Posts - BPG

In the age of the Intarnetz, radio is an easy target. I mean, it’s kind of low tech, in the grand scheme of things. Electromagnetic waves flying through the air? Analog? Really.

Yeah, really.

Today we take on radio, or more specifically we take on radio on the internet. It only seemed appropriate, what with the launch of Beats 1. And we have some very special guests: Zack Sparrow, our illustrious intern, and Joshua Rawlings, one of Brian’s offspring. It’s an awesome episode.

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Show Notes:

• Always On, and We’re Listening: Day 1 of Beats 1 Radio «
• Did Nielsen Kill The Radio Star? | FiveThirtyEight
• For the Love of Radio: Why College Radio Matters and Why You Should Support It | Luis Ruuska
• SHOUTcast – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• 2 Beats 1. Or Does It? — 500ish Words — Medium
• Don’t Touch That Dial — Cuepoint — Medium
• Apple Music: Human curation – Business Insider
• Apple Music’s Beats 1 Is Like Radio Before It Sucked | Re/code
• #beats1 – Twitter Search
• ‘You’re Playing for the World’: Q-Tip Talks About His Beats 1 Radio Show ‘Abstract Thought,’ Working With Sonos | Billboard

Are you enjoying your 3 month free trial of Apple Music? Or have you just been listening to music for free your entire life? Yeah. About that. This episode is.

Also T Swifty. Because we can’t seem to get through a single episode without here (we owe it all to you, Taylor).

Enjoy.

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This episode and all future episodes will also be on Apple Music! We’ll post a link when it’s live.

Show Notes:

• Taylor Swift – To Apple, Love Taylor
• What Taylor Swift vs. Apple tells us about artist power and a music business going cheap – Music Business Worldwide
• Tidal interim CEO steps down | Music Week
• Rdio boss: streaming music is ‘a retail business not an internet business’
• Dear Apple, any chance you could help get us out of this mess? – Music Business Worldwide
• Sony’s Equity Stake in Spotify Challenged in Lawsuit Claiming Artists Are Robbed – The Hollywood Reporter
• Apple – Music
• How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

(Sorry about the audio issues in this episode. We’re trying to improve this.)

Bands and brands have always played nice nice, but sometimes it gets a little close for comfort. On today’s episode we welcome our intern Zack Sparrow (yes, that’s actually his name) and get a millennial voice on the question of whether brands are the new arbiters of cool.

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Show Notes:

• Brands, The New Merchants of Cool — Cuepoint — Medium
• GoPro Music| Billboard
• Brands and bands – product placement in pop is a betrayal of fans’ loyalty | Rebecca Nicholson | The Guardian
• Pop music’s biggest sellout: How many brands paid for product placement in your favorite songs? – Salon.com
• Scion’s Music Label Attracts Big Names by Putting Artists First | Adweek
• Songs As Branding Platforms? A Historical Analysis of People, Places, and Products in Pop Music Lyrics (PDF)
• Universal’s New Ad Initiative Will Match Bands With Brands | Rolling Stone
• Red Bull Music
• Red Bull Media House

And here we leave you with this clip from the Colbert Report featuring The Black Keys facing off against Vampire Weekend to see which one is the bigger sell out. Hashtag ironic.

We’re probably gonna get in trouble for this one.

We begin today’s episode with the thesis that lasting change is coming to the music industry. We know this because, well, everyone knows this. Even while other industries see similar change, perhaps none of them has had as much public attention in its upheaval as this sad little business we call music.

Let’s be clear about this, though: the music industry is not dead, nor is it going extinct. It is simply changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

Which brings us to our second thesis, and the most important for this episode: change will come in the form of coffins. Pardon the morbidity, but it would seem that most, if not all, of the industry’s so-called problems are actually just aggressive resistance rather than actual strife. We saw it in the early days of iTunes, and we’re seeing it again with streaming. Hell, we saw it when sheet music turned to recordings, when vinyl made way for cassettes and CDs. We see it in concert ticketing – because lord knows we need another overpriced ticket to a crappy show, right? Publishers resist new formats, PROs resist transparency, and writers…. well…..

And so, in order for lasting change to occur, we need the stalwarts to die. Literally.

