Have Li-ion Batteries Gone Too Far?The proliferation of affordable lithium batteries has made modern life convenient in a way we could only imagine in the 80s when everything was powered by squadrons of AAs, or has it? [Ian Bogost] ponders whether sticking a lithium in every new device is really the best idea.
There’s no doubt, that for some applications, lithium-based chemistries are a critically-enabling technology. NiMH-based EVs of the 1990s suffered short range and slow recharge times which made them only useful as commuter cars, but is a flashlight really better with lithium than with a replaceable cell? When household electronics are treated as disposable, and Right to Repair is only a glimmer in the eye of some legislators, a worn-out cell in a rarely-used device might destine it to the trash bin, especially for the less technically inclined.
[Bogost] decries “the misconception that rechargeables are always better,” although we wonder why his article completely fails to mention the existence of rechargeable NiMH AAs and AAAs which are loads better than their forebears in the 90s. Perhaps even more relevantly, standardized pouch and cylindrical lithium cells are available like the venerable 18650 which we know many makers prefer due to their easy-to-obtain nature. Regardless, we can certainly agree with the author that easy to source and replace batteries are few and far between in many consumer electronics these days. Perhaps new EU regulations will help?
Once you’ve selected a battery for your project, don’t forget to manage it if it’s a Li-ion cell. With great power density, comes great responsibility.

SRM Sounds launch Valley Forge library The third release from SRM Sounds captures a 15-piece timpani ensemble performing at Studio Richter Mahr, and includes some additional synth-based content courtesy of an original Minimoog. 

Plugin Boutique offers SSL Native FlexVerb at 93% off in LIMITED time discount
Plugin Boutique continues their huge sale, offering a limited 93% discount on SSL Native FlexVerb. This is the time to get a slew of expensive plugins for an affordable price. We recently covered the 32Classic Channel by Harrison Consoles at a 91% discount. Today, we’ll look at another offering: the SSL Native FlexVerb for €21.88. [...]
View post: Plugin Boutique offers SSL Native FlexVerb at 93% off in LIMITED time discount

Roland SP-404, System-8 and studio monitors among “tens of thousands of dollars” worth of gear stolen from Melbourne bandMelbourne-hailing jazz/funk band Hiatus Kaiyote have been victims of a gear theft, and have had “tens of thousands of dollars” worth of music gear stolen.
On 11 March, the group – consisting of singer and guitarist Nai Palm, bassist Paul Bender, keyboardist Simon Mavin, and drummer Perrin Moss – revealed on Instagram that their space in Preston, Victoria, was broken into, asking for any information regarding the burgled equipment.

READ MORE: “There’s something deeply disconnected”: This metal band is banning phones for their 2025 tour – here’s why

“We have been robbed. Please keep your eyes out, especially if you are in Melbourne and surrounding areas/states. Contact us if you see anything. Absolutely gutted right now,” the caption reads.
Further down, the caption lists the items that were taken with known serial numbers:

Ernie Ball Bongo 6-string Bass, blue with stickers. (serial number #F45515)
Jackson Randy Rhoads V guitar, white (serial number ISJ2106072)
2 x Roland JX-3P synths (serial numbers 343094, 475173)
Korg Kronos 2 73 (WITH FLIGHT CASE) (serial number 206038)
Roland System-8 synth (with flight case) (serial number ZOL5444)
Novation Bass Station II synth (serial number DB94197011856)

They listed items without known serial numbers in separate slides. Those include an Apollo Twin audio interface, Roland RE-301 Chorus Echo, a pair of PMC TwoTwo 8 studio monitors, an Allen and Heath GL2200 24-channel mixer, and a Roland SP-404 “loaded with Hiatus samples”.
The final slide reads: “If anyone has any leads please contact us.”
Despite this setback, the band is still due to embark on a tour of the US:
“WE WILL REBUILD,” they write. “Having a bunch of our shit stolen will NOT stop us from bringing the heat to YOU, people of America! That’s right we are going back on tour through the USA, and no amount of thieving c*nts can stop us!”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hiatus Kaiyote (@hiatuskaiyote)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hiatus Kaiyote (@hiatuskaiyote)

 
For tickets and more information on Hiatus Kaiyote’s upcoming tour, head to their official website.
The post Roland SP-404, System-8 and studio monitors among “tens of thousands of dollars” worth of gear stolen from Melbourne band appeared first on MusicTech.

