Estes São Os Melhores Streaming De Música No Mundo

These are the 7 best music streaming apps in the world

When it comes to the best music streaming apps, the conversation usually revolves around the battle between Spotify and Apple Music. But there are a lot of other apps out there.

Which music streaming app is best suited for your needs? Here are the best options.

Spotify

Spotify/App Store

Best features: There's a reason Spotify consistently comes out on top of its music app competitors: It makes 30 million tracks available to listen to or add to playlists for free. But where Spotify really shines is its ability to allow users to find new music. Its wildly successful Discover Weekly feature delivers users with a playlist specifically curated for them every Monday. And Spotify has a library of other pre-made playlists perfect for every life event imaginable, like a pregame, morning commute, or bad break-up.

Flaws: Some big musicians have criticized Spotify, alleging the streaming giant doesn't pay artists enough for making their work available for free. As a result, some artists have pulled some or all of their music from the service. So, if you're looking to listen to Taylor Swift's entire discography or Beyoncé's powerhouse "Lemonade" album, you're out of luck. 

Available on: iOS and Android.

Price: There's a free version (with ads and a mobile app where your music is perpetually on shuffle); the premium version app costs $9.99 (or $12.99 if purchased on the App Store).

Best for: People who want to discover and access the most music without paying a penny.

Apple Music

Lisa Eadicicco/Business Insider

Key features: Apple's much-anticipated streaming service underwhelmed when it was released last summer. But the big changes coming this fall to the app, including a more easy-to-navigate design, could rise Apple Music's stock in the streaming wars. Apple Music's current version does have some great features, including playlists made by people instead of algorithms and a knack for attracting anti-streaming artists to the platform (Apple Music ad star Taylor Swift's entire catalogue is only on Apple Music, and Gwen Stefani and Pharrell gave Apple Music exclusives on their latest releases before they put them on other streaming platforms.) 

Flaws: Apple Music has a lot of frills (namely, the Connect feature) and its platform isn't the easiest to navigate. Let's see if the update this fall lives up to its promises. 

Available on: iOS and Android

Price: $9.99 per month

Best for: Devotees of Apple or Taylor Swift.

Pandora

Pandora/App Store

Key features: Pandora, once a giant of the streaming world, has struggled in recent years and recently faced pressure to find a buyer. But Pandora does have its strengths: It's super simple to use and it's a good tool for discovering new music based on other artists or songs you like. And, to keep up with Apple and Spotify, Pandora has rolled out some new features that aren't half bad. The chief example is Thumbprint Radio, a personalized radio station that plays songs based on what songs you've liked on Pandora in the past à la Spotify's Discover Weekly.

Flaws: Pandora really is a just-the-basics service, and its wholly randomized stations don't always make for the best listening experience. And it only has 1 million songs compared to Apple Music's 43 million or Spotify's 30 million. 

Available on: iOS and Android

Price: Free, or $4.99 a month without ads. 

Best for: Users nostalgic for radio. 

Tidal

Tidal/App Store

Key features: Tidal has had its fair share of publicized problems, including shuffling execs and site crashes worthy of SNL parodies, but Jay Z's streaming service has two big things going for it: sound quality, and star power. Beyoncé debuted "Lemonade" exclusively on Tidal, causing Tidal to rocket to the top of the App Store. ("Lemonade" has since been made available on iTunes and Pandora.) Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo" and Rihanna's "ANTI" were released on Tidal before they landed anywhere else. And Tidal is the only service that has Prince's catalogue. 

Flaws: Tidal's interface can be pretty buggy, and it lacks a lot of options to discover music.

Available on: iOS or Android

Price: $9.99 a month, or $19.99 a month for higher quality sounds. 

Best for: Fans of Jay Z and Jay Z-adjacent artists. 

SoundCloud Go

SoundCloud Go/App Store

Key features: SoundCloud has enjoyed success as the place for users to release their own music or remixes with the hopes of becoming the next big thing. That means SoundCloud has a huge variety of music you can't find anywhere else—and some of the user-generated music is great. 

