• Music Tech Rewinder
  • Posts
  • MusicTech Rewinder - Music As Medicine, Understanding Streaming Services, New Listening Experiences, Get Creative With Web 3, and more industry news

MusicTech Rewinder - Music As Medicine, Understanding Streaming Services, New Listening Experiences, Get Creative With Web 3, and more industry news

Hey there,

This edition of the Music Tech Rewinder consists of a few more links than usually as I don't want to you to miss out on developments in the space during the week in which I took a break.

Before we dive into the news, I want to share a few other things with you.

1) I am always amazed by the power of music. There is no other art form out there that has such influence on society in general, our personal relationships and our well-being. Researcher and scientists are making more and more progress to prove with scientific studies that it is not just some esoteric hokus pokus but music can really be used as treatment for Alzheimer, Dementia or to alleviate pain.

2) Probably the most mindblowing and scary discovery that I had in the last days was playing around with OpenAI's DALL-E. That freely available text-to-image AI app generates nine different pictures based on a single text prompt. You gotta check it out yourself!

3) One of my favorite websites on the internet is "The Pudding". I just love how they use data to do research and explain all sorts of things in a really user-friendly, engaging and entertaining way. This time, they partnered with Vox for a data investigation into how TikTok is shaping the music industry. If you want to learn why TikTok is the rising social media force of the moment and how it is shaping today’s up-and-coming musicians and the music industry at large, you need to watch this video.

4) I am interested in the potential of Blockchain for music since 2016. I even organised a little conference during SXSW 2018 with quite a few of the leading figures in the space back then. I believe that this technology could have a huge impact on the music ecosystem in the future but I am also very sceptical about most of the hyped use-cases that we have seen in the past months. Most of the present NFTs won't have a sustainable future for music (for many reasons) and a lot of DAO roadmaps remind me about the good old ICO scams (not all of them. A rather promising example is Songcamp). Anyway, I might write a dedicated newsletter about my opinion at a later point.

Today, I just wanted to stress the fact, that a web on Blockchain protocols aka web 3.0 is about having a network of independent nodes instead of servers behind walled gardens + being able to automate tasks between the digital and analog world in a trustful and transparent way without intermediaries through a machine-readable internet. This is where the magic is and I am farely disappointed that the music ecosystem hasn't really picked up on that. Why are there no creative use-cases with smart contracts that make use of the power of Oracles so far? I was really happy to see that the Water & Music community created a NFT contract template that also allows off-chain tasks. Maybe this will give birth to new, out-of-the-box fan engagement tools for artists. I will run a little hackathon here in Berlin in August about Blockchain for music. More info on that soon.

So, now enjoy reading other news and have a wonderful and sunny weekend.

Cheers,

Matt

On average, each smartphone user has 80+ apps on their phone, but only really launch around 9 apps per day. Curiously, I checked my own phone - which somehow holds 148 apps, with only 10 being used only a daily basis.

Spotify just held an investor day in which it ran through its vision for growth. Spotify has long touted the concept of its total addressable market (TAM), its path to a billion users and the role of emerging markets as the surest path to this figure.

Here is our guide on how to understand if a playlist is good or not.

Hello, happy to be back after a couple of weeks off. To preemptively kick off the summer, I put together a reader survey to collect your thoughts on the newsletter and potential changes I might wanna make.

What if a company offered music streaming not only as a service but as a true “platform” as well? This is certainly far from a novel idea but, depending on how it was implemented, it could be very useful to listeners. This post is basically a description of how this could work.

What if we treat the financial rails around music with the same level of creativity as the music itself?

Apple in iOS 16 is enhancing the spatial audio experience with a new personalization feature. Personalized Spatial Audio uses the TrueDepth camera on...

A new vault for music could protect one of our greatest art forms for future generations.

Should the data collected in connection to the artist's career be considered personal data under GDPR? And if so, what would be the implications of data ownership in the music business? Let's get to the bottom of it.

For companies building a data inventory, over 50% will need more than a year to discover all data systems and create a unified data map.

Sony has updated its two Signature Series hi-res audio Walkman models, the NW-WMZM2 and NW-WM1AM2 with better battery life and larger screens.

Songclip closed an $11m funding round in March 2021.

MTV turned music into spectacle. The app is doing the opposite.

Spotify has been constantly bringing new features to its platform, as a way to stand out against competitors like Apple Music. Today, the company announced its acquisition of Sonantic, an AI Voice Platform that creates realistic voices from text. 

Feel free to share this newsletter with your friends if you like it. ;)