Pandora Buys Rdio To Become A Global Streaming Powerhouse
This & That

Pandora Buys Rdio To Become A Global Streaming Powerhouse

Darren Pearson @ Music2Deal UKLeave a comment

Mark Mulligan's avatarMusic Industry Blog

pandora rdioPandora today announced that it was acquiring the assets of now failed subscription service Rdio.  While the whispers about Rdio’s future had been building for some time, the deal is more interesting for what it says about Pandora’s plans than what it says about the state of the subscription business.

Rdio Battled Bravely And Set Innovation Standards But Fell Short

For what Rdio lacked in subscriber numbers it made up for in innovation.  It continually set product and feature precedents that Spotify and others subsequently aped, and its $75 million dollar ad inventory deal with US radio giant Cumulus sets a business model blueprint that other streaming services will follow. But for all its efforts and extensive marketing efforts Rdio was simply not able to get to the same sort of level as Spotify’s 2nd tier competitors, let alone to seriously challenge Spotify itself.  The music subscription business is not…

View original post 765 more words

This & That

YouTube And The Attention Economy

Darren Pearson @ Music2Deal UKLeave a comment

Mark Mulligan's avatarMusic Industry Blog

This is the third in the series of posts exploring how the music industry can better leverage the potential of the YouTube economy.  You can see the first post here and the second here.

Short form video is accelerating at a rapid pace, racking up 4.2 trillion views in the first half 2015.  While challengers Facebook, Snapchat and others now account for just over half of that total, few platforms of scale yet provide content creators and owners comparable ability to build engaged audiences and income.  For music the situation is even more pronounced – no other platform is even on the same lap of the race (and I include Vevo as an extension of YouTube). YouTube is the most popular online music destination by far (46% of consumers use it regularly) and its role for Digital Natives cannot be exaggerated – 65% of US under 25’s use YouTube…

View original post 849 more words

This & That

What is an Entrepreneur?

Darren Pearson @ Music2Deal UKLeave a comment

Aimed squarely at all musical entrepreneurs, some inspiration.

Geoff's avatarFreedom after the sharks

jumping entreperneurI have many discussions with my business partner in the US over entrepreneurs and cross border challenges, the entrepreneur and his/ her role to the business community and have seen lots of definitions for what makes an entrepreneur over the years but I read an article recently that is quite compelling over exactly what is an entrepreneur. It comes from Chris Oakley OBE, chairman of web design company Chapter Eight. He is also a former journalist who in 1991 led what was then the world’s largest media management buy-out, the £120m acquisition of regional newspapers based in and around Birmingham and Coventry.

So what is an entrepreneur?

“An entrepreneur sees an opportunity which others do not fully recognise, to meet an unsatisfied demand or to radically improve the performance of an existing business. They have unquenchable self-belief that this opportunity can be made real through hard work, commitment and the…

View original post 1,257 more words