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”
Music
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”
In the fast-paced online environment where rumors fly almost daily about new music releases, it is nice to have an official source to back rumors about upcoming album or single releases. Unbeknownst to many, iTunes has a useful fact-checking source in its own Link Maker. The Link Maker is intended for affiliates to create links to products within the iTunes Store; purchases made through these links provide affiliate sales to the creator of the link, providing they are a member of their affiliate program. Since the Link Maker can show links to products within the iTunes database, searching on the Link Maker can be used as a legitimacy check if a new release is in the iTunes database. I previously covered this search ability as a method of fact-checking the name of Justin Timberlake’s single “Suit & Tie,” and now I would like to highlight its usefulness in order to analyze the rumored tracklisting for Kanye West’s upcoming album, Yeezus, slated for release on June 18.
Even if a song or album is not yet available to purchase or pre-order on iTunes itself, if a release is in the iTunes database, the artist will appear in search results for the song or album name. As noted in the aforementioned Justin Timberlake post, once the single was rumored to be titled “Suit & Tie,” I was able to confirm the title and the Jay-Z feature by using a search query like “suit & tie feat jay-z” even before the name had been confirmed.
Similarly, when rumors rose that the upcoming Kanye West album would be named Yeezus, I checked the Link Maker to confirm that the name was legitimate. Recently, as reported by Beats Per Minute, screenshots have appeared online suggesting the leaked tracklisting of Yeezus, with featured artists including Frank Ocean, Tyler the Creator, and John Legend. Since the tracklisting was posted as a screenshot of an iTunes pre-order page, I checked to see if the titles appeared in the Link Maker. While “yeezus” still brought up Kanye’s artist link, the songs did not, simply showing instead that “Your search had no results.” For example, a search for “new slaves frank” reveals two unrelated matches, while “new slaves feat frank ocean” delivers none. The results are the same for other combinations, including “kanye lightning,” “yeezus awake with the dark,” and “kanye lonne chia.” If the tracklisting were correct and currently in the iTunes database, all of these search queries would have shown Kanye West in the artist links. Even the previously-confirmed tracks, “New Slaves” and “Black Skinhead,” produce the “Your search had no results.” message.
Notably (and perhaps a piece of evidence that would further debunk the rumor), there are search results that do connect themselves to the Yeezus tracklisting. As iTunes has shown with previous pre-orders, such as One Direction’s Take Me Home and Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories – both of which were available to pre-order on iTunes before the tracklisting was revealed – tracks without released names are listed with the word “Track” and a number, such as “Track 1.” Searching such queries as “yeezus track 1” through “yeezus track 14” pulls the Kanye West artist listing, but “yeezus track 15” does not. Not only does this suggest that Yeezus will have fourteen tracks, as is shown in the rumored pre-order, but it shows that the temporary titles of the songs in the iTunes database have not yet been replaced.
One final note: in the two images with the leaked tracklisting that I have seen thus far, the prices for the songs and the album are shown in pounds, not US dollars. In order to confirm that this was not just an absence from the US store, I searched in the Link Maker for UK results as well, with no changes in results.
Even if the Yeezus tracklisting is revealed to match the leaked images, I am not yet convinced of its legitimacy without any additional confirmation from the iTunes Link Maker. Regardless, I have found the iTunes Link Maker to be a useful source not only for creating affiliate links, but to confirm information, and I hope that this post sheds some light as to why.