Dê Uma Olhada Neste Toca-Disco - Classe A

A Look At Building A High-End Turntable

First of all thanks to BOBBY OWSINSKI for this article.

There’s no question that vinyl is back with a bang, and as a result, so is the turntable business. In fact, most turntable manufacturers both big and small have experienced double digit sales growth in the last few years, a trend that looks like it won’t be stopping anytime soon.

But what exactly goes into making a turntable, especially a high-end one? In the following video you’ll no doubt marvel at what a fine hand-crafted precision tool the Riga RP8 is as you see it being made from scratch. By the way, the RP8 sells for $3,500 with the stylus cartridge and $3,000 without.

That’s no doubt more than most people are willing to spend on a device to play their vinyl (in most cases their entire playback system doesn’t cost that much), but it doesn’t make the RP8 any less cool if you have that kind of money to spend.

Indústria Da Música Dois Dígitos De Crescimento

U.S. Music Industry Sees First Double Digit Growth in Almost 20 Years as Streaming Takes Over

It looks like happy days are here again: U.S. recorded music sales were up 11.4 percent in 2016. The industry brought in $7.65 billion in revenue, according to the RIAA, up from $6.87 million in 2015. Although the music business showed signs of a recovery at the half-year mark, the 2016 year-end results show more significant growth, led by streaming revenue.

This is the first time since 1998 that the U.S. industry has experienced a double digit increase in overall revenue. Back then, the industry enjoyed revenue of $13.7 billion.

Unsurprisingly, streaming is pulling the business back to health, as revenue grew 68.5 percent to $3.93 billion, up from $2.33 billion in 2015. In fact, streaming grew so much last year, that it now accounts for more revenue than downloads, CDs and vinyl combined. Together, these formats brought in $3.51 billion. Paid music subscriptions doubled in the U.S., according to the RIAA -- up to 22.6 million, from 10.8 million in 2015.

Even with this robust growth, recorded music brings in just over half the $14.6 billion it generated at its 1999 peak.

There is more good news, though. When you subtract out the year’s $883.9 in royalties collected by SoundExchange, and divide revenue by the 431.74 billion streams counted by Nielsen Music, the average per-stream rate is $0.0072. Last year, that number, which includes video and audio on-demand streams, was $0.00517. In 2014, it was $0.00666.

So even though on-demand, ad-supported revenue, like that from Spotify’s free tier and YouTube, grew 25.9 percent to $469 million, payments from paid subscription services are growing three times as fast. Paid subscriptions generated $2.26 billion for the industry industry, up 94.9 percent from $1.16 billion in 2015.

On the sales side, digital downloads accounted for $1.84 billion while physical sales totaled $1.67 billion. The decline on the digital side came largely from singles: download song sales fell to $751.1 million, which led to a 24.1 percent decline in revenue to $9.06.8 million.

Digital album sales declined 21.3 percent to 86 million units from 109.3 million units in 2015; they generated nearly $876 million, a decline of 19.6 percent from $1.09 billion in 2015.

On a per unit basis, the average list price for downloaded songs increased slightly to $1.21 from $1.20, while the average list price of albums also increased slightly, to $10.18 from $9.97 in 2015.

Physical sales remain important to the industry, accounting for 21.8 percent of revenue, though they generated 15.7 percent less revenue in 2016. And since unit sales were only down by 15.7 percent, average prices are falling as well.

CD sales fell 20.9 percent to $1.17 billion. The average list price of CDs was $11.80, down from $12.36 in 2015.

The vinyl revival is losing some steam, although the format remains a bright spot. Unit sales grew 1.8 percent to 17.2 million, while revenue rose 3.5 percent, to nearly $430 million. (This year, revenue from ad-supported streaming surpassed than of vinyl -- it rose to $469 million.) Since vinyl growth averaged 38 percent a year from 2012 through 2015, according to Nielsen Music numbers, some wonder if the format’s resurgence has peaked.

Revenue from synchronization licensing -- $204.3 million -- was essentially flat, while revenue from ringtones and ring-backs fell 26.5 percent to $40.1 million.

For the first time, the RIAA broke out revenue generated by limited-tier subscriptions -- those that restrict the availability of songs, the devices they can be heard on, or other features. That category brought in $220.3 million in revenue. In another first, the RIAA reported $101.2 million in revenue from ad-supported streaming services that operate without a statutory license (and license music directly from labels).

Warner Music Lança Um Selo Exclusivo Para Vinil - Run Out Groove

Warner Music Launches Fan-Driven, Vinyl-Only Label Run Out Groove: Exclusive

Warner Music Group is officially unveiling its new fan-driven, vinyl-only record label: Run Out Groove.

