Hip-hop runs the world, it’s a fact. Since I was in high school, artists like Nas, Tupac, and Puffy influenced what I liked, what I wore, and how I carried myself. I got my start in the biz throwing parties and quickly discovered “the X factor” that determines whether an event is a failure or a success: is hip-hop in the house?There’s a great article in Rolling Stone this week which claims that, thanks to rap music, the music industry is no longer embarrassed or shy about advertising and brand partnerships. Last summer, Nielsen confirmed that rap had surpassed rock as America’s most popular genre. It rattled boardrooms the nation over. We need Quavo on a Wheaties box!As entrepreneurs, it’s our job to see the future, to expect the unexpected. While sports branding has become a 60 billion dollar industry, music’s equivalent stands at a paltry 1.5 billion. Kanye can sell out a basketball arena with one mic (or one tweet…) but the amount of money spent on sports remains bewilderingly disproportional to what we see in entertainment. I know plenty of people who care more about Kendrick than CP3 or Bryce Harper. Maybe that’s why the Yeezy brand was just given a billion dollar valuation. This is a big arbitrage opportunity for marketers.If this were a gold rush, you’d start seeing hip-hop deals level off, but they’re not. They’re getting bigger and more frequent. Since starting this company, I’ve learned the ins and outs of the brand deal. We do them around the clock at Nue. Believe me, there’s nothing quite like making that meaningful match. And it’s long been clear to us that hip-hop can’t be pigeonholed or stuffed into the tried-and-true box of liquor brands and sneaker deals. Is our industry finally realizing the immense profit potential of expanding its horizons?At Atlanta’s A3C Conference in October I will have the honor of being a featured speaker alongside Rob Stone and Steve Stoute, a couple cats who know a thing or two about hip-hop ;) If you’re in the area, check out the Artist Accelerator panel, the Beatstars Summit, and the Music Tech talk. This conference is fully focused on the future and growing with the times. Here’s to hoping the music business does the same.
BEATS
Rap’s Ascent Is Bringing a Whole New Money Stream to MusicThanks to hip-hop, the music industry is no longer embarrassed about advertising and brand partnerships (Amy X. Wang – Rollingstone)
Why Fitness Is The New Hot Marketing Platform And Revenue Stream For MusicThe right music can keep these users even more engaged in the long term: new research released this week from Feed.fm found that users of fitness apps with specialized music curation were 2.2x more likely to return the following month and 2.8x more likely to return the following quarter. (Cherie Hu – Forbes)
The Future is Ear: Why “hearables” Are Finally Tech’s Next Big ThingThe explosive growth of their AI voice assistants has Google, Apple, and Amazon racing to put your entire smartphone in an earpiece. (Peter Burrows – Fast Company)
Fashionably AI Eison Triple Thread reimagines suit-making with music and artificial intelligence. (Henry Pickavet – TechCrunch)
The Rise of The Instagrammable Pop SongTData and recent trends suggest that pop songs are getting shorter – we asked the experts how streaming and social media are making new rules. (Aimee Cliff – Dazed)
Spotify’s Playlist for Global DominationHow CEO Daniel Ek plans to beat Apple, Amazon, and Google at the music game. (Robert Safian – Fast Company)
Vinyl Visionary: How A Digital Dealmaker Revived VictrolaThree years ago, Innovative Technology was doing $60 million in annual sales, a little over half of that coming from a burgeoning business peddling generic turntables through retailers like Sam's Club and Kohl's for as little as $49.99. But Lieblein longed for a brand identity that would resonate with consumers. So he purchased the defunct trademark for Victrola, one of America's first manufacturers of record players, paying "deep into the six figures." "It was the juiciest cherry on top of the most decadent sundae," says the trim 46-year-old with Mitt Romney hair."Now we had the most historically rich brand on planet Earth." (Zack O'Malley Greenburg – Forbes)
Ticketing App AXS Scrapes Everything it Can get From Your Phone Seeing your favorite band live will probably cost you more in data than in dollars. (Paris Martineau – The Outline)
Some people can dig up great music like magic, or have friends inside the industry who keep them updated. Some people are contented with their weekly Spotify Discover playlist. But if you need more ways to find music, here are 50 ideas, taken from Twitter users, my colleagues at Lifehacker’s publisher Gizmodo Media Group, and some of my own habits. Some are obvious, some bizarre, some embarrassing, but they’ve all helped people find their new favorite song, or even their favorite band. (Jake Krol – Mashable)
