Song Stories

I speak with Eric Gilbert, who is the co-founder and director of Treefort Music Fest, a music festival in Boise, IA. The festival proudly hosts indie artists from all over the country. It also shines a spotlight on regional music, literature, art, food, and beer. We talk about why the festival came to be and how it has impacted Boise's national reputation and local music scene.

Cortney Harding of Friends With Holograms talks about the state of VR and AR.

In this episode of the Music Biz Podcast Kyle Bylin talks with Heather McBee from Project Music, which is a music tech incubator, and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s leading action to support innovation within the music industry. They talk about the benefits of going through an incubator, some of the inherent issues music tech companies run into during start up, and why the music industry is so ripe for disruption.

In this episode of the Music Biz Podcast Cortney talks with Alex Mitchell of Audiokite, a market research tool for musicians. Audio kite allows musicians of all sizes to upload their own tracks, and receive feedback from vetted listeners. Cortney and Alex talk about how AudioKite got started, how artists are using the platform successfully, and how to find balance between art and market research.

Cortney talks to Per Emanuelsson about Soundtrap, a startup that allows people all over the world to write collaborative songs.

On this episode of the podcast, Cortney talks to Jeremy Wineberg, the co-founder of the Heard Well label. Heard Well produces compilations from YouTube stars, but in an usual twist, sells physical product and digital downloads. We also talk about Jeremy's past venture, the Music Tee.

In this episode of the Music Biz Podcast, we talk with D.A. Wallach, who is a musician, Spotify’s first artist-in-residence, and an adviser for several other technology companies. D.A. put out an essay last year titled "B​itcoin for Rockstars: How Cryptocurrency Can Help Revolutionize The Music Industry," w​hich discusses how blockchain technologies can help the music industry at large with tracking metadata, and moving payments. We talk to D.A. about his essay, his views on blockchain, and how he manages a career in music while also investing in technology companies.

In this episode of the Music Biz Podcast we talk with Tim Quirk and Bryan Calhoun the founders of Freeform, a new app development platform for artists. Tim Quirk previously worked at Google Play as head of programming, and was an executive at Rhapsody. Bryan Calhoun previously worked at Sound Exchange as the VP of New Media and External Affairs, as well as numerous positions at various record labels. In this episode we talk about the Freeform platform, how artists can use an app to connect with fans, and how artists can make money while giving their music to fans for free.

In this episode of the Music Biz Podcast, we talk with Stephen Witt, who is the author of the recently released H​ow Music Got Free,​a book about music piracy, the mp3, and the downfall of the music industry. We talk to Witt about his book, music piracy, streaming, royalties, and the future of the music industry.

In this episode of Music Biz Podcast, we talk with Mark Steiner of GigSalad and Kevin Breuner of CD Baby. We sat down and interviewed them at SF MusicTech 2015 on November 15. Tune in to hear a great conversation about how these two companies are creating new revenue streams for DIY musicians and building supportive community through their joint efforts.

In this episode of Music Biz Podcast, we talk with Scott LeGere and Jay Coyle, who are music business educators and entrepreneurs. Scott is the head of the music business department at McNally Smith College of Music. He has a long history of founding companies, teaching classes, playing music, and recording bands. Jay is the founder of Music Geek Services, a music marketing and digital strategy agency for artists. He also teaches music business classes at Berklee Online. The three of us attended the Future of Music Policy Summit in Washington, DC a few weeks ago. I sat down with Scott and Jay for dinner, we had a couple of drinks, and we recorded a podcast.

Steve Rennie has spent the last 30+ years in the music business wearing a number of hats: manager of Incubus, concert promoter, record executive, host of Renman Live, and now the founder of Renman U. Renman U offers an online course all about the music business, where Rennie's straight to the point delivery provides an honest look at what it takes to survive and thrive in today's music industry. In this episode, Alex May (@AlexmDrums) talks with Steve Rennie about his new online course, and how he's hoping to share his knowledge and experience with future music professionals.

In this episode of Music Biz Podcast, we talk with Phil Hutcheon, who is the founder and CEO of DICE, a live music discovery platform that allows fans to find shows and buy tickets without any booking fees. We talk to Hutcheon about the current state of the live music sector.

In this episode of Music Biz Podcast, we talk to with Ed Aten, who is the CEO and co-founder of Merchbar, a website and mobile app that allows people to purchase artist merch. We talk to Aten about his company and what he has learned running it. Make sure that you subscribe to Music Biz Podcast in iTunes or your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the show and get the latest episodes and on SoundCloud. If you like the show, I'd love for you rate us highly and submit a review in iTunes.

