Tag Archives: spotify

Weekend links and video roundup

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For your reading pleasure…

Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi) Weighs In on the Great Streaming Music Debate:

Writing in Pitchfork, Damon Krukowski gives a thoughtful analysis of why he believes “Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music.” In response, blogger Shi Lei wrote a response on his website directly addressing Krukowski’s concerns. Both articles are smart, well-articulated and definitely worth a read, however they use Spotify and Pandora as their only examples (no Chinese equivalents). No matter how many pay-to-play services debut in China, suffice to say any given model (1Ting, 360buy, Wa3) is still far away from the consumer bases of Spotify, Pandora or Xiami.

Beijing Band Residence A Featured on Al-Jazeera

Beijing indie darlings and Radar favorites Residence A are gathering more and more buzz, if that’s even possible, at the end of a very fruitful year that saw them release their debut album, embark on a 30-city domestic tour, and bring down the house at Yuyintang with a rousing show during this year’s JUE | Music + Art festival.

Pairs’ Xiao Zhong Interviewed by SmartBeijing

Congratulations on your official launch, SmartBeijing! May your snark slowly infiltrate even the most earnest of Beijingren. Hot on the heels of last week’s revealing interview with Dan Shapiro of the Fever Machine, SmBj is back on the hunt with another soul-baring and bridge-burning dialogue with Xiao Zhong, drummer of Shanghai shitrock 2-piece Pairs and one of the music industry’s most interesting advocates.

Hangzhou’s The Tree Is One of Two Winners in Converse’s “New Noise” Campaign

Wooozy Sessions alumni The Tree are headed to New York’s Rubber Tracks studio to record after being named one of two winners in Converse China’s latest campaign “Searching for New Noise.” An online competition, Searching for New Noise enlisted young bands from all over the country to submit their music and videos to social networking platform Renren (equivalent to China’s Facebook) for other users to listen to and vote on their favourites. The top 5 finishers would embark on a 6-city Chinese tour, at the end of which 2 winners would be selected for the trip to New York and studio time.

Our Chinese-language music information site and blog Wooozy.cn invited The Tree to play in Shanghai in April of 2012 as part of their Wooozy Sessions, a series of concerts meant to highlight promising young bands from across the country who have not yet had the opportunity to play in Shanghai. With other alumni including Maybe Mars darlings Mr. Graceless, Chengdu pranksters Eat Alien’s Brain and Taipei/Beijing-based shoegaze power trio Skip Skip Ben Ben, the Wooozy Sessions has fast established itself as an early recogniser of domestic talent.

Check out a video of The Tree performing at Mao Live House Shanghai during the Searching for New Noise tour.

Touring China – some differing perspectives

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A recent article written by a Canadian publication profiles and chats to some bands that have toured China over the last few years. Some interesting take outs:

“If the band’s at a certain level and expects a certain degree of professionalism, production and predictability, then I think the Chinese market can introduce some variables that might not work,” says Henwood. “But if the band is looking for life experiences and willing to roll with the punches then I certainly would recommend they go.” (Piers Henwood manages Tegan and Sara as well as being the guitarist in Jets Overhead)

“I don’t think there’s a reliable market for the music that we play in China,” says Alex Cooper, singer and guitarist for Parlovr, who played last year’s Transmit tour. “At this point it’s kind of hard to tap into anything there financially.”

“The great thing about China is once something gets going it just rolls like a wave. All of a sudden there’s this explosive energy,” he says. “If you don’t have your relationships in place and you don’t have your network and you don’t understand how to operate on the ground there, you’re going to have to move really fast. If you’re not connected to it, you might miss it.”

Versteeg sees it a bit differently. “You can’t really be in this business to make money,” he says. “What’s the difference between making no money in China or no money here?”

[disclaimer: our sister company Split Works co-produces TransmitCHINA and also toured all of the artists mentioned above]

Our comments:

It seems that everyone in this article is right to a degree. There is little in the way of established infrastructure, there isn’t a reliable market for Western music (or really music at all) in China, but there is a need to get yourself positioned, because if and when this place does “get it” growth will be exponential, like in every other industry here.

Changes in the last 5 years point inexorably towards this – the explosion of live venues, festivals and bands to play points towards an increasingly febrile and vibrant undercurrent flowing through China’s cities. Of course, the main impediment to real growth are reliable income streams outside of touring which is a conundrum not exclusive to China. Big companies are hard at work trying to solve this: witness the mainstream acceptance of paid streaming service Xiami, the recent establishment of an ad supported service from search behemoth Baidu and the impending arrival of Spotify. The future isn’t yet rosy, but dawn does appear to be breaking on the horizon…..

 

Baidu Reaches China Licensing Deal with Universal, Warner, and Sony.

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UPDATE: thanks to Andy for pointing out Beijing Daze’s much better analysis of Baidu’s offering, namely that Google has had a somewhat better service in the China market for nearly 3 years. We covered the Google thing back in August 2008.

