O Som É 50% De Um Filme, Mas Hollywood Parece Surda

Sound Is 50% of the Movie, but Hollywood is Often Tone-Deaf

People in the industry vaguely understand the job of an editor, cinematographer or production designer. But even sophisticated showbiz veterans are flummoxed by the work of sound people.

It’s ironic because the movies of 2017 created some indelible sounds: the tinkle of a stirred teacup in “Get Out”; the hollow singing of the holograms in “Blade Runner 2049”; the exaggerated loudness of Alma scraping her toast in “Phantom Thread”; the noises of warfare heard by the soldiers huddled below deck in “Dunkirk”; and even the dramatic silence at a key moment “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

Yet movie critics rarely single out the work of sound people; adding insult to injury, if they do mention sound, they often credit it to Dolby, i.e., the equipment rather than the artisans.

The industry also seems to turn a deaf ear to sound. Other key below-the-line artists get single cards in the main credits of a film. Sound people don’t.

George Lucas has said that sound is 50% of the moviegoing experience. But often a layman ignores the contributions because it isn’t clear who’s responsible for a sound choice.

The credits for “Blade Runner 2049,” for example, list one cinematographer (Roger Deakins) and one editor (Joe Walker). But there are 33 individuals listed in the sound department. That group includes people who are Oscar-nominated for sound editing: Mark Mangini (supervising sound editor) and Theo Green (sound designer). The film’s sound-mixing Oscar nominees are Ron Bartlett and Doug Hemphill (both re-recording mixers) and Mac Ruth (production sound mixer).

That’s a lot of titles.

Julian Slater is a double Oscar nominee for “Baby Driver,” as the film’s sound editor, and as part of the sound mixing team (with Tim Cavagin and Mary H. Ellis). However, IMDb lists him as the film’s re-recording mixer, sound designer and supervising sound editor. So what is he, exactly?

Generally, sound editors gather sound. Nothing that you hear in a film is accidental: The distant sound of a train, the murmur of people at other tables in the restaurant — all are carefully placed there for a reason.

Mangini says they created 2,850 unique sounds for “Blade Runner.” Some were for things that don’t exist yet: spinners (the vehicles), the sounds of a replicant birth, etc. They also needed to create unique variations of things that seem familiar, such as the constant rain that is heard in several scenes, K and Joi on the rooftop and the wind chimes heard faintly in Wallace’s office/lair.

Under “Blade Runner” director Denis Villeneuve, “We got opportunities you don’t normally get,” says Mangini. “Denis said to Theo and me ‘compose with sound,’ and the movie has so much atmosphere.” Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, the walk through the desert, the casino — “all are replete with musical textures,” says Mangini. “Normally, sound needs are like a coloring book: You have to stay within the lines. But with this film, we could create sound atmospheres, moods and textures, and we painted WAY outside the lines.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences might want to rethink its category labels. One Oscar category is “sound mixing,” but that phrase actually incorporates several distinct jobs: production sound mixing (i.e., capturing the performances on-camera and mixing accordingly) and post-production sound mixing (the work of specialists, such as ADR mixer, Foley mixer, etc.).

An individual or team finally assembles all the sound mixes, including music. The Academy has listed these people in the category of sound mixer, but the Cinema Audio Society more precisely labels the person as the re-recording mixer, since there is a vast community of mixers.

The 1926 “Don Juan” and 1927 “The Jazz Singer” pioneered sync sound in movies. Hollywood’s uneasy adjustment to talkies was spoofed in the 1952 classic “Singin’ in the Rain,” which depicted a movie’s sound coming from one microphone on the set. That image over the years has turned into a compliment (filmmakers want audiences to think they’re listening to the actual noises) but it’s also a slight. It discounts the complexity involved in creating sound for any scene.

It also leads to an ongoing sore point: In the early days, sound people were technicians, trying to wrangle new machinery; but to call current behind-the-camera folks “technicians” or to call these “tech categories” is to overlook their enormous creativity.

Os Novos Fones 'Wireless' Para Todos, Dos Amantes De Música Aos Atletas

New Wireless Headsets for Everyone-- from Music Lovers to Athletes

Wireless headphones are a must have accessory and new models are being been created with superior sound and design to meet the needs of every type of user. Gamers, music lovers, and marathon runners can now all find the perfect device.

