‘tours’ with a string of performances. Now deathcore band Suicide Silence […]

Music Ally last covered Kosovo-based artist DJ Regard in September 2019, when his ‘Ride It’ track became a TikTok-assisted viral hit. Now the artist, signed to Ministry of Sound, is getting his own casual game, Regard Runner, which can be played on mobile devices and computers alike. Ministry commissioned digital agency The Creative Corporation to make the […]

Instagram has updated its ‘commerce eligibility requirements’ dictating who’s allowed to use its Instagram Shopping feature to sell products directly from their profiles. Good news: musicians are now included. And candle-makers will be waxing lyrical about the change too… “Whether you are a candle business making a foray into e-commerce, a musician selling merch or […]

Last week, we covered Twenty One Pilots’ scavenger hunt to promote their new single, ‘Level Of Concern’, which got fans to track down codes hidden online to unlock content. Which they did much faster than expected. “We didn’t think you would tear through the codes so easily,” the band tweeted. “Should have taken a week but you did […]

Music Ally knows card game ‘Uno!’ best for being second only to Monopoly in the chart of ‘games most likely to cause almighty family rows at Christmas’. What we don’t know it for, until now, are digital marketing campaigns with world-famous K-Pop groups. But yes: BTS are taking over the mobile game version of ‘Uno!’ […]

You wait for a news story about ‘smart links’ for music marketing to come along, then three turn up at once… Linkfire has announced its latest conversion-data deal with a streaming service: Deezer. Artists and marketers sending fans to Deezer via Linkfire smart links will now get data like streams, follows and playlist adds to understand how […]

Music marketing firm Linkfire has announced a deal with Deezer to access data on what music listeners do after following one of its ‘smart links’ to the streaming service. Artists, labels and marketers using Linkfire will now be able to see, for example, whether fans have gone on to play a song, add it to […]

The latest artist sending fans to different corners of the internet to unlock content around a new album is Twenty One Pilots. It kicked off with a livestream (although fans who missed that can check out the ‘START HERE’ YouTube video that the band posted on Saturday). It prominently features a US phone number – 1-877-LVL-CNRN – note: […]

Music marketing platform Linkfire has a new feature that could be very useful for artists. It’s called ‘Artist Bio Links’. According to Linkfire, it “brings together all your promotions in one personalised microsite. Drive fans to your releases, merch, SoMe profiles, tours, and more, all with one shareable link”. The idea is that this will […]

Back in January, we wrote about Show4Me, which described itself as a “music interaction network”. It had raised $13.5m in funding and was offering acts a variety of tools such as music and concert crowdfunding campaigns, sales of music, D2F interaction and even a $1-per-year fan membership model. The company launched an online ticketing option in […]

Rock band Def Leppard hold the record for playing the most gigs in different continents in one day (three: Africa, Europe and North America). Meanwhile, Jeff Aug holds the record for most gigs in different countries in a day (nine: Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria). Now artist Tom Walker is making his own globetrotting move, albeit […]

Canvas is the feature on Spotify where artists can upload eight-second looping videos to accompany their tracks when played in the streaming service’s mobile app. It’s been growing steadily in popularity, and earlier this year Spotify started letting artists share their Canvas videos out to Instagram stories. Now that ability is being extended to listeners as well. […]

12 June is the 50th anniversary of ‘Lola’ by British band The Kinks, and there’s a digital campaign up and running to celebrate the anniversary. A dedicated microsite to celebrate #LolaDay (as it’s being dubbed) will have digital stickers available for fans to ‘Lolafy’ their own photos and share them on social apps. Meanwhile, on the […]

Jayne Stynes, general manager at management body the MMF, hopes that some of the innovation around livestreams during the Covid-19 pandemic will lead to lasting change. “At my most optimistic, I would love to believe that what is happening right now will open up a huge cultural shift towards consumers valuing online content beyond its […]

TikTok tends to get the headlines when a music track goes viral through short-form videos. However, rival app Triller has also fuelled its fair share of hits by artists including Lil Tecca, Calboy, K$upreme, Rich The Kid, Darkoo and Chantel Jeffries. Now you can add Nigerian musician DJ Neptune to that list. His track ‘Nobody’, […]

Last week, we wrote about a livestreamed set by Dutch DJs W&W, for which they had a virtual stadium full of dancing fans created. Now British duo Prospa have put a different kind of virtual environment through its paces: a warehouse for an old-school rave. It was the result of a partnership between Polydor, Prospa’s label […]

We’ve mentioned the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons several times in this bulletin recently, mainly because it’s one of the chosen stress-busters for several members of the Music Ally team. But it’s also a fascinating cultural thing, including the ability for players to design their own clothing and share it for free with the wider community. That […]

British mobile-ticketing firm Dice is one of the startups most affected by the Covid-19 impact, but the company has been pivoting during the pandemic to focus on livestreams. Now its CEO Phil Hutcheon has published an article about 20 things Dice has learned about music livestreaming, which we think has some practical, helpful advice for artists […]

We are seeing more artists embrace the possibilities of voice assistants, led by Amazon’s Alexa music + Alexa. Witness The 1975’s recent use of an Alexa skill to nudge fans towards their latest website. Amazon, too, is encouraging artists and labels to experiment with voice technology more, including through partnerships on its own content features. This week, […]

Earlier this month, we wrote about a marketing campaign for Ministry of Sound that made inventive use of Instagram Stories to create a motorbike-racing game – with fans tapping to avoid obstacles and ravines (i.e. to move to the next story post). Now the digital agency behind that campaign, F-That, is at it again – this time […]

“Dear Stan, I meant to write you sooner, but I just been busy,” wrote Eminem on Instagram yesterday. “text me, ill hit you back” – with an accompanying phone number. And no, of course Eminem isn’t giving out his cellphone number to 30.1 million people on Instagram: it’s part of a marketing campaign involving one of […]

Music analytics firm Chartmetric has published the third and final part of its analysis on Covid-19’s impact on music consumption. The study focuses on livestreams, and the extent to which they boosted artists’ social media followings. The conclusion: yes they did. Chartmetric says that “live streams scheduled by artists from their own channels generated significant […]

Andy Day is a popular children’s TV presenter in the UK on TV channel CBeebies, but he’s also been building a music career as the frontman of Andy and the Odd Socks. The band’s new album comes out today (22 May) through Sony Music’s children’s entertainment label Magic Star, and there’s an inventive marketing campaign around […]

TikTok is not the only short-form video game in town and Triller has been snapping at its heels for some time, making a strong splash in the US and drawing in hip-hop acts in particular. Triller has now landed the exclusive on the video for ‘Come Back To Me’ by US singer/producer/model/YouTube personality Chantel Jeffries. The video is […]

In February this year, we wrote about The 1975’s ‘Mindshower’ campaign, which saw the band create a fictitious ‘digital detox’ retreat called Mindshower, complete with its own website and a spoof video ad on YouTube. Now, days ahead of the release of the band’s new album ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’, the website has reopened to the […]

Polydor-signed act Gracey is promoting her ‘Empty Love’ single with an AR filter for Instagram that plays an instrumental passage from the song which can then be played around with by the user. It works by opening the selfie camera in Instagram so that anyone using it can use an on-screen slider to lower or increase the […]

One of 2018’s cleverest music marketing campaigns was the one for US group Khruangbin. It included the AirKhruang website, which asked fans to input details of their upcoming flights, then created Spotify playlists to match their length, drawing on tracks that the group would use in their DJ sets, as well as artists from the countries under […]

Adult colouring books are a significant part of the book publishing world, with plenty of apps offering this too – usually in the name of mindfulness. Now Sony Music UK is getting in on the colouring action with a new site called The Colouring Sessions. It’s based around album artwork from artists including Elvis Presley’s debut […]

In the streaming age, what is a ‘deluxe’ album anyway? It’s more than just extra tracks and alternative versions. A number of artists have explored Spotify’s ‘enhanced’ playlists format, which inserts videos between the music tracks, for example. And video is also at the core of the strategy for the deluxe version of Lil Baby’s […]

We’re fairly sure Travis Scott made a killing from virtual items around his recent Fortnite concert, although a figure hasn’t yet been announced. One artist that is announcing some numbers from an online performance, though, is veteran British act OMD. Last Saturday (9 May) they streamed a recording of a November 2019 concert on YouTube […]

Zhu is the latest dance artist doing something interesting on Twitch – a livestreamed concert this Thursday (14 May) that will be used to premiere new single ‘Only’. However, it’s part of a wider deal for Zhu with a company called Enthusiast Gaming, which focuses on games and esports – the latter through its Luminosity Gaming […]

“Our goal is to provide the best virtual flower delivery service that can help you tell someone you care, you love them, you miss them, or simply thank them for believing in you. Select a bouquet you wish to share and write your personal message to go along with it.” No, not the latest Silicon […]

It’s fair to say that the Verzuz battle between Jill Scott vs Erykah Badu was hotly anticipated – and thankfully (given the technical difficulties we’ve seen in previous battles) lived up to expectations. It did pretty well in figures too: Scott posted a follow-up Instagram pic celebrating “1+ Billion Impressions” for the event, which saw both stars spinning […]

Last year in Sandbox, we covered the campaign for Finnish hip-hop duo JVG’s RATA/ RAITTI album where they used their links to the world of ice hockey (absolutely massive in Finland) and also Warner Music Live to get to arena level. Now they’ve done something else inventive. On Vappu Eve (the night before May Day […]

We are seeing lots of campaigns having to quickly adapt their planned real-world elements to work as purely online initiatives – and the immersive video for Rita Ora’s ‘How To Be Lonely’ single is a very good case in point. The video was directed by Dave Myers and was made in partnership with Wonderland Agency. […]

Well, the partnership is more than just a tile, but given Garth Brooks’ status as an “avid Words With Friends player” we suspect he’s pretty proud of that achievement. The partnership with games firm Zynga is actually part of Brooks’ longstanding relationship with Amazon. “Under the arrangement, Brooks will promote Words With Friends with original […]

Forget Fortnite: 2020’s most intense battle royale might just be between all the livestreaming-video services promising to help musicians make back at least some of the revenues they’re losing from the concerts shutdown. The latest to join the fray is US startup Yoop, which has created an ‘eSpace’ that it describes as “a new immersive virtual venue designed […]

At the recent superfans event we held with the BPI and ERA, Wicksteed Works’ Jessie Scoullar was one of our experts, explaining how artists can make better use of mailing lists. Now she has launched a separate guide offering musicians and their teams an introduction to setting up a fan club or membership scheme for […]

Ministry of Sound has found an inventive use for Instagram stories: it’s turned them into a game to promote the single, ‘Mightnight (The Hanging Tree)’ by Hosh & 1979 ft. Jalja. The Sony-owned label worked with digital agency F-That to create the game, which involves driving a motorbike through a snowstorm while tapping to avoid obstacles […]

Two more artists have revealed plans for weekly YouTube formats during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Rolling Stones have launched something called ‘Extra Licks’, which will stream past live performances on their YouTube channel every Sunday, using YouTube’s ‘premieres’ feature. The first, focusing on the band’s 2016 ‘Ole!’ tour of Latin America, can be watched here and has […]

Red Light Management – through its Hot Command gaming subsidiary – is partnering with esports company HyperX for a series of online streaming events. It will match Red Light’s artist roster with major esports names on HyperX’s books. The companies have not yet announced specifics of any of these pairings, but it’s another sign of […]

