How to Stand Out on Spotify Wrapped 2024: A Musicians GuideSpotify has signaled that its 2024 Wrapped will launch soon. This guide on How to Stand Out on Spotify Wrapped 2024 offers a simple roadmap for every musician to become part of this global music phenomenon.
The post How to Stand Out on Spotify Wrapped 2024: A Musicians Guide appeared first on Hypebot.

Avenged Sevenfold celebrate their 25th anniversary with spooky virtual museum inside FortniteMetal band Avenged Sevenfold have launched a virtual museum inside Fortnite, but with a spooky twist.
The museum celebrates the band’s 25th anniversary, and doubles up as a virtual escape room. In a statement shared via their official website, the five-piece state that you do not need to be a gamer to enjoy The Museum, and that users can simply use problem solving skills to navigate their way through a fun experience.

READ MORE: “We’re taking power away from corporate networks, and saying, ‘No, we’re gonna reward our fans, not you’”: M. Shadows on Avenged Sevenfold’s new Fortnite-style Season Pass

“25 years have absolutely flown by. We wanted to do something to mark the occasion of our vast history by not just looking backwards but also forward,” the band say. “We started throwing around the idea of a gallery or museum of sorts to display art and eras of the band, but it was important to us to reach more people virtually.
“With The Museum, fans are able to control their own narrative as well as unlock hidden meanings, recordings and easter eggs. This project quickly got larger and larger as we worked with our friend Ryan McKinnon [artist who works with Unreal Engine] over the last year. What we have now is basically a fully virtual gallery, experience and escape room. We hope you enjoy taking a trip down memory lane with us… To 25 more.”
Fortnite Islands is a place within the Fortnite universe where players can create their own games, content and experiences using UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite).
Take a closer look in the teaser below:

This virtual experience lands as no surprise, given that A7X have been exploring fan experiences in virtual realms for some time now. Following the 2021 launch of their NFT-based fanclub, Deathbats Club, the outfit also launched Season Pass – a direct-to-fan loyalty platform offering a number of perks – in March this year.
By “participating” in the band’s ecosystem – via attending concerts, streaming music, and buying merch – fans are rewarded with points that can be used to unlock tiered rewards including collectibles, merchandise, unreleased music and even real-life experiences.
Frontman M Shadows explained in an interview with MusicTech earlier this year that much of the motivation behind Season Pass is to take back the power from large corporations which put bands into boxes with regard to how they reward their dedicated fans.
“[Corporations] want to come to the artist and say, ‘We’ve built a business off of you, and now we want to reward the fan, but you can’t reward the fan, we want you to allow us to reward the fan in our own way,’” he said.
“And we’re taking that power away from them, and saying, ‘No, we’re gonna reward the fan – who is the same fan that participates in all of your corporate networks – and we’re gonna reward them in the way that we feel is the most meaningful, which is access to us, things that we want to give them, not through [corporate networks] but through us.’”
To access The Museum, simply download Fortnite on any device. When prompted with the search bar, you’ll need to enter island code 5592-6865-3961. Find out more via Fortnite.
The post Avenged Sevenfold celebrate their 25th anniversary with spooky virtual museum inside Fortnite appeared first on MusicTech.

Don’t miss Music Tectonics’ Creator Fair: Get $25 Discount Tickets NowNext week's popular Music Tectonics Conference has added a companion Music Tectonics Creator Fair on Oct 23rd in Santa Monica.
The post Don’t miss Music Tectonics’ Creator Fair: Get $25 Discount Tickets Now appeared first on Hypebot.

From UMG’s [PIAS] buyout to Concord’s $217m Daddy Yankee deal… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpThe biggest stories from the past week – all in one place…
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No, vinyl sales aren’t down this year – they’re still on the riseVinyl record sales are still on the rise, it has been confirmed, following reports that claimed the US market was down 33 percent.
A number of news outlets were under the impression that sales had declined for the first time in 17 years since the vinyl revolution revived the medium once again. The data for such reports came from Billboard’s Market Watch weekly report, which automatically updates with data provided by the company Luminate. The company had recently changed how it gathers its data, leading to some confusion.