Marshall

Perfect for music fans

For music lovers 

Marshall’s Major II Bluetooth headphones incorporate over 50 years of music expertise with the latest technology to create an ideal set of headphones. These headphones last forever (over 30 hours of playtime) and the customized 40 mm dynamic drivers guarantee amazing sound. The headphones are equipped with extra cushiony pads that are extremely comfortable. And the Major II Bluetooth also has phone functionality and another super fun feature for music lovers: when listening to music wirelessly, they can use the empty 3.5 mm socket to share the music with a friend. (MarshallHeadphones.com, $150).

Urbanears

Headphones that move with athletes

For athletes                      

What makes an ideal headphones for someone on the move? The headphones have stay in place no matter how much the wearer jumps around. Urbanears Active Stadion wireless headphones produce quality sound and stay put with stretchy cords that wrap around your neck and “EarClick” technology that keeps the earbuds secure. The Stadion is sweat-proof and includes reflective details for those who want to be visible at night. (Urbanears.com, $99).

HyperX

Great sound and battery life for gamers

For Gamers

Great sound is a key component to any gaming experience and gamers who don’t want to be tethered to their devices with love the Hyper X Cloud Flight wireless gaming headset. The immersive gaming audio, superior comfort and 30 hour battery life means serious (and not so serious) gamers can enjoy immersive play for longer. Intuitive audio and mic controls and a detachable noise cancelling microphone are other key features gamers will love. (Hyperxgaming.com $159).

Phiaton

Phiaton makes the ideal travel companion

For travelers

Looking for the perfect wireless headphones to take on you next trip or commute? Phiaton’s BT 150 NCprovides numerous features that are ideal for those use headphones on the road. In addition to great sound, these headphones have active noise cancellation, a power savings sensor and vibration notifications for incoming calls. In addition, multi-taskers will love the multi-point connection that connects any two Bluetooth-enabled devices similtaniously, such as a smartphone and tablet. The retractable earbuds and memory flex neckband make them easy to wear and store. (Amazon.com, $149).

Satechi

Great sound for less

Value investors                

Looking for a pair of great wireless headphones for under $100? Try Satechi’s Aluminum Wireless Headphones. These headphones connect effortlessly and stream crystal clear audio from up to 33 feet away and has up to 16 hours of playtime or 18 hours of talk time. Satechi’s headphones also add a bit a bling—in addition to gray, they come in silver and gold. (Amazon.com $69).

A Música De Vídeo Game É Uma Arte?

Is Video Game Music An Art -- And A Business -- In Its Own Right?

Musicians have been drawing inspiration from video games for decades—whether as a simple hobby, as a multimedia creative tool or as an adjacent revenue stream to traditional record sales. But to what extent can musicians today build an entire career off of writing music for games alone?

As long as video games need some sort of sound design to function, musicians from all genres will step up to the job. Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor scored first-person shooter game Quake in the late ‘90s; hip-hop producer Just Blaze, who touts album credits for Jay Z and Eminem, made the background beats for NBA Street Vol. 2 (and, incidentally, got inspiration for his stage name from the Streets of Rage game series); electronic artist Squarepusher recently composed original music for the Super Nt, a new Super Nintendo system made by retro hardware company Analogue.

Other musicians have incorporated their gaming enthusiasm directly into interactions with their listeners and fans. In April 2016, rapper and Forbes 30 Under 30 nominee Logic launched a personal gaming channel on YouTube that gained over 100,000 subscribers in a single day. A handful of bands have expanded albums into full-fledged mobile games with their own characters, such as what Glass Animals implemented for their latest album How to Be a Human Being.

On a strategy level, the music business is looking increasingly to gaming as an industry that profited, rather than suffocated, from digitization. Overall, gaming has been much quicker to embrace innovation in terms of new product offerings and revenue models, from freemium services to micro-transactions around virtual goods.

Streaming may be the music industry's easiest gateway into gaming: Spotify has been Sony PlayStation's exclusive streaming partner since 2015—replacing the latter’s own failed Music Unlimited Service—and recently announced a partnership with Discord, a text and voice chat platform for gamers. Artists and labels can also now run their own Verified Server pages on Discord, similar to how labels like EDM-focused Monstercat host their own 24-hour channels on live-streaming platform Twitch.

In fact, Monstercat is both an outlier and a potential role model when it comes to relationships with gamers. Aside from running its own gamer-focused event series Away From Keyboard (AFK) in partnership with events like DreamHack and E3, the label regularly taps into Reddit, Minecraft and Major League Gaming forums as key outreach channels, and operates its own management arm specifically for gaming influencers.

