via Billboard.biz

by Richard Smirke

Coldplay, the Black Keys and Adele may strongly disagree, but making your repertoire available on streaming services does not cannibalize record sales. At least that’s the verdict of Rob Wells, president of Universal Music Group’s global digital business sector, who reiterated his support for services like Spotify and Rdio at the launch of IFPI’s Digital Music Report 2012, held in London yesterday.

Citing analysis that Universal Music Group had carried out during the last six months regarding four “key” Universal artists – “a heritage rock act, front-line pop, an urban R&B act and [one] in the MOR field” – Wells dismissed the argument that streaming services have a negative impact on download and brick-and-mortar sales as “absolutely bogus.”

Read full story at Billboard.biz

by Brian Kecskemety

At noon EST, Spotify hosted a press conference in New York City. The biggest takeaway from the event was the announcement of the creation of a Spotify HTML 5 app platform and their release of a JavaScript API. At launch, several services have partnered with Spotify to create apps, including last.fm, Billboard, Songkick, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, GAFFA, Soundrop, Top10, The Guardian, ShareMyPlaylist, Moodagent, Tunigo, Fuse, We Are Hunted, TuneWiki, and others.

Rolling Stone co-founder and publisher Jann Wenner was on hand to present the Rolling Stone Spotify app, which acts as a curational tool and features music recommendations from their staff, as well as album and track reviews.

Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek also demonstrated Songkick and TuneWiki apps. Songkick looks at your music library and suggests nearby shows based on the user’s location. The app can direct the user to buy tickets and even see prior setlists from the artist’s earlier shows. TuneWiki shows the lyrics of whatever song the user is listening to, and adjusts the lyrics displayed based on what part of the song the user is listening to.

To help navigate between apps, and help users discover new apps, a special App Finder will be located along the menu on the left of Spotify. Daniel Ek added that apps would only be available within Spotify and not on external or partner websites. He also mentioned that all apps would be free (for now).

Other new features include the ability to create a “favorite friends” list among your social connections, as well as a new window that shows real-time updates from your friends. When one of your friends listens to a song or creates a new playlist, it will show up in this feed, which acts much like Facebook’s Ticker.

Of course, during the Q&A, Ek fielded a question regarding the service’s scrutinized artist royalty structure.  Ek responded, “There’s value created every time someone listens to a song… We’re paying out the vast majority of our revenues, and that’s how we want to keep going.”

Daniel Ek opened his presentation giving an update on Spotify’s progress and giving some interesting facts and figures of the streaming service.

Spotify’s catalog contains over 15 million tracks and adds over 20,000 new tracks every single day. To listen to the whole catalog would take 100 years.

They are the second biggest digital revenue source (after iTunes) to labels in Europe.

33% of Swedish population use Spotify. Since Spotify’s launch, piracy in Sweden has decreased 25%.

Spotify currently has 10 million active users and 2.5 million paying subscribers.  7 million new users have singed up since September. The service is available in 12 territories.

Users have collectively created over 500 million playlists in Spotify.

Spotify released a video announcing their new app service. Watch here.

UPDATE: Spotify has released a beta version of their app service which you can download here.

As you can see below in my iPhone screenshot, the app is clean and fairly similar to the web version.

Playing around, there was some lag time in loading as well as a few crashes, but no one gets an app completely perfect on the first go around. I expect an update within the next few months.

However, the programming was dubbed, “Founder Stories with Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, Turntable.fm”, so in conjunction with their app announcement it was great to hear about how they started and where they’re headed. Goldstein is fairly confident that, in addition to affiliates sales, that they will be able to monetize the service by allowing brands, companies, and individuals to sponsor rooms, so don’t be surprised if there’s a Red Bull or Converse presents branded room coming soon.

However, the most fascinating part of their talk was to hear some of their analytics:

• 300,000 rooms
• 1,000,000 song streams a day
• 600,000 registered users (40% active users)
• before limiting access to only the US, 30% of the users were from Japan and 10% from Brazil

Whether you’re a fan or not of Turntable.fm, social listening won’t be going anywhere anytime soon as it’s the next step in the evolution in online music consumption. Funny enough, one of the companies in the Startup Alley that I spoke to was Lets Listen, which has the interface of Google Music Beta, but with the social aspects of Turntable.fm. Expect an interview next week…

When we launched Music Beta four months ago, we wanted to help users fall in love with their music again by removing the hassles of digital music management. We’re now taking that idea one step further with the launch of Magnifier, Music Beta’s new music discovery site.