How To Sell More Tickets To Your Next ShowAfter you've listed your shows on Bandsintown and adding them your website, how do sell as many tickets as possible? From exclusive offers to hidden event pages, we've got five creative ways to boost ticket sales.
The post How To Sell More Tickets To Your Next Show appeared first on Hypebot.

“There’s something deeply disconnected”: This metal band is banning phones for their 2025 tour – here’s whyAre we likely to see more phone-free concerts in 2025 and beyond? It certainly looks to be the case, as metal band Ghost are set to implement Yondr magnetic-sealing phone pouches to their forthcoming gigs this year.
In a new interview with Audacy, the band’s frontman and mastermind Tobias Forge explains why he’s forcing fans to attend his concerts phone-free.

READ MORE: “Our model uniquely creates more opportunities for indie artists to build sustainable careers in music”: Spotify releases its annual royalties report

“If you have 10,000 people at a concert and 8,000 of them are holding a phone, there’s something deeply disconnected,” Forge says, at the same time aware that fan videos can serve as free publicity for a tour.
“The whole thing in the business is, basically, ‘Yeah, we want people to film because we want people to see the show, and that will sell more tickets.’ Fine. I understand that there’s a promotional tool with social media.”
Forge says that while the sharing of gigs on social media has been integral to his band’s growth, fans spending too much time on their phones at concerts diminishes the experience he has worked hard to curate.
“I’m not saying that all social media is bad. I’m just saying that when it comes to the actual live show, my calling, my reason for being there is the connection between myself and everybody that I brought with me that are working in tandem to give you an experience,” he says.
“I really wanna underline that the ban has nothing to do with, let’s say, copyright control. It’s not that we wanna sit on all the material and we don’t want anybody to monetise [Ghost videos]; it has nothing to do with that.”
Upon entering the venue, attendees will be required to seal their phones in Yondr pouches that are magnetically sealed. Should they need to use their phone, they can leave the main showroom and unseal the pouch in the lobby and other designated areas.
“You don’t give it away. You have your phone; you don’t have to worry about that. If you need to call, you can go out. If you need to take a photo, you can take a photo of yourself out in the lobby; that’s fine,” Forge says.
Forge’s decision to implement Yondr pouches at Ghost’s 2025 concerts stems largely from the filming of Rite Here Rite Now, the feature they filmed across two shows at the Kia Forum in LA in 2023. Both events were phone free.
“We had such an engaged crowd that seemed joyous in a way that… I had to go back years and in time since I last saw a fully engaged crowd where everybody’s actually watching [the show],” Forge says.

Recently, MusicTech’s 2022 Producer of the Year, TSHA, made her Jackfruit Tour phone free, announcing the stipulation with a satirical Instagram reel.

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A post shared by TSHA (@tshamusic)

“Phones have taken over the dance floor in recent years. So I’m bringing a no phones dance floor with non-stop dancing,” TSHA wrote in the caption. “Dance music and clubs are a place for you to escape your phones and the outside world and just focus on connecting with each other through music and movement.”
While taking videos to relive it is arguably integral to the concert experience, the thinking behind Yondr pouches is to encourage gig goers to be more present and enjoy the concert there and then. Are phone-free shows likely to become more prevalent? Only time will tell, but more and more artists seem to be adopting them.
The Ghost Skeletour world tour begins April 15 at the AO Arena in Manchester. It then runs through September with dates in the UK, Europe, and North America.
For tickets and info, head to Ghost’s official website.
The post “There’s something deeply disconnected”: This metal band is banning phones for their 2025 tour – here’s why appeared first on MusicTech.