But what if a label like Monstercat wanted to build an entire business solely on the back of creating and licensing bespoke music content for games? Is this financially sustainable—or is the current market so fragmented, and costs being pushed down so deeply, that survival is more difficult than ever?

WHAT IS "VGM" ANYWAY?

One immediate challenge in tackling this issue is defining “video game music” (VGM) in the first place.

Many fans and industry nostalgics bemoan the simplistic, hook-driven songwriting techniques behind today's radio hits—but catchy, repetitive hooks are precisely what drove VGM's popularity and relevance from the medium's inception. It is arguably unfair to judge VGM using the same set of criteria as that for pop music; rather, one should take into account gaming's unique properties, development process and consumer-facing context.

“When you’re playing games, you’re glued to the screen for up to hours at a time, so the zen of game music is in striking that delicate balance of repetition without irritation,” Steve Goodman, who makes music under the name Kode9 and runs electronic label Hyperdub, told me. “You could apply that to music generally today, but it’s particularly important for games, in which you might get stuck on the same level for a long time.” In other words, the top priority for VGM is whether the sound supports the gameplay experience itself, not necessarily whether it is listenable on its own as a individual song.

From a technological perspective, the sonic possibilities for the first VGM in the '80s were limited to—and literally programmed into—the types of sound chips that were available at the time, leading to what veteran composer Motohiro Kawashima (Streets of Rage 2, 3) described as the feeling of “picking through sounds by hand.”

“For me, all these different chips were different instruments, and composers were exploring how to push each chip to its limits,” Nick Dwyer, director of Red Bull Music Academy's VGM docu-series Diggin' in the Carts, told me. “That whole period is one of pioneering electronic music in its own right. When the limitations went out the door and everything became wide open—when you could just write a standard jazz or classical piece and call that a 'game soundtrack'—I think VGM lost a little bit of its uniqueness as standalone music.”

THE VGM BUSINESS: AN EVER-WIDENING NET

In contrast, changes in the VGM landscape today have very little to do with technological limitations, and more to do with the overall business of game development. In fact, one could easily draw a parallel between the indie-vs.-DIY dynamics among record labels with those among game developers. Bandcamp and DistroKid are to the major labels (Universal, Sony, Warner) what Steam and Game Jolt are to major corporate developers like PlayStation and EA, and both industries have “bedroom producers” who self-finance their productions and are competing for market share with large-budget games that take anywhere from 100 to 400 people to produce.

There was a unique set of organizational, in addition to technological, circumstances that allowed Japanese VGM to flourish in the '80s and '90s, in a way that is arguably unrepeatable in the U.S. and other markets today. Composers at major game companies like Sega were not freelance, work-for-hire “indie artists” in the modern sense, but simply regular, full-time employees (what Japanese natives would call "salarymen"), paid by the hour for going into the office and writing music.

In contrast, over 40% of game composers today are pure freelancers, according to the 2017 Game Audio Industry Survey. Such composers tend to work on a non-exclusive, residual basis, such that they retain their master and publishing rights, earn additional royalties for each unit sale of the game (which itself may make only a few hundred dollars total) and then move on to another company.

As for the work itself, VGM composers typically explore one of two professional paths: either composing in the more traditional sense of writing static background music for the medium, or specializing in more interactive and/or spatial sound design, which is increasingly important with the rise of mixed-reality platforms. The Game Audio Industry Survey found that nearly three-quarters of VGM composers regularly do sound design projects, perhaps reflecting the reality of what musical needs people really demand in the gaming space.

On the company level, since most modern music- and celebrity-focused mobile games to date have flopped, labels are compelled instead to piggyback off the success of already-established brands. Perhaps the most famous example of this behavior is with the Grand Theft Auto series, which has licensed hundreds of tracks across hip-hop, rock, pop, country and reggae over the last 15 years for its in-game radio stations. For GTA V in particular, the franchise's sync team tried to secure the rights to 900 tracks, but eventually scaled back to a “mere” 241 tracks.

Some entire stations in the GTA franchise are outsourced to labels—such as FlyLo FM in GTA V, which features a mix of licensed and original content from multi-genre producer Flying Lotus and his Brainfeeder collective. An unnamed exec from EMI Music Publishing told Music Week in 2012 that the GTA franchise provided a “unique opportunity to get sync placements for some hidden gems in our catalogue that otherwise may not have landed” in traditional games.