Flaws: SoundCloud's discovery options are limited to "popular," "related tracks," or "suggested tracks," which means it's a bit hard to find some of the great user-generated music unless you know what you're looking for. 

Available on: iOS or Android

Price: Free, or $9.99 a month for an ad-free, premium version called SoundCloud Go.

Best for: Musicians who want to share their music or users who want to listen to songs off the mainstream. 

YouTube Music

YouTube Music/App Store

Key features: YouTube realized that a good chunk of its users use the video service for just music, so it unveiled its own YouTube Music app last October to appeal to those people. The app lets you turn on an "audio" only setting, so users can listen to music and explore other apps (previously, users had to have the YouTube video constantly open or the music would stop playing.) And once the song you've selected stops playing, YouTube Music will select another song that it thinks you might like.

Flaws: The app isn't the best choice for people who are dependent on their playlists. Additionally, YouTube Music's songs are limited to the songs available on YouTube (read: singles with music videos or artists' songs uploaded by other users that haven't been taken down by the big studios.)

Available on: iOS or Android

Price: Free, or $9.99 for Android or $12.99 for iOS for an ad-free version called YouTube Red. 

Best for: Users who primarily use YouTube to listen to music on their phones.

Google Play Music

Google Play Music/App Store

Key features: Google Play Music doesn't tend to factor into the conversation about the best music streaming services, but it's quietly become a great app. The app uses technology from the late popular music curation service Songza, which Google acquired and subsequently shut down, to give you excellent song and playlist recommendations curated specifically for your mood or activities. The premium version of the app comes with the ability to store 50,000 songs on the Cloud and a free subscription of YouTube Red. 

Flaws: The app isn't the cleanest to navigate, and the sound quality isn't as great as Tidal's. 

Available on: iOS and Android

Price: Free for a shuffle version, and $9.99 per month for an on-demand version.

Best for: People who never got over the death of Songza, or Spotify users who are consistently unhappy with their Discover Weekly selections. 

A Banda Dos Muppets Tocam Pela Primeira Vez Em Um Festival - Video

Muppet band plays first music festival

Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem perform during the 2016 Outside Lands Music And Arts Festival on August 7 in San Francisco.

(CNN)Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem have been together for more than 40 years, but they just played their first music festival. 

The Muppets' house band were one of the acts Sunday at the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco, where they opened for Third Eye Blind, Chance the Rapper and Lionel Richie.

Their 25-minute set included their signature song, "Can You Picture That?" plus covers of Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, "San Francisco" by The Mowgli's, "Ophelia" by The Band and the Beatles' "With A Little Help From My Friends," done Joe Cocker style.

OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder Fala De Marcas, Tecnologia E Música Nova em 2016

OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder Talks Brands, Technology, And New Music In 2016

Apple CEO Tim Cook, right, looks at the new iPhone 6s with OneRepublic lead singer Ryan Tedder, in the demo room after Apple event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2015. (AP Photo/Eric Rosberg)

As a band, OneRepublic has found massive, international success with several of their singles, and many of the more memorable ones—“Apologize,” “All The Right Moves,” “Good Life,” and “Counting Stars,” to name just a few—have gone several times platinum, and have earned them a place in the top 40 world. The group is lead by Ryan Tedder, who is by far one of the most prolific and creative hit songwriters and producers of our time, with much of his most famous material having gone to other artists. Tedder has worked with Adele, Taylor Swift, Rob Thomas, Ellie Goulding, One Direction, Demi Lovato, and countless others. 

He has won the highly coveted Album of the Year Grammy twice as a producer, with both Adele (for 21) and Taylor Swift (for 1989, the current reigning champion), and he is in high demand by almost every star out there. That doesn’t stop him from making his own band a priority, and just recently, the group released its first single in years as the beginning of a new promotional cycle.

Last week, the band took time out of its busy schedule to team up with Motorola to launch two new products specifically designed for smartphones at a free concert: a magnetic speaker that connects to the back of certain phones, and a device that projects the screen’s image onto the wall, cutting down the size of typical projectors many times over.

