Last week’s Future Music Forum in Barcelona saw The Orchard’s founder Scott Cohen causing a stir by suggesting that the music industry “is obsessed with measurement” but may be “measuring the wrong things”. Those wrong things being unit sales rather than Average Revenue Per User. Cohen also defended streaming services like Spotify against criticism from artists like Thom Yorke. “With the streaming/subscriptions services it is not about the per-stream amount,” Cohen said. “The focus is on how many listens/views an artist gets in relation to all other artists. Then they get a larger share of the pie. And it is a big fucking pie. Spotify said their share to rights holders this year will be over $500m.” At the same event, Rdio’s Stefan Baumschlager explained his company’s plans for its recently-announced partnership with radio giant Cumulus Media. “It gives us so many more ears in the US with one hit than all the other on demand streaming services there combined. It also gives us an advertising budget of $100m a year to play with. We are going to use that money to break new bands and promote existing records.”
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…