Instagram is opening up its Live feature to allow users to create a fundraiser initiative where 100% of the money raised will go to a nominated cause. There are a number of caveats – notably that fundraisers can only be undertaken for nonprofits and Instagram has its own list of approved nonprofits that any money raised can […]

We wrote earlier this month about L Devine’s inventive ‘URL Tour’ in which she held livestreams on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, as if each platform was a stop on a tour. Now US duo Lion Babe have put their own spin on a digital tour with ‘Around The World At Home‘. It’s based on only […]

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, we’re seeing a growing number of artist marketing campaigns – and even the music that’s at the centre of them – address the crisis. The latest marketing example is from Colombian artist Carlos Vives, whose latest single is called ‘No Te Vayas’ (translation: ‘Don’t Go’). That theme has been adapted for […]

Earlier this month, we wrote about Erykah Badu building her own livestreaming destination rather than using the big social platforms to reach her fans during the Covid-19 lockdown. Now we’ve got some more information about the technology she used to do it. Badu’s partner was a startup called Maestro, which helps artists to create and stream shows from […]

Dance artist Zedd has launched an official Twitch channel. It went live on Saturday with a stream of a 90-minute concert video from his Orbit World Tour. “I’m so excited to relive this show with everyone this weekend, and while so many of us are staying at home right now, I hope that this show will […]

We last covered Gotickety when it launched in September 2018, calling itself the “Candy Crush for the Music Industry” where users of the app play games in order to win meet and greets with musicians, personal video messages from stars as well as tickets/merchandise. The company has now revealed the results of a recent partnership with […]

It’s the 50th anniversary of the release of ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ by Bob Andy and Marcia Griffiths, and label Trojan Records is gearing up to celebrate it in style. It has launched a campaign of the same name, with an emphasis on fans. “Join in the celebrations by uploading a photo/video of yourself along with […]

The first of Travis Scott’s ‘Astronomical’ concerts within Fortnite happened overnight, and it was a big hit with the game’s players. “Over 12.3 million concurrent players participated live in Travis Scott’s Astronomical, an all-time record!” tweeted the official Fortnite account. That means Scott beat the 10.7 million audience for Marshmello’s Fortnite concert in February 2019. The post 12.3m […]

Travis Scott is coming to Fortnite this weekend with his ‘Astronomical’ event. Ahead of the multiple performances, the game has added several Scott-themed virtual products to its item shop. Fans wanting all of them will be spending nearly $35. Here’s how that breaks down. There’s an Astronomical Bundle including two skins (characters) – Travis Scott and […]

How’s your dubstep and UK garage knowledge? If you’re clued in, you might want to tune in for artist Plastician on his Twitch channel, where he’s been holding regular pub quizzes on the genres. He’s one of the DJs profiled in a new Pitchfork article about livestreaming, which notes that Plastician has gone more down the interaction route […]

This Saturday (25 April) a sing-along edition of The Beatles’ 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine will be screened on the band’s official YouTube channel. The film – which was remastered and restored for theatrical and DVD release in 2018 – has never been available on YouTube before. Well, not in an official capacity. This screening is […]

Last month, we reported on Spotify’s announcement that artists would soon be able to “link out to a verified funding page for themselves, for another artist in need, or for a separate initiative of their choice” from their profiles on the streaming service. The new feature – named ‘Artist Fundraising Pick’ – goes live today, […]

This weekend (24-26 April), Warner Music Group is hosting the virtual PlayOn Fest where listeners can “relive epic performances one time only”. Over the three days, past shows from a huge range of acts, among them Coldplay, Green Day and Janelle Monáe (we only picked these three as they rhyme, but there are MANY more) will be […]

British band Belle & Sebastian are turning to their fans to crowdsource their thoughts and feelings about self-isolation and life under lockdown. ‘Protecting The Hive’ is a two-part project where fans will be asked to submit lyrics and song themes and the band will then turn them into music. The first fruits of this is a […]

Earlier this year in our piece about how we worked with Atlanta rapper K Camp to capitalise on the TikTok success of his track ‘Lottery’, we explained that changing its title on streaming services to ‘Lottery (Renegade)’ because the second word was what kids were searching for – thanks to the producer tag in the clip that went […]

Friday saw the first ever Music Ally TV weekly show, broadcast using video-conferencing platform Zoom. Our guests included Rosie Lopez, president of Tommy Boy, and the topic at hand was YouTube. “We’re feeling very optimistic about YouTube. We’re projecting that YouTube could potentially become our number one DSP in the future,” said Lopez. “It’s a […]

Well, in the case of Dolly Parton it’s ‘re-release’ since her “93 Song Surprise” is the digital relaunch of six of her albums from earlier this century. ‘Little Sparrow’ (2001), ‘Halos & Horns’ (2002), ‘For God & Country’ (2003), ‘Live & Well’ (2004), ‘Those Were the Days’ (2005) and ‘Better Day’ (2011) are the six, […]

As video-conferencing app Zoom continues to grow massively for business and personal use alike, it was only a matter of time before artists started using it to make music videos. Take a bow, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, for being one of the first. The band’s new ‘Phenom‘ video was made using Zoom, […]

Instagram is one of the best platforms for quickly drawing an audience for an artist’s livestream, if they have a healthy following on the app. However, when it comes to those artists making money from their broadcasts, Instagram Live is still at a very early stage. This thread of tweets makes for very interesting reading on […]

“Is Trolls World Tour the most important film of 2020?” wondered a piece in the Guardian earlier this week. That may sound like hyperbole, but the main point was that it’s the first big movie of the year that’s going straight to streaming (due to cinemas being closed). If parents aren’t willing to shell out up to […]

Usually the house band on The Tonight Show, excellent hip-hop collective The Roots are using this period of social distancing to work on their YouTube channel. They already have 267,000 subscribers to the channel and 165.3m lifetime views, but the coming weeks will see the group ramp up their original content. There’ll be DJ sets from Questlove, […]

If you’ve been spotting Drake’s new track ‘Toosie Slide’ all over your socials in recent days, it’s no accident. Rolling Stone has a piece explaining how the artist enlisted some popular dancing influencers to promote the single. Toosie, Hiii Key, Ayo & Teo (the latter are a duo) are the influencers in question, popular on TikTok, Instagram […]

Back in July 2016, we profiled a British startup called SupaPass, which had just launched an app for musicians to run their own subscription services: starting at £1 a month for access to their music, videos, social posts and other exclusive content. Imogen Heap would be one of its most high-profile artists. We hadn’t checked in […]

One of the most inventive approaches to livestreaming so far this year came from British artist L Devine, who went on an online-only ‘URL Tour’ when a planned physical tour was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of towns or cities, the URL Tour was structured around platforms: Instagram Live on 16 March; Twitter on 20 […]

Personalised video messages from celebrities are officially A Startup Thing, thanks to companies like Cameo and Taki, where people can pay for celebs to record them (or their friends / family) a unique video clip. Now music/tech startup Encore has launched a spin on the idea for musicians. Its core business is providing a website for events organisers […]

The latest edition of Sandbox went out to subscribers last night and the cover feature runs through the biggest YouTube channels outside of music (although we do add in T-Series for good measure) to look at what they do, how they do it and what music can learn from them all. There is comedy (in […]

Artist Grimes has just released the video for her new track ‘You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around’, which sees her performing the song against a green-screen background. That design decision was actually part of a partnership with internet firm WeTransfer, with the goal being to encourage creatives (and fans) to take the raw footage from the […]

News that Justin Bieber is going to be releasing a couple of albums a week during the coronavirus pandemic may raise your eyebrows, but there’s a caveat: these are compilations rather than all brand new material. “Gonna be putting up some compilations for you guys. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Here is the first one,” tweeted Bieber yesterday, […]

We really hope that means ‘Learn Korean with BTS’ – blame Google Translate if not! We wrote about Weverse earlier this year as part of our report on K-Pop giant Big Hit Entertainment’s latest financial results: it’s a fan community platform focusing on artists including BTS, TXT, Seventeen and Gfriend, launched by Big Hit subsidiary beNX. Now it […]

As you’ll have noticed, livestreams are all the rage right now, as artists look for a way to perform for and chat to fans (and perhaps to find a new income stream) in lieu of cancelled tours and festivals. This Thursday, Music Ally is holding a free webinar called ‘Bringing Live Online’ – kindly supported by […]

We haven’t written about Soundplate before, but it’s one of the companies creating marketing tools for artists and labels: its best-known product is Soundplate Clicks, a smart-links tool competing with the likes of Linkfire and SmartURL, but it also has a tool for creating music-vizualiser videos for YouTube and social platforms, and a tool for […]

Everyone and their artist auntie is livestreaming now, it seems – our RSS feed was overwhelmed by a blizzard of media articles commenting on the trend this morning too. Some of the more notable examples from the past 24 hours include: Charli XCX kicking off a series of Instagram livestreams, patching in fellow artists like Christine and […]

British band Years & Years swiftly set up a TikTok account at the end of last week – in a large part because their cover of 2003’s ‘Breathe’ (by Sean Paul ft. Blu Cantrell) from six years ago was having a viral impact on the app without any push from them. They were able to capitalise on […]

As the live-music shutdown continues, more and bigger artists have turned to livestreaming performances online as an alternative, if not (certainly not in terms of income) a replacement. Neil Young is launching a ‘Fireside Sessions’ series of concerts broadcast from his home. As far as we can tell, the performances will be hosted on his own Neil […]

Melanie Martinez is the latest musician to get the YouTube Artist Spotlight Story treatment: a 13-minute mini-documentary about her “artistic journey and the many hats she wears as a creative”. We were tickled by the phrase ‘With exclusive BTS from her feature film K-12’ in the video’s YouTube description too: that’s exclusive ‘behind the scenes’ footage, obviously, […]

“You can’t get to heaven without raising a little hell darlin’,” is how the website for Kesha’s new promotional game Blessed Mess greets fans, before inviting them to “connect to Spotify, wreck Kesha’s room and unlock exclusive content”. As with other Spotify-linked campaigns, connecting the streaming service means the label (Sony Music in this case) will get […]

With more than 55 million music streaming users around the world, most of whom are paying, Amazon is the third biggest player in the global music subscriptions market behind Spotify and Apple Music. One area in which it has lagged those rivals has been artist analytics: the data it provides artists and their teams on […]

We’ve heard some weak excuses in our time, but suggesting that you “did not believe the playlist was designed primarily for children” when the playlist is called ‘Classical Lullabies’ and has several tracks mentioning children in their title? It’s not the strongest of defences, and especially not when what you’re defending is the appearance of […]

Atlanta rapper K Camp began releasing mixtapes in 2011, before signing to Interscope in 2014, building up a loyal following. However, the release of his track ‘Lottery’ in early 2019 changed everything. The track initially had a slow build through platforms including Instagram, YouTube and Triller, but then a few months later users of TikTok […]

Spotify is launching a new program called Radar to promote emerging artists. Actually, it’s 19 ‘sister’ programs across the world, which in 2020 will feature 36 artists. Those musicians will get slots on Spotify’s programmed playlists – including a dedicated ‘On Our Radar’ playlist – as well as other types of marketing support and editorial content […]

American artist Carrie Underwood has a new sideline in 2020: as a fitness guru. Her book ‘Find Your Path: Honor Your Body, Fuel Your Soul and Get Strong with the Fit52 Life’ came out last week, complete with a deck of 52 cards that help people exercise at home. Now, to borrow a phrase from […]