The label’s forward-thinking format calls upon fans each month to determine which of three records -- either previously unreleased, out of print, or an entirely new collection compiled from the Warner Music vault -- will become available for purchase in a limited run.

"The crate-digging community is steering the ship," said Billy Fields, vp of sales and account management for WEA, the artist and label services branch of Warner Music Group, in a statement. "We are crowd-sourcing niche but in-demand selections from our vast vault to be pressed on high-quality vinyl, and it’s going to be a lot of fun to see where the community decides to take us."

Each month, fans will vote on the record they want pressed to vinyl from a trio of selections; the popular vote wins. The record with the most votes will then be available to pre-order for 30 days, and once the window closes the quantity being pressed will be revealed. Run Out Groove already opened operations quietly; its first release was MC5’s The Motor City Five, though its first fan-chosen release was a new collection from Echo & The Bunnymen, It’s All Live Now, recorded in Sweden, which features live covers of "Paint It Black," "Soul Kitchen" and "It’s All Over Now Baby Blue."

"I am chuffed that our fans came out in droves and voted for us," Will Sergeant of Echo & The Bunnymen said. "It’s a historical document of another time, another place, another me and a very interesting stop off traveling the road map of the band's life."

Once the pre-order window for a particular record closes, fans may still be able to snag the release at local participating retailers. Potential future releases, which can be voted on right now, include Solomon Burke’s Best Of Atlantic Soul 1962-1965, Secret Machines' Now Here Is Nowhere and Golden Smog’s Down By The Old Mainstream.

"With LP's you feel like you have actually got something worth having, to hold and read while you listen," Sergeant added. "I love the organic visceral nature of the record, a piece of plastic that can bring forth such wondrous sound. It’s all pretty weird when you think about it, some sort of wonderful sonic voodoo."

Streaming De Música Brasileira Esta Desafiando O Spotify

This Brazilian Streaming Music Player Is Challenging Spotify, Using Chatbots

First of All thanks to Murray Newlines  for this article.

Disrupting the streaming music market is extremely difficult to do, given the entrenched positions of Pandora and Spotify in the world market. But Brazilian company SuperPlayer is doing just that, with its streaming music service that is simple, curated, and effectively halves the price of Spotify’s Premium service in Brazil. With the ability to listen to music offline without consuming data, Spotify should be worried.

But the most impressive disruption that SuperPlayer has pulled off is using chatbots in their influencer marketing schemes. It’s no secret that chatbots are essential to customer service, but SuperPlayer is the first to integrate music into chatbots, and effectively.

At an event hosted by Apex-Brasil  during SXSW  I spoke with Gustavo Goldschmidt, CEO and co-founder of SuperPlayer, to find out more about how chatbots are revolutionizing streaming music, and the future of chatbots in streaming music.

You compete with people like a Pandora, how and why you are so successful, do you think?

We are focusing on very simple-to-use service that provides great music for every moment of people’s lives. The interface is easy to use, and we curate by activities so people don’t have to think about what they would like to listen to, they just do it. That made SuperPlayer a big hit; people started using and adopting it, and we started to grow -- we had 100K users in the first month, and now we have one million active users per month, and over four million downloads in the app stores.

How are you using chatbots in your marketing and in your company?

We started building chatbots for SuperPlayer so people could tell the player how they were feeling or what they were doing, and we could provide a soundtrack right away. This was very cool and very innovative, so some record labels asked us to build bots for them and for their artists. Now we’re providing chatbots for artists that can send their concert schedule, their music videos, and also playlists that take users to our streaming service. Besides being beneficial for the artists, we’re benefiting from using that to acquire users, and it has been a nice strategy.

How did you work with particular artists to make that work?

We initially worked with Luan Santana, one of the biggest artists in Brazil, and Som Livre, one of the biggest Brazilian record labels. ChatClub, one of our sister companies through our investors, made a chatbot for Luan Santana which launched the first music inside a chatbot in the world. Luan Santana posted a video saying, “If you want to listen to my music, go to my chatbot and ask for my music.” Then Facebook helped us to distribute this video to the whole fan base of Luan Santana, and in five days we had 350K plays of his music. It was a really innovative way of launching a song.

Why do you think that chatbot was so successful?

Bot is a new technology, but it’s a new technology that is easy to use. It’s not like something new that only people who are incredibly technological can use. It’s a new-old technology, and very accessible to everybody. Having an artist to promote it was key to our success. If we launched a bot and didn’t have that artist appeal, it would be difficult to scale. But with the artist, it was a good way to grow fast. People love to stay in touch with the artist and know everything he is doing, and a bot is a good way to build that relationship.

