Is Instagram about photos, or videos, or messaging? The obvious answer: all three, and that third prong is getting a big new feature. The post Instagram is adding messaging-based ‘broadcast channels’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The original fan community concept – artist fan clubs – have shifted from physical mailing lists to email lists and now to online messaging platforms like Telegram and Discord. Fan communities are highly desirable at the moment, allowing direct communication between the artist and their most devoted fans. But building your online communities on messaging […]

Popular chat platform Discord has announced some new features which will be relevant for artists building communities there, as well as for how music is experienced more widely on it. The post Discord adds YouTube integration and monthly $3 subscription appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

“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 […]

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 […]

US music-industry body the RIAA has submitted its latest list of sites and apps raising piracy concerns, for consideration for the next ‘notorious markets’ list produced by the US Trade Representative. Some familiar names are included from the stream-ripping and MP3-download areas, but there’s also a new villain in the RIAA’s view: messaging app Telegram. […]

Lead: Working with D2C experts is one part of the business, but changes in how social media sites are structuring themselves can offer acts new ways to sell products to fans of all stripes. We look at where social platforms are being best used to sell merchandise, how casual fans (and not just superfans) can […]

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 […]

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 […]

Music Ally cooled on the idea of ‘music messaging’ startups some time ago: there were a bunch of them, and sustainable business models/consumer interest was thin on the ground. But the intersection of music and messaging in other ways – streaming services integrating with Facebook Messenger, for example – is very interesting. Can Project Wave change our […]

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 […]