Music Ally has been covering location-based marketing startup Landmrk for several years now, including its campaigns for artists including CNCO, Ariana Grande and Louis Tomlinson. The startup’s latest client is AWAL act Lauv, to promote the release of new album ‘How I’m Feeling’. The angle is that Lauv has hidden clips of the album’s tracks across the world, pinning them […]

Plenty of artists have launched their own beers and lagers: Iron Maiden, Queen, Elbow, Motörhead and so on. It’s good to see someone sticking up for the more apple-y end of things in 2020 though: British band Circa Waves are launching their own cider called ‘Cider Waves’. There’s also an interesting story behind it: alongside […]

It’s not quite a ‘visual album’ on the scale of Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ or Frank Ocean’s ‘Endless’, but Latin American star Bad Bunny has partnered with Spotify to create what is being termed a “lookbook” for his third album, ‘Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana’ (translating as I Do What I Want). The Puerto Rican artist […]

Earlier this week, we reported on a strong start for K-Pop stars BTS’ latest music video, ‘Kinetic Manifesto Film: Come Prima’, on YouTube. The video was the fifth biggest 24-hour debut in YouTube history, but it turns out it also set a new record in another way. BTS used YouTube’s ‘premiere’ feature to time-release the […]

We have written many times that the DSP thirst for exclusives from major artists has moved away from the album and towards things like videos, live performances and session singles. The new EP from Coldplay suggests a testing of the water as to what an act will give a DSP on an exclusive basis that […]

We reported last week on TikTok’s coup in securing a 30-second exclusive preview of ‘ON’ – a track from the new BTS album – ahead of its official release to streaming services. The app challenged fans to create their own videos for an #onchallenge, and as you’d expect, the BTS Army responded in droves. So much so, that at […]

It’s fair to say that Cash Money Records, whose roster has included Lil Wayne, Drake and Nicki Minaj among others, likes exclusive documentaries about its history. ‘Before Anythang: The Cash Money Story’ launched on Apple Music in 2018. Two years on, and there’s a new docu-series on the way, but this time Spotify is the […]

Rapper T-Pain posted a curious tweet earlier in the week. He claimed that someone had launched the f—ktpain.com website (we can’t put the full title in here as some spam filters don’t like profanities), perhaps to mock or troll him. So he decided to do something else. “I simply purchased it from them and now all the profit comes […]

“Begin your own journey and find yourself in our stunning retreat. Mindshower digital detox puts you back in control. RECONNECT. RECHARGE. REJUVENATE.” No, one of the daleks from Doctor Who hasn’t suddenly got on the wellness bandwagon. This was the introductory tweet from a mysterious new digital detox retreat called Mindshower. Which, as it turns out, […]

YouTube has emailed its music users with an update on how it’s managing artists’ channels. Many now have an ‘Official Artist Channel’ on YouTube, but also their own channels, Vevo-branded channels, and ‘topic’ channels focused on their music. That’s all being rationalised. “If you previously subscribed to an artist’s topic or partner-provided channel, you’ll automatically […]

British band The 1975 have taken a leading role in talking about the climate emergency, as well as taking action to reduce their own environmental impact (for example with recycled merchandise). Now the band are trying something new: they’ll be selling a £15 reusable water bottle as merchandise at their upcoming round of gigs in […]

Pearl Jam fans may well be going out into their back gardens this week and howling at the moon. No, this isn’t about ticket prices for their upcoming tour. The returning band have launched an augmented reality ‘experience’ called Super Blood Wolf Moon, ahead of the release of their new album’s lead single ‘Superblood Wolfmoon’ […]

The British music industry is gearing up for next week’s Brit Awards in London, and TikTok will be on board as one of the event’s key digital partners. The app will be live-streaming the  arrival of artists and celebrities on its official Brits channel, complete with a red-carpet live performance from Lewis Capaldi. The night will […]

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so if you have a partner (or an object of your affections) how are you planning to celebrate? Chocolates and flowers? Furry handcuffs and a glint in the eye? A brisk lecture about Valentine’s Day being a cynical creation of the greetings-card industry? Pfft. All of these things (especially the last […]

It sometimes feels like we are living in an age of permanent anniversaries – where 10th, 20th, 25th and 50th album anniversaries all seem to crash in on each other. For a long time, the remastered or deluxe album reissue was the main way to mark these occasions, but streaming and social media (and the […]

British YouTuber KSI is a social media sensation. His YouTube channel has 21m subscribers, while his November boxing match against fellow influencer Logan Paul was described as “the biggest amateur boxing match in history”. KSI has also been releasing music for some time: his first single came out in 2013, while in November 2019 he […]

Justin Bieber’s new YouTube documentary series, Seasons, is already a record breaker. The show’s first episode was watched 32.7m times in its first week, setting a new bar for the ‘most-viewed premiere in its first week’ for a YouTube Original show. Not that viewing tailed off there: the first episode has since grown to 42m views on YouTube. Subsequent […]

We’ve written about Google’s experimental division Area 120 before: for example when it launched a project called Fundo to explore crowdfunding for social stars, or when it made a co-viewing app for YouTube called Uptime. But Area 120’s latest project is of direct relevance to the music industry. It’s called ‘Demand’, and it’s a partnership with live-music brand […]

Who said Spotify’s premium tier is advertising-free? KFC Arabia has found a way around that, taking over the profiles of three artists in a campaign run by advertising agency Memac Ogilvy. “KFC teamed up with three major artists from the region—Flipperachi, Moh Flow, and Shébani—to place imagery of Kentucky Burgers in their cover photos, bios, […]

The Verge’s headline about Justin Bieber’s latest marketing campaign is pretty tart: ‘Justin Bieber is increasingly desperate for ‘Yummy’ to go viral on TikTok’. Ouch. It refers to Bieber’s Super Bowl campaign with restaurant chain Chipotle, which was heavily focused on TikTok, and videos made by influencers on that app. Bieber launched an official profile on […]

Apple Music is pressing on with its work to sign up external brands and music companies as playlist curators, alongside its in-house editorial team. The latest to join is independent music retailer Rough Trade, which will be maintaining some Apple-exclusive streaming playlists. “Launching as a curator on Apple Music to champion the most exciting new […]

Patreon has snagged another prominent musician to use its platform to fund their work. M.I.A. has launched her page on Patreon, offering fans the chance to spend $5 or $10 a month to support her art. And ‘art’ is the right word: her Patreon isn’t just about music. “I’m doing a Patreon, because I make so […]

Gismart is the company behind music creation apps such as Beat Maker Go, Piano Crush and DJ It. Those apps have, as of December, been downloaded over 500m times. Now American band Judah & The Lion are using the Beat Maker Go app as part of the promotion for their new album. This is all […]

There is a lot going on in this TikTok video featuring musician Nicky Jam and YouTuber Teala Dunn: a motorbike chase, a fight scene, drones and a daring, tracksuited car-park-clambering escape. Published through Sony’s official TikTok profile (that’s big Sony, the overall company, rather than its Sony Music subsidiary) it claims to be “the most epic TikTok […]

A growing number of artists have been taking advantage of Spotify’s Canvas feature, with its eight-second video loops accompanying tracks instead of static artwork. Now Spotify is encouraging artists to spread those videos on social media. “Starting today, artists in the Canvas beta can share Canvases to their Instagram Stories, broadening the reach of their […]

Prajakta Kohli is one of the emerging wave of young Indian YouTubers growing their audiences on the video service. Her channel MostlySane has nearly 4.5 million subscribers, and she’s just launched an original series called ‘Pretty Fit’, which is about getting fit by doing some unusual non-gym activities – tilling land, harvesting sugarcane etc. Anyway, her guest […]

The US Recording Academy may be in the thick of a full-blown crisis following the defenestration of its boss Deborah Dugan, but with the Grammy Awards imminent, it’s still business as usual on the latter front. That includes digital partnerships for the organisation’s flagship event. Buzzy social-music app Triller is on board for the 2020 Grammys, […]

British creative, marketing and digital agency Blackstar London, whose founder Olivia Hobbs spoke at our Sandbox Summit conference last autumn, is expanding. The company is opening an office in Los Angeles, and has hired three new staff, one of whom will be based out in LA. “The expansion of the team and company is as vital […]

“Radiohead.com has always been a) infuriatingly uninformative and b) surprising. The most surprising thing to do next, therefore, is to suddenly become incredibly informative,” explained an announcement on Radiohead’s website yesterday. “So that is what we have done.” They certainly have. The band have launched a ‘Radiohead Public Library’, which they describe as “an online resource containing […]

As part of the promotion for their The Later Years album and box-set, Pink Floyd have just launched a number of augmented reality filters for social media. Rhino UK commissioned WMG’s Firepit Technology to create Instagram and Facebook AR filters based on artwork for releases including ‘The Division Bell’, ‘Endless River’ and ‘P.U.L.S.E’. Fans can thus have […]

Facebook messaging and fan engagement service Sendmate has been acquired by text-messaging firm Community. Sendmate’s co-founder Andreas Mahringer will become head of business operations at Community, with plans to contact Sendmate’s customers in the coming weeks to explain how the transition will work. Sendmate was a spinoff from Record Bird, a music discovery startup that closed in […]

Fans of brandspeak will find much to enjoy in financial firm Mastercard’s latest press release. In a nutshell, the company has commissioned and released its first music single, a track called ‘Merry Go Round’ by Swedish artist Nadine Randle. But as the company prefers to put it: “Mastercard is redefining how people interact and recall the […]

The latest artist experimenting with releasing music through meditation apps is Keaton Henson, the British folk-rock musician and composer. His new album ‘Louise’ Piano’ is coming out through Music Zen, the mindfulness app developed by music-apps firm Gismart. It’s the first time an artist has written exclusive music for the app, although the model has been […]

Bad news if you want to hear the all-new remixed version of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the flesh: tickets to the “immersive experience” in the band’s native Liverpool are already sold out. The good news, however, is that the remix – in the Dolby Atmos format – is also being made available […]

Your Mission. We have an exciting opportunity for a Marketing Co-ordinator to join BMG Production Music in the sales and marketing team based in our new office in Hoxton! The role will be working with the international territories to co-ordinate the global marketing strategy for BMG Production Music.  Your Responsibilities. Create and coordinate the distribution […]

As Drake never sang: you used to call me on my cell phone, late night when you need my… cell phone too, to watch the new video from Post Malone. Yes, fans will need two phones to watch the latter artist’s new video, which is exclusive to Spotify. Essentially it’s the story of a couple breaking […]

2019 has been a good year for creative music-marketing campaigns, as you’ll know if you read our end-of-year Sandbox report earlier this month. If you haven’t, you can find it here: it’s our pick of the best campaigns of the year. Anyone looking for more inspiration for their music marketing in 2020 would do well […]

The latest brand working with TikTok is sports-entertainment organisation WWE, which has created an official account on the social app. However, music is also a key part of the deal, with WWE licensing the entrance themes for more than 30 of its past and present wrestlers for use on TikTok. That means users of the app will […]

The latest act to get into the Spotify Wrapped co-promotion mood are BTS, with the headline stat being that their music has been streamed over 3bn times on Spotify in 2019. Those streams come from 60 million people across 79 countries – resulting in 178.4m listening hours. Reminder: Spotify’s ‘Wrapped’ data covers the period of January […]