In this episode of Music Biz Podcast, we talk with Craig Watson, who is the co-founder of Soundwave, a popular music discovery app. They also make an SDK, called Shine, that helps developers learn about the mobile music habits of their user base and provide them with better recommendations when they first install a new music app. We talk to Watson about how Soundwave’s product and focus changed as they learned more about the mobile music sector.

In this episode of Music Biz Podcast, we talk to Farhad Mohit, who is the founder and CEO of Flipagram, an app that allows users to create musical slideshows with photos and videos. We talk to Mohit about Flipagram’s meteoric rise and his views on the future of music.

LANDR's automated online mastering service helps music creators get professional sounding masters. By uploading a track to LANDR, artists get quick results, and are able to choose from a few different styles of processing. In this episode, Alex May talks to Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Justin Evans about how this process works, and what it means for artists.

In this episode of the Music Business Podcast, we talk with MaryLeigh Bliss, who is a Trends Editor and Strategic Consultant at Ypulse, a youth market research firm. We talk to Bliss about the millennial generation. Who are they? How do they listen to, discover, and interact with music?

In this episode of Music Business Podcast, we are talking with Bryce Clemmer, who is the co-founder and CEO of Vadio, a Portland-based company that provides an online video platform to media companies. We talk to Clemmer about the state of mobile video and how it’s changing.

In this episode of the Music Business Podcast, we talk with Casey Rae, who is the CEO of
 the Future of Music Coalition, a non-profit research, education, and advocacy organization for musicians. We talk to Rae about the need for transparency in the music business.

In this episode of the Music Business Podcast, Alex May talks with James Shotwell of Haulix, a platform for artists to securely share electronic press kits. As the company’s Social Media Coordinator, Shotwell helps us explore how Haulix addresses and prevents the unauthorized leaking of promotional pre-releases. With his wide range of music business expertise, Shotwell addresses social sharing and helps us answer the question: is Haulix on the road to making album leaks a thing of the past?

In this episode of Music Business Podcast, we talk with George Howard, who is an Associate Professor of Management at Berklee College of Music and Head of Music at Music Audience Exchange. We talk to Howard about his recent Forbes article about why people do not want to discover music.

Cortney Harding and Kyle Bylin review Apple Music.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Music Business Podcast, presented by Hypebot.com. I’m your host Kyle Bylin. Today on the show, we are talking with Bill Wilson, who is the VP of digital strategy and business development at the Music Business Association. We are going to talk to Bill about the state of metadata in the music business and why it’s so important today.

In this episode of Music Business Podcast, presented by Hypebot.com, we talk with David McMillin, who is the lead singer of Fort Frances and author of a recent essay on Pop Matters called “Why Its Time To Stop Hating Spotify.” In the piece, McMilion adds an indie musicians perspective to the royalty payout discussion and floats the idea that maybe Spotify isn’t run by a bunch of sadists. We talk to McMillion his essay, Spotify, music royalties, Tidal and so, so much more. Make sure that you subscribe to Music Business Podcast in iTunes or your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the show and get the latest episodes and on SoundCloud. If you like the show, I would love for you rate us highly and submit a review in iTunes.

Kyle Bylin and Cortney Harding discuss Apple Music.

In this episode of Music Business Podcast, I talk with Anu Kirk, the former Director of Music Services at Sony Network Entertainment. He spent over three years as the business owner of Sony Music Unlimited, a global multi-platform music subscription service. He also worked on MOG and Rhapsody for several years. I talk to Kirk about Spotify Now, Pandora’s acquisition of Next Big Sound, and music streaming services more broadly. Who is creating the best product? How could they be improved upon? These are all important questions to think about as the music industry gets ready for the Apple Music announcement on Monday. Make sure that you subscribe to Music Business Podcast in iTunes or your favorite podcast app.

Today on the show, I am talking with Jim McDermott, who is a social media and content marketing strategist for artists. Jim has been involved in the new media and digital music space since 1993. During his career, Jim has developed successful grassroots and online marketing campaigns for Guns & Roses, U2, Sheryl Crow, David Bowie, and many others. He has also worked for Sony Music, PolyGram, Warner Music, UMG, and Island Records. I am going to talk to Jim about music exclusives. These days, every music streaming company is fighting over exclusive content. They want singles and albums from popular artists that no one else has. But do consumers care? Is this going to a strategy that signs up more paying subscribers for companies? Make sure that you subscribe to Music Business Podcast in iTunes or your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the show and get the latest episodes and on SoundCloud.