Baidu, China’s largest search engine, has reached a music licensing agreement with One-Stop China (OSC), a joint venture between Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony BMG which will make over 500,000 songs in their catalogues available for free and legal download and streaming on Baidu’s music page and through the search engine company’s new social music venture, Baidu ting!

Baidu Ting Launches in China

Within the agreement, Baidu will pay the artists’ and labels’ licensing fees, allowing China’s 450 million Internet users to stream and download these songs freely and legally, though with commercial interruption. A “pro” paid model with limited or no commercials is in the works, scheduled for release later in the fall.

It will be interesting to monitor what this means for the notoriety of foreign groups in China. Though many artists in the One-Stop joint venture already have ardent Chinese fans (Avril Lavigne and Lady Gaga come to mind), we wonder what this means for younger bands signed onto the major labels. San Francisco’s Cults, one of the most talked-about groups of 2011, went from deliberate Internet anonymity to signing with Columbia (a subsidiary of Sony BMG). It will be interesting to see how these labels will (or won’t) use this new platform to promote their diverse rosters.

More HERE and HERE

“Big” announcement by Apple

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UPDATE: we got it completely wrong – the Apple update was to let the world know that the Beatles back catalogue was finally available on iTunes. Worthy of this kind of announcement?

If you go to www.apple.com, the whole page is an ad for an announcement tomorrow. Like this.

Apple's Big Day

In true Apple style, they are hyping the PR in the (justified) hope that people will share and get excited. And that the free media storm will be a deluge.

So what is it going to be? If you’ve been following the industry press over the last 12 months, Apple purchased Lala (the music streaming service) last December and then killed it. Legend had it that Apple was buying Lala for her engineers and technology so that they could apply it to iTunes and create iTunes-in-the-cloud.

Streaming music services are not new. Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG and even Pandora have been doing it for the last few years in one shape or another. Apple, having pioneered the iTunes way of selling music have apparently realized that streaming is the future, and bought the best engineers in the business to put it together for them.

We do have a bit of an anti-Apple bent at the Radar. We just don’t like the closed loop that they have created and the fact that they are trying to control what you read/listen to/ watch and how you do it, all under the guise of controlling the user experience. We are great believers in open source and despite its limitations, we believe that Android is the future. We just don’t like to be controlled by a single corporation…

Apple has been living on the back of its frankly amazing innovation, introducing next generation products and technologies to market, and making them ultimately usable. However, in recent times, it seems that Apple have started to copy innovation from other companies: Ping, taking the best of Facebook and Twitter and putting it into the iTunes platform (does anyone actually use Ping?) and now this. The funny thing is, this isn’t a new phenomenon. If you have a spare hour, read this simply fascinating story about the birth of iTunes, and Steve Jobs (legendary) negotiating style.

(rumours on other music blogs mostly point to the Beatles back catalogue becoming available on iTunes – still, this was a good opportunity to chat bug-bears)

The trouble with becoming the biggest company in the world is that innovation isn’t scalable to this degree. Microsoft, Oracle, Sun were all hugely innovative companies at the beginning. Scale defeats innovation, as Facebook and Apple are finding increasingly.

Anyway, we could be completely wrong on this. Feel free to disagree…

Music Matters, 2010

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Hong Kong based music industry conference Music Matters is hitting us left right and centre with press releases about their upcoming event (May 26/27).

You can check out everything that’s happening at their website, but in summary, here are a few of the best bits and pieces:

  • Daniel Ek from Spotify: Spotify has been the most talked about development in the music industry these last 12 months, but there has been plenty of controversy about whether or not the streaming music service will actually be good for artists or not. Despite big plans, Spotify still hasn’t laid out clear timelines for both the US and more intriguingly, China.
  • Bill Silva, the legendary promoter and manager will be coming with his charge Jason Mraz, who will be engaging in a performance/ interview at the end of the last day of the conference
  • A new multi venue music festival, in conjunction with the Lan Kwai Fong bar strip of Hong Kong.

What a potential GOOG exit means for Top100.cn

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The WSJ’s Loretta Chen covers the potential fallout from a Google China withdrawal for its music partner Top100.cn HERE.

Top100 launched the world’s first free-to-stream-or-download music service in association with Google in 2008.  You can read more about that HERE.  The service has struggled against Baidu’s “free” and illegal service, which is the mainstay for most Chinese music lovers.  But with Baidu under pressure to go legal, services like Spotify, Nokia’s Comes with Music and others are all eyeing China with interest.

Spotify to China…?

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Spotify, the ad-supported music service that has swept Europe over the 12 months since launch, has plans for China.  According to Shakil Khan (Spotify’s consiglieri) at a keynote speech given at London’s brand new NOAH conference, the company that already has 6 million users in the 6 European countries in which it currently operates has aggressive plans for the US first (Q1 2010) and then China and Germany in Q1/Q2 of next year.

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