January 10, 2014

In an increasingly crowded sector, it’s important to launch with a little noise and a better product. That’s exactly what Beats Music intends to do later this month, according to multiple sources. Just before the holidays, Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers announced that Beats would launch in January. Here’s what we’ve learned in the last few days:

Expect launch before or during The Grammys, which will be televised on Jan 26th.
An expensive marketing and ad campaign will follow, including during The Grammys and an ad buy during the Super Bowl on February 2nd., according to the NY Post. 30 second Superbowl ads run around $4 million each.
An important tie-in with AT&T. “Finally, AT&T is going to do this,” said a senior music industry source. “It’s going to be bundled”. Fees for Beats will reportedly be a phone bill add-on for AT&T customers.
No free tier. Unlike it’s competitors, Beats is rumored to only offer a short free trial.
The Beats User Experience
Beats has confirmed that curated playlists are a core feature. “We’re going to focus really heavily on playlists, because that’s how we consume music and that’s how most people consume music,” COO Luke Woods told the press late lats year.

In fact, both curation and personalization will be baked into every corner of Beats. “We’re talking about real depth of personalization and knowing who I am, who you are, what we’re listening to, what we like, what we’ve listened to before and then offering up music that is highly relevant to our taste profile,” Woods added.

Hyepbot has spoken to several industry execs who have seen early versions of Beats, and all say it that looks impressive. “They’ve borrowed the best features from other (music) services, and put them together in a really interesting way,” one source told Hypebot. But another told Hypebot that, while the service “looked pretty” and combined “many of the best features from other streamers”, Beats didn’t really break much new ground.

Can Beats Beat The Competition?

In fairness, no one Hypebot spoken to has seen the final version of Beats Music – which is certainly being improved until launch day and beyond. But will Beats be so compelling that users – now spoiled by free – suddenly want to pay? And for those who don’t mind paying, will switching to Beats be worth abandoning all of the personal playlists they carefully curated elsewhere? We’ll find out later this month.

Via Hypebot

[Al Lindstrom]

Lily Allen has said she feels record companies are scared of taking risks on experimental artists.
Speaking to NME in this week’s issue, which is on newsstands or available digitallynow, the singer says record labels are veering towards picking safe, “watered-down” music when choosing singles to release.

“What pisses me off about music right now is the lack of support for being experimental and brave,” she said. “People just want to be formulaic and predictable. Record companies and A&R people are just absolutely terrified of taking risks at the moment – and that’s quite frustrating as an artist, when it comes to picking singles, because they only ever want to go for the watered-down stuff.”

This causes frustration for artists, she continues, when only more commercially-driven music is released. She added: “I’m not saying that those songs can’t have a good pop sensibility about them, but personally, I like to think of myself as being something a little bit more than that. It’s sad to watch the tracks that I think are stronger having to sit back on the album while the poppier, more commercial ones are driving it.”

Allen went to Number One in 2013 with a cover of Keane‘s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ and Number Nine with her comeback single proper ‘Hard Out Here’. She is yet to announce full details of her third album, which she previously told NME will be released in 2014
[NME]

Nielsen & Billboard have released 2013′s U.S. music report, a report analyzing data for the year in music.

According to the data presented in the report, overall music streams have increased from 2012, with 118.1 billion streams in 2013, a 32 percent increase from the previous year.

Overall music sales have decreased 6.3 percent, according to Nielsen & Billboard, from 1,661 million in 2012 to 1,556 million in 2013. Total album sales have also decreased 8 percent, from 316 million in 2012 to 289.4 million in 2013.

An increase was reported with vinyl sales, as figures increased by 33 percent from 4.6 million in 2012 to 6.1 million in 2013. Meanwhile, CD sales dropped 14 percent from 193 million to 165 million.

Justin Timberlake had the biggest album-debut week of the year, with 20/20 Experience opening with 968,000 units in its first week. The album also was the highest-selling album of the year with 2.4 million copies sold. His two albums, 20/20 Experience and 20/20 Experience Complete, combined to sell more than 3.2 million units in 2013, according to Nielsen & Billboard.

Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 had the second-biggest album debut week of the year, with 792,000 units sold in its first week. The album, which sold 1.7 million copies in 2013, was one of four Eminem releases to make the Top 200 best-selling albums of 2013. Recovery sold 169,000 units in 2013, The Eminem Show did 165,000 units and Curtain Call sold 145,000 copies for the year. The releases were #s 164, 175 and 189 for the year, respectively.