A new report from BuzzAngle Music, the industry’s leading source of consumption data, is turning a lot of heads around the industry. The takeaways are numerous, but one fact is clear: Streaming popularity is going to hit the stratosphere in 2017.
According to the report, which can be read in full for free on BuzzAngle’s site the rate people around the world consume audio streams grew a staggering 86% in 2016, totaling more than 250 billion streams. In fact, there were more song streams on any given day last year than there were song downloads for the entire year. Think about that.
Perhaps even more impressive is how this growth compares to the growth of video, which has long been heralded as the biggest source of media engagement online. BuzzAngle’s report, as you can see in the image above, shows just 7.5% growth in video consumption, with total views for the year topping out just over 181.3 billion.
Increased consumption is good for everyone, but it’s also worth noting that competition for consumer’s attention is also growing at an alarming rate. There were 28 million unique songs streamed over the last twelve months compared to just 7 million unique songs being sold.
More people are listening to more music than ever before, and even if they are not buying an individual song or album they are more than likely accessing the media through a premium subscription service that does pay royalties to the performer. The streaming industry saw overall subscriptions more than double in the last year. Those numbers are likely to double again, if not triple, in the year ahead.
This is all good news, but there is one thing that remains crucial to any individual artists finding success in the digital age. Ease of access is everything in today’s music climate. Why put your new single on one service when it can be on all of them? Why rely on Spotify and Apple Music when Soundcloud and Bandcamp have less barriers to entry? Make your music easy to find and cheap (or free) to access. Make it so easy to engage with you that people feel they must give you a chance.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for making your way to our blog. The article you are about to enjoy was written for us by Jesse Cannon based on a request from our staff. Jesse is a music producer, podcast host, author, and someone seemingly everyone in the alternative music realm wants to know. He’s also one of the smartest people we have ever had the pleasure of working with, and we’re thrilled to host some of his insight on the industry this afternoon. If you want to learn more about Jesse’s work, please follow him on Twitter as soon as time allows.
Last week we saw a tidal wave of news about Jay Z’s new streaming music service Tidal, which sadly swept away the even bigger news of the day a new audio format from Native Instruments called Stems. This new format being packaged by one of the most ubiquitous manufacturers in music today and solves a problem that music creators have been dealing with for years.
Stems themselves are nothing new, even packaging them has been going on since Todd Rundgren released a CD-i ( a short lived pre-CDR format) in 1993 which enabled you to play with stems and remix songs. For the uninitiated stems are what a mixing engineer makes for an artist at the end of a record if they want to have remixes done, submit their music for Rock Band-type games, get their songs in movies with surround sound mixes or for use of backing tracks in a group’s live music setup. Instead of getting the individual tracks of a song without their mix processing, mix engineers print the effects and multiple tracks down to a stereo mix of each element such as drums, bass, guitar, vocals. These files can then be passed on to a remixer to be reworked into whatever fashion they see fit.
So if this has been going on for years you may wonder why me and every other dork with a MIDI controller is so excited? The world of giving and receiving stems has always been chaotic. Whether they are sent in extreme excess, unlabeled in varied sampling rate and bit sizes, exchanging stems has been a nightmare for the past 3 decades. The Stems format is first and foremost a container for 5 audio files in the Apple developed MP4 format (these files are also compatible with iTunes and will be able to be developed by other services to be played back and dissected). This files contains a regular mix and then 4 elements which most commonly will be drums, bass, accompaniment (aka guitars, synth, main chord changes being played in the song) and vocals. This along with some meta data will help make this file exchange to be a more organized world, coupled with files being presented in more manageable sizes instead of excessively large wav files, we can expect to see this making the world of mashups, remix and altering files to get way easier.
Native Instruments, the most popular manufacturer of soft synths, samplers and other music production instruments introducing this format ensures it will be widely adopted. Their popular DJ software Traktor is the first to adopt the new format, ensuring it will be used to creatively mix and match song elements in DJ sets across the country soon. Once a musician has a Stems file authored they can distribute it however they may see fit. This can obviously be used to promote music that is remixable by allowing DJs to use it creatively in their sets.
But what about those who don’t care for remixes? This format will enable musicians to get educated and break down parts of songs like they never have before. For far too long stems have been exchanged across closed links and are rarely made publicly available. An open, organized exchange of these files will allow musicians to isolate and learn from the way each instrument is used in some of their favorite songs. Never before have musicians had this much access to get educated about what makes their favorite songs work.
For those who do care about remixes, this will enable a world that can often be gated to be opened to everyone and democratize the remix world and spur more enjoyable and innovative remixes. The format will open up sometime in the next few months and I am very excited to see what it will do for music creation and education.
After a little more than a month away it gives us great pleasure to reintroduce the Inside Music podcast. We learned a great deal from our first episode, including the necessity of high quality microphones, and have made several efforts to improve our production for this latest offering. If you have any ideas for how we can improve our efforts further, please reach out on Twitter.
This week’s episode features guest Zack Zarrillo, otherwise known as the founder of PropertyOfZack.com and co-founder of Bad Timing Records. Zack has been a fixture in the pop punk scene for the last several years, and though he’s only 21 he has already managed to carve a unique niche for himself in this business that has opened more doors than I am able to count. Our conversation revolves mostly around Zack’s efforts in writing, as well as his plans for future, but we do dive into his other projects and the problems that arise when someone takes on as much as he has in the past year. I’m really happy with the result, and I think those that listen to the full recording will learn to see Zack in a new way as a result.
Our plan is to release a new podcast every week from here on out, and we already have another episode 90% complete. We hope you have as much fun listening to this show as much as we did making it. I know we’re not on the iTunes store just yet, but we will update you on that front soon. For now, let’s get to the show:
