Niche is mainstream #MusicIndustry and mainstream is niche #Music #Producers #artists #Midia

Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos and esteemed lawyer Priyanka Khimani join Songtradr boardSongtradr says duo will help company in its next phase of global growth
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Getting It Done: The Week in D.I.Y. & Indie MusicThis week, our tips and advice for independent, do-it-yourselfers covered Spotify’s New Release Guide, improving your website, a guide to algorithm-free platforms for musicians, and more.
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REWIND: New Music Industry’s Week in ReviewIt was a busy week by any definition, and the music industry was no exception. There were big accusations regarding Merchbar, music publishers’ fight with Spotify escalates, action on group. Continue reading
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Magical Peach PRC is Sweet on L.A.There's a lot going on with rising Australian pop artist Peach PRC. With a woodland sprite image that would make Melanie Martinez jealous, she skips around the stage like a pixie--a magical being emitting rainbows, sparkles and hearts.

Then, the next minute, she's pole dancing. Because--guess what--people are complicated and they have more than one dimension.

"The rising pop star packs an often-unbelievable journey from writing and recording in her bedroom to social media phenomenon into smart, slick, and sweet songs with a bold bite," reads her press bio. "Equally funny and sensitive, she holds nothing back when it comes to life’s ups and downs, mental health, and everything in between."

 Peach PRC has a huge following on social media (over 1.7 billion TikTok views, a combined audience of 4 million-plus social followers, generated over 180 million combined artist streams), which explains the devoted fans in attendance at the Fonda Theatre on Thursday, June 13. People that scream with full-throated vigor and know every single lyric.

Pride flags were waved enthusiastically, fairy wings flew, as Peach PRC's vibe of inclusivity, joy, love and revenge was celebrated.

Yes, revenge. The main character in the song "Josh" is told, in no uncertain terms, to stop calling her. In "F U Goodbye," an ex is told that his jokes aren't funny, and she hopes terrible things happen to his career. One might assume that's about Australian comedian Alex Williamson, whom Peach RC dated for a while.

So yeah, there's a lot going on. Real life clashes with a fantasy world. Escapism smashes into realism. And by god, it works.

 
 
 
 
The post Magical Peach PRC is Sweet on L.A. first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

The Raveonettes Turn Seattle's Crocodile into a Sound BathThe Raveonettes (Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo)- who made waves in the early and mid-2000s with their matchless flair for melding melodic girl-group doo-wop with retro rock and modern bents of shimmering effects and glitzed-out guitar dissonance- have returned to the U.S. touring circuit after a decade-long absence. Inside Seattle’s ultra-cool The Crocodile, longtime devotees eagerly anticipated the return of the Stygian-tilting musical visionaries while gathered in the packed pit, all waiting patiently with Danish-like hygge. Their eyes focused with intent on an illuminated silver screen hoping the band’s signature strobe show would ignite and pull them into the duo’s world filled with hallucinatory dark delights.

Whether it might be through sheer will or simply the time of night, their wish to see the band again was fulfilled when a burst of bright light ushered in the Danish duo from stage right, dressed in their emblematic black and white. A hint of a synthesized hum thrummed in the air as Sune and Sharin grabbed their mics and sang the beautifully eerie acapella “When the Night is Almost Done” from 2014’s Pe’ahi. After the gorgeous prelude, the pair picked up their instruments and moved into the otherworldly "Aly, Walk with Me” from 2008’s Lust Lust Lust. Together, the selection showcased The Raveonettes’ skill in harmonizing scintillating, wraithlike voices alongside haunting stories and cinematic soundscapes that range from sparse to complex.

Burrowing deeper into the catacombs of their abstract reveries, the pair moved into a subset of tracks from Lust Lust Lust - the sparklingly dark-edged “Dead Sound” and scuzzy David Lynchian “Blush.” The addition of exploding strobe lights blitzing and dancing in time enhanced the performance and surreptitiously pulled the audience further into their songs filled with dark allure.

The Raveonettes followed with a few gothic Western serenades, including “Somewhere in Texas” from 2005’s Pretty in Black and “Love Can Destroy Everything” from 2003’s Chain Gang of Love. The band’s vintage vocals and retro-tremolo twang harkened to sounds made famous by artists such as Duane Eddy and Gram Parsons, just a few of the duo’s many favorite influences acknowledged on their recent release, a compilation of vamped out classics, Sing…

After a brief pause to switch guitars, the duo delved into a B-movie beat denouement filled with Nordic noire storylines, distorted feedback, and oneiric atmospherics featuring fan favorites “Attack of the Ghost Riders” from 2002’s Whip It On and “That Great Love Sound” from 2003’s Chain Gang of Love. Another frenzied explosion of timed strobes followed as Sune and Sharin closed the show with the emboldened “Recharge & Revolt” from 2011’s Raven in the Grave. Its last chords rang against the walls while the venue faded to black. Fans, not knowing when the band might return, stood their ground - with many not wanting to leave just yet, reveling in The Raveonettes’ mysteriously surreal sound bath.