With the decline of high-street record stores, not to mention the rise of smartphones, are artist-signing events dying out? Scribbled signatures may pale compared to selfies, but a startup called Qjam is aiming to give signings a new, digital spin. It’s launched an Android and iOS app that fans can use to stream live video of an […]

The latest two artists to get their own augmented-reality camera ‘effects’ on Instagram are Stormzy and Wham. The Stormzy effect has been created by the Firepit Technology team at Warner Music in the UK, and puts a rotating crown of ‘H.I.T.H’ (the initials from Stormzy’s new album Heavy Is The Head) on the user’s head […]

Streaming services are going in all guns blazing with podcasts and the major labels are following suit. In April, Universal Music Group announced a partnership with podcast publisher Wondery to develop original podcasts based on the label’s catalogue, artists and labels. Sony Music has launched two podcast-focused joint ventures, and recently unveiled its US leadership team for podcasts. […]

The game Grand Theft Auto V was released in September 2013, but six years on it’s still going strong, having sold more than 115m copies across various consoles, and with a popular online mode extending its lifespan. It’s also still making musical waves, with the latest example being a new station for the game’s in-car […]

The treasure hunt, scattering of Easter eggs and a good dash of the cryptic is a failsafe in music marketing. It is all a nice way to get the fanbase excited about a new album, an opportunity to test out a new platform and hopefully get some virality and/or wider media coverage in the process. […]

Anyone who has been to an improv comedy show will know that making up songs on the spot based on audience suggestions is often more admirable than enjoyable. But that’s, in a way, what Jamie Cullum is doing with the release of 19 songs, as part of a partnership with lifestyle retail brand Clos19. Each of […]

U2 are the latest artist to ink a partnership with both SiriusXM and its Pandora subsidiary. The band are launching something called U2X Radio, which will include their own station on SiriusXM’s satellite-radio service playing recorded and live music, interviews and other content. There’ll also be exclusive stuff available for Pandora listeners. The news follows SiriusXM’s creative […]

Artists connecting with fans and rewarding superfans has been a trend in our industry for years. Doing that while respecting their digital privacy is… a somewhat-newer trend. Something that’s trying to walk this line is Portes, a new platform and app launched by startup OCL. The app is available on iOS, with Android to come. “Use […]

TikTok currently finds itself in a position that YouTube knows only too well, being simultaneously hailed as a kingmaker for breaking new artists, and a hot potato when it comes to the question of licensing and royalties for music on its platform. Part of TikTok’s charm offensive is partnerships with artists, and the latest example […]

Cast your minds back to October 2018, and a story we wrote about a playlists partnership between Apple Music and Ministry of Sound. The gist being, as Ministry’s profile on that streaming service explained it: “All Ministry of Sound playlists and the monthly Ministry Mix – only on Apple Music.” At the time, we noted that Ministry […]

In October, Spotify announced that it would be testing sponsorship of its full-screen ‘marquee’ album recommendations, allowing artist teams in the US to buy these spots – but only for people who’d already listened to their artist. What Spotify didn’t say at the time was how much this would cost. Enter Rolling Stone, which has got its hands […]

“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” sang Janis Joplin in 1970. “My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.” Half a century on, instead of wishing for luxury automative brands to fall out of the sky, pop stars now become creative directors for them. Which is the long way round to […]

It’s that time of year again, when artists eye Mariah Carey’s annual Christmas royalties-boom with envy, and hope to follow suit with their own original festive songs – and cover versions of classics. But music-streaming services are also on the Christmas bandwagon: Amazon’s program for commissioning new Christmas songs is well known, but Spotify has also […]

Neil Young’s debut solo single in 1968 wasn’t called ‘The Loner’ by accident. He has defiantly ploughed his own furrow for over half a century – and that relates as much to his attitude to the industry around him as it does to the music he creates. He has now announced, in a brief posting on […]

We have several favourite sentences from the announcement of Spotify’s latest brand partnership, with Tic Tac. “The unique event series employs Spotify’s streaming intelligence to target consumers who exemplify the fun and refreshing Tic Tac brand personality,” is one of them. “The interactive concert will intertwine music with the spirit of the Tic Tac brand […]

Indian streaming service JioSaavn has been commissioning original tracks and remixes for a while now, but its latest example takes things up several notches in terms of the participating artists. U2 have teamed up with Indian legend A.R. Rahman for a new track called ‘Ahimsa’, which launches today ahead of U2’s first ever concert in India, […]

At the time of writing, Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ is the 41st most-streamed Spotify track in the UK, which tells you something about we Brits’ eagerness to embrace Christmas rather than think about Brexit and/or our upcoming general election. The rest of the world will be catching up (on Mariah, […]

Universal Music Artists (UMA) is a new Android and iOS app for artists signed to Universal Music Group (and their managers) where they can access data and insights on their music plays on the major international DSPs – Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube are named in the announcement. However, it will also pull in data […]

The reason we can’t mention the website where the latest video from UK-based artist Miink has nothing to do with prudishness, and everything to do with not wanting to get this bulletin blocked by music-company email filters across the world. Let’s just say the website’s name starts with ‘You’ joined to a four-letter word that […]

Some of the most creative music-marketing campaigns we’ve reported on over the last decade or so have involved maps and location. So an announcement of a new feature in the Google Earth service piqued our attention this morning. “With new creation tools now in Google Earth, you can turn our digital globe into your own […]

Last week, we reported on Linkfire’s data-attribution deal with Apple Music, as well as the strings attached which included the stipulation that to get the data, people had to put Apple Music in top spot on their smart-link landing pages. When we wrote our story, criticism of these requirements had been led by Darren Hemmings, founder of […]

Music-marketing firm Linkfire had a big announcement yesterday: it has a deal with Apple Music to provide more attribution data on what fans are doing on the streaming service after clicking or tapping through from artists’ smart-links. “No more guessing about streaming performance and fan engagement,” as Linkfire explained it in an email to its […]

Mince pies are in the shops, Mariah Carey is lurking in the lower reaches of the charts, and Amazon is joining the early-Christmas fun with its latest crop of brand-new festive tracks. They’re part of its Amazon Originals program, and this year the company is promising to release ‘many’ Christmas songs over the coming weeks, exclusively […]

SoundCloud has launched Promote for users of the platform to help them better push tracks to listeners. The self-service tool is part of SoundCloud’s Premier tier for users to assist them in getting their music in front of more people on not only SoundCloud but also other digital platforms. “With Promote on SoundCloud, creators can […]

Amazon’s live-video platform Twitch is best known for its gaming communities, from creators streaming their play-sessions live to professional esports tournaments. But musicians have also used Twitch. One of them is British artist and producer Dan Le Sac, who joined Music Ally at our recent Sandbox Summit conference to share some of the lessons he […]

This article is an excerpt from Ari Herstand’s second edition of How to Make It in the New Music Business: In 2009, I was co-managing one of my favorite Minneapolis bands with my girlfriend. I was actively touring, playing 100+ dates a year myself, so the day-to-day duties were mostly handled by her. The band […]

The latest startup hoping to apply the idea of loyalty schemes to music artists is Boston-based Venu. Its Android and iOS apps are billed as ‘coming soon’ on the company’s website, which sets out how it’ll work for artists and for fans. In the former case, artists will be able to post their news to […]

‘All I Want For Christmas is You’ is Mariah Carey’s biggest streaming hit by a distance: it has 511.9m Spotify streams and 555m YouTube views, for example. The ‘Merry Christmas’ album the track originally featured on is getting the ‘deluxe anniversary edition’ treatment for its 25th anniversary this year, too, while in the UK Carey […]

A number of social-media influencers have been reprimanded by regulators about not offering clear-enough disclosures about their commercial relationships. Now the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has published a guide – ‘Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers‘ – which aims to keep them on the right side of advertising regulations there. It’s a plain-language summary […]

Ed Walker, VP of original content & production at Vevo, used his presentation at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit to explain how to ensure videos on YouTube benefit from – rather than rub against – the platform’s recommendation algorithms. Walker used Vevo’s catalogue of music videos and original content – more than 400k videos in total […]

Lars Ettrup, CEO of smart-links firm Linkfire, delivered a talk at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in London this week on “the joys of attribution”, and how music marketers can better track the journey music fans take from discovery through to consumption and purchase. “With all the channels and influencers who can drive streams, how […]

The debate around digital privacy tends to focus on the biggest technology companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Yet as internet users become more aware of the privacy debates around those companies’ services and devices, they’ll also be thinking more about how their personal information is being used in other ways. Including music marketing: from […]

As a platform, TikTok continues to generate strong opinions within the music industry regarding what kind of licensing deals it needs, and how much it could or should be paying rightsholders. But it’s also generating a lot of interest and activity from the marketing teams working with artists. It’s certainly not the first platform to […]

Music Ally has covered analytics firm Chartmetric’s concept of Trigger Cities before but at Sandbox Summit in London this week, we assembled a panel of marketing experts to talk about the idea in practice and how – or if – it is changing the architecture of their global campaigns. Chaired by Isabelle Ljungqvist, digital marketing […]

Domino’s campaign for A Bath Full Of Ecstasy – the seventh studio album from Hot Chip – was named Campaign Of The Year at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit in London yesterday (30th October). It was one of five shortlisted campaigns that were put to an audience vote and it emerged as the clear winner. It […]

Jamie Oborne is the owner and CEO of Dirty Hit Records and All on Red Management, working with The 1975, Wolf Alice and Benjamin Francis Leftwich among other artists. He was also the opening speaker at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in London this morning, interviewed by our very own Eamonn Forde. “Marketing is about […]

For some time now, Spotify has been showing its mobile listeners full-screen recommendations of new albums from the artists that they like – ‘Brand new music for you!’ pop-ups with a ‘Go to Album’ button to tap. Thus far, this has been a purely-editorial feature, but today Spotify is launching a test in the US to […]

There’s a new Coldplay double-album on the way next month, and it sounds like the band and their team are having fun with the announcement process. So far, the teaser campaign has included a typewritten letter sent to fans (“For the last 100 years or thereabouts, we have been working on a thing called Everyday […]

Music-analytics platform Soundcharts has a new feature: ‘Mentions’. It promises ‘global media and web monitoring’ for artists, tracking where they’re mentioned in three categories of media: ‘music media’, ‘verified media’ and ‘unverified sources’. Artists will be able to dig in to the data by country; traffic rankings; and sources like news sites, blogs and discussions. […]

It’s five years since Pandora launched its Artist Marketing Platform (AMP) tools for artists to market to listeners on the streaming service. The company is celebrating the anniversary with some new stats. “In the last 12 months alone, we’ve seen a 688% increase of monthly active creators on AMP,” announced Pandora in a blog post. There’s […]

There have been several interviews with artist Neil Young recently, to promote his new book ‘To Feel the Music: A Songwriter’s Mission to Save High-Quality Audio’. The latest piece, from Wired, has some stats on how Young’s own subscription service is doing. Young is charging $1.99 a month for access to his Neil Young Archives website, […]

Dance star Marshmello has hit a new milestone on YouTube: his channel now has more than 40 million subscribers. YouTube says that makes him the third most-subscribed-to musician on YouTube, behind Justin Bieber (47 million) and Ed Sheeran (42.5 million). At the time of writing, Marshmello is also 34th in YouTube’s global artists chart, with 73.2m weekly views […]

