Tag: David Bowie
Posted inSandbox

Sandbox Issue 267 :: The Optimism Issue. 2021

by Rocio Sanchez

Lead: 2021 – The Optimism Issue:  Let’s not dwell any longer than necessary on the seemingly never-ending year of challenges that was 2020. In this issue we look forward with optimism and find many reasons to be cheerful in 2021. We asked our international panel of industry experts to explain what gave them hope in […]

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Posted inSandbox

Sandbox Issue 209: Storylines, Music’s next chapter with Instagram Stories

by Rocio Sanchez

Lead: There are 400m people using Instagram Stories every day and musicians are among the heaviest lifters here. Until recently, however, it was a curiously music-free set up; but new licensing deals with parent company Facebook  have seen audio being incorporated into posts. This is, in part, a move by the photo-sharing app to hold existing […]

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Posted inNews

David Bowie museum retrospective gets AR and VR version

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

More than two million people visited the ‘David Bowie is’ exhibition as it visited 12 cities around the world. Now the retrospective will live on in virtual form, via an augmented and virtual reality version due to launch in the autumn.

It’s the work of New York studio Planeta, working with Sony Music Entertainment, the David Bowie Archive and the V&A Museum in London. “The digital experience, a first of its kind, will deliver an astonishing, but deftly connected sequence of audio-visual spaces through which the work and artifacts of Bowie’s life can be experienced,” is how Sony described it in an announcement yesterday. “3D scans will preserve and present his fabulous costumes and treasured objects in meticulous detail. The experience may even allow a spectator to virtually step into one of Bowie’s outfits and see themselves in it.”

Posted inNews

Posthumous popularity drives David Bowie to 1bn Spotify streams

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

David Bowie has reached a milestone of sorts on Spotify: more than 1bn streams on the platform.

Billboard reported the milestone, noting that ‘Heroes’ is the late star’s most popular track on the streaming service. That’s split between several versions of the song though: the 1999 remastered version has 74.8m Spotify streams, for example, while the 2014 remastered single version has 22.2m.

What remains interesting to us, though, is the relative importance of stars like Bowie to Spotify as a whole. While a billion streams is a decent milestone to have reached, Bowie is currently only the 213th most popular artist in Spotify, with 7.6 million monthly listeners.