In this episode, I talk with Nicole Cifani, who is a marketing lead 
at Chosen, a talent competition app. Chosen officially launched a few months ago after being in stealth mode for two years. I talk to Nicole about what Chosen 
is and how she landed a job at the company. We are also going to talk about what exactly 
it means to “gamify” the music experience.

Music Business Podcast's Kyle Bylin and Cortney Harding discuss the present and future of YouTube and music videos.

We talk with Jack Conte, who is the co-founder and CEO of Patreon, a platform that allows people to support creators by becoming paid subscribers of their creative works.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk with Julien Simon, who is the VP of Music Rights and Label Relations at Deezer, a subscription music service. We discuss the company's global expansion strategy and the challenges it must overcome in new markets.

Gideon Bullock, who is a design director at Songkick, discusses user research methods.

Jon Healey of the LA Times and Kyle Bylin discuss Jay Z's Tidal streaming music service.

Data journalist Liv Bulli crunches the numbers at Next Big Sound, then puts them into words that even the lay-artist can understand. She and her team have an uncanny way of predicting future hits; they’ve called out Iggy Azalea and Sam Smith way before they were commending awards and headlines. Liv joins the podcast to talk about her role, why artists shouldn’t compare themselves to Taylor Swift, and why tweeting isn’t enough — you actually need to engage your base.

In this special episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, Cortney and Kyle discuss whether Jay-Z's Tidal will suffer a hard knock life in the subscription music market.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk with Panos Panay, who is the founding managing director of Berklee's Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship. You probably know Panos from his previous role as the founder and CEO of SonicBids, a platform that allows bands to book gigs and market themselves online. I talk to Panos about the founding story of Berkee ICE and his goals for the initiative.

According to professor Aram Sinnreich, author of the 2013 book The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry’s War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties, college students have changed significantly in their music listening habits and overall musical tastes over the last decade, in part due to market forces and technological innovations. Ten years ago, undergrads typically had a CD collection, perhaps supplemented by a computer hard drive full of MP3 files downloaded from a file-sharing service and listened to using Winamp or iTunes. Students carefully managed their music libraries and strongly identified with one specific genre or group of genres. It’s also likely that they owned an Apple iPod or MP3 player or used an old Sony Walkman. Today, students with access to a computer or smartphone with an Internet or data connection have millions of songs at their fingertips if they don’t mind sitting through a couple of annoying ads. They’re more likely to experiment with new styles and develop broader musical tastes, because the cost of exploring different artists and songs has become so minimal. When you read a news story about a new music app, you often wonder if the startup team sanity-checked their product idea with potential users. Did they visit a university campus and ask a classroom of students, “Can anyone here see themselves using this music app? If so, why would it be useful or valuable to you?” It would seem prudent for them to spend a week walking around a variety of college campuses, observing how students listen to, discover, and interact with music. I think it would be an eye-opening experience, as it would give them a view into real music listening habits of a cross-section of the target population, as opposed to, say, people in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is why I wanted to interview Aram Sinnreich, who is an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information. Sinnreich has both a music industry analyst’s insights into what’s happening in the market and a university professor’s view of what’s going on with students in his classroom.

Studying people’s music buying habits used to be simple. You handed a person a stack of postcards and told them to send you one the next time they bought an album. They wrote down what they purchased, why they purchased it, where they purchased it, how much they paid for it, and sent that postcard back to you. Russ Crupnick, managing partner of research group MusicWatch Inc., says the rise of file-sharing clients and streaming music services has made it harder to track where people getting their music and whether they are paying anything at all. The number of things that people are doing has increased each passing year. You have to ask people a myriad of questions to cover all the bases. Are you listening to AM/FM radio or SiriusXM? Are you playing songs on Pandora or Spotify? Are you looking up music videos on YouTube or VEVO? Are you buying songs on iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon? Are you ripping the audio from a video clip on YouTube and downloading it to your computer as a MP3 file? If you type “YouTube to MP3” into Google’s search engine, it lists dozens of websites that allow you to enter a video link and download a MP3 file. In a few clicks, Taylor Swift’s song “Blank Space” can be playing in iTunes. “The average stream ripper is taking the equivalent of about two albums per year,” says Crupnick. What follows is a podcast interview with Russ Crupnick.