 I spoke with the OneRepublic frontman about the group’s process for how they decide to work with certain brands, why Motorola makes sense for them, and what’s coming up for the rest of the year (hint: lots of new music).

So tell me, what’s going on with Motorola? What is this?

We did an event with Motorola a couple of years ago. It was in a different country. Austria? I remember the whole time I was bugging the president to give me his phone. It was a prototype of some new phone. Anyway, he never gave it to me.

We did something with them in the past, and then this was kind of a last-minute deal, just in the last two weeks. Full disclosure, we kind of look for any opportunity to come to New York City. We love New York, and we’re here every six weeks or so. This is kind of a no-brainer for us. Motorola is a company we like and we use. We’ve all owned things from Motorola in the past. Without sounding brand-whorish, we actually genuinely like the company and have used their products. 

We like technology, we’re kind of geeks. Anything that’s new or shiny. I’m the guy that’s buying things on Kickstarter waiting for them to actually come to market. Half the time it’s terrible, like a floating speaker I bought, which sucked. The other half of the time it’s stuff like these products, which are actually functional. We’re techno-dorks. We’re into any type of technology that’s disruptive and that’s going to make things easier and better.

So it’s not just the actual products themselves, it’s the qualities of the company?

It’s that it’s disruptive. Anything that’s disruptive. There’s a lot of stuff that goes to market all the time. I’m constantly reading Wiredand FORBES—I read this month’s issue cover to cover. I’ll find something in one of those articles, and immediately I’m online, tracking it down and looking at the company behind it, to see if it’s a company worth investing in, or if it’s on Kickstarter. Is it something I’m going to actually use?

I love technology. I’m the guy that buys the new phone the moment it’s released. I’ve already purchased two. We’re into that because we travel so much. Technology is our friend. It’s how we record, it’s how we get ideas across, it’s how we communicate. Every new device that comes out that’s disruptive and that’s not just a clone of something else is something that I’ll likely purchase.

Other than if you like a product, how do you guys decide what brands you want to put your name with?

It would have to be very specific. We have a longstanding relationship with Apple. We’ve played at their launch events before. We’re friends with Tim Cook. We go way back with him. We have to be very cognizant of who we’ve done things with in the past, and what is the depth of our involvement in those things. There’s not a laptop company in the world that we’re going to align ourselves with that’s not a Macbook Pro. That’s honestly how we make all of our music and do everything we do. There are microphone companies that I’ll align with and others that I won’t. 

There are car companies that we’ll align with. We work with Mercedes-Benz, and we did a two-year campaign with them. When the Mercedes deal came through, it made sense. My wife and I have a G Wagon. Another member of the band has vintage diesel Mercedes. 

The brand partnerships that we’ve had have been as natural as can be. There’s always going to be a level of questioning the authenticity of any partnership with a creative entity, To me, both parties have to be serviced. It’s scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. It has to be natural. 

Someone asked us recently on Twitter what it would take for us to play at a Trump rally, and my answer was, “There’s not enough money in the world, including his entire net worth.” There are certain things where it doesn’t matter what someone does or how much they pay you. It’s whatever feels authentic and natural.

This kickoff concert with Motorola, is this the beginning of a long-term campaign, or is it just a one-off?

This is a… We’re rounding first base. Hands are on the hips. Maybe going up the back… We’re leading off.

NYC O Mais Novo Festival De Música! É O Futuro Da Música Ao Vivo

NYC's newest music festival, and it's the future of live music

First of all thanks to 

Harrison Jacobs  for this article.

I made the trek to Randalls Island in New York City this past weekend for Panorama Festival, the city's newest three-day music festival put together by Goldenvoice, the promoters behind Coachella.

With temperatures topping 100 degrees and a lineup featuring big headliners like Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, and Kendrick Lamar, I expected the weekend to be — both physically and performance-wise.