The Unusual Case of 'Chart Data' and Music’s Fascination With NumbersThe past few weeks have been busy when it comes to artists changing managers, which raises a salient question: Why? Sometimes performers switch partners when an artist outgrows their original manager, who usually takes them from the ground up to the threshold of success, but is ultimately unable to take them all the way to the promised land. Think of Bruce Springsteen’s Mike Appel, who grudgingly gave way to Jon Landau, the Rolling Stones’ savvy Andrew Loog Oldham, losing out in a power struggle with Allen Klein, or Owen Husney, the man who discovered Prince, giving way to Robert Cavallo, Joseph Ruffalo, and Steve Fargnoli. The days of career-long managers like ZZ Top’s late Bill Ham, Bob Seger’s Punch Andrews and U2’s Paul McGuinness is a thing of the past. (Eric Skelton – Complex)
Smart Speaker Company Sonos Surges After a Slow Start in IPO DebutSonos, the maker of smart speakers for the home, surged 32 percent higher in its stock market debut Thursday after a slow start. Shares rose as high as $21 after opening at $16.00, just 7 percent higher than the $15 initial selling price. The stock's closing price of $19.91 gives Sonos an implied market value of about $1.95 billion. (Sara Salinas – CNBC)
This Band Launched a Business Writing Theme Songs for Tech CompaniesThe Music for Business venture may find a market by capitalizing on the sector’s predilection for team-building exercises. Commissioning a song may seem like one more example of tech excess, but it hardly stands out on the list of things that tech companies have done to cultivate bonds among employees, from paying for them to work abroad for a month to holding meetings on seven-person tricycles to sending workers out in the streets to tag walls with corporate graffiti. (Katy Steinmetz – Time)
Crowd-Sauce: How Memes Are Helping Rappers Reach Number One Tracks like ‘Bad and Boujee’, ‘Black Beatles’ and ‘Mask Off’ all benefitted hugely from viral memes, and pushed the artists behind them (Migos, Rae Sremmurd and Future respectively) into the mainstream spotlight in a big way. Hip-hop and meme culture are interlinked, that much is clear, but how and why has this happened? (Clash Music)
How Music Health Alliance Is Working to Save $33 Million (and Counting) In Healthcare Costs The STORM Report is a compilation of up-and-coming bands and artists who are worth watching. Only those showing the most promising potential for future commercial success make it onto our monthly list. (Chuck Dauphin – Billboard)
Out of Tune Wants to Be the HQ Trivia of MusicEver since HQ Trivia burst onto the scene last year, countless startups have tried to jump on the mobile quiz show bandwagon. Last week, Out of Tune launched with a new spin on this idea: an app with a twice-daily show that has DJs play ten songs out of tune, giving players just a few seconds to guess the correct title. (Janko Roettgers – Variety)
Pandora 2Q Earnings: Revenue Up, Beating Analyst EstimatesPandora continued to turn a long corner in the second quarter of 2018. There’s more distance to travel, but the music streaming veteran again nudged the numbers in the right direction in the second quarter. (Glenn Peoples – Pollstar)
BYTES
This week to discuss some real experiences we have had over the years with artists. Do you know all your passwords, to all your many accounts? We bet you don't. Do you know everyone who has access to all your accounts? We bet you don't. We share our experiences and advice related to maintaining control and ownership of all your many online accounts.
Produced by YouTube, J Balvin: Redefining Mainstream is a look inside the life of José Álvaro Osorio Balvin. This film is a portrait of his life from a more personal perspective than we have seen before. From his early days freestyling in the streets and barbershops of Medellín, Colombia, to sold out arena shows across the globe. This is a look at who J Balvin is as a person beyond the artist–a glimpse into his lifestyle and process, how he stays centered, and why he does what he does for people around the world.
Necessary Explosion app is a new kind of Augmented Reality experience that converts your turntable or surroundings into a psychedelic sculpture garden.
Rosalía is a Catalan artist who's challenging the notions of what flamenco music can be. Her second album El Mal Querer is due out soon, and this week, she unveiled a new single, "Pienso en Tu Mirá."The video plunges Rosalía directly into situations of intense danger, which she, of course, conquers gracefully. It might just be one of the most cinematic videos of the year thus far. - The Fader
This week's newsletter was carefully curated by the Nue Agency staff and our editor Maria Tejada If you think we missed something this week or have any suggestions/comments for next week's newsletter, let us know!