What are your future plans using bots and technology? How do you see using them to grow your company?

Our goal is to make music close to people’s lives; to improve people’s lives. I think that bot can help people have control of what are they going to listen to, like an unlimited service, but with the simplicity and convenience of curation. In the future people are going to say, “I want a bot playlist with Justin Timberlake – for jogging,” and then the bot will understand and create only this playlist. It will make it so much easier for services to find the right music for you.

Seis Gravações Da Última Década Que Transformaram A Indústria Da Música

Six Records From The Last Decade That Transformed The Music Industry, According To Zane Lowe

DJ Zane Lowe attends Esquire's celebration of March cover star James Corden and the Mavericks of Hollywood presented by Hugo Boss at Sunset Tower Hotel on February 8, 2017, in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Esquire)

"My job is to be a conduit between the artist and the fan."

If Zane Lowe's life were a classic hip-hop record, this phrase would be his breakbeat. Speaking at SXSW yesterday to a packed audience, the world-renowned DJ and Creative Director of Apple Music's Beats 1 returned frequently to this idea of connecting artists and listeners, as he presented his vision of the music industry as unifying rather than divisive.

"Music tends to fall into camps: punk versus rock, rich versus poor, fans versus artists," he said. "In radio, my role is to keep standing strong with one foot on each side."

Exuding an infectious energy and charisma reserved only for the best DJs and radio hosts, Lowe walked the audience through his multifaceted journey with music—from "pirating the sh*t out of Nirvana," to landing his first jobs at Max TV in Auckland and secondhand record store Music & Video Exchange in London, to watching his weekly stacks of tapes and CDs at BBC Radio 1 slowly dwindle under the weight of an up-and-coming site called Myspace.

"Myspace often gets an also-ran badge in the internet space, alongside the ranks of Ask Jeeves," said Lowe, drawing laughter from the audience. "But Myspace was one of the most exciting centers of the music industry because the fans took control. That was where the conversation was really happening. If you didn’t have radio play as an artist, Myspace was where you could really develop an audience from scratch."

His stance on Napster is more ambivalent, and not just because of its negative financial repercussions. "Sure, Napster meant no more shiny, plastic, expensive albums, no more gatekeepers or politics—but there was also no more love, no more layers of thought," he said. "It was music made modern, but to me, as an avid owner of this"—he pulled out a vinyl record from behind the podium—"it felt like we were going back to the stone age."

On the other hand, Lowe suggested, the more positive legacy of free was that it "encouraged artists to think for themselves." He pointed to six records from the last decade that preached this paradigm by capitalising on the Napster revolution and its aftermath.

First up was Radiohead's 2007 album In Rainbows, which the band released without a record contract under a pay-what-you-want model on their website. From that point on, not only was the value of music itself thrown into question, but "artists began searching for ways to make record distribution itself into an event," said Lowe.

Jay Z would continue paving the path that Radiohead forged with his 2013 album Magna Carta Holy Grail, which was made available for free to Samsung customers through the rapper's Magna Carta app. In general, by providing almost infinitely more choice, technology allowed artists to "experiment more not just with distribution, but also with promotion—how and when to speak," said Lowe.

Another iconic output of this experimentation was Kanye West's Yeezus, which Lowe deemed "the modern punk record of our time." This was less about technology, and more about personality.

"Kanye's genius is in his transparency: his willingness to let us behind the curtain into his complicated world, the way he crafts every rant, every social message, every idea like a new hit," said Lowe. "He's absolutely fearless when it comes to his vision, which leads to his high-intensity relevance."

Despite West's mega-celebrity status, Lowe argued that the rapper's approach to fame could provide a blueprint for emerging artists as well. "If you ask any aspiring pop star on the edge of culture, they'll tell you that creativity is a business model and attention is a currency," he said. "Tomorrow’s artists know that there’s so much more to music than just music. Artists can no longer thrive on just one hit record; the emphasis is on great ideas that build alongside great music."

The importance of ideas in 2016 pinnacled with Beyoncé's album-cum-short film Lemonade, which  "taught musicians that they could now mold themselves into TV, film and fashion," said Lowe. He added that multimedia, interdisciplinary projects at large offer fans even more layered, nuanced contexts that "could not be told through playlists alone."

Meanwhile, Migos' viral, meme-friendly single "Bad and Boujee" presented both a lesson and a warning about today's fragmented music audiences. While the record received hundreds of millions of streams and views online within weeks, it peaked only at around #40 on the U.S. radio charts.