The most noticeable part of the festival, however, was a structural addition I didn't expect to either notice or care about: the massive video screens attached to both the Panorama Stage (main stage) and the Pavilion Stage (second-largest stage).

Here was my experience of Panorama festival and what impressed me the most:

Here's a look at the screen at the Panorama Stage:

Run The Jewels performs on day three of the Panorama Festival.Theo Wargo/Getty Images

The Panorama Stage featured an LED screen that wrapped around the entire performance space. It's 245 feet long and 36 feet tall at its highest point, according to Kyle Casey, the Panorama Festival director.

The Pavilion Stage, meanwhile, featured three screens. The one in the center was 32 feet wide and 18 feet tall, while the two screens on the side were 20 feet wide and 11 feet high.

Here's what the screens at the Pavilion Stage looked like:

Grace Potter performs on the Pavilion Stage.

This may seem like an odd thing to point out. Just about every large-scale concert, from festivals to amphitheater shows, has video screens to help the nobodies in the back see what the tiny figures in the distance are doing on stage.

But at Panorama, the screens seemed bigger.

Not only that — what was playing on the screens seemed far more thought out than at other shows and festivals I've attended. The cinematography of the artists' performances had a concert documentarylike quality. Those behind the booth seemed to always know where to place the camera to give a particular part of a song the emphasis it needed to drive it home.

This suspicion was confirmed by Casey, who said VER and BML Blackbird, the companies that provided the screens for the Panorama Stage and the Pavilion Stage, respectively, collaborated with each artist's team to make sure their prepared video content meshed with the camera work provided by the companies.

The more prominent artists, like the headliners and those playing just before, had their own personal video directors who called the shots and clearly knew the cues of each song.

Matt Berninger of The National performs at the Panorama Festival.Theo Wargo/Getty Images

I never thought I would care about something like that. I usually make fun of the people staring at the video screens at a concert. Why go to a concert if you are going to just watch a screen?

But at Panorama, the camera work was so visually interesting on its own — and the screens so massive — that I found myself constantly looking up at them whether or not my view was blocked.

On top of that, many of the artists turned the video screens behind and around them into something approaching a video art piece that completely changed your experience of their performance.

Sia tricked half the crowd into thinking Paul Dano, Kristen Wiig, and Tig Notaro were dancing on the stage. Arcade Fire displayed a slideshow of David Bowie photos while singing 2013's "Reflektor." The National and Oh Wonder layered the performance footage over abstract colours, patterns, and lines that mimicked the aesthetic on their album covers.

And then there was Kendrick Lamar.

Kendrick Lamar at Panorama.Theo Wargo/Getty Images

The current king of hip-hop took the video screens as his canvas, switching between live black-and-white footage of himself performing and the crowd jumping, and an ever-changing reel of looped historical footage thoughtfully chosen and spliced together for maximum effect.

There was a suitably Orwellian clip of Ronald and Nancy Reagan blown up to cover the entire screen, Ellen DeGeneres and Barack Obama hugging repeatedly, George W. Bush tripping on a curb, Michael Jordan driving to the hoop, and Bill O'Reilly cursing at the camera.

The loop was endless and mesmerising, taking those in the audience back and forth through the last 60 years of televised history.

This video gives you a good idea of the kinds of footage playing during the set:

And here's an iPhone video I took from inside the crowd:

At a festival presented by the technology site The Verge and sold with a tagline of "Music.Art.Technology," the video screens and the way that the artists like Kendrick Lamar used them felt like the future of live music.

And I imagine that's exactly what Goldenvoice wanted.

A few logistical notes for future festivalgoers:

• The lines to get in were mercifully short, even if security personnel had a tendency to be overzealous.

• There was a wide variety of reasonably priced — by Manhattan standards — food and drinks.

• The marketer activations (hello, American Express Access and HP Lounge!) were semi-creative and, at the least, unobtrusive. Nearly everyone required you to post a photo with their chosen hashtag to get a free bandana, sunglasses, or whatever else they were giving out. (Advertisers: Please stop this.)

