Focused on independent artists, it promises that 90% of revenues are “split fairly between the artists you’ve listened to each month”.
Tag: Ireland
Posted inNews
TikTok’s next regulatory headache is a pair of Irish inquiries
The Data Protection Commission is the lead privacy regulator for the EU, and its inquiries have teeth.
Posted inCountry Profile
Country Profile – Ireland 2021
Ireland’s booming live music industry was decimated by Covid – but hope remains for a recorded music industry where streaming is making serious inroads.
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Posted inNews
Irish taskforce proposes universal basic income for arts
Amid the ongoing debate around artists’ income from streaming, and the impact of Covid-19, here’s a curveball: what if musicians were paid a universal basic income (UBI) to sustain their […]
Posted inNews
Spotify upgrades family plan with new features (but same price… for now)
Last week, it was reported that Spotify will test a price increase for its family-plan subscription in Scandinavia. This morning, the company is announcing that it is launching an “upgraded” version of the plan globally, although the press release sent out by Spotify made it clear in the very first paragraph that this is “for the same price of $/£14.99”.
What’s the upgrade? The plan still offers six individual accounts: the subscriber plus five members of their family, as long as they’re sharing a household. There’s also a new ‘Family Hub’ where the main subscriber can manage their settings, including new parental controls to turn on or off the ‘Explicit Content’ filter for younger family members.
There’s also a new algo-personalised playlist called ‘Family Mix’, offering “songs the whole family enjoys” with the option to set who’s listening to tune the selection (or to tune out ‘Baby Shark’ / ‘Let It Go’ / all 164 ‘Old Town Road’ remixes more specifically, depending on your family’s musical dynamics). Spotify has been quietly testing ‘Family Mix’ since earlier this year judging by a couple of online-forum posts (here and here), but this morning is its official announcement.
Posted inNews
Dice reveals its 2016 Live Award nominees
British ticketing startup Dice has announced the nominees for its third annual Live Award, which highlights emerging artists in the UK and Ireland. This year’s nominees are Bonzai, Pumarosa, Loyle […]
Posted inAnalysis
BalconyTV turns 10: ‘At the start it was just a bog-standard camera…’
BalconyTV is 10 years old and in that time has grown from a small-scale operation in Dublin to now being in 65 cities around the world.
The company was bought by The Orchard in 2014 and now finds itself headquartered in New York and setting up its own label. All this, from an idea that started as a hangover.
“My friends and I were living in an apartment in Dublin which had a small balcony that we would never use – and we usually threw our rubbish onto it,” explains co-founder Stephen O’Regan.
Posted inStartups
Irish startup Pulp aims to take on Musical.ly
The swift rise to popularity of Dubsmash in 2015 and now Musical.ly in 2016 is spawning a new wave of video-based social music apps.
The latest is Dublin-based Pulp, which as far as we can tell is a rebranding of existing startup YapMe – a rebranding so fresh that Pulp’s Twitter account only tweeted for the first time yesterday.
Posted inNews
Virgin Media in Ireland ordered to stem file-sharing
Time was (15 years ago) when the headlines in digital music were dominated by the war on ISPs and attempts to get them to stop their customers illegally filesharing, so we felt a keening sense of nostalgia when we read that the Court of Appeal in Ireland has ruled that Virgin Media, the country’s second largest ISP, has to take steps to stem illegal downloading on its network.
Posted inNews
BBC takes on Beats 1 with global rollout of iPlayer Radio app
When Apple launched its Beats 1 radio station as part of Apple Music, there was a lot of speculation in the UK about the possible competition with the BBC’s music radio stations.
Posted inNews
SoundCloud Go launches in UK: ‘less of a spreadsheet and more of a Snapchat’
SoundCloud is launching its SoundCloud Go subscription tier in the UK and Ireland today.
They are the second and third countries to get the new premium tier, which launched in the US in March. SoundCloud is also introducing advertising on its free service in the UK and Ireland today.
Posted inStartups
Gramma Music launches ‘reactive radio’ app
Irish firm Gramma Music is the latest music startup exploring the idea of personalised streaming radio.
Or, as it describes its iPhone app, which went live last week: “The worlds first reactive-radio which intuitively uses your mood, activity & environment to play the right song at the right time based on your tastes in music.”