MusicTech Rewinder - Music Distribution, Streaming and Fighting Goliath

Happy Friday,

I hope you had a great week and you are now ready to start the weekend. Here comes some reading material with thoughts about the future of music in the digital space and the latest new in music tech.

Before you dive into it, here are two web discoveries from this week:

1) Drawing Neurons From Sound And Music In Real-Time. Inspired by Neuroscience, we can start to answer the question: What does music look like?

2) This one is not music-related but pretty mind-blowing. Google Research, Brain Team presented Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model with an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding. Imagen builds on the power of large transformer language models in understanding text and hinges on the strength of diffusion models in high-fidelity image generation

Enjoy reading and have a fantastic weekend.

Cheers,

Matt

Epic Games’ Bandcamp Gets to Use Own Payments System on Google Play — futureparty.com

Epic Games temporarily wins injunction against Google Play store so Bandcamp (recently acquired) gets to use its own payment system & not pay Google a fee.

Spotify Isn’t Netflix—For Better Or Worse — zogblog.substack.com

Shares of both streaming giants have tumbled in the past month following negative Netflix news. Wall Street doesn’t seem to get that they're different.

TikTok has changed music — and the industry is hustling to catch up — www.npr.org

TikTok has flipped the script on the music industry, and everyone from artists to analysts and even marketing bosses at the top labels are trying to catch up.

How Rappers Are Trying To Lead Innovative Ways Of Distributing Music — www.okayplayer.com

Black Star with their podcast and Kanye West with his Stem Player are among the acts rolling out albums in new unprecedented ways.

The 18th Century’s Surround-Sound Machine — www.vulture.com

A behind-the-scenes feature about the organ at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue in New York City.

The Woes of Being Addicted to Streaming Services — pitchfork.com

After a decade under the influence of music algorithms, a look at what streaming services afford the most engaged fans and what lingers below the surface.

Music streaming has a ‘tsundoku’ problem — www.musicbusinessworldwide.com

London-based music industry journalist Eamonn Forde on the future of music streaming.

Can Abba really recreate the feel of a live concert using holograms 41 years after their last set?

This week the supergroup begin seven months of gigs in a purpose-built London arena… with the band members elsewhere

How NFTs Are Shaping the Way Music Sounds — pitchfork.com

Like it or not, the industry has embraced NFTs. What could that mean for the way music will be made?