Giggem’s New User Profiles Expand Its Music Community

SoundCtrl November 12, 2013

Giggem has released new user profiles on its “music matchmaking” platform to bridge music and entertainment industry professionals, making business and interaction more efficient. The site, which launched this summer, helps musicians and industry professionals make relevant business connections in an online community of artists, songwriters, managers, venues, labels, and more.

Giggem is now expanding this platform to include a wider range of professionals within the music industry, segmented into inclusive categories:

Businesses/Agencies: Ad Agencies, A&R, Animation Studio, Game Studio, Jingle House, Interactive Agency, Media, Movie Studio, Recording Studio, Rehearsal Space, Road Crew, Theater
Professionals: Booking Agent, Choreographer, Consultant, Dancer, Distributor, Graphic Designer, Image Maker, Entertainment Lawyer, Model-Actor, Movie Director, Music Teacher, Music Video Director, Photographer, PR, Producer, Publisher, Sound Engineer, Supplier

This expansion will help to solidify Giggem as a business and creative media platform. The update comes along with new features, including the ability to see who has viewed a user profile and a direct messaging feature between users. Giggem’s home feed functions in real-time with up-to-date information about new members and connections, opportunities, promotions, new music, new shows, videos, and photos, all within the Giggem community.

Giggem hopes that by augmenting its user community, it will create lasting connections between a variety of people working within the music community. “We have received phenomenal reception from the music community and have helped numerous musicians and bands to find each other,” says Emir Turan, founder and CEO of Giggem. “Talent managers, record labels and musicians have all expressed the value that they’ve found in our community and we’re excited to open up our platform to include more of the industry’s counterparts, especially at the intersection of the music and entertainment.”

Carbon Audio’s New Pocket Speaker Now Available Through Apple

SoundCtrl November 12, 2013

By Kira Grunenberg

When it comes to music technology, sales through ubiquitous companies like Amazon or iTunes represent a well-recognized benchmark of progress. Managing that feat more than once is all the more impressive, and many independent innovators haven’t attained that success.

Portland, Oregon’s Carbon Audio, is a retailer that can put one, and now two such feathers in its cap. The launch of the company’s new Pocket Speaker shows one giant that has clearly taken to Carbon Audio’s product potential without hesitation.

A young company of only two years, Carbon Audio came about in 2011 and though it only carries two pieces of hardware thus far, both wireless speakers, the pair of pieces have gleaned the attention of computer, media and music leader, Apple. The first piece, a portable speaker “bar” called ZOOKA, built for i-devices, was originally proposed via Kickstarter and the public wanted in on the action. The funding exceeded the $25,000 goal by nearly three times the amount. That success led to Apple’s intrigue and now Pocket Speaker has easily done the same.

Available today via Apple’s online store, the Pocket Speaker is just that: a wirelesss, Bluetooth-enabled playback device that can fit in a pocket as easily as any smartphone–one of the most prevalent sources for music playback. Right from the start, one might wonder where the sense is in purchasing something that offers listening outside the privacy of headphones, especially if it’s meant to be so portable and carried on your person.

Metronomy’s “I’m Aquarius” Released on The Night Sky App

SoundCtrl November 11, 2013

By Brian Parker

Following the 2011 release of their acclaimed studio album , The English Riviera, English indie-pop band Metronomy are back with a new single, “I’m Aquarius,” released on Elektra Records. Today at 2PM EST, Metronomy are releasing the song via an astronomy app called The Night Sky, which identifies and navigates stars, galaxies, planets, and satellites using GPS and accelerometer technology.

Users of The Night Sky can scan the sky for the constellation Aquarius, click on the star formation, and hear “I’m Aquarius” via the app for one week. A teaser of the song is available at the band’s website.

YouTube’s Music Subscription Service: Massive Move Toward Mobile Music Industry

SoundCtrl November 11, 2013

By Carolyn Heneghan

YouTube is already lauded as a giant in the world of music and music videos, and with a new music subscription service on the horizon, it stands to throttle mobile music consumption as we know it.