Each and every day, our team of music experts will highlight new, free music on Magnifier. Sometimes it will be songs you haven’t heard of by artists you have. Sometimes it will be new artists we think deserve more attention. And sometimes there will be video interviews and live performances.

But you can always count on the following:

• You can add any or all of the songs to your Music Beta library instantly
• You can do this for free
• The artist is being featured because someone on our team thinks they’re pretty great

Check Out Magnifier

– Tim Quirk, Head of Music Programming

Naturally, we decided to reach out to founders Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen to hold their first official NYC-speaking engagement with us and they were completely on board.

We hit it off so well with them that we decided to co-curate a SXSW panel, which you can vote for here.  Your support is extremely appreciated.

Anyways, the details for the September 21 event are below if you’re able to come, but capacity is limited, so RSVP does not guarantee entry.

What do they sound like…exactly how you’d think Stillwater (band from Almost Famous) would sound in real life:  raw and fun head bobbing rock music.  And boy am I glad that Rolling Stone and Atlantic chose them to win!

Check them out below or later tonight on Jimmy Fallon.

And more info about the contest can be found here.

SoundCtrl is giving away 20 invite codes, thanks to our friends at Chevy.  To enter please email soundctrlblog[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

The code will be good for a free account that allows the user unlimited streaming with ads (as opposed to the regular US account that limits users to 10 hours of streaming).  Once the codes are gone, you go to Chevy’s Facebook page to try get one.

Cheers and enjoy.

The revolution has begun!

Post by Jesse Kirshbaum

For what feels like years, but in reality was probably closer to a year, I waited for Google to push through their cloud-based music service offering.  And one day, at long last, it arrived.

Having waited for this moment for so long, I held off on posting any sort of review of the service until I was sure I knew precisely how I felt about it.

It seems that time has arrived.

Let’s get the dirt out of the way first — uploading your music is going to suck.  Google, who at the time of this post does not have a deal with the four major music labels, lacks the matching capability Apple is prepared to offer (wherein Apple simply sees you own a song and allows you access to a perfect version of that song from their own server.)  As far as I can tell, Google is really pulling your music up to their servers, and it’s going to take a very, very long time.  My collection took days and days to finish uploading, and trust me — to an even more serious collector, my collection is a drop in the pond. (Editor’s Note:  Like my massive 1 terrabye collection of music)

If you have a large enough collection, there will be a temptation to give up on uploading halfway through the process.  Don’t give up, because when you do make it through the uploading process, the real magic begins.

I’ve also found that some of my music was either uploaded twice, or the music seems to not have uploaded successfully. Not a deal breaker, but not good.

However, once the music is up, music.google.com can act as your iTunes, and it has every song in your entire library.  Whenever you can reach the internet, you have access to everything.  The UI takes an intuitive, no-frills approach, and for the most part works without trouble.  This is not so different from other locker services, you get the gist — it works (at least as well as you would expect a beta to work.)

In addition to the web service, I also have the app on my Android device, which is where things get even more awesome.  From my experience, music seems to sync from the cloud to my phone effortlessly and reasonably close to instantly.  You can pin specific songs or playlists to download for offline use, or let the app figure out what you’re trying to listen to and intelligently cache as you’re using the app.

In terms of UI, once again I’m a big fan of this app.  The background color changes as you switch songs to better match the album art, and once again the UI was reasonably intuitive.

Playback has been flawless for me so far on all music that didn’t have a problem uploading (as mentioned earlier.) The app features your standard shuffle as well as a wonderful iTunes genius playlist rippoff that has done a good job for me so far.

When traveling in areas that loose 3G coverage, the app does sometimes seem to have trouble recognizing when we have re-entered 3g and stays offline, which ocasionally requires a phone restart to fix (app killers did not seem to do the trick.) Then again, that seems to be a recurring theme of my Droid2 (Verizon) so we might be able to chalk that issue up to the carrier or the hardware.

It also bears mentioning that the music app looks gorgeous and works flawlessly on my wifi-only Motorola Xoom tablet – a major selling point of both products in my opinion.

Both the app and the service are free for now, but it remains to be seen how long that will last. For now, for what you’re paying (nothing) Google’s music service is a steal, and works quite well for a beta.  I use the Google music app on my phone as my primary mobile music listening device, and despite some recurring frustrations, have not looked back.

