Adaptr Shakes Up Music Licensing with New Platform for Developers

It’s been an exciting start to 2021 for Feed Media Group.

The San Francisco-based technology firm raised the curtain on the new year by partnering with Warner Music Group to launch Adaptr, a platform that fosters the growth of innovative new apps by allowing developers to easily and legally integrate music into their experiences on an interactive basis.

Viberate: Every Music Festival Will Likely Have an App by 2025

The music industry has digitalized over the years, shifting towards streaming, social media, and apps.

During the covid-19 pandemic, these tools proved to be essential for connecting with fan communities and keeping businesses afloat; especially in the heavily-impacted festival industry. As live events will finally start to make a comeback, optimizing online communication efforts and costs will be crucial – and apps will be a vital part of that.

Bulldog DM Unlocks the Interactive Power of Livestreaming

Livestreaming performances and experiences became The Thing in 2020, but the technology has existed for two decades. Founder/CEO John Petrocelli and the team at Bulldog DM were there at the beginning, mastering the technical and creative aspects of a medium just coming into its own, long before it was hot.

They’ve learned its true power: Turning viewers into participants.

LÜM Launches New Platform

LÜM announced the launch of a new digital music marketplace for creators – The Exchange. With COVID-19 significantly limiting artists’ ability to make money, the launch of The Exchange demonstrates the Company’s commitment to providing artists pathways to profitability from peers – as well as fans.

Dubbed as the “Shopify” for musicians and ‘Home’ for independent artists, The Exchange will allow creators to buy and sell features, vocals, mixing & mastering, beats, and even music reviews.

Staccs to Launch New Streaming Service for Music Concerts

Staccs, a Swedish tech startup, will launch a new, premium streaming service for music concerts providing fans with the opportunity to relive their favourite concerts, on demand.

Set to launch in the Nordics in the first quarter of 2021, Staccs opens up new, untapped commercial opportunities for the music industry with its user-centric business model – offering artists and rights holders a new revenue stream to market classic video content. The new home for concerts on demand, Staccs will offer fans the chance to relive their favourite gigs advert free in the highest quality possible.

Palcast Launches to Give Podcasts More Love

Last week, Spotify released its yearly tradition “Spotify Wrapped,” but for podcast fans the fun was limited to just a few data insights.

Not to worry. Palcast has launched to analyze your podcast listening data in more detail and let’s you compare your taste with friends.

SiriusXM Joins Forces With The Bob Marley Family to Launch “Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Radio” Channel

SiriusXM and the family of Bob Marley announced today an exclusive year-round channel dedicated to the legacy of Bob Marley.

Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Radio will launch on December 3rd on SiriusXM channel 19 and will feature the cultural icon’s entire music catalog, both live and recorded, including rare recordings, some of which have never been made available to the public.

Amazon Music UK Reveal 2021 ‘Ones To Watch’ List

Amazon Music UK announced their 2021 ‘Ones to Watch’ list, the rising stars in music tipped for future superstardom, as selected by the streaming service’s expert Programming Team.

Craft Brewed Music Debuts New Podcast Series

Boutique streaming service Craft Brewed Music, started in Nashville in 2018, announced the launch of The Craft Brewed Music Podcast, available on all mainstream podcast providers.

Craft Brewed Music® is a curated service that streams “better music for serious listeners” and bills itself as “the small batch streaming app”.

TuneTik Plays Matchmaker for Musicians and Influencers on TikTok

Designed for musicians and creators on TikTok, TuneTik was founded in early 2020 to help musicians and TikTok influencers more easily connect.

TuneTik is all about helping creators make that next viral song. Whether you are an influencer looking to get paid for your promoting talents, or a musician currently on a deep dive to find the right influencer to help create the perfect video that gets your song some major traction, TuneTik has both sides of the TikTok platform covered.

We were lucky enough to catch up with Peter Kwitny, TuneTik founder, to get some extra details about how it all started and what’s next for TuneTik.

What was the jumping off point to start TuneTik?

