Ever think of selling your music by the single? Or have you ever thought about re-releasing some of your album cuts as singles? If not you should be. Why?
Aside from the fact that fans are starting to shun albums, here are 4 pretty good reasons..
1) You Stay Relevant
Assuming you are not god, and can whip out a full album every month, making your fans wait 6 months to a year (or more) between releases is an eternity these days.
Especially when there is so much else going on in the lives of the music fans that we are trying to win over.
By releasing singles, you stay relevant in a music market where releasing music only 1 or 2 times a year is almost the same as releasing nothing at all.
2) You Build A Loyal Fan Base Faster
When you release music, you are essentially opening the up the lines of communication with your fans. The more often that you release music, the faster you and your fans are going to get to know each other.
By releasing singles, you create a loyal fan base faster. A fan base that gets in the habit of getting music from you on a regular basis. They begin to anticipate each release. You win.
3) You Crush Procrastination
By releasing singles you replace procrastination with the sense of purpose that is created from frequent delivery of music.
You can’t sit around and wonder why your career is going nowhere because you have work to do.
4) You Get Paid More Often
Get paid 8 – 12 times per year instead of just once or twice.
You Can’t Lose!
Let’s review:
When you release singles you…
● Stay relevant.
● Stay busy.
● Build a loyal fan base faster.
● Get paid more often.
● Wear a big fat smile more often.
If you are willing to put in the time and effort, releasing singles is a great strategy.
By Cory Koehler | LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/4-reasons-you-should-sell-your-music-single-corey-koehler
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DEEZER SCRAPS IPO THAT COULD HAVE RAISED $400M – HERE’S 5 REASONS WHY
It was supposed to be one of the music business’s stories of the year: French Spotify rival Deezer floating onto the Paris stock exchange by the end of October.
But now, just three days ahead of its deadline to do so and raise €300m-€400m ($330m – $414m) Deezer has pulled out.
The company says it’s postponing its IPO due to tough “market conditions”.
It added: “Deezer is well-funded and well positioned as it continues to pursue its growth strategy.”
Some will quibble with that statement.
When Deezer announced plans to IPO last month, it released an in-depth document which revealed everything – good and bad – about its company’s fiscal health.
Some elements of the report were quite alarming.
Here’s five things the business needs to fix, and fast:
1) It’s lost subscribers in 2015
This is one of the least-reported yet most shocking music streaming statistics of 2015: in a world where streaming companies typically struggle to post a profit but have soaring user numbers, Deezer has lost subscribers this year.
As you can see below, Deezer’s total global subscriber base has fallen by more than 500,000 year-on-year as of June 30.
There are a few contributing factors towards this worrying trend, including…
2) Nearly half of deezer’s ‘subscribers’ aren’t actually paying anything
Get this for double-speak: Deezer categorises its subscribers into ‘revenue-generating’ and ‘non-revenue generating’.
When you crunch the numbers, only 3.8m of its subscribers are actually coughing up month-to-month, either through a standalone subscription or a bundle deal.
The reason for this revenue-generating/non-revenue-generating madness is all to do with what Deezer calls its ‘monthly inactive bundle subscribers’ – usually, people who got a free trial Deezer subscription with the purchase of a device.
‘Inactive’ subscribers are qualified by not having played a single stream in the past 30 days.
Some of these are ‘revenue-generating’ – largely through structured payments from telco partners – and some are not.
As we stand in 2015, there are 3.34m ‘monthly inactive bundle subscribers’ using (or rather, not using) Deezer.
That amounts to 53% of the service’s total 6.34m subscriber base.
(Added into the mix of factors that might have spooked Deezer-related market forces is Pandora: the US streaming radio service lost more than a million listeners last quarter, with suspicion on Wall Street that many defected to Apple Music. It was enough to send Pandora’s share price plummeting by over 30% last week.)
3) It’s lost a heck of a lot of money
Okay, you kind of expect this from a streaming company these days.