READ MORE: Ticket touts cost UK music fans an extra £145 million per year: “All too often fans are forced to pay a price decided by a stranger on the internet”

Discogs reached out to Luminate following such reports, and it now shares that Chris Muratore, director of partnerships at Luminate, confirms that the reported data was incorrect, and that vinyl sales are actually up by 6.2 percent. Billboard has since clarified this within its Market Watch report, and other news outlets have also updated their articles.
Luminate’s previous reporting process was in place for over 30 years, and involved “sampling independent stores to extrapolate sales of CDs, vinyl, and cassettes for the entire US marketplace.” Its new system was implemented on 29 December 2023, the first day of its 2024 calendar, and involves counting actual sales from independent stores in the entire US market, as per Discogs.
In Luminate’s mid-year report, the company stated: “While the new modelled methodology more accurately represents the independent retail market, we do not have comparable historical data to provide an accurate year-over-year trend. Therefore, independent retail physical sales are not included in our H1 2024 vs. H1 2023 US physical sales reporting.” To summarise, while Luminate now claims that vinyl sales are up 6.2 percent, this number does not include independent record stores from 2023 or 2024 to avoid an unfair comparison.
In other similar news, data shared at the end of 2023 by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) noted that the CD market had sustained its smallest annual decline in nearly a decade last year as it moved closer to plateauing. Nearly 11 million CDs were sold across the year, while sales of cassettes topped 100,000 units in a calendar year for the fourth consecutive year.
Further details on physical music sales for 2024 will likely come in over the next two months as the year comes to an end. MusicTech will bring you this data as soon as we have it.
The post No, vinyl sales aren’t down this year – they’re still on the rise appeared first on MusicTech.

Beginner’s Guide to Music PublishingIf you've made some music and now you're looking for the next steps, you've come to the right place. This guide covers what music publishing is and the significant role it will play into your music success.
The post Beginner’s Guide to Music Publishing appeared first on Hypebot.

Grab 10 plugins for $49.99 with the Brainworx Heritage Bundle
If you’re looking for more advanced mixing tools, keep reading because we’ll cover a great bundle today! Until the end of October, you can get 10 Brainworx plugins for $49.99 total, which is a hefty 96% discount! Brainworx has been a staple of the audio plugin world and continues to make great tools for music [...]
View post: Grab 10 plugins for $49.99 with the Brainworx Heritage Bundle

Origin Effects launch free IR Cab Library Origin Effects have released an impulse response library that includes captures of six cabinets and combos that were used in the development of their popular emulation pedal. 

Stripe in talks to acquire Bridge for $1 billionStripe is in talks to acquire stablecoin platform Bridge for a whopping $1 billion, according to Forbes. The talks are reportedly in advanced stages, although nothing has been finalized.  Bridge, cofounded by Coinbase alumni Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, has built an API that helps companies accept stablecoins. The pair raised $58 million from investors […]
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Euroclear makes first Asia investment with Marketnode stakeThe major European securities settlement firm has found an Asian platform for its FundPlace offering.

Tiny LoRa GPS Node Relies on ESP32Sometimes you need to create a satellite navigation tracking device that communicates via a low-power mesh network. [Powerfeatherdev] was in just that situation, and they whipped up a particularly compact solution to do the job.
As you might have guessed based on the name of its creator, this build is based around the ESP32-S3 PowerFeather board. The PowerFeather has the benefit of robust power management features, which makes it perfect for a power-sipping project that’s intended to run for a long time. It can even run on solar power and manage battery levels if so desired. The GPS and LoRa gear is all mounted on a secondary “wing” PCB that slots directly on to the PowerFeather like a Arduino shield or Raspberry Pi HAT. The whole assembly is barely larger than a AA battery.
It’s basically a super-small GPS tracker that transmits over LoRa, while being optimized for maximum run time on limited power from a small lithium-ion cell. If you’re needing to do some long-duration, low-power tracking task for a project, this might be right up your alley.
LoRa is a useful technology for radio communications, as we’ve been saying for some time. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own nifty radio comms build, or anything in that general milleu, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

Litmus Music Enters Creative Partnership with Randy Newman on Recorded Music Royalties and Music Publishing RightsLitmus Music, a music rights business backed by Carlyle’s (NASDAQ: CG) Global Credit Platform, has acquired Randy Newman’s share of his recorded music and publishing, encompassing the scores to timeless and beloved Disney film franchises such as Toy Story, Cars, Monsters Inc., and The Princess and the Frog. The deal also includes Newman’s hits from the 1970s-1980s such as “I Love L.A.,” “Mama Told Me Not To Come,” “Feels Like Home,” “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” “Short People,” “Baltimore,” and “It’s A Jungle Out There”

The catalog includes Toy Story’s “You’ve Got A Friend In Me,” which has become more than just a soundtrack to a beloved film; it has evolved into a universal symbol of friendship solidifying its place in contemporary culture.

