Posted inNews

John Legend is meditation app Headspace’s new ‘chief music officer’

We’re big fans of famous artists being given spurious job titles as part of partnerships with tech companies, dating back to the glory days of Lady Gaga as Polaroid creative director and Will·I·Am as director of creative innovation at Intel.

But perhaps meditation app Headspace really did need a ‘chief music officer’ and John Legend happened to shine the brightest in the interview process.

Enough snark though: even if Legend misses the daily Zoom meeting, it’s an interesting partnership. He’ll be working with the company’s new Headspace Studios division, tasked with “creating and distributing mindful living content” for the app, which has more than 65 million users.

Posted inNews

More artists turn to livestreams amid coronavirus isolation

As the live-music shutdown continues, more and bigger artists have turned to livestreaming performances online as an alternative, if not (certainly not in terms of income) a replacement.

Neil Young is launching a ‘Fireside Sessions’ series of concerts broadcast from his home. As far as we can tell, the performances will be hosted on his own Neil Young Archives website, since (as his announcement reminded fans) he’s dropping Facebook “very very soon”. Coldplay’s Chris Martin streamed a performance via Instagram yesterday, as part of a new ‘Together, At Home’ partnership between the World Health Organization and Global Citizen. John Legend will be the next artist to take part, later today.

Meanwhile, US satellite-radio firm SiriusXM has announced that acts including Armin van Buuren, Afrojack, Martin Garrix and Major Lazer (all of whom were to play the now-cancelled Ultra Music Festival in Miami at the start of the month) will play DJ sets at the Ultra Virtual Audio Festival on limited-run channel UMF Radio which will be accessible from 20th March to 23rd March. Plus, artist Frank Turner is playing a three-sets concert later today from home, via his Facebook page.

Posted inSandbox

Sandbox Issue 226: What people just don’t “get” about digital marketing

Lead: what digital marketing trends are most underrated or simply misunderstood in 2019? That’s the question we put to the music marketing community and got them to hold forth on the subject. This resulted in a lot of ideas and a lot of new paths for marketing this year and beyond. Campaigns: TikTok goes all […]

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