Recorded music market 2024: $36.2 billion, up 6.5%MIDiA has just released its annual recorded music market shares report. Clients can access the full report and the accompanying massive (!) data set here. For the rest of you, here are some highlights from the report.

Global recorded music growth has oscillated through the 2020s and 2024 continued that pattern, up 6.5% to $36.2 billion after 9.4% growth in 2023. (Excluding expanded rights, the total was $32.1 billion). Given that the first half of the 2020s was characterised by global upheaval and uncertainty, shaped by factors such as the pandemic and rising inflation and interest rates, 6,5% growth was no small achievement. But global disruption is not going away – 2025 has thus far picked up the baton and sprinted with it. The music business is going to have to get used to operating in challenging global circumstances, even before considering a growing catalogue of disruptive industry specific trends such as, bifurcation, the rise of the Global South and a fast-maturing streaming market.

Streaming still dominates revenues but its impact is lessening. For the first time ever, its share of total revenues declined slightly in 2024, down from 61.5% to 61.3%, with streaming growing slightly slower than the total market to reach $22.2 billion. Streaming is no longer the market maker. Its contribution to total market growth was down by more than a fifth compared to 2022. The streaming revenue slowdown has been on the horizon for many years and – despite price increases – it has now arrived. Super premium cannot come soon enough.

On top of this, physical was down -4.8%, carrying on its very own 2020s yo-yo growth pattern (up, down, up, down). So where did all the growth come from? Other i.e. performance, sync and expanded rights. Expanded rights (merch etc) were up to $4.1 billion, reflecting the recorded music businesses success in monetising fandom. Other as a whole was up 17.3% while Sony Music pulled up a forest of trees, seeing its ‘other’ revenue up by 38.6% in 2024.

In fact, Sony Music had a good year all round. UMG remained comfortably the world’s largest label with revenues of $10.5 billion but for the second successive year, Sony Music Group (SMG) was the fastest growing major label, increasing revenues by 10.2% to grow market share 700 basis points to 21.7%. SMG was the fastest growing major label in the first half of the decade, growing by a total of 73.9% between 2020 and 2024. The only other market constituent to grow share was non-major labels, up to 29.6% market share. Artists Direct meanwhile (self-releasing artists) felt the pinch of new royalty structures, with revenues slower than the market to reach $2.0 billion. This despite the fact that the number of self-releasing artists grew by 17.2% to reach 8.2 million, with Chinese streaming services Tencent and NetEase seeing particularly strong growth.

One of the most important market trends though, is the growing gap between DSPs and labels and distributors. Streaming services are both growing revenue faster than rightsholders and are widening the growth gap. DSPs grew revenue three times faster than labels in 2024 and the rate of growth was up three years running. Despite working within tightly set rightsholder constraints, DSPs are learning how to improve margin through a diverse mix of tactics including content mix (e.g., podcasts, audiobooks), acquiring cheaper music (e.g., production libraries, exclusive commissions, generative AI), licensing discounts (e.g., audiobook bundles) and charging labels for access to audiences (e.g., Spotify Discovery Mode). 

All in all, a solid year for the recorded music market, but with warning signs: labels aren’t keeping pace with DSP growth and despite keeping the long tail of Artists Direct quiet with new licensing structures, more artists than ever are deciding to release without labels. Eventually they (and smaller indie labels) will take heed of the ‘you’re not welcome here’ sign on streaming’s door and build their audiences elsewhere. This will be a short-term win for bigger labels, but long-term risk, with this new lane being where much of tomorrow’s culture will be made. In case you forgot, Bifurcation is coming.

Note: we scaled down some of our historical numbers slightly to reflect some double counting of independent label revenue distributed by other independent labels

Songs in Film and TV: Which songs are used most?The relationship between film and and TV and music has always been strong, but these songs have been used so often that their identity is shaped by on-screen appearances.
The post Songs in Film and TV: Which songs are used most? appeared first on Hypebot.