• The second-largest stage was thankfully underneath a massive tent that kept the scorching sun away in the middle of the day.

• Artists' sets weren't jammed together so that you had to run from stage to stage, and set times seemed thoughtfully picked to ferry like-minded fans through the festival. One example: The National played on the main stage, followed by Sufjan Stevens on the secondary stage, thus making way for fans of Kendrick Lamar.

• Panorama had only three stages instead of the four that Governors Ball, Panorama's NYC competitor, had. The downside: fewer artists to choose from. The upside was that each stage could play its sound system at full volume without noise pollution at other stages.

• The Lab "interactive experience" was only mildly interesting, except for the virtual-reality theater, which was worth every minute I spent in the line waiting for it.

• Getting out of Randalls Island only felt mildly like the escape scene from a zombie apocalypse movie. (This is probably endemic to holding a massive event on a small island.)

Deadmau5 Sobre A Realidade Virtual De Jogos E Música: Estes Mundos Vão Colidir

Deadmau5 Dishes On Virtual Reality Game & Music: 'These Worlds Are Gonna Collide'

Earlier this week, deadmau5 launched a virtual reality game in conjunction with Absolut Labs. Users get a taste of a day in the life of the producer, interacting with his cars, his cat, and his crowds; deadmau5 also debuted a new track, "Saved," inside the game.

Billboard caught up with the producer on Thursday to discuss the inspiration behind "Absolut deadmau5," the importance of getting the virtual reality experience right, and the bright future for virtual reality in music.

How did the idea for a VR game come about?

To do VR, you have to do it well. If you do it poorly, it's just a bad representation of VR, and you're also delivering a shit project, and you're just wasting a whole bunch of time -- including your own. I decided let's give this a shot, let's talk to some developers and get some ideas together and see what kind of thing we can do to max out quality and produce something that's good for you guys. Once we started prototyping and working with the studio that was involved, I was super happy with the result -- they took the time to do it right.

Usually companies, when they approach other people to do VR, they're like "we're gonna offer a virtual reality experience" -- to me that usually means they're gonna put a bunch of 360° cameras in a room, film something, and wrap the video in a sphere so you can head-track and look around. To me, that's not virtual reality. That's 360° video. So that's what initially scared me off.

Once we started going into technical details -- like we would be building a game engine for this -- I was like, "this is great." Our interests are aligned. This is a world I'm starting to immerse myself in, and these guys want to be immersed too. This a great entry level project in VR to get my feet wet.

Explore deadmau5's Studio in Video Walkthrough & Razer Music Production Tutorial

You were closely involved in the process?

As much as I could be. I had to do other things -- I've got three or four projects at any given moment. I do this sort of thing where even for my own shows, I like to supply my own fingerprint of creativity. Not just ideas, technical things: offering model data, creating visuals for my stage show myself, babysitting renders, learning that technology as I go. That's what makes me feel like an artist. I'm doing this thing in all these departments to create and release and have that as part of the final product, as opposed to being a guy who only does one thing and then has all these companies and teams that create the rest of it.

Is it difficult to balance all those projects simultaneously?

It keeps me busy; it keeps me satisfied and challenged. I know very well that I can release a song or two and then spend weeks and weeks hanging out by the lake or sitting on my porch. That puts me in a state -- if I'm caught idling, I get really fucked up and miserable. The feeling of being unproductive to me does not go over well.

Do you think a project like yours will help to build demand for VR?

That's the point of this. It's technologically as fucking insane as it could be, it's there, it's working, you can get it in anyone's hands right now. To build something that can work on that platform is a fucking great way to entice people into VR development. We really stressed quality in terms of performance. It's a small proof of concept, a demo, an experience that lasts five to ten minutes, you can go check it out and have it work well and then take it off and go, "wow, that was neat." And then hand it to your buddy.