But from 2012 to the end of the first half of 2015, Deezer posted €87m ($99.5m) in net losses.
Deezerfinance
There’s no getting around it – that’s a possible red flag to any potential investor.
There are a couple of bright spots in the numbers above for Deezer, however.
Firstly, its revenue is up year-on-year. In the first half of 2015, it posted €93m, an increase of 40% on the same period in 2014. Plus, its total losses have reduced, down from €12.82m in H1 2014 to €8.96min H1 2015.
But let’s face it: that means it’s still losing around €1.5m every month, while its subscribers reduce.
And of those subscribers, remember, almost half aren’t paying, and over half aren’t using the service. What a pickle.
4) Its deal with orange is still vital to its bottom line – but looking fragile
Deezer scored a coup in its early days by signing a long-term bundle deal with Orange in its native France.
It’s largely why the company remains the streaming market leader in the territory, despite Spotify’s rapid growth around the world.
But this relationship now looks a little precarious.
First, the good news: Deezer’s business isn’t half as reliant on Orange as it once was.
In terms of global revenue, the Orange partnership delivered 56% of Deezer’s income in 2012. In 2013, this fell to 38% and it was down to 28% in 2014. In the first half of 2015, it contributed just 24%.
Now the bad news: since the end of 2014, Orange France has ceased acquiring new bundle subscribers for Deezer. This explains a lot about (1) above.
It gets worse. Since August last year, Orange has been paying Deezer a ‘substantially reduced minimum guarantee’, and is not obligated to pay the platform any advances after July 2016.
And here’s the fact that will have Spotify salivating: Deezer’s exclusive lock-in with Orange also expires in July next year – when another partner could swoop.
Plus, Deezer’s overall Orange partnership agreement will expire in July 2018, at which point Deezer could lose all of its Orange customers.
In its IPO pitch document, Deezer admitted: ‘Depending on the level of bundle subscriber churn and migration rates, this shift to offering primarily standalone subscriptions under the Orange partnership could cause Deezer’s revenue growth from this partnership to slow or cease or cause revenues from this partnership to decline.’
5) It’s literally giving away money to labels
We’ve already covered this one extensively through here.
But, in summary, between 2012-2014, Deezer paid out $23m in unallocated advances to record labels.
Breakage
The concept of this so-called ‘breakage’ isn’t always an easy one to explain.
So let’s have a bash at illustrating, as simply as possible, why it’s such a pain for Deezer.
Imagine this: rather than paying your electricity provider monthly/quarterly, you agree to give them a lump sum for the year ahead, based on estimations.
At the end of that year, you realise you have given them far too much vs. the amount of electricity you’ve used… and then the electricity company keeps the difference.
That’s breakage. What a business model.
[Contributed by Dick Weissman]* * * * *
THE STATS FOR ADELE’S COMEBACK SINGLE ‘HELLO’ ARE ALREADY PRETTY NUTS
After all that anticipation, all that fear of underwhelming, it’s been a walk in the park. More than three years since Adele’s last single was released, her new track, Hello, looks on course to become a record-breaker.
Hello, produced by Greg Kurstin, was officially released on download and streaming sites on Friday (October 23).
In less than 72 hours since it arrived online, it’s making a huge splash on leading digital services.
MBW rounds up some of the biggest achievements of the track below…
YouTube/Vevo
The official video for Hello surpassed 50m views on Sunday (October 25) at around 11am GMT – 54 hours after it was released on Friday.
Do the math: 50m views in 54 hours means Hello ran very close to a million views an hour in this time-frame.
As of 8 a.m. GMT this morning (October 26), 72 hours after it was released, the official Hello video has hit more than 67m views on YouTube/Vevo.
At this rate, Hello is in contention to hit 100m streams on YouTube in its first seven days.
That would put it in the Top 5 list of the fastest-ever videos to reach the milestone, only behind Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball and Psy’s Gentlemen.