The idea for TuneTik came to me after looking for different ways to promote my own music with influencers on TikTok. I’ve played in a band now for the past 4 years. We made our own attempts at trying to make our songs go viral on TikTok, but pretty quickly realized that it was going to be fairly difficult to make the next trend without some help. The task of scrolling through my TikTok feed to find influencers to promote the song seemed like a daunting task, so I took to Google to search things like “music promotion service on TikTok.” Every result was basically just agencies and managers who would make the campaign and select the influencers for you, and most of them mainly worked with brands which was a bit of a turn off as a musician.

I was looking for more of an experience like Fiverr, a simple marketplace where I can just find the influencer I want to work with and send them my track to make a video for. Not being able to find anything, I got the idea that maybe I should build it myself. I messaged my friend Marc, who has a fairly big following on TikTok and is now the co-founder of TuneTik, if he thought influencers would like to sign up for such a service. He told me that he gets multiple requests from musicians asking to make a video for payment, but he is often hesitant to do them because he can’t be sure if the musician will pay him. That was the moment that I knew there might be something here, as it was solving a critical problem for both sides of the marketplace.

Just how important – now, and moving forward – is TikTok in regards to an artists’ career (brand, promotion, creativity, etc…)?

While this may be a fairly strong and controversial opinion, I believe that TikTok is one of the most incredible and powerful apps ever created.

YouTube and Reddit paved the way for digital virality, but TikTok has perfected it to an outstanding degree. In terms of music, Spotify curated and algorithmic playlists have essentially run the music industry for the past few years in terms of determining which tracks blow up, but there is currently no playlist placement that is more valuable than a viral TikTok song attached to a trend. While I would advise all musicians to continue promoting their music by sending to blogs and playlists, I would also say that TikTok participation in some form, either through content of your own or working with influencers, should 100% be a part of the puzzle.

What are your thoughts on the business of music streaming?

To quote Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton who quoted Steve Jordan in this interview, “If Whole Foods came out with a $10/month subscription to food, it would be a pretty popular product as well.” I’m fairly young, but am still old enough to remember the days of buying CDs and then buying digital downloads on the iTunes Store. My brother and I would make a list and specifically plan out the music we were going to buy with the limited budget we had. There is no doubt that music streaming subscriptions are a revolutionary, disruptive consumer product.

They disrupted an industry so hard that the thought of purchasing music at this point is almost foreign. Even though the film and TV industries were disrupted as well by streaming, there is still a thriving market of renting or paying for downloads. As a musician, my feelings are a lot more mixed on streaming services. While they have allowed for me to put my music in front of hundreds of thousands of listeners’ ears through an algorithm, they have also made it a little harder to make money from those listens.

As many know, the payout from streaming services is very low and has essentially required musicians to make most of their money from other sources like touring, which is now not possible with COVID.

It’s definitely a double-edged sword. But it’s here whether musicians like it or not, so we might as well make the best of it. Given the constant dramatic shifts in music consumption methods throughout the decades though, it would not be surprising if we see another disruption at some point. Perhaps Elon Musk’s Neuralink will eventually just store songs in microchips in our heads.

What’s on the horizon for TuneTik?

I have lots of ideas planned for TuneTik! The short-term plan is to keep getting more influencers registered and begin perfecting the promotion process for our musicians. Long-term though, the mission of this company is to simply help you make the next viral song. Above all else, we want to be the catalyst of the next big thing. How do we do that? For one, this may involve expanding from just TikTok and look into other mediums.

Another idea is to further our TIkTok presence by looking into better ways to observe music trends on the app and provide better analytics for musicians.

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Mandolin Secures $5M Seed Round to Fuel Rapid Growth

Focused on the unique needs of artists and venues today, Mandolin is a digital platform designed to help artists, venues, and fans connect through live music.

Fueled by recent wins, Mandolin has announced a $5 million seed round to accelerate growth, with participation from High Alpha Capital, Marc Benioff, and leading SaaS angel investors with a personal passion for seeing live music return to the stage. 

Midtempo Radio Delivers a Harmonically Programmed Radio Stream

We recently had the pleasure of discovering Midtempo Radio –  an experiment in harmonic audio broadcasting that plays great tracks from a diverse music library as smoothly as possible.

Each track is analyzed on key, tempo, and intensity, then passes through various playlist selection rules – nothing about genre or era, and no A-list/B-list hierarchies.

You don’t know what the system will select, but often the music flows so smoothly and naturally you won’t notice when one song ends and the next begins.