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Show Notes:

• Stan Cornyn, Visionary Warner Bros. Records Exec, Dead at 81 | Billboard
• Bruce Lundvall, Blue Note Records Veteran, Beloved Jazz Executive, Dead at 79 | Billboard
• Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business
• Amazon.com: Howling at the Moon: The Odyssey of a Monstrous Music Mogul in an Age of Excess eBook: Walter Yetnikoff, David Ritz: Kindle Store
• Amazon.com: Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis eBook: Fred Goodman: Kindle Store
• The Soundtrack of My Life, by Clive Davis
• Hitmaker: The Man and His Music, by Tommy Mottola

Episode photo by David

In which we answer the age old question: is anything in the music industry actually broken?

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We all know money doesn’t grow on trees. But what if it did?

In this episode we explore the strange world of music tech capital: where does it come from? who controls it? and how does one get some of that?

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Lots of linkage:

• Revenge Of The Record Labels: How The Majors Renewed Their Grip On Music
• Warner Music Group Becomes Founding Partner of YouTube Competitor Interlude | Billboard
• Music Messenger, the App That Nicki Minaj and David Guetta Invested In, Is Exploding — Here’s Why | Billboard
• Snoop Dogg, Investor | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
• Casa Verde Capital
• Rich And Savvy: The 15 Celebrities Who Invested In Tech Startups
• Record labels part owner of Spotify

An artist-owned streaming service sure sounds like a good idea. A streaming service that pays higher royalties sounds like a great idea. Unfortunately TIDAL is neither of those things. And on today’s episode we talk about why TIDAL is (maybe) great news for Jay Z, and more of the same for artists and labels and fans.

Show Notes:

• It’s a Trap! TIDAL and the Common Fallacy of Music Royalties (Mike’s article, which struck a few nerves)
• Episode 33 of Conversely, in which we tested TIDAL against Rdio 320kpbs to see if anyone could find a difference in the audio quality
• Tidal and the Future of Music | stratechery by Ben Thompson
• Tidal Addresses the Backlash: ‘There’s So Much More to Do’ | Billboard
• Marina & the Diamonds on #TIDALforALL, ‘It Feels Very Corporate’

Today we welcome all four teams from Project Music that BPG has been graciously asked to advise. Project Music is the first ever accelerator devoted specifically to music technology, and BPG is pleased to be mentors and advisors for this program.

Our guests today:

• Michael Amburgey, hiVolume Media/KaraoQ
• Stephen Davis & Joseph Moore, EarIQ
• Makenzie Stokel, EVAmore
• Chris McMurtry, DART Music

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Welcome back, my friends, to the show that seemed to have ended. We’re back with a brand new Conversely, and we do hope that you enjoy the new format. We’re trying some new things, hopefully having some new guests, and as always we’d love to know what you think. If you didn’t take our survey yet, please clickety click on this here link.

Today’s episode goes deep into the realm of mythology, as we explore Joseph Campbell‘s monomyth and The Hero’s Journey, a theory about our unending, timeless human desire to understand the world through the stories of heroes and their paths toward enlightenment.

More specifically we talk about rock stars and CEOs. But, well, that’s just how we do it on Conversely.

As we mention in the episode, this was all kicked off by an idea Mike had while driving, that went a little something like this:

We’ll let you read up on the rest. Here are the show notes:

• Joseph Campbell – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Monomyth – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (Amazon affiliate link)
• The Power of Myth (25th Anniversary Edition) – Bill Moyers with Joseph Campbell (Amazon affiliate link)

We promise not to screw it up.  Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going.  We will operate Tumblr independently.  David Karp will remain CEO.  The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve.  Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster. – Marissa Mayer on the Yahoo Tumblr acquisition

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Hello and welcome to this not-really-an-episode of Conversely. As you may have noticed, we haven’t been recording Conversely episodes lately.

Don’t worry, we’re coming back. Soon.

In the meantime, we’re looking for your feedback so we can make Conversely awesome. Like, really freaking amazing awesome. We’re not messing around here, we want Conversely to be the best entertainment technology podcast in the world.

And so we need your help.

We’ve put together a little survey – it’s only a few questions, shouldn’t take more than a minute or two – and your responses will help shape the future of Conversely.

Thank you all so very much for listening.