“Our model uniquely creates more opportunities for indie artists to build sustainable careers in music”: Spotify releases its annual royalties reportSpotify has released its Loud & Clear annual royalty report for 2024, in which it aims to provide “clarity about the economics of music streaming”.
As part of its key findings, Spotify shares that it was again the highest paying retailer globally in 2024, paying the music industry over $10 billion in total. It says this is the largest payout in music industry history, and is over 10x the contribution of the largest record store at the height of the CD era.

READ MORE: It looks like Spotify lossless audio is coming later this year

The report lands among continued criticism of Spotify’s royalty model, with a vast number of artists feeling its payouts are too low. CEO Daniel Ek previously compared its royalty payouts to professional sports, saying: “Football is played by millions of people – but there’s a very small number that can live off playing full time”. At the end of Q4 last year, Spotify celebrated its first full year of profitability.
The data: This is how much money is being paid out
Despite the low royalty backlash, the new report states that from 2014 to 2024, Spotify’s yearly payouts to the music industry increased 10x from $1 billion to over $10 billion. “Spotify has been on a mission to get the world to value music again – and the system we’ve built together is working,” it claims.
In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1M in royalties from Spotify alone. It argues that these artists aren’t just household names either, as 80 percent of them didn’t have a song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart in 2024. The majority were also not legacy artists either, having not launched their careers until 2010 or later.
For the first time ever, an artist who received one in every million streams on Spotify generated over $10,000 on average last year. As for independent artists and labels, these collectively generated more than $5 billion from Spotify.
“Spotify globally represents about one-third of overall recorded streaming revenue (IFPI), but represents over 50 percent of Indies’ streaming revenue (MIDiA). That over-index of Spotify in Indies’ revenue shows that our model uniquely creates more opportunities for more artists to build sustainable careers in music,” it states.
Why Spotify feels “the fraction who find success appears smaller over time”
The Loud & Clear report also tries to tackle criticism of Spotify’s royalties by referring to what it calls the “paradox” of the modern music industry. The number of uploaders to Spotify is now nearly 12 million, and “looking back to the peak of the CD era, only a few thousand artists had their music on the shelves of record stores,” it explains.
“The paradox? Streaming has allowed millions to easily share their music globally – that’s an amazing thing. But the sheer volume of uploaders means the fraction who find success appears smaller over time. The fact remains: Thanks to streaming, more artists than ever before are generating royalties at every career stage. More than at any time in music history. And we think that’s what really matters.”
To further dive into its royalty model, Spotify has also released a new video (seemingly voiced by its AI DJ). In the breakdown, Spotify shares that it does not pay artists directly, but pays rights holders instead. In general, it pays them roughly two thirds of every dollar it makes from music. Watch below for more:

You can check out the full Loud & Clear report from Spotify now.
The post “Our model uniquely creates more opportunities for indie artists to build sustainable careers in music”: Spotify releases its annual royalties report appeared first on MusicTech.

Steinberg update Cubase 14 Cubase 14.0.20 introduces some changes to the Pattern and Score Editors, additional Audio Export options and a new Audio Segment Detection feature capable of highlighting individual elements such as words, drum hits in audio regions. 