Universal Music Group is shaking up its ‘college lifestyle marketing program’ in the US, with a new team, and brand, called °1824. The label describes it as “a new marketing, content and experiences team powered by university students and young creatives from around the world”. It’s partly about finding new creative talent to place in […]

Snap and Spotify have teamed up in an interesting way for a promotion in India around the Diwali festive season. The Snapchat app has a new augmented-reality lens designed to be used in a specific location: the Gateway of India monument in Mumbai. “The Spotify lens adds some unique AR experiences with special 3D effects, […]

YouTube is rolling out another feature for musicians with ‘Official Artist Channels’ on its platform. The company has signed a deal with Merchbar which will see artists able to “surface their official merchandise and vinyl alongside their videos… Fans watching videos from their favorite artists on their YouTube Official Artist Channels can now see a shelf with […]

Sony Music/RCA Records UK act Bring Me The Horizon are using their fans’ Spotify listening data to shape the T-shirt design that they can then buy – all as part of the promotion for their amo album from January. By going to a dedicated web page, they log in with their Spotify details and then […]

On Friday, we covered Spotify starting to slowly open up its Canvas feature to more acts and posting a related blog that gives tips on how those using it can get the most out of its assorted features. One of the tips was “try creating a theme or narrative that crosses an entire album” such as […]

The idea of the pop-up tied into an album release is hardly new and often involves taking over a small and recently vacated shop (or the site of a different pop-up from the previous week) and selling a few T-shirts and posters from it, hoping the pop stars themselves show up to gain a bit […]

MBW has an interview with Timothy Armoo, founder and CEO of Fanbytes, where he talks about the TikTok campaign for Decca-signed act Aurora based around her track ‘The River’ which was about sending out “a positive message promoting mental health awareness”. For the #youcancrychallenge, they focused on 13 well-known TikTok users to get things rolling by […]

The Canvas feature on Spotify (where a short video loops on the mobile app instead of just having the single or album artwork) is opening up to more users via the Spotify for Artists tool. Music Ally first spotted the feature at the start of last year – back when it didn’t even have an official […]

2019 is a busy year for British band Foals: they’re releasing two albums: ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1’ came out in March, with ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 2’ set to follow later this month. The new album has its own microsite now, with an interesting twist: new content will […]

Hands up if you predicted that one of 2019’s more intriguing areas of competition in the music industry would be Netflix versus YouTube – in the field of original music documentaries. YouTube’s latest salvo in this battle is ‘How to Be: Mark Ronson’, a feature-length documentary set to drop on 12 October. It’s a blend […]

It’s that time again: Music Ally is starting work on our end-of-year ‘Sandbox Campaigns of the Year’ report, showcasing the best digital music-marketing campaigns of 2019. We’re inviting labels, management companies, marketing agencies and artists to submit details of the campaigns they’ve been most proud of this year, on a creative and/or commercial level. Here’s […]

REM’s Michael Stipe released his debut solo single this weekend, but you won’t find ‘Your Capricious Soul’ on any of the major streaming or download services yet. For now, the track is exclusively available from Stipe’s own website as a $0.77 download, although fans can choose to set their own price as a donation, not to Stipe, […]

What were you doing last night? Music Ally was listening to the premiere of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ new album ‘Ghosteen’ with more than 19,300 other people… on YouTube. The band made use of YouTube’s ‘Premieres’ feature, but instead of using it to debut a single track/video, they premiered their entire album – using lyric […]

Facetune is a popular app among young people who want to digitally tweak their selfies before sharing them with the world. Its developer, a company called Lightricks, is now expanding into apps for businesses wanting to give their own social profiles a boost (albeit not quite in the same way as Facetune). The company has launched […]

Hozier is the latest artist to launch his own podcast, ‘Cry Power‘ although in this case he has some heavyweight backing: from activism platform Global Citizen. That’s a guide to the show’s content: “The podcast series will see Hozier speak with musicians, artists, writers, campaigners about how to take action and change the world,” according […]

Apple’s new iOS software (iOS 13) launched earlier this month, and one of its features suddenly has an interesting music angle. The feature is called ‘Memories’ – it actually launched three years ago, but was updated within iOS 13 – and automatically edits together photos and videos for particular events in someone’s camera roll. Now […]

More artist podcasts? You got ’em! Country trio Midland have launched their own spoken-word show called ‘Set It Straight with Midland‘. It sounds fun too: rather than promote the band’s music, each of the first season’s 10 episodes will investigate a famous, strange story from country-music history, starting with the theft of Gram Parsons’ corpse. […]

At the time of writing, it’s 19 hours since Big Hit Entertainment’s official Twitter profile for BTS made this announcement: “#BTS TikTok Channel Open!”. 19 hours later, BTS’ TikTok account is being followed by 2.2 million people. Their two posts so far have 2.9m and 1.9m likes respectively. BTS are the latest prominent artist to join TikTok with […]

Music-analytics firm Chartmetric has published a blog post outlining some of the findings from its ‘Pre-Playlist Analyzer’ and ‘Post-Playlist Analyzer’ tools, and it makes for interesting reading. The tools can be used to measure tracks’ progression from one programmed playlist to another on the key streaming services, in an effort to understand how the ‘ladder’ systems work, […]

YouTube developing music artists? It’s been at it for a while, with its Foundry ‘global artist development program’, which first launched in 2016 as a training scheme, of sorts, for artists including Dua Lipa, Rosalía, Dave and Mahalia. In April this year it was ‘refreshed‘ as an initiative offering marketing promotion as well as training […]

Artist Lucy Dacus is stepping out of the traditional album-release cycle in 2019, choosing instead to release a series of tracks tied to public holidays and other notable dates. She covered ‘La Vie En Rose’ for Valentine’s Day; released ‘My Mother & I’ for Mother’s Day; and then a track called ‘Forever Half Mast’ for […]

Oakland-based singer/songwriter mxmtoon has built an audience of 3.6 million listeners on Spotify – aided by slots on playlists including New Music Friday, Lorem and Alone Again. Now she’s getting a different kind of support from the streaming service: its Spotify Studios division is making an eight-episode podcast all about her. It’s called ’21 Days […]

If you thought that the succession of remixes of Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ were a *bit much* we’d advise you to look away from your screen now. “PANINI REMIX 1 OF 25 TONIGHT!” he tweeted yesterday. This was shortly before dropping said remix, which features rap star DaBaby. ‘Panini’ was originally released as a single in […]

This story has been written to the soundtrack of gravelly-voiced German artist Ben Zucker, as well as the ‘Ultimatver Party Hitmix’ of his compatriot Sonia Liebing. It’s been quite the listen. Why? Because we’ve been investigating Universal Music’s ‘Ich Find Schlager Toll!’ YouTube channel (translation: ‘I think Schlager’s great!’). It’s one of the projects called […]

With almost 20 years of touring and hundreds of releases under its belt, Anjunabeats remains one of the world’s best-loved independent dance labels. We’re looking for an early career marketing all-rounder to help us write our next chapter!  Working from our brand new London office, just a short walk from London Bridge Station, you’ll be […]

We like Mabel a lot. We’re excited about many of the ways that music fans are sharing their love for music using mobile phones and social apps. But we apologise for raising a weary eyebrow at news that Mabel played “the world’s first vertical gig” for Samsung at “London’s new destination to experience the latest […]

What does a music video made for blind and partially-sighted people look like? Artist X Ambassadors have worked with Microsoft to find out. The ‘audio-only music video’ is for the band’s track ‘Boom’, and has been released as an application for computers, mobile devices and Microsoft’s mixed-reality HoloLens headset. It uses a spatial-audio technology called ‘Windows […]

Sony Music artist Badshah came under the spotlight recently when his label claimed he’d broken YouTube’s first-day-views record; YouTube pointedly didn’t confirm it (and still hasn’t); and then debate ensued about the strategy of buying Google ads to boost a video’s view-count on YouTube. As Times Music COO Mandar Thakur crisply put it in a panel at […]

Major labels buying merchandise companies is an established trend now, from Universal Music’s Bravado division acquiring rival Epic Rights in January, and Warner Music paying $180m for German merch firm EMP in October 2018. The latest example was announced this morning: Sony Music UK is acquiring merchandise firm Kontraband for an undisclosed amount. The deal […]

Well, it’s not so much ‘blocking’ as it is an option for Gmail’s iPhone app not to automatically display external images when people are reading emails. But that in turn will have an impact on some of the technologies used by marketers to track (for example) emails being opened. Not that this is the main reason Google […]

According to Republic Records, Taylor Swift’s new album ‘Lover’ has whizzed past the mark of 3m ‘album equivalent units’ worldwide since its release a week and a half ago. Interesting, since a third of that consumption came from China alone. But we’re also interested in the role played by Swift’s ‘Love Taylor, Lover Enhanced Album’ playlist on […]

British artist Headie One is the latest musician to experiment with an augmented-reality (AR) camera effect in a social app – in his case, Instagram. It’s based on the artwork from his new mixtape ‘Music x Road’: a reflective mask and chest-tattoo that fans can superimpose on themselves for the purpose of Insta amusement. What’s […]

Is Facebook gaming still a thing? After a decade of ignoring Music Ally’s FarmVille farm, we don’t dare log back in to find out what became of our crops and animals. But yes, Facebook gaming IS still a thing: the social network’s catalogue of ‘instant games’ now sits within a dedicated gaming tab on the […]

Are streaming exclusives dead? Not quite, but they tend to veer towards the promotional side of things nowadays: an album will be available everywhere, but (for example) live EPs are fair game for single-service exclusives. Witness Mabel’s ‘Stripped Session’ acoustic EP, which is exclusive to Apple Music. She is also the latest artist to turn […]

Billie Eilish is the latest artist playing a concert that will be streamed in virtual reality. The gig will take place on 3 September in Madrid, and then later that evening will be broadcast in Facebook’s ‘Oculus Venues’ app for its Oculus Go and Oculus Quest headsets. The concert is the result of a partnership with startup […]

After Marshmello and Weezer, the latest artist to launch a high-profile collaboration with video-game Fortnite is Major Lazer. The Diplo-led group have remixed two of the tracks that players hear in Fortnite’s ‘lobby’ – ‘Default Vibe’ and ‘Default Fire’. Meanwhile, the game’s publisher Epic Games has created a ‘Lazerism’ set of virtual items, including a […]

What’s that? Taylor Swift has a new album out? You’d think someone in the media and/or streaming-service world would have told you, right? Just joking: ‘Lover’ is inescapable this week, with a full complement of DSP activations and media excitement for Swift’s first post-Big-Machine album. One of the key planks in the promotional strategy was […]

Amid all the hubbub around the various streaming services’ activations around Taylor Swift’s new album ‘Lover’ it shouldn’t be forgotten that she’s one of the artists still capable of shifting a LOT of album sales. Variety has the scoop on how ‘Lover’ is doing, courtesy of a chat with Republic Records’ Monte Lipman. “The anticipation of […]

As Facebook has continued to sign music-licensing deals that include Instagram, so artists and labels have been thinking about what more they can do with music and videos on the popular social app. Mark Ronson is the latest example of an artist to benefit: his ‘Pieces of Us’ track with King Princess is getting an […]

When Marshmello played a concert in the game Fortnite earlier this year, he pulled a virtual crowd of 10.7 million people. Korn won’t have expected that scale of audience for their own virtual in-game shows yesterday, but the move shows that in the wake of the Marshmello success, other games and other artists are exploring the […]

