I recently wrote a piece for Billboard in which I analyzed the first week of airplay for Beats 1, Apple Music’s 24/7 worldwide radio station. While Apple provides playlists (through Apple Music’s Connect feature) for the programs curated by hosts like Zane Lowe and specials like St. Vincent’s Mixtape Delivery Service and Q-Tip’s Abstract Radio, there is no native way to see a list of everything on Beats 1’s airwaves.
Continue reading “How to view, search, and analyze the Beats 1 playlist”

Lyric websites have been a staple of music-related search results since the start of the millenium, but the format of presenting lyrics on many of these sites has remained mainly the same since their inception: plain text with no supplementary information or interactivity. Perhaps the most notable innovator in the genre is Genius — formerly known as Rap Genius, the site’s sidebar annotations now extend to multiple genres and even outside the music sphere to news and entertainment, and infrastructure to help “annotate any page on the Internet” is currently in beta. Google recently began showing lyrics in their search result pages as part of their Knowledge Graph, but beyond requiring a click through to the song available for purchase in their Google Play store for access to the full lyrics, their method of displaying lyrics is no more advanced. Even despite sidebar-comment approaches similar to Genius in other industries, including notes on content platform Medium and annotations on Quartz articles, most lyrics-dedicated sites have been stagnant and unimaginative.

Continue reading “Using Livefyre Sidenotes to make lyrics more interactive”

While many people flocked south to Austin, Texas last week for this year’s South By Southwest festival, which showcases more than two thousand artist performances alongside label presentations, technology reveals, and discussion panels, some of us had to settle for attending Couch By Couchwest from home. I spent the past week digging through a spreadsheet of 2,121 artists who were slated to play during SXSW 2015, and after whittling down the list and listening to 622 of them, I have selected 76 independent acts that warrant further attention now that the festivities have ended. Read a short blurb on each artist below along with a prime track among their discography, or skip ahead to the full playlist on SoundCloud by clicking here. Continue reading “76 independent artists to watch following SXSW 2015”

I’ve been thinking lately about popular social media apps like Vine and Tinder that emphasize a brief snapshot of content and allow you to move quickly through a brief feed or stack, and how their technologies could inspire new ideas for the music industry. Continue reading “Using ideas from Tinder and Vine to power music discovery”

As the music industry wakes up from its holiday slumber and begins the new year, attention shifts to developing new artists whose careers are beginning to build. Below are forty hand-picked artists of varying genres and current levels of success. Some are completely independent, while others have already topped charts. Regardless, all of them show potential to be even bigger names, particularly in America, in the coming year. Listen to the artists through this SoundCloud playlist, and check back later in the year to see how these predictions turned out. Continue reading “Class Of 2015: 40 promising artists to watch this year”

In recent years, nominees for the most prominent, cross-genre GRAMMY Awards have been announced on a primetime CBS special, with popular artists like Taylor Swift, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Miguel, Keith Urban, and Lorde turning the nomination ceremony into a live concert performance. For its upcoming 57th season, the GRAMMYs, likely in attempt to keep up with evolving digital trends, made an adjustment to that formula, adapting the CBS broadcast into a holiday-themed concert special called A Very GRAMMY Christmas with only one award announcement: the prestigious Album Of The Year. As for the rest of the other 82 categories recognized by the Recording Academy committee, they were rolled out throughout the day on daytime television and radio properties and by a number of artists’ Twitter accounts.

Beginning at 8:30 AM Eastern, Pharrell and Ed Sheeran visited the set of CBS This Morning, announcing the nominees for Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Country Album, Best Urban Contemporary Album, and general field category Record Of The Year. Shortly thereafter, Ryan Seacrest announced the nominees for Best Pop Solo Performance. After announcing a few awards themselves on the @TheGRAMMYs Twitter account, announcement duties were turned over to popular artists such as Alanis Morissette and Jared Leto, as well as media personalities including Mario Lopez and Entertainment Tonight‘s Nancy O’Dell, all using Twitter’s native video function. A flurry of tweets from nearly twenty-five different outlets followed through 2:00 PM Eastern, at which point all of the nominations excluding Album Of The Year were posted on GRAMMY.com, which previously occurred at the close of the primetime nomination special.

This social media-fueled campaign is another step toward modernizing the awards process for the Recording Academy, in a field now expanding with awards shows from big players like MTV, Billboard, YouTube, and iHeartRadio that have taken advantage of creative social media usage. As Maura Johnston pointed out in the Boston Globe, MTV previously used Snapchat to preview this year’s Video Music Awards nominees, while Billboard partnered with Tumblr to provide nearly-instant GIFs of the 2013 Billboard Music Awards. By utilizing the well-followed accounts of popular media figures, the GRAMMYs are able to spread the news of their nominees across a much wider audience than could have been available through solely their own media channels.

