MusicTech Rewinder - Is this the end?

Dear reader,

when I started to write this week's newsletter, I thought about restructuring it a little bit and adding two new categories to give you some extra goodies for subscribing to it.

Then, yesterday, I got an email from Revue(the newsletter service I am using) stating that they will shut down for good by next week. What a bummer!

This doesn't mean that I will stop writing this weekly music tech digest but I now have to do some research to find a new way to deliver you the latest music tech news.

With that being said, here comes the last edition of the Music Tech Rewinder on Revue(longer than usual), and also probably the last one for this year.

One of the categories which I wanted to add is a weekly recommendation of a useful tool that I came across on the web. I have a bookmark folder full of it and will share them now one by one in future editions of this newsletter.

Starting today with 12ft.io. This tool allows you to read paywalled articles by circumventing the wall. The idea of this tool is simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it. Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL of any paywalled page, and this service removes the paywall and gets you access to the article.

I would like to thank you for being a subscriber and reader of my weekly summary of music tech news. Enjoy the holidays (if you celebrate Christmas) and have a wonderful rest of the year.

We will connect again on another platform for the Music Tech Rewinder.

Until 2023.

Cheers,

Matt

Today's 2022 roundup article focuses on funding rounds for startups (and bigger companies) in and around music/tech.

The music industry is often one of the first to get disrupted. What happens in music is often a preview of what’s to come in other sectors. The incumbents in music aren’t easy to overtake though.

Swifties are convinced a ticket sale screwed them over. Bring out the charts.

"Drinking from a fire hydrant,” the live industry’s mantra in 2022, was heard often and invoked constantly for good reason: The tsunami  of shows, festivals

Listen to “Skinny Ape” ahead of the cartoon band’s immersive performances next weekend

What playing music has to do with the happiness of the forest.

Cassette tape sales are surging again due to nostalgic collectors. If you’re old enough, you likely remember waiting hours for your favorite songs to come on the radio so you could add them to your mixtapes. Today, songs are available on demand, yet the humble tape is making a comeback. Between 2020 and 2021, sales nearly doubled from 173k to 343k.

In this interview, we speak to Steve Rhodes, Co-founder and CEO of UK-based 'vinyl-on-demand' startup…

Cohen argues that YouTube Shorts offers a distinctive difference to the likes of TikTok or Instagram Reels…

As more listeners find music on apps like TikTok, editorial playlists from Spotify, Apple Music and other streamers don't break hit songs as much.

Hello, happy to bring 2022 to a close. If you’re a musician or freelancer, check out the New York Seed Fund that allows freelancers to claim up to $5,000 of money lost due to the coronavirus pandemic. Groups like the Music Workers Alliance fought for this, so please

It’s a trend that’s been spotted by everyone from Sting to social media users: the bit of a song between the verse and chorus is disappearing. Are short attention times to blame, or is this simply another evolution in songwriting?

Generative AI technology is changing how songs can be written. What will happen to songwriters and producers?

They may sing and dance like other musicians but they are made with artificial intelligence. With the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI), deepfake and avatar technologies, these pop idols are taking their fame into a whole new dimension.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made great strides in recent years, and one area where it is beginning to have an impact is music.

Taking cues from Detroit techno and showcasing Autechre and Aphex Twin, the famed compilation found hedonism in the wind-down. As it is reissued, famous fans from then and now explain why they love it

Audio Diffusion leverages the recent advances in image generation using diffusion models by converting audio samples to and from mel spectrogram images.