How long have CD’s got left?

Everywhere you look you see signs that the music industry has moved well beyond the humble CD. These days it seems music consumption and sales are all about downloads and streaming – with new streaming platforms from big hitters like Apple, Twitter and Google expected to join established players like Spotify in killing CDs completely. […]

Deftones tshirt

Christmas gift ideas for music lovers…

Fancy lights and trees have started going up in town centres, boxes of mince pies have invaded supermarket shelves and soppy adverts for department stores are all over the telly – yep, it’s officially run-up-to-Christmas time! If all these sudden festivities have taken you by surprise and left you struggling for gift ideas, then struggle […]

The Rise Of The Cash-in Cover Song…

If you are a regular streamer of music from sites such as Amazon, iTunes or one of the many others, you can’t have failed to notice the amount of streams available of songs currently in the charts, or coming out soon, but performed by cover bands. When I say cover bands I don’t mean tribute […]

BRITs 2014 – the social media stats are in

The build up to this year’s BRIT Awards was all about how shit it would be – thanks mostly to last years particularly insipid ceremony – but it turned out to be just about on the right side of acceptable. It wasn’t what I would class as entertaining – nothing with James Corden presenting could ever be classed as ‘entertaining’ – but it wasn’t mind-numbingly dull, so it was a bit of an improvement.

Part of the reason for the BRIT Awards becoming increasingly dull over the past few years has been the organisers’ insistence to get One Direction there – even making up awards (Global Success Award!?!?) especially for the boy band to make sure that huge audience of teenage girls are not only watching the awards ceremony, but Tweeting about it too. Read more about BRITs 2014 – the social media stats are in

Music streaming data will soon influence UK Top 40 – says Radio 1 boss

The UK Top 40 singles chart will soon incorporate data from online music streaming services, according to Radio 1’s Head of Music George Ergatoudis.

Ergatoudis revealed the plans during a speech last night at the Radio Academy Playlists: What Makes a Hit in 2014? event in London.

Traditionally, Radio 1 has used sales data direct from The Official Charts Company to compile the UK Top 40 singles – but now they appear to be ready to follow the lead of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US and use streaming numbers as well.

After his revelation, Ergatoudis took to Twitter to provide further details on the plans and confirmed that the plan is to use data from a number of music streaming services, rather than just Spotify.

 

Read more about Music streaming data will soon influence UK Top 40 – says Radio 1 boss

SoundCloud

SoundCloud reaches 250 million people per month

MP3 streaming platform SoundClound has announced that it now has 250 million listeners per month. To put that into context, Spotify currently has about 25-30 million active users and Twitter ‘only’ has about 220 million active users. SoundCloud, then, is becoming huge and they are now quite justifiably calling themselves the ‘audio platform of the […]