Following high-profile deals with Katy Perry, benny blanco, and Keith Urban, this partnership with Newman further solidifies Litmus’s commitment to preserving and promoting iconic catalogs that resonate across generations. Having operated at the highest levels of the music industry, Litmus’ founding members have collectively fostered deep connections to record labels, distributors, artist managers, and the artists themselves, with a mission to create value for artists and investors through the thoughtful management of music.

“Randy Newman is a unique and brilliant songwriter, composer, and performer whose body of work has proven him to be an artist for the ages. There is absolutely no one like him, and his influence on the music world cannot be overstated. We couldn’t be more proud and excited to acquire Randy’s catalog of beautiful, witty, and sharply observational songs,” said Dan McCarroll, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Litmus Music.

“Randy’s music has touched so many generations. His songs continue to transcend time and illuminate films. Dan and I and the entire Litmus team are so grateful Randy has trusted us as his partner to care for these songs and recordings. It is an honor and responsibility we don’t take lightly,” added Hank Forsyth, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Litmus Music.

“Randy Newman’s music has been a staple of childhood memories and experiences for decades,” said Alex Popov, Head of Private Credit at Carlyle. “Litmus Music continues to partner with the world’s leading artists to promote and drive value for iconic catalogs.”

With songs that run the gamut from heartbreaking to satirical and a host of unforgettable film scores, Randy Newman has used his many talents to create musical masterpieces widely recognized by generations of audiences.

After starting his songwriting career as a teenager, Newman launched into recording as a singer and pianist in 1968 with his self-titled album Randy Newman. Throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s he released several acclaimed albums such as: 12 Songs, Sail Away, Good Old Boys, Little Criminals, Born Again, Trouble in Paradise, Land of Dreams, and Bad Love. Since 2003, he has released three Randy Newman Songbook volumes, the Randy Newman: Live in London CD/DVD, Harps and Angels, and Dark Matter.

In addition to his solo recordings and regular international touring, Newman began composing and scoring for films in the 1980s. The list of movies he has worked on includes The Natural, Awakenings, Ragtime, all four Toy Story pictures, Monsters Inc. and Monsters University, Seabiscuit, James and the Giant Peach, A Bug’s Life, Meyerowitz Stories, and Marriage Story. Randy Newman’s many honors include seven Grammys, three Emmys, and two Academy Awards, as well as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is in both the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and has been awarded an Ivor Novello PRS for Music Special International Award as well as a PEN New England Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award.

Photo by Pamela SpringsteenThe post Litmus Music Enters Creative Partnership with Randy Newman on Recorded Music Royalties and Music Publishing Rights first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Toontrack release Orchestral Grand EKX The latest expansion for Toontrack’s popular virtual piano platform delivers an epic-sounding Steinway grand captured at Belgium’s Galaxy Studios

Access the Information Superhighway With a Mac PlusFor some time now, Apple has developed a reputation for manufacturing computers and phones that are not particularly repairable or upgradable. While this reputation is somewhat deserved, especially in recent years, it seems less true for their older machines. With the second and perhaps most influential computer, the Apple II, being so upgradable that the machine had a production run of nearly two decades. Similarly, the Macintosh Plus of 1986 was surprisingly upgradable and repairable and [Hunter] demonstrates its capabilities by bringing one onto the modern Internet, albeit with a few tricks to adapt the old hardware and software to the modern era.
The Mac Plus was salvaged from a thrift store, and the first issue to solve was that it had some rotten capacitors that had to be replaced before the computer could be reliably powered on at all. [Hunter] then got to work bringing this computer online, with the only major hardware modification being a BlueSCSI hard drive emulator which allows using an SD card instead of an original hard disk. It can also emulate an original Macintosh Ethernet card, allowing it to fairly easily get online.
The original operating system and browser don’t support modern protocols such as HTTPS or scripting languages like Javascript or CSS, so a tool called MacProxy was used to bridge this gap. It serves simplified HTML from the Internet to the Mac Plus, but [Hunter] wanted it to work even better, adding modular domain-specific handling to allow the computer to more easily access sites like Reddit, YouTube, and even Hackaday, although he does call us out a bit for not maintaining our retro page perhaps as well as it ought to be.
[Hunter] has also built an extension to use the Wayback Machine to serve websites to the Mac from a specific date in the past, which really enhances the retro feel of using a computer like this to access the Internet. Of course, if you don’t have original Macintosh hardware but still want to have the same experience of the early Internet or retro hardware this replica Mac will get you there too.

HYBE’s Weverse to launch new superfan subscription tiers… and keep up to 60% of the moneyWeverse will reportedly take up to 60% of the revenue generated on its new paid membership service
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