Set to be launched by the end of this year, YouTube’s currently unnamed (or at least, name unreleased) music subscription service will offer users a way to access unlimited, on-demand music and music videos uninterrupted by ads. They’ll be able to stream full albums rather than the one or two singles the artist might have released videos for. Another premium feature, users can cache songs and videos for offline listening on their mobile devices.

Additionally, a free, ad-supported version of the streaming service will play music videos one after another, like the former model of MTV. Longer viewing means more commercial watching, so this may be a lucrative business move for YouTube as well.

The music subscription service should also coincide with a revamped YouTube app that will allow YouTube to run in the background of a mobile device.

YouTube’s parent company Google has had plans for the music subscription service for some time now, having already secured music licenses with Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group when preparing to launch its current music streaming service, All Access, which launched in May.

Moving Toward Mobile Music

YouTube executives have reported that about 40 percent of its viewing takes place on mobile devices, which is a huge surge since being only 6 percent of viewing just two years ago. This is not restricted to YouTube by any means—mobile is the latest trend in media consumption, and the technology is being adopted at an astounding rate, including both smartphones and tablets.

Consumers want to be able to access their music easily, quickly, and from anywhere. In line with Walkmans and mp3 players before them, modern mobile devices offer the best and most convenient portable music experiences available. In turn, more music and media providers are turning toward capitalizing on this growing mobile market, and YouTube is simply adapting to the movements of its customer base.

Successful Business Model?

The big question is, will these features be enough of an improved user experience to encourage YouTube watchers to pay $10 for the subscription rather than simply continuing to watch the ad-supported version for free?

With the volume of YouTube users and video streams—1 billion users streaming 6 billion hours of video per month—even a slight adoption of the subscription service from its user base could mean big bucks for YouTube and parent company, Google.

For example, if one-tenth of YouTube’s current users switched to the subscription service, YouTube would generate around $1 billion per month from subscriptions alone, not counting how much they would make in advertising revenue as well. While one-tenth of the user base may be generous, particularly in the service’s infancy, the numbers do emulate just how financially viable such a service might be.

As revenue from monthly subscriptions would be much steadier and more reliable than pay per clicks—whose rates are dropping due to users’ switch to smartphones and tablets—the new music subscription service appears to be a sustainable business model, and one that could propel YouTube and Google forward in the realm of mobile music and media consumption.

As more music streaming services are now offering paid subscriptions, such as Spotify and Pandora, this move for YouTube appears to be in line with the wave of the future of music listening—one that is sustainable both for the media providers as well as the record companies and musicians themselves.

Keep an ear to the ground—or to your mobile device—around December when the YouTube music subscription service is slated to be released.

Gramophone II: Elegant Acoustic Amplification For The HTC One

SoundCtrl November 08, 2013

By Brian Parker

Piggybacking the HTC slogan and initiative Here’s To Change, the UK branch of the company has been working with product designers in a new program called Here’s To Creativity. The first collaboration between HTC and designer Justin Wolter realized a beautiful and innovative 3D printed speaker called the Gramohorn II, formatted to be a dock for the HTC One.

The Gramohorn II is a passive speaker system, meaning it requires no electrical power to function. Rather, using the resonance chambers of the speakers and the gramophone-inspired horns, the audio emitted from the HTC One’s Boom Sound dual front-facing speakers is amplified by natural acoustics.

The Gramohorn II is a available in a variety of vivid colors, with the choice of having the speakers printed in a plaster or a metal composite. The two versions are available at a whopping £999 ($1600) and £4999 ($8000) for the wealthier HTC owners.

Wolter’s philosophy behind the Gramohorn’s design is based on the increasing accessibility and diminishing sound quality of digital music. Each Gramohorn is hand-made and finished to order, bringing the intrinsic ‘uniqueness’ and ‘originality’ of art into the sphere of digital audio technology. On a technical level, the Gramohorn somewhat ironically addresses audio compression, in that the loudspeakers can only be as good as the sounds it amplifies. So HTC One users, please make sure you’ve downloaded the lossless versions of your songs before docking into the Gramohorn.