That being said, from a commercial perspective, GTA V is certainly the exception, not the rule: its production budgetwas more than that for nearly every Hollywood blockbuster film ever made. In contrast, the sheer abundance of opportunities today for VGM composers—driven largely by the increase in smartphone games, which brought in an estimated 35% more revenue globally in 2017 than console games, according to Newzoo—have ironically left both producers and developers strapped for cash.

“Only one out of ten of these new companies can actually pay their music composers properly, because they don’t have enough budget,” Yuzo Koshiro, the VGM composer known for his work with Streets of Rage, told me. “What also usually happens is that veteran composers get most of the work, because they already have the skills and experience and don’t need much oversight. Yes, there’s a lot of work in the industry now, but if you’re a young composer wanting to make a living just from games, you have to study what the larger companies really want and cultivate that very specialized skill set.”

Music supervisors and sync managers also regularly advise clients not to rely entirely on licensing to a single external medium—be that games, TV or movies—for recorded music revenue. "One of the biggest errors you can make is ...  trying to steer [your label] in a direction specifically for sync,” Ashley Howard, Head of Publishing and Sync at drum & bass label Hospital Records, told Thump in 2015. “Invariably, you will get it wrong, you won't get the sync you wanted, and you've compromised your musical integrity and probably not sold any records either. Sync is the icing on the cake, and you've got to have a nice cake."

SUSTAINING VGM: BUILD FOR THE SUPERFANS

If this modern landscape is so nebulous and fragmented, what room is left for standalone VGM companies? Just as in music, a handful of entrepreneurs still sense an market opportunity to cater to the subgenre's most diehard superfans.

A growing crop of specialist VGM labels, such as Data Discs and iam8bit, are reissuing classic soundtracks on vinyl, sometimes going so far as to record the music off the original arcade system boards. In November 2017, Goodman's Hyperdub label and Red Bull Music Academy co-released a compilation of rare Japanese VGM from the '80s and '90s—which, Dwyer told me, took two whole years to put together, including one year of negotiations with corporations and rights owners in Japan.

“A lot of incredible pop music made in Japan in the '80s never made it out of the country due to the inward-looking nature of Japanese major labels, as well as the overall language barrier,” said Dwyer, who is fluent in Japanese. “A lot of people thought doing business with Japanese game companies was impossible in terms of licensing IP and even getting the initial connections off the ground.”

In part due to the rise of streaming, this insular corporate culture is gradually opening up to more international partnerships and licensing agreements, which could yield even more opportunities for game lovers and companies to create new products and experiences around Japan's rich VGM history.

Many Japanese composers in their 50s and 60s are also releasing entirely new albums and/or touring the world for the first time. One of Nintendo’s first in-house composers, Hirokazu Tanaka, released his first solo album in November 2017 at age 60. Koshiro and Kawashima, both of whom worked on Streets of Rage, recently wrapped up an international tour with the Diggin’ in the Carts series, making stops in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo.

“This was our first time ever performing live, making music onstage in real time in a way that actually works in the club, and not just as background music in games,” Kawashima told me backstage in LA last October. “I hope this encourages people to see game music as a legitimate art form on its own.”

On the other end of the spectrum, a separate ecosystem of companies is trying to forge a sustainable and engaging path for the future VGM canon. Gamechops, founded in 2010 as a mixtape series by chiptune artist Dj CUTMAN, now serves as a record label for EDM remixes of VGM classics. Materia Collective, a Seattle-based VGM publisher and label, specializes in tribute and remix albums inspired by the likes of Pokémon Gold, Diddy Kong Racing, The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania. There is an entire festival dedicated to VGM called MAGFest, which attracted over 20,000 attendees in 2017 and has been running for over 15 years without any corporate sponsors.

One issue Materia Collective is trying to solve is bridging the gap between composers and fans. "There’s no community more passionate than gaming—so what if you take that passion and apply it to the creator level?" Sebastian Wolff, Founder of Materia Collective, told me. "You have this entire ecosystem of fans surrounding specific franchises and composers, with fans creating their own remixes, covers and other derivative works."

Demonstrating its commitment to community engagement from its inception, Materia launched in 2015 with a five-disc Final Fantasy VII tribute featuring over 200 music contributors, pooled from a dedicated Facebook community of volunteer musicians who wanted to step up and contribute to the project. "The goal was to empower emerging producers to understand the tasks required to pull off such an ambitious album, so they could govern and self-manage their own music workflow moving forward," said Wolff.

