As part of a new “Tweet Music” campaign, the audio electronics company will turn your tweets into sound if you tweet at them. It works through JBL’s Tweet Music algorithm, which takes words and assigns sounds to them. It has pre-assigned sound clips for certain letters, and so there are nearly 13 billion possible combinations. Users who enter into the campaign by tweeting at them will also be entered into an expenses-paid trip to the 2015 Grammy’s. JBL is pairing the campaign with physical, experiential kiosks outside of the Grammy’s this year so listeners can interact with their custom music before tweeting it out. In the first week, they’ve received 2,600 mentions with their @JBLaudio handle, and have added 3,100 new followers this week; 1,200 songs have been generated with 3,500 listens. It’s a clever ploy by the company, one that, though a tad gimmicky, is technologically interesting enough to hold Twitter’s attention.
Tag: music
Beats Music Launches
The day is here: we now have a big third competitor in the streaming music market. Beats Music launched today, and its take on streaming music is a $9.99/month service. But whether it can take on Spotify – which boasts more than 24 million monthly users – and Pandora might take more than just a “better service.” To push Beats music to the fore there will have to be some meaty marketing moves; users are mostly already entrenched in the Pandora/Spotify market, not to mention other options like Rdio, Google Play, iTunes Radio, and to pry them out of it will take some serious incentives. Beats won’t have a free tier after a 7-day trial, so it’s counting on users signing up. It’s a big ask; taking on this many established players at once is a bold move. But the wide reach of the headphones and brand name might just be enough to give Beats a leg up in the initial phases of development.
Beats Launches Streaming Music
Beats Electronics announced a new streaming music service called Project Daisy. On the heels of acquiring MOG last year, Project Daisy aims to sell listeners – and Beats owners, of course – music by every artist you can think of. According to Beats, Trent Reznor had a big hand in the project. There’s no word on when the service will launch, and there’s no word about pricing or the complete artist library that’s promised; nor is there any word on royalties or how the service will actually run on a profit. What’s for sure, though, is that the music streaming sphere is becoming awfully saturated, awfully quickly.
YouTube Plans Spotify For Music Videos
YouTube, the number one destination for music is preparing a premium on-demand music video service that looks a lot like Spotify. With both free and premium models, users get access to a breadth of music that is organized by album and artist in a way that makes it a more lean back experience than YouTube currently offers. Amidst serious competition from Spotify and Pandora and a precedent of free services, can YouTube breakthrough the clutter?
Twitter Music Going Silent
Only six months after a very high-profile launch, Twitter #Music may very well be closing its doors. Although there was a lot of positive press generated around #Music’s launch, the target audience of mobile app users failed to materialize. Only nine days after its launch, Twitter #Music fell off the top 100 free apps in the iTunes store. It’s hardly even cracked the top 1500 overall apps, and it hasn’t been in that category since May. To contrast the success of the video-sharing app Vine, which sits at 15 out of all free apps, it’s a pale comparison, and a clear sign that it didn’t live up to its promise. What happens from here is anybody’s guess, but for Twitter to be ready to admit defeat is a big step back in the music space.
Spotify Launches Follow Feature
Spotify, looking to build out the social features of its on-demand music streaming service, launched a new Follow button for artists, labels, concert organizers, and anybody else with music to promote. The button can be added to any external website or blog to raise awareness of a specific spotify profile. On click, signed-in Spotify users who are already logged in will automatically follow the artist; if they’re not logged in, they’ll log in and thereafter follow the artist. In following, Spotify users will get an update whenever new tracks or albums are added to the artist’s profile. It’s a very visible play to increase Spotify’s presence across the web, and the button will likely sit next to all the requisite Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ buttons on artists’ pages.
Spotify Connect Cements Spotify In The Home
In its ongoing play to become the dominant player in the music distribution arena, Spotify has forged deals with 10 audio equipment manufacturers to develop a system, launching today, called Spotify Connect. Connect allows users to seamlessly switch between playing music on their handsets and Wi-Fi connected home audio devices. As an added bonus, any Spotify user on your Wi-Fi network can control the music, so getting friends involved is simple. Music providers getting into the hardware game is nothing new, recalling products from Zune to AirPlay, but this system could be the push needed to bring true ubiquity to Spotify, and could certainly be the backbone of a car based system which has been a major goal of Spotify for some time.
Instagram Is Changing Music Festivals
Through partnerships with Instagram, several major festivals have displayed fans’ images on big screens around their events. Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, and Outside Lands, for instance, showed social content on main stages, and Outside Lands will feature Instagram Video for the first time as well. Shots that were previously only accessible to outside friends can now reach massive audiences and can quite literally act as social megaphones. This radically increases engagement with the festivals, and takes their social reach from purely outgoing content to internally shared images.
Music Sales Down As Streaming Up 24%
Amidst artist criticisms of streaming services, Nielsen released numbers that demonstrate just how streamed music is on the rise. In the first six months of 2013, streaming music was up by 24% to nearly 51 billion streams, while overall sales of albums and tracks were down by 4.6% over a year ago. The top track of the six months, unsurprisingly, was the Harlem Shake, which was streamed 438 million times, with the next closest contender, Thrift Shop, at 187 million streams. So no matter how the streaming issue resolves itself, it remains clear that streaming music is a medium that listeners are clamoring for.
Foursquare And Deezer Incentivize Check-Ins
Foursquare’s monetization strategy relies in large part on offering other businesses large quantities of user data – so partnering with other companies to encourage the creation of that data comes as no surprise. Today brings another such partnership, this time with Deezer, to help incentivize check-ins at live music concerts. Users in Brazil, the UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and others can opt into a 3-month Deezer Premium+ subscription after several check-ins at different gigs. Over 15,000 venues presently support the scheme, and Foursquare’s partnership points to a continued effort to increase its monetization and data edge. How well these partnerships work to boost Foursquare’s business remains to be seen, but it must be noted that they’re working diligently to increase check-ins across the board.