Virtual reality to me seems to have a number of different tiers. Entry level tier VR is this experience: on a phone, some simple head-tracking, and some quick and dirty, game-engine-quality stuff. The price point is minimal getting in. Up at the top end, you're looking at $600 to $800 for a headset, and then $1000 for a video card. It gets up there. That's why there are no true VR games right now. All the major game companies -- they put in $200, $300, $400 million to produce a game over a period of four or five years, and then they sell the shit out of it and make all their money back. These games are on platforms that everybody can enjoy: some mid to high end PC specs with a 2D game. That sells; they get their money back. With VR, because the tech is so limited right now, no one has really been focusing on that sort of thing.

Deadmau5 Launches Virtual Reality Game

Is this the first song debut via a VR experience?

I think so. I whipped that track up out of the vault and said let's try it out. It's a risk, but I think the end product, having seen it and babysat it from start to end, is a beautifully well-executed thing for what it is.

Do you have ideas for where you want to go with VR in the future?

I've been working with a lot of pretty big companies in VR right now. I'm exploring this world of game development and GPU and getting involved in any capacity that I can to meet talented artists and programmers and developers. That's what you're gonna need to get a high-end experience done.

All this technology and this delivery method relies on game engines. Anything short of that isn't virtual reality -- it's you standing in a room looking around from a fixed point perspective with no interactivity. To be as fully an immersive experience as it can be, it has to be built in a game engine, meaning every component has to be rendered out in real time in three dimensional space.

We're gonna start to see a merge happen in the industry, where production companies will be talking to game studios. These two worlds are gonna collide, and when they do -- they're already starting to now -- it's gonna be a really big thing you're gonna really regret not getting into now at this time, not in the future. That's the next big thing that's gonna happen to the music business I think. Not in the sense of co-branding, where Aerosmith comes out with a first-person shooter, cool as that would be. The technologies are going to collide: musicians are going to be working with game companies instead of some twat director with a 35 mm shooting a music video.

Sony Pode Oficialmente Comprar 2 Milhões De Músicas Que Pertecem a Michael Jackson

Sony Can Officially Buy 2 Million Songs That Belonged to Michael Jackson

Including a trove of 250 Beatles songs. 

A ruling by the European Commission on Tuesday gave Sony access to works by Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and a much-coveted trove of 250 Beatles songs that were previously owned by Michael Jackson.

The commission’s decision gives the music company the green light to buy 2 million songs from Jackson’s estate for $750 million and dismisses opposition by Warner Music and independent music trade group Impala, which argued that the purchase would give Sony too much influence in the industry.

The deal will give Sony full control of Sony/ATV, a music publishing company created 21 years ago through a joint venture that split ownership of the firm 50-50 between Sony and the pop superstar, who died in 2009.

Warner and Impala had opposed the purchase, arguing that it would give Sony—already the largest music publisher—outsize leverage in negotiating licensing deals with music and video streaming services like Spotify and YouTube. Publishing rights are more important than they used to be given the explosion in digital streaming services that give consumers access to millions of tunes through a few taps of their smartphones. Songwriters and rights holders are paid publishing royalties when songs are played through these platforms.

The commission said Tuesday that the transaction will have “no negative impact on competition in any of the markets for recorded music and music publishing in the European Economic Area.” In particular, it said, the deal will “not materially increase Sony’s market power vis-à-vis digital music providers compared to the situation prior to the merger.”

Helen Smith, executive chair of Impala, said in a statement Tuesday that the decision is “clearly wrong.”

“It goes against the EU’s previous analysis of concentration in music, as well as the concerns raised during this market investigation. We will need to read the decision in full when published to understand properly why the Commission has allowed this transaction to go ahead—there is a fundamental flaw somewhere.”

Como Mello Music Group Tornou-se O Maior Sucesso Como Gravadora De "Indie Rap" Da Década

How Mello Music Group Became The Most Successful New Indie Rap Label Of This Decade

When Mello Music Group founder Michael Tolle entered the music biz in 2007, he was bombarded by proclamations of the industry’s imminent demise. A digital revolution had decimated the market for physical sales, and conglomerate-backed major labels were slow and indecisive in adapting to the new landscape. If once-loyal consumers were listening to music on their phones and laptops, skeptics fearfully asked, how were artists, much less labels, going to make money?