Surprisingly, even though the video game industry is an expert in monetization, that does not always trickle down to monetizing the music itself. According to the Game Audio Industry Survey, just 49% of music used in high-budget video games (defined as those games made by teams of 100 to 400 people, with a budget of $30,000,000 to $150,000,000+) was registered properly with a performing rights organization; that percentage plummets to 28% for indie games.

“There’s a bit of isolation with the video game industry, in that you don’t have game music publishers, administrators or any other larger music-facing representation, even though gaming financially outgrows both TV and movies combined,” said Wolff. “Most of the people I talk to in the gaming community have a vague understanding of PROs like BMI and ASCAP, but that’s usually the extent of their knowledge of the music industry. As someone who used to work at a distributor, I want to change that: let’s talk about boosting your video game soundtrack with sheet music, live concerts and sync deals.”

In other words, carving out a sustainable future for VGM will also involve taking the corresponding industry convergence seriously—laying down the proper financial and technical foundations for more structured, mutually fruitful collaborations between the music and gaming businesses. Clearly, the passionate creative culture and community around VGM is already alive and well; little by little, as mobile and streaming trends expand opportunities for all types of creators, the businesses will follow.

Porque A Cultura Dos Festivais De Música É A Cultura Do Playlist

Why Music Festival Culture Is Playlist Culture

Spotify, the world's leading music streaming service by market share, is no stranger to live events. Since November 2016, the company has partnered with Ticketmaster to deliver personalized concert recommendations and exclusive presale codes to subscribers, and has since grown its ticketing partnership roster to include Eventbrite and AXS. More recently, Spotify has expanded some of its most popular playlist brands, including RapCaviar and Who We Be, into its own multi-city tours, featuring performances by Cardi B, Stefflon Don, Gucci Mane and other streaming-bred stars.

Ironically, all this activity from Spotify was picking up just as Apple wound down its own music festival, which lasted ten years at the Roundhouse in London—but other streaming competitors are still fighting to claim their own stake in live music's future. Tidal has been producing the charity concert series Tidal X for three years, and is the exclusive partner of Budweiser’s annual Made in America Fest. Pandora recently launched Fall Into Country, a “digital country music festival” featuring a mix of live concerts and online station takeovers by the likes of Blake Shelton, Kelsea Ballerini and Darius Rucker.

For years, managers, promoters and booking agents have used in-depth consumer data from streaming services as a tool for contextualizing fan outreach strategies and tour planning. The ongoing launches of artist data dashboards across services, even on the notoriously opaque Apple Music, also signals a paradigm shift towards increasing transparency and reducing, rather than maintaining, friction in the sharing of information for artists and their teams.

Now, Spotify and others want to prove they can use their proprietary data to deliver added value in analog environments that its brick-and-mortar competitors might not be capable of replicating. More traditional music festivals (i.e. those without their own streaming services) are feeling the pressure both to compete and to align with these tech-savvy new entrants, on the axes of business models and cultural messaging.

In terms of business models, corporations and startups alike have experimented over the past few years with subscription offerings for live events. In May 2017, Live Nation launched the Festival Passport, which gave pass holders access to over 90 music festivals around the world for a fixed annual price of $799. Concert subscription startup Jukely, which currently operates in 16 cities across the U.S., U.K. and Canada, caters to more indie and emerging local scenes and offers four tiers of membership, ranging from $25/month for four shows to $65/month for up to ten shows.

As for the change in messaging, some festivals now want to position themselves as "live playlists"—as flexible, "shuffle-friendly" entry points for music discovery and fandom. For instance, I spotted the following sponsored ad from Boston Calling on Facebook last month:

Cherie Hu

Screenshot of a paid Facebook ad for Boston Calling Music Festival, taken on January 11, 2018.

From a price perspective, matching festival culture with playlist culture is almost a no-brainer. As with a Spotify monthly subscription, an individual music festival charges a fixed price for a buffet-style experience, in which concert-goers can jump easily from one act to the next.

Embedded within this type of model is also an unspoken “moral physics” that favors, and deliberately programs, diversity and breadth over focused depth. Just like how Spotify views its growing listening diversity as a success, festival attendees are compelled to make the most of their $300 ticket by maximizing the number of sets they watch within an allotted period of time. The only difference between these two contexts is that festivals provide only a matter of days, not months or years, to milk the most out of this fixed value.