Gibson Certified Vintage Launches Next Round of Rare, Highly-Collectible GuitarsGibson - the iconic American-made and leading instrument brand—has a legacy of making world-class instruments since 1894 when Orville Gibson was crafting archtop mandolins. As a natural extension of Gibson’s passion for its unique instruments and the stories they tell, the history-making Gibson Certified Vintage program offers collectible vintage guitars authenticated and certified directly by Gibson, with a new limited lifetime warranty and a certificate of vintage authenticity. All Gibson Certified Vintage guitars are sold via the Gibson Garage in Nashville, TN, call (615) 933-6000; select models will be available for purchase via https://www.gibson.com/en-US/Certified-Vintage.Today, the Gibson Certified Vintage program premieres the next collection of guitars: a 1956 Gibson Les Paul Standard, 1957 Gibson ES-225TD, 1958 Gibson Les Paul TV Junior, 1964 Gibson SG Special, and a 1966 Epiphone Century E422T. “P-90s have been the sound of Gibson electric guitars for the better part of a century, and this release is a small celebration of that,” says Mitch Conrad, Gibon Certified Vintage Manager. “I'm particularly fond of the 1957 Gibson ES-225TD; it's this great combination of the specs of an ES-295 in the thinline package of an ES-330. Don't be fooled by how clean these guitars are—they're a joy to play, and they sound fantastic.”A world first, the Gibson Certified Vintage collection offers collectors an incredible opportunity to own extraordinary instruments, sourced and authenticated by Gibson. Gibson Certified Vintage guitars feature one-of-a-kind Golden Era blue-chip guitars, unique, one-of-a-kind prototypes, celebrity-owned guitars, as well as 70s and 80s models directly from the Gibson Vault. In an industry first, all Gibson Certified Vintage guitars are sold with a brand new limited lifetime warranty. All guitars arrive with a detailed letter of appraisal confirming the provenance and history of the instrument, a certificate of authenticity signed by Gibson’s Certified Vintage Manager, Mitch Conrad, and an array of unique extras.Explore the next guitars to debut in the Gibson Certified Vintage collection below and check back for refreshed vintage offerings as each guitar is sold; for all details, visit https://www.gibson.com/en-US/Certified-Vintage.The post Gibson Certified Vintage Launches Next Round of Rare, Highly-Collectible Guitars first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

US CPI comes in lower than expected — Are rate cuts coming?The latest US core Consumer Price Index (CPI) print, a measure of inflation, came in lower than expected at 3.1%, beating expectations of 3.2%, with a corresponding 0.1% drop in headline inflation figures.According to Matt Mena, crypto research strategist at 21Shares, the cooling inflation data adds to the likelihood that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates this year, injecting much-needed liquidity into the markets and sending risk-on asset prices higher. Mena added:“Rate cut expectations have surged in response — markets now price a 31.4% chance of a cut in May, up over 3x from last month, while expectations for three cuts by year-end have jumped over 5x to 32.5%, and four cuts have skyrocketed from just 1% to 21%.”Despite the better-than-expected inflation numbers, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) declined from over $84,000 at the daily open to now sit around $83,000 as traders grapple with US President Donald Trump’s trade war and macroeconomic uncertainty.A majority of market participants believe the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by June 2025. Source: CME GroupRelated: Bitcoin’s ‘Trump trade’ is over — Traders shift hope to Fed rate cuts, expanding global liquidityIs President Trump crashing markets to force rate cuts?Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on several occasions that the central bank is not rushing to cut interest rates — a view echoed by Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller.During a Feb. 17 speech at the University of New South Wales in Syndey, Australia, Waller said the bank should pause interest rate cuts until inflation comes down.These comments were met with concern from market analysts, who say that a lack of rate cuts might trigger a bear market and send asset prices plummeting.On March 10, market analyst and investor Anthony Pompliano speculated that President Trump was intentionally crashing financial markets to force the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.The US government has approximately $9.2 trillion in debt that will mature in 2025 unless refinanced. Source: The Kobeissi LetterAccording to The Kobeissi Letter, the US government needs to refinance roughly $9.2 trillion in debt before it reaches maturity in 2025.Failure to refinance this debt at lower interest rates will drive up the national debt, which is currently over $36 trillion, and cause the interest payments on the debt to balloon.Due to these reasons, President Trump has made interest rate cuts a top priority for his administration — even at the short-term expense of asset markets and business.Magazine Elon Musk’s plan to run government on blockchain faces uphill battle

Remote music collaboration: Approaches and best practices
Expert musicians Milk and Blika join us on a discussion of proven approaches and best practices for remote collaboration.

Spotify stock up on strong Loud & Clear royalty report[NYSE: SPOT] Spotify stock beat the market Wednesday rising sharply after the release of it annual Loud & Clear royalty payment transparency report.
The post Spotify stock up on strong Loud & Clear royalty report appeared first on Hypebot.

Impact Soundworks Tape SculptorTape Sculptor is a next-generation tape plugin that can go far beyond typical tape emulation to enhance your productions in all-new directions. Created in partnership with brilliant engineer... Read More