Digital Radio Tracker for March 2019

Welcome to Trakr!! Here’s your monthly dose of what we at DigitalRadioTracker.com are finding interesting this month. Hope these articles help you improve your music industry life and your life in the world as a whole. And remember, DigitalRadioTracker.com can help you see where any song is being played, worldwide, at digital (internet) radio...and some terrestrial stations too, as an added plus!  Did we mention Worldwide??  Woo hoo!! Taking this all the way, like a Boss... Please forward this to one or two people you know who could benefit from DigitalRadioTracker or our lovely curated newsletters that boost our collective knowledge of the music industry. Playing to Strangers How do you build an artist’s brand? Can you do it from the bottom up amassing fan after fan until there’s a rabid enough base to breakthrough? It’s a commonly held belief that breaking songs is the result of huge vocal, dedicated fan-bases but fans aren’t actually that loyal. To test this, I analyzed 107 artists on Spotify comparing followers to monthly listeners, using followers as a proxy for fans/heavy users. Only 24% of an artist’s total listenership is made up of fans. That’s it. https://medium.com/@AmberHorsburgh/playing-to-strangers-8568f5e0e2fd State Of Social For 2019 How marketers across the globe think about social media, what's working, how the industry is changing, and more. The State of Social is Buffer's annual report focused on the world of social media marketing, providing you with the insights you need to fuel your strategy for the year ahead. The 2019 results have landed! This year we heard from more than 1,800 marketers from businesses of all sizes, across a range of industries. Check out what we learned this year... https://buffer.com/state-of-social-2019 What Streaming Music Services Pay (Updated for 2018) Thanks to streaming music services, record labels reported record-breaking revenue last year.  In 2017, the ‘big three’ made an estimated $14.2 million a day from streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music.  Universal Music Group alone made $4.5 million each day last year. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/16/streaming-music-services-pay-2018/ How to Promote Your Music Three big bombs went off in the computer industry in the 1990s. The first was the browser, our connection to the internet world. Next came tools, compressed video and audio for transmission over this new medium. Then, the music “sharing” site Napster was launched in 1999. From that moment on, the computer provided a single platform on which to record, distribute, and consume music. http://acousticguitar.com/how-to-promote-your-music/   Always Up-to-Date Guide to Social Media Video Specs Staying relevant and capturing your audience’s attention is a constant challenge for marketers. And now that brands rely on video content more than ever, it’s critical to use the correct social media video specs and advertising video sizes. However, we couldn’t find all the correct social video sizes in one place. So we decided to create a complete guide of every single social media video spec and advertising video dimension. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-video-specs-guide/ We Asked Some Gen Z Kids How They Discover New Music Discovering music used to be simple, like picking up apples from the grocery store. You’d head to HMV or Tower Records or whatever big conglomerate stood tall upon your town and then grab the newest record from the chart section. Or perhaps you’d dive deeper, scouring the alternative racks or bookish vinyl shops in search of a suggestion from a sibling, or one of those freaks on the back of the bus. Maybe, once-in-a-while, you'd opt for something rogue because the cover art looked good. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/yw77gx/generation-z-music-discovery What Happens When You Create a Fake Music Record Label and Upload Bad Music to Spotify In October 2014, the album Election Music by Heinz Duthel was uploaded to services such as Spotify, iTunes, and Google Play. The album consisted of one electronic tune that had been modified thirteen times according to the voting results in different municipalities in the 2014 Swedish government election. The tempo had been adjusted on each track according to the number of voters in specific voting districts, so that a high number of registered voters corresponded to a fast beat, and a low number of voters corresponded to a slow beat. Specific instruments in the tunes had also been paired with particular political parties, making it possible to “listen to” local voting results and compare tracks with one another. https://www.salon.com/2019/02/17/what-happens-when-you-create-a-fake-music-record-label-and-upload-bad-music-to-spotify/ How to Release a Project In the Streaming Era