SETLIST

When the Night is Almost Done

Aly, Walk with Me

Hallucinations

Lust

Dead Sound

Blush

Railroad Tracks

Somewhere in Texas

Love Can Destroy Everything

Attack of the Ghost Riders

Veronica Fever 

Do You Believe Her

My Tornado

The Enemy

Endless Sleeper

That Great Love Sound 

Encore

Remember

Love in a Trash Can

Recharge & Revolt
The post The Raveonettes Turn Seattle's Crocodile into a Sound Bath first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Latin music star Feid hit with copyright lawsuit over sample used in ‘Ferxxo 100’Artist Sebastien Graux alleges he was “taken advantage of" by Feid's creative team
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From Robert Kyncl’s NMPA keynote to music publishers’ FTC complaint against Spotify… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpThe five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days…
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UnitedMasters & Musixmatch launch Lyric Competition, showcase AI video creationIndie music marketing and distribution platform UnitedMasters and lyrics aggregator Musixmatch have partnered for a lyric contest that showcases the latter’s new AI-powered lyric video creation tools. UnitedMasters artists will. Continue reading
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Why independent musicians need a music publisherAs an independent artist, having a music publisher can make a major difference to your music career. If you are looking to increase your music revenue or want to have. Continue reading
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Mainstream is the new nicheFive years ago, we made the call that ‘niche is the new mainstream’. Today, this dynamic is so fundamental to music and culture that we are firmly in the stage of second order consequences. Superstars are getting smaller, the long tail is getting longer, and rightsholders are bringing in earnings thresholds to keep that growing long tail at bay. But it was a blog post by my colleague Tatiana – “Did Charli XCX go mainstream, or did the mainstream just go niche?” – that got me thinking whether, now five years in, the mainstreaming of niche has reached a tipping point.

The dynamics of Charli XCX’s career (e.g., 25,000 RSVPs in one hour for a 1,000-cap Boiler Room gig) feel very much like those of Taylor Swift. Of course, the sheer scale of the Swift fandom machine is the big difference – or is it? Is mainstream about actual numbers or reach, or perhaps both? In fact, it is best measured in three key ways:

Absolute scale: how big are the numbers?

Relative scale: how big are the numbers compared to others?

Active reach: what share of the total audience does an artist have?

Let’s use Taylor Swift, as today’s biggest mainstream music artist, to test each.

Absolute scale

There is no getting away from the fact that everything “big” has got smaller. Michael Jackson, arguably the equivalent of Taylor Swift for the peak-CD era, shifted half a billion units worldwide, when units actually meant units. By comparison, Taylor Swift has fewer than 200 million ‘album equivalent sales’ – which of course means this figure is increasingly made up of streams being converted into ‘sales’. Given that so much of streaming behaviour today is radio-like, we would really need to add an estimate of total individual radio listens to Jackson, which would result in a figure that would comfortably end up in the tens of billions in ‘equivalent sales’.Yes, Jackson’s career happened in a different era, when fewer artists were competing and linear broadcast platforms dominated. But that is the entire point of fragmenting fandom.

Relative scale

It is abundantly clear that Taylor Swift has more streams and ticket sales than pretty much everyone else. She is the biggest artist on the planet right now. She has mainstream awareness, but does that make her actual listenership mainstream? 

She certainly has more mainstream cultural clout than her peers, managing to become part of the mainstream media narrative – look no further than the Financial Times running pieces on ‘Swiftonomics’. This is thanks, in large part, to the fact she first built her fandom pre-fragmentation, when music was still much more a part of mainstream culture. It is an advantage enjoyed by other artists, such as Beyoncé, that came up pre-streaming’s peak, and therefore pre-fragmentation. But an FT subscriber reading a Swiftonomics story does not necessarily make them a listener (I’ll hazard a guess that particular conversion rate is not one to sing about). Having mainstream media reach is not the same as being a mainstream artist in terms of listenership, even though the two things did largely go hand-in-hand once upon a time.So, simply being bigger than the rest does not inherently equate to being mainstream. In the same way that the fastest kid at school could leave her classmates for dust but not even qualify for national heats, let alone compete with the fastest runners in the world.

Reach

Active reach is where the picture really comes into focus. The best-selling albums in US history (when sales were sales) were the Eagles ‘Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975’, with 38 million sales, and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, with 34 million. Based on the respective populations of the year of release of those albums, the Eagles was bought by 17.4% of the US population, while Michael Jackson was bought by 15.9%. 