Edison Research, a New Jersey-based market research firm, introduced its “Share of Ear” study in June 2014, where it showed the share of everything in the audio space. For the first time, the amount of time that people spend listening to broadcast radio, streaming music services, and owned music, among other audio sources, could be compared side by side. In January 2015, Edison Research announced an important finding from its latest “Share of Ear” study: American teens now spend more time with streaming music services, such as Pandora and Spotify, than they do with AM/FM radio. Larry Rosin, president and co-founder of Edison Research, said in a blog post that while AM/FM radio listening “leads by a significant margin among all other age groups,” the increasing amount of time that teens are spending with Pandora and Spotify “could be a lens into the future of audio usage.” Here is an Upward Spiral podcast interview with Larry Rosin.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk with Theda Sandiford, who is the VP of Commerce at Republic Records and Island Records, where she handles VEVO, Spotify, Youtube and more. Sandiford got her start at WBLS and then became the first black programmer of a major market country station. In 1994, she was nominated for “Programmer of the Year Award” by the CMA. She moved to Billboard to run the Hot 100 chart, then went on to work at Def Jam. After spending time working with an online games startup, she came back to the music industry, and currently works at Republic. We talk to Sandiford about big data, music streaming, and gaming startups.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk with Jon Maples, the former VP of product at Rhapsody, who is now writing on his blog and consulting for companies. We ask Maples about the next crop of music startups and where they might take the music industry in the coming years.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk with Darren Hemmings, who runs the digital consultancy Motive Unknown and curates the daily music industry newsletter the Daily Digest. We talk with Hemmings about the top stories that happened in 2014 and what these developments might mean for the music industry in the new year.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business, we talk with Paul Cantor, a writer and producer, who recently published a piece on Medium about why television is killing the movie business and what that means. We talk to Cantor about his essay and what film and TV can learn from the music biz.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk with Archie Hamilton, who runs Splatter, China's first integrated music promotion and brand activation agency. His team manages campaigns for brands seeking to leverage music effectively in their communications strategy. He also runs Split Works, which promotes music independently, owns and runs three of China's biggest festivals and books artists all through SE Asia.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk with Dan Cantor, who is former CEO and co-founder of exfm, a social music discovery platform that enables people transform music blogs into playable mix. In recent months, his company was acquired by Rhapsody International and he became their VP of product. We talk to Cantor about his company, the music startup space, and Rhapsody’s future.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk to Eric Ronning, who is the EVP and Chief Revenue Officer for Digital at adLarge Media, a advertising sales representation organization. Prior to joining adLarge, Ronning served as the EVP of Emerging Media at TargetSpot and the founder and managing partner of Ronning Lipset Radio. We talk to him about the future of music streaming and targeted advertising in connected cars.

Beats Music executives have been overhyping their product for a long time. So the co-hosts of the Upward Spiral, Cortney Harding and Kyle Bylin, asked several friends to use the mobile app for a week and conducted research interviews over Skype to collect their feedback. Now everyone is speculating on whether Apple is buying Beats Electronics and what motivated the potential deal. Is the company worth 3.2 billion? What will Apple do with Beats Music? It’s too early to know for sure but here are some candid thoughts from regular people on their experience of the Beats Music service.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk to Scott LeGere, who is a serial entrepreneur and college educator. Over the past 15 years, Scott has played key roles in the ownership and operation of audio recording facilities, indie record labels, media schools, and commercial music production companies. During this time, he also engineered Grammy nominated albums, produced critically acclaimed indie projects, and lectured on the music business and audio production. In 2010, he co-founded NoWare Media, a composition focused sound agency. We asked Scott about how to educate and inspire the next generation of music business entrepreneurs.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk to artist manager and music producer JJ Italiano about whether the concept of a “favorite artist” has changed. Today’s music listener has unlimited access to streaming music across any connected device. They can follow the activities of favorite artists on a variety of social media platforms. We share stories from our history as music fanatics and industry professionals. We dive deep into a wide ranging discussion about how digital technology has shaped music fandom.

In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk to Maggie Vail, who is the co-executive director of CASH Music, a nonprofit group that is building both open source tools and an educational curriculum for artists. Previously, she spent 17 years at the indie label Kill Rock Stars. She talks with us about how to make sure indie artists are paid for their creative works.