On the other hand, the inability to pre-determine where nomination announcements were coming from made the hours-long process a bit difficult to follow at times. The official GRAMMYs Twitter account dutifully retweeted each announcement after it was made on Twitter, but attempting to find each tweet amidst the regular buzz and reaction of the Twitter newsfeed added a lot of noise to the stream. With no roadmap or direction from the GRAMMYs account itself, those interested had to wait for their account to retweet each announcement, then parse the tweet and watch the video announcement to get a grasp of the artists and songs nominated. While this was a great first step, the campaign could have potentially been improved if @TheGRAMMYs had laid out a timetable of which accounts would be making announcements and in what order. Additionally, regular announcements of who was announcing the next category’s nominees could have added potential followers for the artists and media personalities involved, as those interested would flock to their accounts in wait of the next batch of nominees.

The 57th GRAMMY Awards air on February 8, 2015 on CBS. A full list of the nominees is available here excluding Album Of The Year, which will be announced at the conclusion of tonight’s A Very GRAMMY Christmas CBS special.

The GRAMMY Awards are often described as Music’s Biggest Night. While the awards ceremony typically lives up to the moniker with star-studded performances and gramophone trophies for hundreds of artists across many genres each year, iTunes charts also show how music sales are impacted, providing the year’s first prominent sales increase following the post-Christmas bump fueled by gift card redemptions. Many of the songs featured during the 56th GRAMMY Awards broadcast on January 26 received significant jumps on the iTunes song chart throughout and following the show, and numerous songs heard in its music-centric commercials felt the benefit of exposure as well. The statistics below reflect positions on the US iTunes chart of about 1500 songs, tracked from the beginning of the broadcast in the Eastern time zone at 8:00pm to the end of the Western time zone broadcast at 2:40am Eastern. Continue reading “iTunes sales surge for Daft Punk, John Legend, and more following the 56th GRAMMY Awards”

These are one hundred songs that stayed in my heavy rotation throughout 2013. In a year that saw personal advancements including eight weeks studying abroad in France and graduation from college, these songs soundtracked my year, each song appealing to me through instrumentation, lyrics, or just its overall mood. Read on for descriptions of each track, access the whole playlist on SoundCloud to listen, and judge away.
Continue reading “Kurt’s 100 Favorite Songs of 2013”

For an abridged version of this paper, see this page.

Though the practice of covering previously-performed songs has been prevalent in music history for several decades, many new artists looking to build their profiles in the modern music industry release cover songs by currently popular artists, often putting a unique spin on their performance in order to showcase their stylistic originality and also gain the interest of fans to support their careers. However, copyright laws are a problematic issue that many artists must face in order to legally release and sometimes profit from their reworked cover versions. Artists need to be aware of copyright laws when posting and selling covers to ensure that they are working within the law, but when done successfully, they can use cover songs as an effective method of building a fanbase and boosting their musical career. This paper will analyze and critique the current copyright system and how it relates to song covers, particularly those that are posted and released through the video-sharing website YouTube. After an introduction covering the history and variants of cover songs, a deeper analysis of copyright law on YouTube and in the music industry will follow, along with case studies of how they can both help and hinder artistic creativity for developing artists using YouTube as a platform for which to promote their music careers.
Continue reading “The Right to Copy: Cover Songs and Copyright on YouTube”

After applying and interviewing for the opportunity to be the student speaker at my fall 2013 commencement from Michigan State University, I was honored to deliver the following remarks before graduating with high honor (for a GPA exceeding 3.90) on December 14, 2013 with a degree in arts and humanities, a French minor, and Honors College distinction.

When you think of a bridge, you probably think of a structure manufactured to go over an obstacle, creating a connection between two places. You have probably traveled across many bridges in your life without even thinking about it. From family trips to the Mackinac Bridge and building monkey bridges in Boy Scouts to crossing the Red Cedar on campus and walking across a bridge to class every day when I studied abroad in France last summer, I know I have used many bridges in my lifetime to help me get from place to place.

Today, as we prepare to cross from college to the “real world,” I’d like to talk about a few other kinds of bridges. Just like those constructed from steel or rope, they too make connections that get people past obstacles; however, they’re a little less literal. As you move forward in the world, these bridges will help you reach your destination even if you don’t yet know what’s on the other side. They are the bridges between people, ideas, and skills — bridges that connect you with your network and with the knowledge that you have gained as a student at MSU.
Continue reading “MSU Fall 2013 Commencement Student Address: Building Bridges”