When we wrote last week about YouTube’s plans to host a live online event with Taylor Swift for the release of her new album ‘Lover’, we pointed out that other streaming services would be doing their own activations around the release. Spotify revealed its plans yesterday: a playlist called ‘Love, Taylor: The Lover Enhanced Album’. It’s starting […]

We’re used to companies like Spotify building pop-up installations for artists: Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish and Aya Nakamura have all got the pop-up treatment from the streaming service. Now US telco Verizon is getting in on the act. This weekend it will host ‘This is Shawn’ in New York, as part of its partnership with […]

Taylor Swift’s new album ‘Lover’ drops on 23 August, and she has teamed up with YouTube for a live-streamed event the day before called ‘Lover’s Lounge (Live)’. It’ll see Swift performing a new track from the album, taking part in a Q&A, and plugging her collaboration with Stella McCartney on a new clothing range. At […]

In early October 2018, Spotify launched a version of its analytics for podcasters, offering data on their listeners, ‘starts’ and streams – in beta. Now the tool is coming out of beta, and is thus available to anyone distributing their podcast through Spotify. More than 100k podcasts are already accessing the data through its beta, Spotify […]

We’ve heard regular praise for Apple Music’s analytics tools since they launched in 2018 as a beta version. Now the dashboard is coming out of beta and is open to all artists. Also new: there’s an iPhone app for the service alongside its website, matching the strategy adopted by Spotify for its own analytics. That rivalry […]

Debate surrounds what the first music video actually was, but by the 1970s these “pop promos” had become the playthings of the biggest acts in the world while by the 1980s, after the arrival of MTV, they were the biggest weapons in the promotional arms race for everyone. All the arrival of YouTube in 2005 […]

Artists using the Bandzoogle platform to create their own websites can now offer premium subscriptions to their fans. The new feature launched this week, and enables artists to put content including blog posts, music, videos, photos and merchandise behind their new paywall, with tools to email subscribers included. Bandzoogle also says it will provide analytics on each […]

Given the sweat Slipknot must work up during a performance, you wouldn’t catch us putting our nose anywhere near one of the band’s famous masks. Virtually, however… The latter is what fans can do now, courtesy of a set of Facebook Camera effects. There are 10 masks to try: nine based on the latest ones […]

There’s a healthy debate about the extent to which labels can make a track ‘go viral’ on TikTok, versus simply piling in to capitalise on the effect when this happens organically. Agency The Influencer Marketing Factory has published an interesting case study that falls in to the former category, however. It was hired by Universal […]

The launch of a smartphone app for fans to create and share their own videos with Ed Sheeran’s music (legally!) forming the soundtrack should be big news. But it seems that the Ed No. 6 app is only available in Australia for now. It’s been launched by Warner Music Australia for Android and iOS smartphones, with […]

Want a recipe to make a big splash with a music video on YouTube in 2019? Well, you could be BTS or Taylor Swift; you could buy a shedload of Google Ads; or you could round up a bunch of the biggest Latin American artists of the moment for a mega-collaboration. The latest example of Option […]

Ed Sheeran is big for streams, sales, socials, concert audiences… and now he’s big on TikTok too. To be specific, Sheeran has launched a challenge on that social app for his latest track, the Khalid-featuring ‘Beautiful People’. Fans are being invited to upload videos celebrating the beautiful people in their lives, using the hashtag #BeautifulPeople […]

Calm is becoming quite the place for artists to release their music. The meditation app got an exclusive on Moby’s new album ‘Long Ambients 2’ in March this year, then earlier this month Sigur Rós launched a ‘Liminal Sleep’ playlist within the Calm app, also as an exclusive. Three makes a trend: electronic trio Above & Beyond are […]

Our Behind The Campaign feature in the latest issue of Music Ally’s Sandbox report covers the campaign for Brooklyn-based indie rock band Charly Bliss’s new album, Young Enough, which came out in May. The central component of the campaign was the launch of CBTV, a round-the-clock MTV-style “station” that created multiple pieces of content that […]

If you’re not Indian, there’s a strong chance you haven’t played Antakshari. It’s a game played at parties where someone sings the first verse of a song. Whatever the last syllable is, the next person has to sing the first verse of another song beginning with that syllable. And so on. Anyway, the reason we’re […]

“The 1975 are being their cryptic selves and have deactivated all of their social media accounts as of Wednesday,” reported Billboard yesterday. Yet as of Thursday morning when Music Ally is writing this bulletin, the band’s Twitter, Instagram and Facebook profiles are all up and running again. If you’re thinking this is part of a campaign for some new music from […]

The latest musician getting some love – and indeed, some video budget – from Apple Music is Berlin-based artist and DJ Peggy Gou. Her latest music video, for her track ‘Starry Night’, was “produced in partnership with Apple Music” and is currently exclusive to the service. Its release will be accompanied by Gou’s second interview on […]

Deviate Digital are seeking an experienced digital marketing manager to join their growing team based at Tileyard Studios in Kings Cross, London. Deviate Digital was founded by Sammy Andrews in 2017 and was named a leading digital advisory agency to the entertainment industry by the Sunday Times in 2018. Their client list includes everyone from global […]

Fuelled by the recent biopic, Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ has become the first pre-1990s video to pass 1bn views on YouTube. The achievement has been marked by a new, remastered ‘HD’ version of the video on Queen’s YouTube channel, complete with the lyrics in English, Spanish, Italian, French, Japanese, Polish, German, Indonesian Bahasa, Korean, Czech, Russian and Turkish […]

Congratulations are due to independent artist Aaron Smith, whose debut track ‘Unspoken’ has (as MBW noticed on Friday) gone in with a bang at the top of Spotify and Apple Music’s flagship new-music playlists in the UK. ‘Unspoken’ was the very first track in New Music Friday UK on Spotify and Best Of The Week on […]

Spotify is putting out some stats around the latest Ed Sheeran album. According to its announcement this morning, Sheeran has set a new record for monthly listeners on Spotify: he’s on 69.1 million at the time of writing, with the 70 million milestone in his sights. That means nearly 32% of Spotify’s active users (based […]

Warner Music Group has a revamped website for its Warner Classics & Erato arm, which it hopes will capitalise on the potential of streaming for the classical-music audience. So much so, that Warner has built streaming directly in to the new website. Visitors will be able to stream 30-second clips from the Warner Classics & Erato […]

YouTube has yet to confirm this officially, but Sony Music India claims that one of its artists has broken the platform’s 24-hour viewing record. The artist is Badshah, with new track ‘Paagal’ and a video that raced to 75m views in its first 24 hours on YouTube. In a press release, Sony hailed the video for “dethroning […]

Snapchat is debuting a new short-form video show format, and is working with traditional celebrities and newer digital influencers alike. It’s called ‘Creator Shows’, which will be series of 8-10 episodes of 3-5 minutes in length each. Serena Williams, Kevin Hart and Arnold Schwarzenegger are among the traditional celebs on board already, with influencers like […]

The latest guest curator on Apple Music is Gay Times, the European LGBTQ media brand. It’s making a series of exclusive playlists for the streaming service, while the companies are also collaborating on a joint advertising campaign in the UK featuring artists including Kim Petras, Girli, Vincint and Alma, which ties in with this month’s […]

Independent dance label Monstercat has been one of the more forward-thinking when it comes to gaming: witness its partnership with Psyonix, the developer of popular cars-play-football game Rocket League. Now Monstercat is trying a new partnership involving virtual reality, working with Linden Lab – the company that Music Ally readers of a certain age may remember […]

Ed Sheeran and Shawn Mendes are no stranger to big digital numbers. Their latest achievements come from YouTube. Sheeran’s official artist channel has just reached 40 million subscribers, which YouTube says makes him only the second artist to hit that milestone. The first? Justin Bieber: he’s on 45.6 million YouTube subscribers. Eminem (38.1 million), Ariana Grande […]

EDM star Marshmello’s association with gaming is already well known: he’s teamed up with online star ‘Ninja’ to win pro-am Fortnite tournaments, and attracted more than 10 million people to his virtual concert within that game earlier this year. Now he’s testing the waters in mobile gaming too, with his own game. It’s called Marshmello […]

This guest column comes from Tim Heineke, founder and CEO of I AM POP. Social media, the poster child of the internet revolution, is losing its influence to such an extent that even Mark Zuckerberg has accepted the decline of the newsfeed. Is this, as Zuckerberg suggests, simply an issue of users becoming wary of […]

Here’s an anniversary we didn’t remember was coming: 10 years since the release of FarmVille, the Facebook farming game that established US firm Zynga as an early giant of the social gaming world. Music is part of the birthday celebrations, thanks to a partnership between Zynga and country star Trisha Yearwood. She’ll be appearing in […]

Today’s the day that BTS fans get to play the band’s new, official mobile game, BTS World. It’s being released by publisher Netmarble as a free download for Android and iOS from this evening (26 June). As we reported previously, the game puts players in the role of BTS’ manager at the start of their career, […]

Universal Music Group is following in the Spice Girls’ footsteps – not a sentence we ever expected to write in a Music Ally story – by remastering some classic videos for YouTube viewers in 2019. The Spice Girls, if you remember, started replacing their grainy old videos with spiffing new 4K-quality ones earlier this year. Now […]

Spotify’s latest feature for brands advertising on its service is ‘podcast listener targeting’. It launched in 10 countries on Friday: the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. “With this feature, enterprise brand marketers will be able to reach Spotify Free users who have listened to podcasts on Spotify, verified by […]

Virtual-reality music game Beat Saber has been one of the success stories in VR so far. Released in May 2018, it sold its millionth copy in February this year. Now it’s going down the traditional Guitar Hero / Rock Band route of selling music in-game, in partnership with artists and labels. Yesterday, the band Imagine Dragons released […]

One of the features artists and labels have most appreciated in Apple Music’s beta analytics are the ‘heat-maps’ of their streams, showing activity around the world. Now The Orchard is taking the idea and using it in a fan-facing marketing campaign for British grime star Skepta. His “streaming heat map” website is available to all, […]

The late dance star Avicii (Tim Bergling) is getting his first posthumous album release this year: ‘TIM’. Facebook has announced that its Oculus virtual-reality division will be running a premiere of the new album on 6 June, through its Oculus Venues app. “We’re honoured to partner with Avicii Music and Geffen Records to bring the […]

Music analytics firm Chartmetric has a new acronym to shout about: CPP. It stands for Cross-Platform Performance, and it’s an attempt to provide a single metric that measures an artist’s performance across music-streaming services, social media platforms and other digital entities. In a detailed blog post explaining how the new metric is calculated, Chartmetric said […]

‘Growth hacking’ is very much a Silicon Valley phrase: a term used to cover a range of tactics used by startups when they’re trying to build a big audience very fast, in their early years.  Yesterday at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in New York, Vevo’s business operations and strategy manager Greg Duffy applied the […]

Bad news, record labels hoping to create the next ‘Old Town Road’ sized hit by making a song ‘go viral’ on social app TikTok. It’s easier said than done. “To really make stuff go on TikTok requires a lot of understanding. We tell labels all the time: you can’t just take a song and throw […]

US firm Vizu.al has built a client list of more than 300 artists, labels, festivals and agencies with its technology that’s capable of embedding video within emails sent out to mailing lists. Founder Matt Highsmith spoke at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in New York today, showing examples of campaigns that the company has powered […]