Tolle saw the challenge as an opportunity. Born from a series of compilations and self-funded collaborations, his Arizona-based upstart embraced the Wild West of digital downloads and streaming as means of organic publicity. But in other senses, Mello Music was a throwback, pressing releases to CD, vinyl, and cassette for a devoted audience. The album art recalled the great jazz and funk imprints of the twentieth century, and collaboration among Mello’s wide-ranging hip hop roster soon spawned full-length joint efforts from artists of varying stripes.

Rejecting the excesses which helped sink major labels in the new millennium (the built-in overhead of pricey A&Rs, extravagant video productions, superfluous equipment and studio engagements), Tolle let the evolving market dictate the means of his output, reasoning that demand would always exist for considered, musical hip hop. Where other labels clung to outdated mediums and rollout schedules, Mello emphasized the album structure in packaging its stable of idiosyncratic rappers and producers.

Many of Mello’s artists–quirky, progressive narrators with old school sensibilities–are ideally suited for the indie setting. Successful projects have included outings by Stik Figa, a scene-painting lyricist from Topeka; the abstract-leaning discographies of Dudley “Declaime” Perkins and his wife, the neo-soul singer Georgia Anne Muldrow; Open Mike Eagle, who terms his free-associative style “art rap”; and a stable of acts helmed by Detroit producer Apollo Brown, whose neo-noir compositions comprise a brutalist take on his city’s musical tradition.

We caught up with Tolle to discuss the demands endemic to the modern independent label, keeping up with advancing technology, and cultivating an audience.

A lot of Mello Music’s artists hail from distinctly middle American cities. How important was it to seek acts beyond the established hip hop epicenters of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta?

Michael Tolle: Hugely, because while I love listening to music from New York, L.A., Chicago, all of those places, they’re very urban cultures that have their own energies and their own vibes, and they’re visible even when you go there. But they’re not the vibes and cultures that everyone’s on. I personally don’t spend a lot of time in L.A. or New York, but I’m in Seattle a lot, I’m in Portland a lot, I’m in Hawaii a lot, New Orleans and Detroit. Because I listen to so much music every day, to find that little pocket that’s familiar, but has its own little twist, that resonates.

A big thing that people don’t realize about an independent label is that there are a couple of business factors going on that I don’t think anyone consciously tries to do, but they do weigh on things. You saw the death of the group a decade or two decades ago because it doesn’t make sense to tour 18 guys if you can just bring a guy with a microphone. And now it’s sort of gotten back to where the live band is part of the equation, but it’s still economically tough for labels and artists themselves to tour with a band if they’re not really cemented.

Likewise, there’s so much talent in the world, and when you speak to a New York artist or an L.A. artist, they pay New York or L.A. rent. So I’ve got plenty of experience with amazing New York and L.A. artists who are struggling financially, and when you talk numbers with them, they’re paying more per month to share an apartment than you’re paying to buy a house with a mortgage, land, and school district. Living in New York doesn’t sell records, talent does. So if you can find an artist who is not based in New York or L.A., but has talent, money goes farther. And so I think that that plays a factor with a lot of artists because you can go to places like Seattle, Detroit, and things are more reasonably priced without being outside the sphere of understanding, it’s not like you went to some country town where there’s only one building–the experience is similar.

Due to their styles and hometowns, some of Mello’s artists carry the status of hip hop outsiders. How has this helped carve a niche?

MT: There are people who are privileged, people who are not privileged–you get the whole spectrum–but in general most people in this country are somewhere in the middle, and we try to reflect that with music. So when you have someone like Stik Figa from Topeka, Kansas, or Red Pill from Detroit, you get these very American experiences that are unique to the regions. If they’re being truthful in their music, that resonates with people, and it resonates with me. I’d like to imagine we’re building a narrative or a story through all these different people from these very American places, portraying everyday existences with little distinctions that make their stories speak to people.

