4 Ways Artists, Labels Manipulate Spotify, Apple Streams and How It Hurts Everyone

Music streaming manipulation – artificially boosting stream counts to improve chart positioning, increase market share and royalty payments, or for other non-legitimate purposes – is a real problem for the entire music industry. Not only does streaming manipulation devalue or shut out legitimate artists, but since streaming payments are calculated…

Spotify Test Drive Higher Prices In Scandinavia

Having accrued an impressive number of subscribers, Spotify is planning to hike up prices on its home turf, increasing the cost of its family plan in Scandinavia by 14%. Whether this test will amount to anything, or be rolled out anywhere remains to be seen, however. ______________________________ Guest post by…

Spotify Upgrades Family Plan. Are Higher Prices Next?

Spotify has launched an upgraded Spotify Premium Family at the same $14.99 price. The upgrade comes alongside a reported Spotify Family price increase test in Scandanavia and pressure from rightsholders to reverse a continuing slide in per listener revenue. Since launching in 2014, Spotify Premium Family has grown to millions…

Bobby Owsinski Looks At Apple Music For Artists

Although Apple Music has consistently taken home the gold for paying artists the most per stream, but was coming up short in other artist services. In an effort to close that gap, the platform is now launching its ‘Apple Music for Artists’ feature, giving bands valuable insights into their audience….

Beatport Is Dropping Tracks That Don’t Sell

EDM, dance and DJ focused download store Beatport is pulling all tracks off the service that aren’t selling a part of a “yearly storage clean-up procedure." ____________________________ Guest post by Randi Zimmerman from the Symphonic Blog There’s always been way more electronic music being put out into the universe than…

How An Old Game Boosted A 2019 Streaming Hit

This piece explores the marketing genius of the Flappy Bird-esque old-school online game Billy Meets World, launched in conjunction with Lauv’s latest release and engineered to help casually grow the artist’s Spotify followers. ______________________________ Guest post from AWAL We recommend playing Billy Meets World for at least 30 seconds before…

TOP POSTS: This Week’s Most Read Posts On Hypebot

This week, some of the most often read, chart-topping articles on Hypebot covered Nirvana band members good-natured response to Spotify’s announcement that the group was playing a show, six key music business trends to keep an eye on, what’s to be done with disgraced artists like Morrissey and Ryan Adams,…

Chartmetric Features: Market Coverage, Cluster Artists, Cross-Platform Performance, User Customization, BandsInTown & More

Here we look at some exciting new features Chartmetric is offering up this summer including genre clustering, BandsInTown tracking, performance ranking across streaming platforms, and much more. _________________________________ Guest post by Komala Prabhu Tirupachur of Chartmetric Chartmetric feature update as of July 19, 2019 Hi there, this is Komala, a…

Want A Music Mentor? Start A Mastermind Group!

Mastermind groups can provide the support that helps smart people do great things. Ariel Hyatt of Cyber PR has successfully brought this widely praised networking meets group therapy practice into the music world and shows you how you can too. By Ariel Hyatt of CyberPR “Alone we can do so…