I give the Google music service a 9 for delivering on what it promises just slightly better than you’d expect for a beta, and for flawlessly (and attractively) syncing across all Google devices, all while being free for an unlimited amount of music. If Google starts capping uploads or streams, or puts a price tag on the service, they better be prepared to iron out the rough edges. On the other hand, with the unveiling of Google+ the possibilities for social integration are limitless. The only thing that can stop Google Music from being a serious threat in the cloud music service field is Google hurting themselves. In the meantime, I’d hunt down a beta invite and enjoy it while it’s free.

Post by Alex Horowitz

FlashFWD represented the culmination of another years’ hard work for SoundCtrl, as well as a celebration of the promising future of music tech.  The stories behind Troy Carter, SoundCloud, SoundTracking, The Creators Project, and The Echo Nest, were proudly on display, and the future of music tech never looked more impressive.

As the title FlashFWD indicated, the night was more than a celebration of the past year’s worth of achievements for SoundCtrl and the five tech companies honored that night — it was a night to celebrate the promise the future holds for everyone in attendance — as music industry professionals, and perhaps even more powerfully, as lovers of music ourselves.

So much so that, for a moment, one could almost forget all the troubles the music industry is currently facing and lose themselves in their excitement for the future.  Difficult as it may be, if one were to push past the piracy concerns, ignore the major labels being sold, and turn a blind eye to the turmoil in the industry we know and love, one might actually realize just what an astonishing time we live in for music fans.  The technology on display that night promises not just to increase consumption of music, but to change the way we think about interacting with music — touching on everything from doing amazing things with the lights on stage at live shows, to further advancing the way we share music experiences with one another.

For one night, we all flashed forward to a world where the focus was on how technology could further the cause of making the world a better place to interact with the music we love.

I can safely say I have never been more proud to be a part of the SoundCtrl family as on that night.

Here’s to another great year for for the advancement of technology, for excellence in blogging, and of course for music itself.

Pandora may have over 80 million registered users, but Slacker has a respectable 25 million listeners and with the addition of Premium, they may get more people to download their app to compare to Pandora.

Slacker Premium is available online and as a smartphone and iPad/iPod Touch app.

What does this mean for Apple?  Well part of attraction to iTunes is not that it’s the best player, but rather that iTunes store is so easy to use and everything is seamless.  If Spotify were to compliment that seamless purchasing and synchability (I know it’s not a word) with their almost flawless on-demand service then Apple might have a competitor.  With over 10 million users and having reached their 1 millionth paying customer the Spotify community is growing.  The more reasons they have for people to never leave the Spotify (on computer or mobile devices), the more they’ll be able to fill other features that match, if not, are superior to that of iTunes.  Needless to say, the rest of 2011 will be exciting for Spotify.

Not long ago, Amazon was the first major brand to release a service that hosts some of your music library in the their cloud, giving Amazon cloud users the ability to stream their music from any mobile device. Amazon was first to the music hosting party by opting not to make nice with record labels, claiming it had every legal right to offer such a service without their blessing.

Coming to an monetary arrangement with record labels is just why the likes of Spotify, the extremely popular UK-based streaming music service, has yet to officially announce that its service is available to the US.

Now it seems HP is entering the music cloud game as well. According to articles like this one and this one, HP is planning on using cloud-based music services to entice tablet users to buy their forthcoming TouchPad devices.

The key takeaway here is that another company might be offering cloud music services before both Google and Apple – the two companies that were supposed to be the odds on favorites all along to race to the finish line with cloud-based music services.

The thing is, it’s Google and it’s Apple, so even when they don’t do something, it’s pretty huge news. I know I can’t be alone in wondering what must be happening internally that is forcing them to allow the likes of HP and Amazon to beat them to the punch. (Think about it – when’s the last time you said to yourself, “wow – HP really out did Google on that one!” Yeah, I can’t remember either.)

However fascinating the reasons might be, the fact remains that the longer Google and Apple drag their feet before offering cloud-based music services, the more competition they’re welcoming into the music cloud market. By the time they enter the ring, the market for such services might be too saturated to make the splash either company might have been hoping for.

Post by Alex Horowitz

I met Justin Kalifowitz during SXSW at his booth inside the convention center.  As the President of Downtown Music’s publishing arm, he has both freedom to test the waters, but the responsibility to maintain results.  As a result, he founded Songtrust, which is an open music publishing service for artists to submit their music for a small one time fee of $10 or $20 for premium service (did I mentioned it’s non-exclusive???).  See the video below to get a decent idea of how it works: