Some music lovers do more than passively groove to their favorite hits. They play along. And there are a lot of them: More than half of households in the US and Western Europe have at least one member who plays an instrument for pleasure, according to recent numbers from Gallup. These active music lovers have a new one-stop place to find the chords, notes, and lyrics they want, all synched to the track, all ready to rock. That place isUtab. The service uses machine learning

BuzzAngle Music brings big-data power to an industry lacking timely, granular, and transparent data. Before BuzzAngle, customers of the industry’s sole reporting service, Nielsen SoundScan, struggled with its limited report capabilities and once-a-week processing. On top of that, there were disparate systems for the U.S., Canada, and rest of world. BuzzAngle changes all that. “BuzzAngle Music has disrupted the market by using new age technologies to store, process and pull

Public radio stations around the country were early in the game of shooting high-quality video of musical guests--big names, indie darlings, emerging voices--who come by the studio. Now VuHaus gathers these once-scattered treats onto one sleek, discovery-enabling platform. With new video coming regularly from music heavyweights like KCRW (LA), WFUV (NYC), KEXP (Seattle), and KUTX (Austin), as well as from established names like Mountain Stage, and WXPN (Philadelphia) / Worl

Producing vinyl has long been an obscure, nearly esoteric process fraught with endless manufacturing delays, unclear market demand, and clunky distribution. Artists and labels often struggle to find someone to help them prepare and press their records, shouldering the considerable costs themselves. They then have to deal with weeks or months of waiting, with no guarantee of quality, in hopes of making back their investment. Until Qrates. Combining the power of crowdfunding wi

Songfreedom has a new way of pricing songs, to serve more diverse audiences with a wider range of budgets. With its growing catalog of licensed, legal music for marketers and filmmakers, Songfreedom now sets different rates for different users, creating affordable alternatives to piracy and letting people use their favorite hits, not knock-off tracks. It reflects a major shift in music usage toward rapidly evolving individual use on video platforms and apps, which demand new

When two tech-savvy services built for musicians and creatives come together, artists’ careers take off. Online entertainment marketplace, GigSalad, has teamed up with Bandzoogle, the leading website platform for bands and musicians, to offer an integrated set of new features designed to make getting gigs even easier. The integration flows from GigSalad’s commitment to serving its more than 80,000 artists and talent provider members, a commitment Bandzoogle shares. “There are

There’s a quiet revolution underway. In the old days, you had to be a major Hollywood filmmaker, TV studio or ad agency with a wad of cash to acquire rights to mainstream music. Now soundtrack possibilities for videographers, photographers and independent cinematographers are expanding to include legally licensed, heavy-duty hits, thanks to a platform called Songfreedom. With 39% of the world’s population on the Internet and expecting quick, on-demand services, Songfreedom is

LyricFind, the world leader in legal lyric display licensing, has inked a deal to distribute French lyrics, and has signed an agreement with Music Story, the foremost music metadata provider in the market. Music Story will represent LyricFind for Sales and Business Development in France. The partnership will give LyricFind access, through SEAM (French collective management organization dedicated to graphic reproduction rights), to CSDEM’s members extensive lyric catalogue, Ba

Springfield, MO may not seem like a likely place to find a clever, whimsical office design. GigSalad, the premier online booking platform for live entertainment and event planning, begs to differ. Based in a 1920s brick Franklin Automobiles dealership in downtown Springfield, MO, GigSalad’s headquarters span 5,350 square feet, two floors, and more than the typical open workspaces and meeting rooms. GigSalad also boasts its own green room inspired by the lounges in theatres

There’s a quiet revolution underway. In the old days, you had to be a major Hollywood filmmaker, TV studio, or ad agency with a wad of cash to acquire rights to mainstream music. Now soundtrack possibilities for videographers, photographers, and independent cinematographers are expanding to include legally licensed, heavy-duty hits, thanks to a platform called Songfreedom. With 39% of the world’s population on the Internet and expecting quick, on-demand services, Songfreedo

On April 8, DropTrack unveiled its new “Get Paid to Listen” feature. A&R reps, DJs, and bloggers who think, “If only I got paid a nickel for every demo I’ve listened to…” can now be compensated when they listen to songs through DropTrack. They can even set their own prices. There’s an upside for musicians, too: a money-back guarantee that their Premium Demos will be heard. DropTrack Founder and CEO Paul Loeb believes industry professionals (recipients) should be rewarded fo

If you think Vice Admiral of StarFleet Command Kathryn Janeway is sexier than Princess Leia, you’re probably gearing up for First Contact Day on April 5, the fictitious holiday meaningful to Star Trek fans. AccuRadio has just the listening experience for boldly listening as you’ve never listened before, to music both soaring and brooding, majestic and mysterious, drawn from Star Trek’s five live-action TV series (to date) and its 12 original motion pictures. For those not f

In 2000, the top 100 musician tours got 90% of the live music income. Their share today is a mere 44%. The more digital we get, the more real life experiences people yearn for, which is one reason why live music is alive and thriving. But there’s an interesting, surprisingly democratic twist: Though stadium tours and big mega-festivals may capture attention, they are losing ground to a swell of independent performers, who are grabbing ever-larger slices of the live music inc

100 million dollars. That’s the value Music Xray expects to be adding to the recorded music industry in 2018, driven by its new Artist Investment program, currently in limited private beta. In the past few months, Music Xray’s confidence in its ability to predict successful songs has become strong enough, that they are beginning to invest in the careers of artists with high potential songs. It’s the culmination of years of data collection and industry crowdsourcing within its

It may come as a surprise that one of the first subscription services offering streaming music was the feisty classical label, Naxos. And this was back in the 1990s. Naxos has always been all about access, about making more repertoire available to a broader audience by offering quality but budget-friendly recordings of great classical works. This mission moved from physical formats to digital delivery, an approach that started with hard drives packed with music and soon shi

Musicians are often students of the school of hard knocks. Music technology, business and education veteran Dave Kusek thinks it doesn’t have to be that way. His instructional platform New Artist Model was created to provide straight-shooting yet in-depth training for the serious professional musician and songwriter. The first tenet, explains Kusek: “Think like a startup. Find and build your audience. It’s not hard to figure out your online platforms, your distribution and

This winter has been tough on rock stars. Since November, music critics have written obituaries for Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots, Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, David Bowie, and Glenn Frey of the Eagles. This series of deaths has, in some cases, increased attention to the artists’ catalogs tenfold and revealed enlightening data related to the ways in which fans choose to honor and remember these recently deceased artists. One such way is reminiscing over lyrics. Ba

AccuRadio, the fastest growing webcaster, knows it’s coming, every year: the telltale spike in listening to the sounds of romance, sharp as Cupid’s arrow. In 2015, the listenership of AccuRadio’s most lovey-dovey channels jumped in early February by more than 50% from the month before, as hopeful lovers tuned in to hear everything from golden oldies and recent romantic hits, to the romance of Beautiful Music or the yearning of a good country love ballad. Comparing five-week p

Digital advertising has blown open the market for music, and advertisers of all sizes and media have opened up to a whole new range of artists and sounds. CrucialCustom, where curation meets crowdsourcing to create seamless custom tracks for images, is riding this wave of fascination with music discovery and diversity. The platform, www.crucialcustom.com, the latest venture from established indie artist sync house CrucialMusic, makes it simple for advertisers to find, work wi

Seven music tech startups will join the sophomore cohort of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (EC) and Country Music Association’s Project Music 2016 Accelerator. These music centric startups will be onsite at the EC for a 16 week business building program that meets the unique needs of musicminded entrepreneurs by surrounding them with the curriculum, community, connections, and capital necessary to turn their ideas into reality. Project Music saw a 55% increase in applica