There is also a growing perception in the music industry that festivals have comparable influence to playlists and terrestrial radio stations in launching and sustaining artists' careers. As a result, more and more artists seem to be taking to social media to announce "festival dates" in place of "tour dates." For example, Arctic Monkeys recently announced an unusually packed slate of 15 festival bookings over the span of two months, matching the schedule and pace of a typical solo tour.

Particularly for indie acts with several performing members and/or elaborate stage sets, there is a strong financial incentive to book more festival gigs. Such acts usually take a loss on normal touring with high production overhead, and appreciate the opportunity to recoup that cost with even higher (and, some in the industry say, overpriced) festival fees that often do not require artists or their teams to provide much extra production support.

However, assuming that a playlist philosophy will continue to infiltrate the festival circuit, an over-reliance on the latter could be potentially problematic for fan community development. After all, in such an environment, announcing a series of festival dates is akin to advertising a series of playlist placements: sure, each placement may get you marginally more streams, exposure and money, but not more ownership over the audience.

In fact, in both contexts, a large portion of listeners may be bigger fans of the third parties mediating their experience than of the artists themselves. For instance, most festival attendees, with their mobile devices in tow, are paying hundreds of dollars with the ultimate goal of upping their social clout (access to parties, alcohol, merch, perfectly posed Instagram photos, etc.) and not just accessing a specific lineup alone. Likewise, many followers of Spotify's largest playlists are lean-back listeners treating songs as welcome backdrops for other activities such as a daily commute, workout or cooking session, rather than as an art form that demands undivided attention.

This detachment would not actually be a problem if artists received richer data about festival attendees—yet, despite the advancement of technologies like RFID and even facial recognition, audience identification, targeting and followup remain surprisingly difficult precisely because the artist-audience connection in question is so casual.

It is also worth noting that festivals' increasing resemblance to playlists fundamentally contradicts the role that the former used to play in indie bands' careers. A 2012 case study by the Berklee College of Music discusses how indie rock outfit Portugal. The Man developed much of its core fan base by logging over 800 live shows over the course of five years—but did not even consider any major festival placements until the end of this five-year period, by which point the band had perfected their live set and onstage dynamics on their own terms.

“Touring is one of the few real and sustainable avenues that an artist has direct control over,” Rich Holtzman, Portugal. The Man’s former manager and current Head of Music Business Development at Stubhub, said in the case study. Control was crucial for Holtzman, which was why he viewed the festival circuit as a marker of hard work and hard-earned reputation that arrived later in an artist's long-term vision, rather than serving as a launching pad for building a following from scratch.

Of course, playing a string of popular festival gigs is an incredible accomplishment for any artist, beginning or otherwise. Nonetheless, as festival culture converges increasingly with playlist culture, and as barriers to entry into the circuit get lower and lower, it will be crucial for artists and their teams to understand that the festival of the future is a bookmarking tool for the casual fan—and thus, like a playlist placement, cannot be treated as both the means and the end to a fruitful career.

Por Que Você Deveria Saber Tudo Sobre O Seu 'YouTube channel'

Why You should know EVERYTHING there is to know about your YouTube channel

First of all thanks to Nicholas Salomone   for this article.

The no-no of not knowing.

Everyone gets a little boost from feeling like their channel is doing well, but what are your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs, for short)?

Chances are, the main metrics you’re measuring for success are views and subscribers — and you wouldn’t be wrong.  But what exactly goes into a “view?”

And what aren’t you looking at that could inform how you grow your channel?

YouTube views are the OBVIOUS starter metric

Views are the most basic metric to measure channel success. If a user finds you video and watches it, you get a view. So, the more views you get, the more advertisers will pay to place their ads on that video, the more valuable your videos become.

It’s a good idea to regularly check the view-count for all your videos.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do all your videos get similar views?
• Do they vary wildly from post to post?
• What is the most valuable time period for views after you post a video?

Understanding your view counts (and the audience behavior that affect them) can reveal opportunities for more targeted work on your part and can, in turn, lead to more views overall.

Playback and Retention

The most logical thing to do after counting views is to dig deeper into how those views are happening.

Playback and retention are your fist stop for this. These data points will let you know what portions of your videos are being watched most and at what point in your videos viewers are deciding to stop watching.  