Around 62 million Americans are listening to podcasts on a weekly basis, according to the latest edition of Edison Research and Triton Digital’s ‘The Infinite Dial’ report, which was published in March 2019. Another research firm, Ovum, predicts that there will be more than one billion podcast listeners globally by 2020. No wonder music-streaming services […]

An artist’s keenest fans are their lifeblood in the modern music industry: the people who won’t just stream music casually, but will listen over and over again; share it with friends and the wider world via social networks; buy music, tickets and merchandise; and support the artists they love with a passion. At Music Ally’s […]

TikTok may be taking over the western world (in terms of downloads at least, as we reported last week) but its parent company Bytedance has just launched a new app in China. It’s called Feiliao, although TechCrunch reports the English-language version of the name is ‘Flipchat’. “Here are your familiar chat, audio and video calls. In […]

Apple Music has enlisted its latest brand to be a playlist curator: dance-music company The Night League. It has created a series of playlists that will sit within Apple Music’s ‘Sounds of Ibiza 2019’ hub, including collections based on specific Ibiza club brands like Ushuaïa, Hï Ibiza and ANTS. Guest DJs and residents from the clubs are […]

“Do You Need Your Own Podcast?” asks Spotify’s latest blog post aimed at artists. The tone of the article is clearly encouraging them to give it a go, ideally via Spotify’s own Anchor podcast-creation app, which it acquired earlier this year. “A podcast is a great way to establish your personality as an artist and expand […]

YouTube has launched a couple of new ways to advertise on its platform, which may be of use for artists or smaller labels who are lacking the time and resources for creating and editing video ads. One of them is called Bumper Machine, and it’s a tool for creating the six-second ‘bumper ads’ that YouTube says […]

Dance label Anjunabeats wants more of its music to be used by people streaming their gaming sessions on Amazon’s Twitch platform. “Starting today, we’ve made 350+ tracks available to soundtrack your @Twitch livestream!” tweeted the label earlier this week. “Throw down without fear of being muted with our playlist of Twitch-ready tracks here.” That’s a link to Spotify […]

Country star Maren Morris is the latest artist to get an ‘Artist Spotlight Story’ from YouTube. It debuted on 10 May: a 15-minute mini-documentary that tracks Morris’ journey from “from her early days singing in honky-tonks, to becoming a songwriter in Nashville, to climbing the charts and breaking new ground in country music as a Grammy-winning performing […]

Musicians who are breaking through should be aware of any skeletons lurking in the cupboard of their past social-media posts, according to Andy Varley from music company Insanity Group. “In a generation where more and more artists are growing up through social media, you might have used Twitter as a conversational playground discussion platform as […]

The latest label exploring the crossover between music and esports is 777 Music, which has launched its own esports division. The company says it’s keen to explore the potential for genres beyond electronic-music to reap the rewards of pro-gaming partnerships. It has launched an online community for music and gaming fans, and is setting up […]

The new Madonna album, Madame X, is out next month but leads singles ‘Medellín’ and ‘I Rise’ have not exactly set the charts alight. Which will make the set up to the album that little bit trickier. Perhaps as part of an accelerated media campaign, Madonna’s team has been talking to Billboard about the use of new […]

There’s something we missed in Facebook’s raft of announcements at its f8 developer conference earlier this week. The company is “opening Instagram to the entire Spark AR creator and developer ecosystem”. What’s that? Spark AR Studio is Facebook’s tool for developers to build augmented-reality content, thus far mainly focused on its Facebook Camera feature. Now, that’s fully […]

It’s often assumed that you can’t make money from any ‘skills’ (the smart-speaker equivalent of apps) for voice assistants like Alexa. Actually, Amazon launched a feature called ‘in-skill purchasing’ in the US last year to enable exactly that. Now the feature is expanding globally, starting with the UK, Germany and Japan. “Soon, developers from around […]

Instagram wants people to start buying the clothes and accessories that their favourite celebrities (‘influencers’ included) are showing off in their posts. It’s launching a new feature called ‘Shopping from Creators’ next week, with a small group of public figures on Instagram. “Instead of taking a screenshot or asking for product details in comments or […]

Her fans made a sterling effort, but Taylor Swift’s new video didn’t quite knock BTS off their perch holding YouTube’s record for a video’s most views in its first 24 hours. Their ‘Boy With Luv’ generated 74.6m in that period, while Swift’s ‘Me!’ video with Brendon Urie ended up getting 65.2m views in its first 24 hours. […]

British artist Nao has a new video, produced by Sony Music UK’s 4th Floor Creative division in partnership with Microsoft. The video is for Nao’s track ‘Orbit’, and gets fans to put in their birthday to generate a video driven by their astrological sign. There’s more interactivity as the video continues, with fans’ input adjusting the […]

mtheory is seeking a motivated, curious, team-oriented and organized individual to work closely with managers, artists and mtheory teammates to facilitate client success in today’s music market. The Marketing Director will work as a key project manager across all aspects of global marketing campaigns, at the direction of mtheory senior management to execute and implement […]

Philadelphia-based R&B star Pink Sweat$ is the latest artist to get the Apple ‘Up Next’ treatment, following in the footsteps of the likes of Billie Eilish, Juice WRLD, Bad Bunny and H.E.R. The campaign will include a short film (shot on an iPhone XS for some double-branding sparkle) talking about his background and creative process […]

“The experience begins with the opening of an AR portal. Walk through it to explore an augmented cave where you can find and interact with hidden glyphs while still being able to see out into the real world…” No, not the introduction to the latest Pokémon Go-style game. It’s Google’s blog post about its latest collaboration […]

Are you frustrated with the size of your fanbase? Tired of banging your head against a brick wall with ticket and merchandise sales? Unable to reconcile your streaming figures with the number of genuine fans? Then you might be suffering from The Dry Streams Paradox. What’s that? It’s the challenge that a growing number of […]

Bandcamp has launched a new vinyl-pressing service for independent artists and labels using its platform. Well, we say ‘launched’ – its official debut is later this year, but it was announced yesterday along with four pilot campaigns to show how it’ll work. It’s a Qrates-style service that combines vinyl with crowdfunding. “Our new vinyl pressing […]

If you’re directing fans to stream a new track by an artist, what happens if they’re tapping on that link on their smartphone, but are on the free tier of a service like Spotify? That’s one of the questions raised in our latest Sandbox music-marketing report – and answered by Cindy James, VP of streaming […]

Spotify and Pandora are throwing their energies into podcasts… but now so is the largest major label, Universal Music Group, via a partnership with podcast publisher Wondery. The pair have signed a deal to develop original podcasts based on the label’s catalogue, artists and labels. No specific shows have been announced yet, but when they […]

In recent years, the traditional discipline of radio-plugging has been joined by playlist-plugging, with people who specialise in pitching tracks to streaming services’ playlist curators. Now get set for a new variant: podcast-plugging. British radio-promotions firm Blueprint Radio has launched a new division called Blueprint Pods, which it says will focus on matching artists “with podcasts […]

Thomas Hesse used to be the digital-business boss at Sony Music, but nowadays is an angel investor and startup founder (of still-stealthy Jamm Music) in his own right. He’s also written a column for Billboard that may hint at what the latter company is planning. His focus is on the music-streaming world’s equivalent of “whales” in casinos: […]

By all accounts, Billie Eilish’s set at the Coachella festival was a big hit – levitating bed and all. And Instagram has gotten in on Billie Fever by launching a camera filter based on her. Tubefilter reported that it “gives users’ skin a plastic glean and also fully blacks out their eyes, while a strobe-light flashes in […]

2019 is going to be a very big year for K-Pop stars BTS, spurred by their new mini-album ‘Map of the Soul: Persona’. Milestones are already tumbling. The band’s ‘Boy With Luv’ video smashed YouTube’s single-day viewing record, notching up 78m views in its first 24 hours last week. That takes the record from another K-Pop band, […]

Once upon a time, ‘views’ were the big metric that counted on YouTube. Then it moved on to ‘watch time’, but if you want to know what’s next, Bloomberg’s latest article is well worth a read. It claims that YouTube has “introduced two new internal metrics in the past two years for gauging how well videos […]

We’ve already reported on claims by research firm eMarketer that Snapchat’s UK users are falling, under intense competition from Instagram’s growth. Now the company has put out its estimates for the US, and the trend is similar. “For the first time, Snapchat will lose monthly US users this year, with growth expected to flatten in 2020,” claimed […]

A new post on the Spotify for Artists blog outlines updates to the Spotify Ad Studio feature where clients will get access to a new set of streaming conversion metrics that can show how users on the service’s free tier respond to their audio ads. “How many people who heard your ad checked out your music on […]

Actor and activist Jameela Jamil has interviewed Lizzo – creator of some of the greatest singles of 2019 so far – about issues around body positivity on Instagram. Jamil has been using her social media presence to call out advertisers and creators of “quick diet” “remedies” who use body shaming to sell their dubious products. […]

Talking of Snapchat… the social app has created its first multi-player game, Bitmoji Party. It is part of its Snap Games arm and will be one of six planned games – the other five being created by third-party developers and exclusive to the app. Players compete against friends across a series of mini games and […]

OK, it’s only one country, but the numbers from eMarketer are still interesting and tap into the issue of just how sustainable multi-platforming is in social media. The research company is saying this year will be the first since its launch that Snapchat user numbers in the UK will decline, calling it an “exodus” and […]

“Imagine hearing the silky smooth voice of John Legend answering your pressing questions everyday. Or narrating your local weather forecast. Or singing you happy birthday,” wrote Google’s Manuel Bronstein in a blog post yesterday. No, Legend isn’t back on the dating market. Instead, he’s lent his voice to Google’s voice assistant, Google Assistant – albeit only […]

Facebook has published a case study of how artist Esperanza Spalding used the social network (and Instagram) to drum up excitement around her latest album ’12 Little Spells’ – including driving Spotify streams of it. “The roll-out included premiering each music video on Facebook and IGTV, talking to fans through comments and Facebook Live and converting the […]

Position:  Director, UK Sales and Marketing Location:  London, UK Reporting to: Director, International Sales and Marketing   The Orchard is a fast growing company that is leading the way in both the distribution and artist service sectors. We have 42 offices worldwide and are extremely proud of the international approach to the business we take. […]

Pianist Lang Lang likes to have fun with technology: we remember him playing ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ on-stage using an iPad and the Magic Piano app back in 2010, for example. On Friday, he released his latest album ‘Piano Book’ through UMG subsidiary Deutsche Grammophon, and there’s some inventive digital shizzle going on around it. […]

Original content is a big strategic focus for the major streaming services in 2019, as is ‘claiming’ as many rapidly-emerging artists as possible, in terms of creating said original-content for and with them. Billie Eilish, whose debut album ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ is out today, looks set to become one […]

Afrobeats artist Burna Boy is the latest musician to get a ‘YouTube Artist Spotlight Story’ produced by Google’s video service. He’s the first Nigerian artist to be chosen as an ‘artist on the rise’ by YouTube Music, to recognise the way he’s building an audience around the world with his videos. YouTube also provided some stats to […]

Until now, there’s been a clear split within Spotify’s own playlists: some are programmed by humans – the streaming service’s editorial team – and others by algorithms: its personalised playlists like Discover Weekly, Release Radar and Daily Mix. Now those boundaries are blurring: some of Spotify’s human-curated playlists will now be getting a dash of […]