Taylor Swift’s best-selling US album was ‘1989’ (6.5 million) while ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ sold 2.9 million. As a share of the total US population, they represent 2.0% and 0.7%. 

Taylor Swift’s biggest selling release has 12 times less reach than the Eagles, while her latest release had less than 1% reach.NOTE: with modern ‘sales’ figures including streams, Swift’s total audience may have been bigger (as many different people’s streams could add up to one sale). But equally, it could be lower, as one person’s streams could add up to multiple units.

Of course, judging Swift’s reach only by album sales – an aging format, and an essentially extinct one for much of her listener base – is unfair. Yet interestingly, the c1% figure doesn’t just apply to Swift’s album sales. The record-breaking ‘Eras’ tour sold 4.5 million US tickets, which is just over 1% of the US population (and Swifties being Swifties, there was probably a decent number who saw the show more than once, meaning that percentage is likely a bit smaller). Meanwhile, Swift’s 26.1 billion Spotify streams in 2023 made her the most streamed artist of the year, yet that was just 1.4% of all global Spotify streams. Now, 1.4% of global streams for one artist is a massive achievement But in the analogue era so many more people would have listened to the biggest artist of the day because radio was the main consumption format, and on radio everyone listens to the same song, whether they like it or not.

None of this is a critique of Taylor Swift, but instead a reflection of the modern music world which she is part of. She is clearly a hugely successful artist at the top of her game. But the game is not the same as it once was. It is not that Taylor Swift is not huge — she is. But she is not mainstream, because mainstream itself is now niche. Charli XCX shows how successful you can be when you understand the power of niche. Niche does not inherently mean small, and its potential is huge. The simple, hard truth is that now everything is niche, even mainstream.

Robert Kyncl turns up heat on PRO metadata matching, and other things we learned from his NMPA keynote in New YorkWarner boss was grilled by NMPA chief, David Israelite, at New York event this week
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US music publishing revenue jumped 10.7% to $6.2bn in 2023… outstripping recorded music’s growth in percentage termsThe NMPA is focusing its energy on a battle against Spotify over royalty payments
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It's Here! NUGEN Audio Releases NUtility ToolkitNUGEN Audio unveils its new NUtility Toolkit, which comprises its SigMod, AB Assist, Jotter and Aligner plug-ins. Ideal for entry-level and professional audio professionals alike, NUtility Toolkit fills gaps in DAW functionality and speeds up tedious admin tasks in order for audio engineers to focus on the more creative aspects of their job. 

“Introducing these utility plug-ins to your workflow will be a gamechanger,” says Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe, Product Specialist, NUGEN Audio. “It’s like finally buying a food processor when you’ve been using a pestle and mortar for the past decade. Do you have any idea how much more often I make pesto these days?”    

SigMod enables the user to create custom signal architecture to enhance the functionality of both the DAW and third-party plug-ins. The plug-in also offers easy access to functionality that is often either missing or difficult to access in certain DAWs, including but not limited to, a phase flip and a mid/side encoder and decoder. 

AB Assist 2 receives and compares up to four audio sources — different takes, plug-in options, mix revisions or versions of a master, with support for all surround channel counts. The blind test function randomly labels the streams as W, X, Y and Z for a completely unbiased assessment of the audio options. Additionally, an auto-level match function allows the user to match short-term loudness (LUFS) of sources, while a mono-check feature compares mono fold-downs and the smooth tool creates fades between sources.

Aligner is an automatic phase and polarity alignment tool designed for convenience and speed. With the automatic linking functionality, users can connect multiple instances of the plug-in to phase-correct all channels via one single user interface. The plug-in also includes manual phase adjustment for fine-tuning especially challenging audio.

Jotter provides easy sharing of timestamped notes and comments between the plug-in and the free standalone Jotter app. The latter allows clients and collaborators who may not own the plug-in (or do not use a DAW) to share their important feedback, and for audio engineers to view this feedback locked to the correct position on the project timeline. 

NUGEN’s NUtility Toolkit is available in AAX, VST3, AU and AudioSuite formats in 64-bit for both Mac and Windows OS. The bundle will be available for $99, which is a savings of $107 versus purchasing each of the individual tools. Each plug-in can still be purchased individually, and current users of any of these tools can upgrade to the bundle at a reduced rate.The post It's Here! NUGEN Audio Releases NUtility Toolkit first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Group music listening improves with Stationhead upgrade, Rythm relaunchNumerous startups and several of the streaming services are working on improving the group music listening experience. This week, a pioneer in group listening relaunched on Dischord, and an innovator unveiled a major new feature that identifies and rewards superfans.....
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