Understanding this will allow you to pinpoint the content that your particular viewers find most valuable and what they don’t care enough about to keep watching. Maybe your signature pun midway through a video on frogs isn’t as ribbeting as you thought and you’re actually losing viewers. Taking it out could mean better retention and more valuable overall views.

Furthermore, how many unique views are you receiving? Is it a handful of people watching your videos multiple times, or are they all distinct viewers watching only once. This can be another key indicator of what sort of content you should be tailoring for you audience.

Traffic

Another way to begin understanding the “HOW” of views is to look into your traffic sources. In other words, how are viewers finding and watching your videos? Are they finding your videos organically on YouTube via search and algorithmic ‘up next’ promoting, through blog embeds, or maybe on social media?

The more you can understand about your viewers habits, the the more you can further tailor your channel offerings to increase traffic and overall views.

The last thing I’d like to mention here is keeping track of what devices your viewers are watching your videos on. If a user only watched your videos on mobile devices, maybe keeping your content graphic and easy to make out on a small screen will mean those users will choose your videos over others on their future bus rides.

Subscribers

Now that you understand your views, let’s talk about Subscribers.

The best way to continue to grow your views is to have return customers (i.e. keep the viewers you already have coming back).

Once a user decides to subscribe to your channel, they will have your content surfaced to them on their personal YouTube dashboard. This promotes return visits, more views, and also can mean your content will be suggested to other users that have similar subscription/viewing habits as your current subscribers.

Also, by understanding who your subscribers are, you can tweak your content to try and attract more of the same. Tailoring is the name of the game!

Demographics

For our final leg of this descent into the bowels of your channels’ key performance indicators, we come to the viewers themselves. Not just the screen name associated with the subscribers, but who they actually are. For this you must consult your demographics tool.

Understanding your demographic is key not only to what content you create, but also to your overall branding as a channel.

Do you appeal to the North American 30-something? Maybe the Indian pre-teen? Or possibly the elusive South American 40+?

The importance of knowing your demographics cannot be overlooked. Google AdSense knows your demographics and will run ads specifically for them right on top of your videos, so why not capitalize on that and, at the very least, try not to offend them.

Comments

Opinions are like belly buttons, everyone’s got one. Unfortunately, those that tend to be most prominent on the internet aren’t always the the most positive, or even real.  

I personally, would be completely fine with never having to read another YouTube comments section for the rest of my days, but I wouldn’t be doing my channel (or my career) any favors.

The comment section is your direct conduit to your viewers. To ignore it is a mistake.

Use it to promote positive communication and engagement.  It’s a place for your viewers and subscribers to feel heard and connected. It’s also a great opportunity to develop grace and tact, which will undoubtedly aid you in all future life endeavors.

Playlist placement

Finally, a quick note on Playlists. If you can, get placed on playlists as much as possible. This can happen for all sorts of reasons (too many to get into here), but the important thing is that it happens. Maybe you can figure out why. Keep an eye on your videos that are placed on playlists!

Discog Vendeu 10 Milhões De Vinis Em 2017

Discog Sold 10 Million Units In 2017, Names New CEO

Sales on the Discogs Marketplace rose 20% to top 10 million units in 2017. Vinyl sales grew 18% to 8 million, the user-built music database and online a catalog announced today.  Key sales trends for the year include:

• Cassettes were the format showing the most substantial growth at 29.54%
• CDs were not far behind, up 28.39% 

Indie music marketplace Bandcamp showed similar increases in physical goods sales, and the trend should accelerate online as brick and mortar retailers like Best Buy and others abandon the format. 

The most collected genre trends include:

• Classical up 42.36% 
• Latin up 38.33%

The two most expensive releases sold on the platform last year were both 7" singles with The Beatles 'Love Me Do' selling for $14,757.00 followed by Sex Pistols' 'God Save The Queen' selling for $14,690.00.

New CEO

 

Discogs COO Chad Dahlstrom has been named the company's new CEO. Founder and president Kevin Lewandowski will  now focus on broadening the company's focus beyond music to include film, comics, posters and books. 

Uma Banda, Dois Membros, Três Músicas E Centenas De Milhares Escutando No Spotify

One band. Two members. Three songs. Hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify.

How Post Precious built a big audience, by themselves, with just a few singles.

Alex Winston, one half of the new synth-pop duo Post Precious, played a showcase of her solo material at the 2017 DIY Musician Conference in Nashville. Her return to the stage after a long hiatus due to Lyme Disease was energetic and engaging, and I’m pretty sure she won over anyone in the audience that hadn’t heard her music.

