Bandsintown adds new Facebook Timeline features

Live music startup Bandsintown has added new Facebook-friendly features to its platform for music artists. People using its service to store their touring plans can now add their entire gigging history to their Facebook Timeline with what Bandsintown promises is a single click. Fans can then click an 'I Was There' button to add individual gigs to their own Timelines, accurately dated. CEO Julien Mitelberg is pitching this as the online social equivalent to fans "holding on to their old ticket stubs and concert pictures". Bandsintown has also beefed up its Facebook functionality in other ways, with new gigs added to its system now automatically shown in fans' news tickers and feeds on the social network. The company says it's now the third biggest music app on Facebook, behind only Spotify and Bandpage. According to AppData, it has 1.6m monthly active users and 120k daily active users. Source: Bandsintown 

Source: AppData - http://tinyurl.com/d3opqsv

Facebook launching Pages Manager app for iPhone

Running a Facebook Page for an artist or music brand? Facebook has a brand new iPhone app just for you. It's called Facebook Pages Manager, and according to its App Store listing it "helps admins connect with their audience and keep up with activity on multiple Pages, all in one place". That includes the ability to post updates and photos as your Page, be notified about new fan activity, and view Facebook's Page Insights analytics from the phone. The app is free to download, and went live in the New Zealand App Store overnight - meaning it should roll out in Western countries over the course of today.
Link - http://tinyurl.com/7swss6l

One of the problems that people in the music industry have is that they do not have a well defined digital marketing strategy.  Therefore, they run into several common issues.  Digital marketing strategist Adam Singer does a great job of identifying the pitfalls in his article entitled Digital Marketing Strategy Development: 12 Common Problems. Stringer mentions that Marketing looks very different now than it did as few as five years ago, which I believe is primarily due to the mobile app markets emergence. We are clearly in a different age now.

Copyright complaint took down Grooveshark's Facebook features
Remember when copyright complaints from labels led to Apple and Google removing Grooveshark's official mobile app from their stores? It looks like the same thing has happened with its Facebook sharing features. We reported yesterday on the disabling of Grooveshark's Facebook features, and now the social network has confirmed that "We have removed the Grooveshark app due to a copyright infringement complaint we received". Grooveshark had previously said that it believed the removal was an error, and would soon be rectified. Music rightsholders will cheer Facebook's willingness to take action, but the move will be controversial - particularly if Grooveshark was given no opportunity to mount a defence before its app was removed.
Source: Digital Music News - http://tinyurl.com/dytalbh

150m registered users for Pandora
Personal radio service Pandora has cracked the 150m registered users milestone. What's more, 100m of these people have accessed the service via a smartphone or tablet - music to the ears of the CTIA mobile industry conference at which the milestones were announced. Pandora also says that 70% of its listening hours now take place on mobile or 'other connected devices' (i.e. anything but a computer, even though that's obviously connected too). Pandora claims that one in three US smartphone users now listens to its service on a monthly basis. Is the company making money from all this mobile listening? Pandora says its mobile advertising revenues rose from $25m in its fiscal 2011 to more than $100m in its fiscal 2012. Overall, Pandora recorded 1.06bn listener hours in April this year, up 87% year-on-year. It had 51.9m active listeners for the month.
Source: Pandora - http://tinyurl.com/bmo6wng

Music Industry Challenges

The primary purpose of this blog is to share the Social Media needs and challenges faced by the Entertainment / Music / Tech industry. It is also meant to be a platform for discussion of business for social media and possible solutions both tactical and strategic. The Top Music Club (TMC) by App Data Systems is one of many new mechanisms that recently entered the mobile market to help people though the stressful ordeal of just getting the music they love on their devices. The table below identifies some of the challenges:

Issues Facing Industry	Problems and Impacts
Copyright Artistic license	To distribute master works for sale and not streaming, both masters and mechanical licenses are needed.  Masters licenses have to be acquired from all four of the major labels, which is even more challenging.  This comes with a 6 figure + price tag.
Reward systems Marketing	How do you music distributors determine the best reward system? Open to any solutions.
Competition Technical training	There are so many free pirate sites out there, why should anyone buy legal music?  Its a sad state of affairs.  Also, there are few places to learn mobile development, so resources are expensive and hard to come by.
Customer/client education/training Technical dissemination	Many of the new products are so novel that people are either afraid to try them or waiting for free versions to come out.
Personnel	For technologies that are only a year or two old its hard to find qualified personnel.  Both the development of hardware and forking of the Android operating system has made it difficult to find people that know it all.
Transaction costs	Due to the race to the bottom, it hard to recover investment costs so many companies put out partial or known defective products to see if returns will be worth the additional investment, which lowers the overall quality of the products.