“It’s just green mate”. “What is this???” Fans were initially confused about an Instagram post from artist Jax Jones late last week: it was just a green square. Which brought back memories of Tidal’s launch teasers for us, although the more-recent parallel is the infamous ‘orange square’ influencer campaign for the ill-fated Fyre Festival. This is entirely […]

Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins has become one of the go-to influencers in the gaming world in recent times: Electronic Arts reportedly paid him $1m to promote its new game Apex Legends earlier this year for example. Meanwhile, he’s also firmly on the music industry’s radar thanks to his compilation partnership with Universal Music, as well as his live-streamed Fortnite […]

Have you heard about ‘dry streams’ yet? They’re streams that come without a great deal of interest in the artist themselves: for example, on mood or activity-driven playlists on streaming services where listeners aren’t necessarily noticing who made the tracks. We’ve been exploring the phenomenon in our latest Sandbox digital-marketing report. “Being featured in large […]

Rumours that Instagram was going to do more with e-commerce have been bubbling for a while. Yesterday, the Facebook subsidiary revealed its latest moves. “Today, we’re introducing checkout on Instagram. When you find a product you love, you can now buy it without leaving the app,” explained Instagram. For now, this is based around products […]

What I’ve got you’ve got to give it to your mummy… even if you have to break in to an ancient sarcophagus to do it. Yes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are heading to Egypt to play a concert at the Great Pyramids of Giza later this week, and it’s just been announced that the gig will […]

I Am Pop is one of the startups trying to help musicians and music brands make better use of messaging apps in their marketing. It’s already working with artists signed to labels including Sony Music, Warner Music, AWAL and PIAS, and now the company has a new €2m funding round to help grow its business. I […]

Snapchat has its lenses, Instagram has its face-filters, and now YouTube has its own augmented-reality effects, which can be used in ‘stories’ posted to the video service. They’re a mixture of animated face-masks, hats and sunglasses that can be used in short videos posted by YouTube creators who have access to the ‘stories’ tool – which […]

We are looking for a talented individual to join our creative and independent team, based in the West London office. The Digital Marketing Coordinator role is a key part of the marketing team and reports to the Head of Marketing, working across all releases on the label as well as sub-labels such as NovaMute. This […]

We’re ashamed to confess that we haven’t given that much thought to the artwork for the programmed playlists on music-streaming services. That said, we suspect a fair few of those services haven’t really made it a priority either, beyond ensuring the right artist or mood-signalling image is present with the correct corporate branding. So it’s […]

Position:  Senior Manager, UK Retail Marketing Location:  London, UK Reporting to: Director, International Sales and Marketing   The Orchard is a fast growing company that is leading the way in both the distribution and artist service sectors. We have 42 offices worldwide and are extremely proud of the international approach to the business we take. […]

The Chemical Brothers have a new track out today, called ‘We’ve Got To Try’, which is marvellous. But the veteran dance duo also released another track this week called ‘WGTT15000BPM F1 NEEEUM MIX’ that’s more curious. Not least because it’s only three seconds long (and thus won’t be earning any royalties on streaming services, which […]

Spotify wants its editorial and artist and label-relations teams to work “more in alignment” in the future, at least in the Nordic territories: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. That’s according to Johan Seidefors, head of content, Nordic, at Spotify. He was talking in the streaming service’s session at the by:Larm conference in Oslo last […]

Twitter has launched a new analytics tool for people and companies posting video on its platform. It’s called Timing is Everything, and we think it could be quite useful for musicians. “Timing is Everything displays historical data showing when audiences are on Twitter watching and engaging with video,” explained Twitter in an announcement blogpost. That means whoever […]

The latest artist to benefit from a partnership with location-based marketing startup Landmrk is former One Direction star Louis Tomlinson. He’s promoting a new single called ‘Two Of Us’ with a digital scavenger hunt using the Landmrk for Music platform that the British startup unveiled in December 2018. “I’ve hidden some video clips in hotspots around the […]

Spotify wants its editorial and artist and label-relations teams to work “more in alignment” in the future, at least in the Nordic territories: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. That’s according to Johan Seidefors, head of content, Nordic, at Spotify. He was talking in the streaming service’s session at the by:Larm conference in Oslo last […]

If you’re reading this, Daniel Ek and team, we have another idea for what the existing podcasts ecosystem is missing: traditional British boozers! But UK band Blossoms are here to change that with the launch of their own ‘Blossoms Pubcast’, recorded in the pub in Stockport that inspired the band’s name. “In the first episode Tom, […]

Classical-music composer Ludovico Einaudi clearly isn’t afeared of hard work: he’s just signed a new deal with UMG’s Decca Records to release seven albums in seven months. The project is called ‘Seven Days Walking’, and kicks off with the 15 March release of an album called ‘Seven Days Walking: Day One’. The other six albums […]

This Friday (8 March) is International Women’s Day, which has become something that pretty much every music-streaming service throws its weight behind in some way, particularly curated playlists. Amazon Music, for example, has roped in a bunch of ‘guest curators’ from the artist world this year, and it’s a super selection: *takes deep breath* Jess […]

If you’d asked us who the next music artist would be to work with Fortnite after Marshmello’s recent in-game concert, it’s fair to say Weezer wouldn’t have been our obvious choice. Yet Weezer it is: the band have their very own island in the latest season of the popular game, called Weezer World. Mashable reports that it’s […]

Apple Music execs will have been cheering the Oscars ceremony on Sunday. Not because they all love Sophie from Peep Show (well, not just that) but because another winner on the night has just curated a playlist on the music-streaming service. Double Best-Supporting-Actor winner Mahershala Ali is behind the ‘Represent: Mahershala Ali’ playlist on Apple […]

British rapper Giggs is the latest artist to experiment with augmented-reality (AR) technology. In this case, Island Records has created an AR experience with a rooted physical location: a mural on a wall in Shoreditch, London. The idea is that fans download an app called AR E2 (QR codes will be provided on the wall […]

Pretty much every social-media service now has ‘stories’ as a format, so why shouldn’t music-streaming services? However, Pandora’s launch of a ‘stories’ feature isn’t what you might expect (i.e. short video clips that expire after 24 hours). Instead, it’s a format that blends podcasts with playlists. “Podcasts can tell stories about music, but generally don’t include full […]

German artist Nils Frahm made his name exploring a blend of classical and electronic music, but now he’s making headlines for another reason: shutting down his Facebook page – “the first of many social media accounts I am going to close,” according to his farewell post. “Facebook et. al. have become unwanted companions in my life, […]

The latest video on artist Billie Eilish’s YouTube channel sees her rifling through her notebook: “an audio visual journey into the thoughts of Billie Eilish, exploring the inspiration behind songs” from her new album, according to its blurb. This is actually the first of a new format on YouTube under the banner of ‘mini series’ – three-to-five […]

Twitter is shouting proudly about the popularity of Korean pop music within its community: “With a new global record of 5.3 billion tweets last year” according to a blog post yesterday. Naturally, this is about K-Pop’s popularity outside South Korea continuing to grow, but Twitter is keen to stress the efforts it has been making […]

We knew that more than 10 million people watched Marshmello’s recent concert within video-game Fortnite. Now we’ve got a specific figure from the game’s publisher Epic Games. “On February 2nd, Fortnite had its best event day ever with 10.7 million players showing up for the Marshmello concert,” it told The Verge. It’s interesting to note how […]

We’ve written a fair bit about the use of bots to automatically respond to fans on Facebook Messenger. But what about turning your tweets and (if you’re a company) LinkedIn posts over to a bot? That’s the gist of Swiss startup Twinybots. “Our service will post content on socials networks without your intervention. But you can […]

British artist Little Simz is preparing for the release of her third album ‘GREY Area’ through AWAL, and as part of its marketing campaign is using music stickers on Instagram. The album comes out on 1 March, but every day between now and its release, a new 10-second snippet of one of its tracks will […]

“What’s the point of marketers like me, why would you commission research, when an egg knocks Kylie Jenner off the top spot on Instagram?!” There were jokes and sharp insight in equal measures in music marketer and Chatty Penguin founder Cally Hocknell’s presentation at the FastForward conference in Amsterdam on Friday. She was referring to the […]

Here’s an interesting new tactic for music-streaming marketing: Apple Music is encouraging subscribers to get their mates onto the service too. “Give Apple Music to your friends,” explained a promotion that was push-notified to subscribers, according to news site AppleInsider. “Apple Music is better with friends. So give one of yours a free month.” The deal […]

British band Mumford & Sons have become the latest artist to produce some exclusive music for Amazon Music. Although in this case, the songs are already well-known: what’s exclusive are new ‘reimagined’ versions of ‘White Blank Page’ and ‘Forever’. Amazon is suggesting that fans say ‘Alexa, play the Amazon Original by Mumford and Sons’ to […]

Next Wednesday is the Brit Awards, the flagship annual awards show for the British music industry. It’s fair to say the organisers are leaving no stops un-pulled out when it comes to the digital activity around the event. There’ll be a live stream on YouTube of the show to viewers outside the UK, fronted by […]

Job description FUGA Aggregation & Services is looking for an experienced, passionate and ambitious professional to head up our global digital marketing & promotions department. As a key part of our content exploitation team you will be instrumental in defining the FUGA brand and build on our strong position in independent digital music distribution.   […]

Never slow to spot a new branding opportunity, Kiss have teamed up with The Emoji Company to create their own line of emoji, which will be splashed across *consults press release* “Apparel, Accessories, Footwear, Electronics, Figures and Collectibles, Drinkware, Fan Merch, Home Goods, Stationery, and more”. The deal for ‘KISS x emoji®’ was brokered by […]

Job Title: Director of Connected Fans Strategy   Location: Los Angeles or New York   Connected fan relationships are at the core of mtheory’s artist development strategy. We are seeking a highly curious individual to help lead us in identifying the core principles around the connected fan relationship – including knowing who the fans are, […]

Deezer has announced the next swathe of artists who’ll benefit from its ‘Deezer Next’ promotion in 2019. British artists Sam Fender and Lewis Capaldi will be global priorities for the streaming service this year, with Capaldi having stepped up from being a Deezer Next artist in the UK last year. They follow Deezer’s global artists […]

Dance artist and DJ Steve Aoki was early in to esports, and now he’s become the first artist to nab a starring role in the latest mobile game based on Star Trek. Aoki is appearing in Star Trek Fleet Command as a character called Officer D’Jaoki, joining the game yesterday. This isn’t a brand new relationship with […]

It was clear last week just how much welly Spotify is willing to put behind podcasts in the year ahead, with up to $500m earmarked for acquisitions of tech and content – including its deals for Gimlet Media and Anchor. Now Spotify has announced details of its next original, exclusive podcast: an eight-part documentary called […]

One of the points we’ve been making about augmented-reality (AR) technology over the past year is that the biggest impact for artists from it will come from campaigns using the big social/tech platforms with AR features: Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook etc. Now Childish Gambino is testing another angle: appearing as an animated character in the ‘Playground’ […]

We wrote last week that we were waiting for the latest weekly YouTube Music charts to go live, so that we could gauge the bump that dance artist Marshmello got from his concert in YouTube. Not least because anecdotally, nearly every child aged 8-13 we know has been hammering his tracks on YouTube ever since […]