With renewed momentum, she announced the following month that she’d teamed up with her friend Max Hershenow (of MS MR) to form Post Precious, and they dropped a single they’d written called “Timebomb.” Then came two more singles, one a remix, and the other a cover of Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times.”

Three songs. That’s it. And with those tracks they’ve built a monthly audience on Spotify of over 170k people.

I find it fascinating that indie music careers can now be made (and maintained) through singles, so I wanted to interview them about the process, as well as how those singles might or might not be building towards the release of their upcoming EP. Thanks to Post Precious for taking the time.

An interview with Post Precious

You’ve both had your share of label hassles and creative obstacles. Can you talk a little bit about that history?

Max: I’m not sure I would’ve acknowledged this a year ago, but I’ve been extraordinarily lucky with my career so far, despite some inevitable bumps along the way. I’ve been half of MS MR since 2011, and we released two albums on Columbia. The first did really well, but (as often happens!) the second didn’t connect in the same way, which led to a bit of an internal creative crisis, and a bit of a disillusionment with the major label structure, despite getting to work with some incredible people. MS MR left Columbia and went on hiatus in 2016, and since then I’ve had the opportunity to produce for a huge range of artists, which got me back on my feet creatively and led me to Alex!

Alex: Unfortunately, I don’t think my experience with major labels has been uncommon.  In fact, I’ve heard my story so many times that it almost feels like a right of passage…or an outtake from Spinal Tap. I’ve been dropped, I’ve had two records delayed for years, I’ve been told what to wear, what my videos should be like, what kind of music to make,… you name it; it truly pushed me so far from who I had known myself to be as an artist that I couldn’t recognize my own creative identity. Once I was freed from all of that crap, I just focused on making music that I loved, with people that I was inspired by — that’s where I am right now. Music feels really exciting again for the first time in ages.

How did Post Precious grow out of that, and what does this partnership let you do that you couldn’t before?

We honestly started Post Precious sort of accidentally – we started out writing songs for other artists and slowly realized that we were maybe the only ones who could bring them to life in the way we imagined. But because we had been writing thinking the work was for someone else we didn’t put the sort of pressure on ourselves that we’d grown accustomed to being under as artists. We realized we could use that freedom as the basis for a new project where we were free to play and experiment.

How does the writing or production process differ when you’re thinking about releasing singles, as opposed to a larger album?

Max: I guess on some level we’re less focused on working within a cohesive sound or overarching themes than if we were thinking on a larger album scale, but because of the Post Precious ethos I don’t know if we’d really be working like that anyway. Rather than singles, I tend to think of the songs in little EP-style packages, which is a really exciting way to work. We get to explore one sonic idea from a few angles and then get to switch to a new one, which keeps things feeling fresh.

Alex: Yeah, there is something about not feeling tethered to one idea for too long that is really appealing to me these days! (ha) I like just following where something sonically different might take you and leaning into it, instead of wondering how it will fit with a record.

In terms of the biz side of things — promotion, playlist placements, stuff like that — what was your “strategy” for your singles?

We’re not really sure we have a strategy, haha…we have an extremely small team of two who have been AMAZING at helping us get the word out, and all four of us are super committed to being able to pivot quickly if something feels like it isn’t working. We’re also really reliant on friends to help spread the word.

With an EP coming soon, were you plotting your course towards that release with the singles, or is the EP kind of a culmination of that previous work?

You make it sound as though we have a plan here! The EP will include all the songs we’ve released up to the this point, so it is a culmination and also a rounding out of the sonic landscape we’ve been exploring with a couple of other songs.

How do you think about your place in the music world the way things are right now … like, you’re indie, but you have label experience. Is it the ideal place to be? Are you happy? Are you aiming to build back into a major deal?

Yes to happy! We’re having so much fun. Otherwise honestly we’re just taking things one step at a time. It feels amazing to feel a little excitement building around the project but we’re just going to see how things go little by little.

How does CD Baby play into your release picture, and what does CD Baby allow you to do that you couldn’t do before?

CD Baby’s been super supportive, providing creative ideas around the release of the music. The Post Precious perspective relies on a really artist-driven approach, and we couldn’t do it without a platform like CD Baby.

What else is in the works to coincide or build upon the release of your upcoming EP?

We’re going to play some shows! We have a few on the books and are just going to see how they go. Again, it’s one step at a time.