Some of the big-name videos it would beat: Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off (27 days), Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda (11 days) and Shakira ft Rihanna’s Can’t Remember To Forget You (10 days).
Fastest EVER videos to reach 100m on YouTube:
● Psy, Gentleman (2013) – 3 days
● Miley Cyrus, Wrecking Ball (2013) – 6 days
● Kobe vs. Messi, The Selfie Shootout (ad) (2013) – 8 days
● Shakira, Can’t Remember To Forget You (2014) – 10 days
● Nicki Minaj, Anaconda (2014) – 11 days
● Taylor Swift, Blank Space (2014) – 16 days
● Wiz Khalifa, See You Again (2015) – 17 days
● Shakira, La La La (2014) – 20 days
● Maroon 5, Sugar (2015) – 20 days
● Kobe Bryant vs. Lionel Messi on Turkish Airlines ad (2012) – 21 days
● Katy Perry, Dark Horse (2014) – 23 days
● Katy Perry, Roar (2013) – 26 days
● Taylor Swift, Shake It Off (2014) – 27 days
● Sia, Elastic Heart (2015) – 27 days
● Pitbull, We Are One (Ole Ola) (2014) – 30 days
To put this storming performance in context, Hello has some way to go to catch Adele’s biggest singles on YouTube.
The official video for Someone Like You has 543m views, and it’s a similar story for Rolling In The Deep (721m).
However, Hello has the streaming count of Skyfall (121m) very much in its sights.
iTunes
At this stage, it’s easier to ask which iTunes singles charts Adele’s Hello isn’t currently topping.
It’s No.1 in the US, UK, Germany, Australia and No.10 in Japan.
It’s also No.1 right across Europe, including France and Italy, as well as Russia and Canada.
[UPDATE: MBW understands that Hello has hit No.1 in no less than 102 countries. Why that’s mad: iTunes is available in approximately 120 countries.]Likewise, pre-orders for Adele’s new album 25 – due for release on November 20 – have turned it into a chart-topper across the world.
25 is the iTunes No.1 album in the US, UK, Germany, Australia and Japan.
It’s the same story, well, pretty much everywhere: our calculations tell us it’s already topped the iTunes chart in 93 territories.
Perhaps less expected is the knock-on effect this resurgent Adele mania has had on her previous album, 21 (pictured).
That LP has gone Top 10 on iTunes in the US (currently No.7), the UK (No.5), Brazil (No.4), Canada (No.9), New Zealand (No.5), Russia (No.5), Czech Republic (No.10), Denmark (No.10) and South Africa (No.5).
As for Hello, it’s on course to break records in the US download market.
Billboard reports that the track sold 450,000 copies during its first 48 hours on sale.
That looks probable to surpass the biggest week one of any digital track in US history – a crown which currently belongs to Flo Rida’s Right Round with 636,000 sales.
Over in the UK, MBW is being told that Hello sold close to 120,000 in its first two days on sale.
Spotify
Adele – at one stage the world’s most famous Spotify hold-out – has elected to put Hello on Daniel Ek’s streaming service from day one. And it appears to be paying off.
In its opening three days on Spotify, the song has been streamed on the verge of 9m times on the service, generating around $63,000.
[Update: After four days, as of 27/10, the Spotify streaming number has jumped up to 17.4m.]So… is it a Spotify record-breaker? In a word, no.
The previous week-one record for Spotify was set by Justin Bieber’s What Do You Mean?, which was streamed 21m times in just five days.
Unless something drastic changes, Hello won’t get near that figure.
It’s worth noting that Justin Bieber, like previous Spotify record holders One Direction, actively pushed his fans to the platform repeatedly during the promotion of his comeback track.
Adele hasn’t followed this strategy, which perhaps explains why her fans have streamed Hello over five times as much on YouTube as they have Spotify.
By Tim Ingham | October 26, 2015
[Contributed by Dick Weissman]