How Do Songs End Up On Spotify Playlists Anyway?; Royalties, Investors, and the New Music Economy

How Do Songs End Up On Spotify Playlists Anyway? — www.forbes.com 
 What does it take to get a song on a popular Spotify playlist? Money? The right record label? A good PR team?

Royalties, Investors, and the New Music Economy — www.thembj.org

Record labels and publishers for decades served as the music industry’s “bank.” They provided the advances artists lived on while making new music, and also paid for services like recording, shipping, marketing and more. No longer

Samsung and Live Nation to Live Stream Coldplay’s Tour in Virtual Reality — www.billboard.com 
 On Aug. 17 you can live stream Coldplay’s Head Full of Dreams Tour live in Virtual Reality.

Warner Music Latest Major Label to Make More from Streaming Than from Sales — ajournalofmusicalthings.com

Streaming doesn’t pay? Tell that the three major labels.

How to Save TIDAL from Near-Certain Death — www.digitalmusicnews.com 
 What the hell is wrong with TIDAL? Here are just a few of our gripes, penned in an open letter to Richard Sanders, TIDAL’s 4th CEO in 2 years.

AT&T Teams Up with Thirty Seconds To Mars To Live Stream Concert — platformandstream.com 
 AT&T Creator Lab has teamed up with Thirty Seconds to Mars to live stream the band’s Aug. 12 concert, and provide wireless connectivity and interactive fan experiences for their upcoming Camp Mars Music Festival. The music fest takes place Aug. 11–14 in Malibu, California.

Apple Expands Free Beats Deal To UK, European Students Buying A MacBook For School — www.forbes.com 
 Apple has rolled out its free Beats headphones with MacBook purchase to the United Kingdom and Europe.

Podcasts are getting better faster than audiobooks are getting cheaper — www.theverge.com

In music, movies, and television, the better produced something is, the more it usually costs. In podcasts and audiobooks, the reverse is true: the most popular free stuff all sounds expensive, and the most popular expensive stuff mostly sounds cheap.

Stream 935 Songs That Appeared in “The John Peel Festive 50” from 1976 to 2004 — www.openculture.com

It was Peel’s particular talent for discovering and promoting such artists that set him apart from his peers.

HD Audio-To-Go: Its Toast-A-Riffic! — audiophilereview.com 
 Mark Smotroff has an audiophile ah-ha moment