"Are these audiences separate? I think so," said Lowe. "Terrestrial radio had been driving pop music for the last 50 years, but I'm not sure that’s still the case."

He fittingly closed his SXSW keynote with a listen to Frank Ocean's new single "Chanel," which premiered on Ocean's Beats 1 radio show blonded RADIO earlier this week. Ocean's recent clash with Def Jam Recordings over the independent release of his album Blonde went down in history as an iconic victory for indie artists. In Lowe's eyes, "Chanel" continues to carry the torch, pointing to the tectonic digital shifts happening under the music industry's feet at the hands of streaming services and any artists willing to venture over the edge.

"Music is restless, always searching," said Lowe. "If it's great, then move."

Suzanne Ciani Uma Pioneira Da Música Eletrônica Uma Vida De Inovação

Electronic Music Pioneer Suzanne Ciani On A Life Of Innovation

Suzanne Ciani is a music pioneer who in many ways defined electronic music. She speaks to George Howard about her career journey and the premiere of a documentary on her life's work.

Sometimes the world lines up. International Women's Day is resonant and profound on so many levels. Who knows definitively where the music industry falls along the spectrum of injustices foisted upon women. My guess, based on 25 years or so of participation, is it tends closer towards abject awfulness with respect to gender inequality than other industries. This makes it all the more significant that, purely serendipitously, I was able to speak to my friend and electronic music pioneer, composer and platinum certified artist, Suzanne Ciani on International Women's Day in front of a group of Berklee College of Music Students, a group, by the way, that was roughly 50% female. For full disclosure, I am an Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music.

Ciani talked about how she innovated and developed modular instruments with Don Buchla, which set her on a path the ultimately led to, among other things, her unexpected radio hit, "Velocity of Love" and establishing the New Age format. Along the way, she created her own label at a time when that really just wasn't done (and certainly not by women).

Ciani's most striking anecdote entailed what led to her supplying the iconic bubble and fizz sound design for a Coke jingle, and thus becoming one of the first female composers for ads. What struck me about this story was that it truly was a result of reaching a level of anger and frustration—i.e., "nothing left to lose"—and barging, unannounced, into a session being helmed by legendary songwriter and producer of music and jingles, Billy Davis.

Many of the highlights of our conversation are presented in the recently premiered documentary, A Life In Waves, that chronicles Ciani's amazing career.

People say that art transcends gender, race and ideology, and perhaps it does...in its final form. However, few who haven't experienced it firsthand know the challenges related to gender, race and ideology that must be overcome for this art to emerge.

What a thrill, therefore, to speak to Ciani--someone who not only knows the challenges, but blazed the trail for others to follow--on International Women's Day in front of a group of emerging music business innovators, and to learn about her remarkable journey to the enduring music.

Napster É A Primeira A Incorporar GIF em Seu Streaming

Napster Becomes The First Streaming Music Service To Incorporate GIFs

One of the biggest problems facing streaming music services that have not already been able to gather audiences in the millions is differentiation. When every company has the same catalog at the same price point, what can convince a user to go with a lesser-known platform instead of one of the more popular options? This is a question that many companies have had to deal with, and every so often one rolls out a new feature that might not be a game-changer but is worthy of consideration.

Today, Napster (formerly Rhapsody) has just become the first streaming music site to incorporate GIFs into its listening platform as part of an update aimed at significantly improving the playlist-making experience. The company has partnered with online GIF titan GIPHY to make millions of short, looping videos available to add to playlists, which is something that has been missing from streaming. 

Those who use their Napster account to create playlists for parties, for friends or even just for themselves will now be able to cover them with a GIF, which can often be much better at expressing the precise mood or feeling the music about to be played conveys than the album art associated with singles.

In addition to making playlists much more visually appealing with GIFs, users can now also take recommendations from the service when creating their next run of songs. Napster has added a Tinder-like function that takes cues from what songs have already been added to a playlist before suggesting what should come next. Users can listen to a few seconds of a song and swipe one way or the other, depending on if they like what they’ve been served or not. 

Neither of these new features will convince many to switch services or begin paying if they aren't already, but they are welcome additions to the streaming world. While many of the bigger services already allow users to make as many playlists as they want, that’s typically where the fun ends. Sharing these creations isn’t always easy, and there aren’t many options when it comes to creating or adding a cover, nor is there much help for those users who aren’t sure what they should add next. Napster is taking a step forward with these sensible innovations, which probably should have been made available a long time ago.