One thing I noticed with other people I worked with outside the label is that they have this ritual–it’s very hip hop–it’s, ‘Let’s get this big studio that looks awesome, this giant mixing board that we’re not gonna use. We’re gonna smoke tons of blunts, and we’re gonna write our rhymes in the studio, and somebody’s gonna pay $300 an hour for this, and it’s gonna look cool.’ And our artists don’t really work like that. They’re out writing stuff on the plane, on the bus, while they’re sitting in the town square, while they’re traveling, they’re writing as they go, and they only hit the studio when they need to record.

I think a lot of artists have a great first record, because they bring in their experiences from the world. And if they have success, they then tour, they live in hotels, they live in the studio and talk rap music. And that’s what you get on the next record, and the next record, and the next record, as long as they’re successful. But with us, you look at our artists, you don’t hear about that experience, because that’s not what they’re living. They’re continually out in the world writing about their experiences. They maintain a life rather than an industry existence.

Revenue-wise, what’s the current breakout between the digital and physical markets?

MT: I don’t care what format people listen to music in–it’s the music that matters. To that end, we do everything. I personally think CDs are great, vinyl’s great, we do some cassettes now too. Downloads are awesome, streams are awesome. But I’ve watched it change. We used to be pretty evenly split between physical and digital–it would be about 30% CDs, 20% vinyl. Then Apple eliminated CD drives and automakers eliminated CD players, so in the last year or two CDs’ share has decreased, but they’re still about 20% of the market. Streaming has taken over very quickly in the last 12 months, to where, revenue-wise, it has an equal share. Now it’s a little bit tilted–maybe 60% digital, including streaming and downloads, 40% physical.

Within digital, I’d say the most interesting thing is that it’s now about equal between streaming and downloads, which until recently wasn’t the case. Spotify is fantastic to us. Anybody you hear complaining about it, I don’t think they’ve really looked at the comparative picture. iTunes and Amazon are great to us–they’re about the same in terms of revenue. I think that’s why you saw Apple move to Apple Music, and it’s going to get bigger. Some of the iTunes people will move to Apple Music, but hopefully revenue will be equal there. I still think CDs will make a comeback in like five or ten years, and be the vinyl of that age.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been really surprised to see cassette tapes make a bit of a comeback. What do you attribute that to?

I think a few things happened. Vinyl became so trendy, and about two years ago vinyl buyers started requesting free download codes with their purchases. I think the market went from people buying vinyl because they really listened to it–and there’s still that market, that 50% of real vinyl buyers–but there were also a lot of people buying it because it was cool. I think that created a little bit of a bubble, but I still think the core of the vinyl market is very solid.

So then the prices started to go up, and pressing vinyl is still a long process–we’d have to hand records in four months in advance–I think people wanted more of a lo-fi alternative, and it was tapes. I will say that no one’s pressing thousands of tapes, we’re probably talking hundreds at best, even if it looks like they’re everywhere. It’s pretty niche still.

Do you think Mello’s artwork and special edition releases have helped capitalize on the remaining physical market?

Yeah, for me, it’s like Netflix. I stream lots of stuff, but once in a while Netflix changes the selection, and I can’t watch one of my favorite movies. You want to have a copy they can’t take away from you. I don’t want to subscribe to PhotoShop and have to renew it every month, otherwise I can’t open my files. So while I still want to be a subscriber to those services, I want the option of the hard copy.

If I’m pressing something to vinyl, I want it to be a work of art. I joke, I stream it when it comes out, if I like it enough to listen all the way through I’ll buy the digital download. If I’m still listening to it a week later, I’ll buy the CD or vinyl so I can have a physical copy in the house. I know a lot of people don’t do that, but for me, if I have something on vinyl, that means I’ve been listening to it a while, and I want to make sure it’s there, like a book on a shelf. I read digital books, but I have books I really love in paperback or hardcover on a shelf.