on a Minimal Budget When I first started in the music business at 18, the term “mini-budget” was unheard of. Working in the major label system, even a small budget could quickly balloon to the six-figure mark. Sure, streaming was starting to rear its head, but it hadn’t fully formed and placed its inevitable grip on the music industry’s neck—yet. We were still sitting pretty in the center of the “good ol’ days” of the music industry as some of the OG’s like to call it. But the tides were indeed turning and they were turning fast.   https://djbooth.net/features/2019-02-12-budgeting-in-streaming-age-on-minimal-budget Tracklib Presents State of Sampling What’s the overall state of sampling right now? The Tracklib team dug deep into statistics from 2018's music to answer this question. A full overview like this has never been done before and we will make this an annual tradition. https://www.tracklib.com/blog/tracklib-presents-state-of-sampling/ Measuring Radio's Lag Behind Streaming Services For decades, everybody in the music business knew one thing for certain: if you wanted to break a new artist, you had to get their songs played on the radio. Radio DJs were the gatekeepers of the industry, offering up-and-coming acts a level of exposure that could change their careers almost overnight. Acts like Jay-Z and REM — among the most successful of the ‘80s and ‘90s — got their starts by forging powerful alliances with regional radio stations before ascending to national stardom. http://thedataface.com/2019/01/culture/streaming-vs-radio Who Do You Need on Your Content Team? Let’s play a game. Imagine you’re in a position to hire your dream content team to outsource some or all of your content marketing… Who do you hire? OK, I don’t mean the person, necessarily, but what are the roles you need to hire? The answer is… it depends! It depends on what you need and the skills of the people you hire. But I thought it would be helpful to talk about some of the roles you might want to fill. https://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/who-do-you-need-on-your-content-team-02167578   The Basics: How to Copyright Music in 2019 I know some writers who clutch their notebooks to their chests when they meet a fellow artist or who refuse to even play their songs out for fear they'll be stolen. Perhaps they've heard horror stories or had bad experiences themselves. For the most part, however, it isn't necessary to be quite this protective of your music – the vast majority of fellow artists you come across are honest with no interest in ripping you (or anyone else) off. At least, in my experience. http://blog.sonicbids.com/how-to-copyright-music-2019 How Focus Music Hacks Your Brain An explanation of what happens to our brains when we put music on in the background to increase our focus. https://youtu.be/vodSSgHgYxM Blackstone's Byron Wien Discusses Lessons Learned in His First 80 Years I was scheduled to speak about the world outlook at an investment conference recently and shortly before my time slot the conference organizer said the audience was more interested in what I had learned over the course of my career than what I had to say about the market.  I jotted a few notes down and later expanded and edited what I said that day. I have since been encouraged to share my thoughts with a broader audience. Here are some of the lessons I have learned in my first 80 years. I hope to continue to practice them in the next 80. https://www.blackstone.com/media/press-releases/article/blackstone's-byron-wien-discusses-lessons-learned-in-his-first-80-years Thanks for tuning in to this month’s DRT feeding of your mind!  Remember, DigitalRadioTracker.com is the leading broadcast monitoring company in the world that monitors Internet Radio stations streaming in cars, smart TV’s, smart refrigerators, airplanes, cell phones, tablets and other electronic devices such as smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod, & Google Home. DigitalRadioTracker.com DigitalRadioTracker.com  is committed to this newsletter, Trakr, as a way of sharing helpful industry information and useful ideas to help our music community be the best we can be as recording artists, songwriters, producers, musicians, publishers, industry professionals, etc.  DigitalRadioTracker.com exclusively monitors and provides personalized and individual DRT Reports for artists and songs from over 5,000 radio stations, internationally, with a focus on digital radio airplay.  The DRT Global Charts excel for marketing, promoting and supplying information for growth.  Trakr keeps its viewers informed as to industry changes impacting airplay and revenue through other related links.  We thank you for tuning-in and look forward to your continued interest.  Always happy to help. Let us know what you think! Please email us at DigitalRadioTracker@gmail.com