The purpose of this paper was to look into the challenges and opportunities that niche music artists face in the digital age, with a particular focus on Universal Music Group and its subsidiary, ...Spinnup. It examined the transition from physical to digital music and the implications for niche music artists critically. It explicitly addressed pricing and promotion issues in the digital music industry, drawing on marketing mix theory. According to the paper, platforms such as Spinnup have made it easier for niche artists to distribute their music globally, but they frequently require assistance in generating sufficient revenue due to high release fees and insufficient promotion. To address these issues, the paper proposed two major solutions: a pricing model revision and the provision of marketing and promotional tools. The proposed solutions aimed to foster a more welcoming environment for niche artists by providing them with the tools they need to effectively reach their audiences and thrive in the digital music industry. The findings provided insights into the music industry’s digital transformation and suggested strategies for promoting the growth and sustainability of niche music.
This innovative study opens up a new area in sociological & urban studies: the aural experience of the social, mediated through mobile technologies of communication. Whilst we live in a world ...dominated by visual epistemologies of urban experience, Michael Bull argues that it is not surprising that the Apple iPod, a sound based technology, is the first consumer cultural icon of the twenty-first century. This book, in using the example of the Apple iPod, investigates the way in which we use sound to construct key areas of our daily lives. The author argues that the Apple iPod acts as an urban Sherpa for many of its users & in doing so joins the mobile army of technologies that many of us habitually use to accompany our daily lives. Through our use of such mobile & largely sound based devices, the book demonstrates how & why the spaces of the city are being transformed right in front of our ears.
Traditionally, consumers purchase physical music (often in the form of CDs or cassettes) from local retailers. With the development of Internet technology, the market share of digital music has grown ...rapidly in recent years. Unlike physical music, digital music is provided by several emerging digital music providers through the Internet to consumers. Pricing models of digital music are also drastically different from those of physical music. In this study, we identify three common schemes for selling digital music: ownership, subscription and mixed pricing models. Under the ownership model, consumers purchase and download their preferred songs and enjoy music using their local devices. Under the subscription model, music is provided through an online streaming service. The mixed pricing model is a combination of the previous two. Our paper explores and compares the three pricing models. Through a stylized model, we find that several factors, including the advertisement revenue rate and consumers’ reservation value for the music service, have crucial effects on the comparison of the three pricing models.
In Norway music-streaming services have become mainstream in everyday music listening. This paper examines how 12 heavy streaming users make sense of their experiences with Spotify and WiMP Music ...(now Tidal). The analysis relies on a mixed-method qualitative study, combining music-diary self-reports, online observation of streaming accounts, Facebook and last.fm scrobble-logs, and in-depth interviews. By drawing on existing metaphors of Internet experiences we demonstrate that music-streaming services can make sense as tools, places, and ways of being. Music streaming as lifeworld mediation is discussed as a fourth framework for understanding online music experiences, particularly those arising from mobile and ubiquitous characteristics of contemporary Internet technology.
Chromosome-scale genome sequence assemblies underpin pan-genomic studies. Recent genome assembly efforts in the large-genome Triticeae crops wheat and barley have relied on the commercial ...closed-source assembly algorithm DeNovoMagic. We present TRITEX, an open-source computational workflow that combines paired-end, mate-pair, 10X Genomics linked-read with chromosome conformation capture sequencing data to construct sequence scaffolds with megabase-scale contiguity ordered into chromosomal pseudomolecules. We evaluate the performance of TRITEX on publicly available sequence data of tetraploid wild emmer and hexaploid bread wheat, and construct an improved annotated reference genome sequence assembly of the barley cultivar Morex as a community resource.
•We present the first study of YouTube’s most popular content genre, music videos.•Our analysis of popular music videos identified three main types and 12 subtypes.•User-appropriated videos emerged ...as the most important new category of videos.•Derivative music videos stirred the highest levels of engagement among music videos.•We discuss a halo effect that may explain the popularity of user-appropriated videos.
YouTube is the leading Internet video service and one of the most popular websites in 2014. Music videos hold top positions in different YouTube charts, but the music video types or engagement patterns with them have not been systematically studied. In this paper we present three studies that focus on YouTube music. We first show that music videos are the most popular content genre in YouTube. We then present a typology of traditional and user-generated music videos discovered in YouTube. It includes twelve subtypes of music videos under three main types: traditional, user-appropriated, and derivative. Last, we present findings on user engagement statistics that go beyond view, comment, and vote counts. These metrics show that while music videos gather more views, engagement differences with other content genres are miniscule. However, there are notable differences in engagement between different music video types. This is prominent between different artists on one hand, and between traditional and user-generated videos on the other. We synthesize these findings by discussing the importance of user-generated videos in YouTube’s music ecosystem.
This research examines the interaction effect of two dimensions of preference on social contagion: preference similarity between a consumer (i.e., who seeks recommendation) and a peer (i.e., who ...potentially provides recommendation) and the fit of an experience good with the consumer's preference. For empirical analyses, the authors collected rich information from Last.fm, a music social networking website, including individual users’ music play histories, friendship information, social tags (i.e., user-generated keywords associated with artists and songs), and new song profiles. The results show that consumers’ trial of a song that fits less with their preference is influenced more by peers with similar preferences. By contrast, consumers’ trial of a song that fits more with their preference is influenced more by peers with dissimilar preferences. This research enriches the understanding of the nuanced role of preference in social contagion and offers managerial implications to better leverage social dynamics.
High-definition maps (HD maps) are a key component of most modern self-driving systems due to their valuable semantic and geometric information. Unfortunately, building HD maps has proven hard to ...scale due to their cost as well as the requirements they impose in the localization system that has to work everywhere with centimeter-level accuracy. Being able to drive without an HD map would be very beneficial to scale self-driving solutions as well as to increase the failure tolerance of existing ones (e.g., if localization fails or the map is not up-to-date). Towards this goal, we propose MP3, an end-to-end approach to mapless 1 driving where the input is raw sensor data and a high-level command (e.g., turn left at the intersection). MP3 predicts intermediate representations in the form of an online map and the current and future state of dynamic agents, and exploits them in a novel neural motion planner to make interpretable decisions taking into account uncertainty. We show that our approach is significantly safer, more comfortable, and can follow commands better than the baselines in challenging long-term closed-loop simulations, as well as when compared to an expert driver in a large-scale real-world dataset.
Streaming services for music are growing worldwide, and the Nordic countries are leading the way. In Norway, streaming represented 88% of digital music revenues in 2014 versus just 23% globally. In ...essence, streaming services offer subscribers access to vast databases of music and offer artists new means of exposure and sources of revenue. This article argues that the possibility of musical discovery is essential to these services' distribution model. It examines the provisions for exploration through streaming, pointing to automated algorithms and human curation as key devices. It then collects quantitative data on the presentation of music via a Norwegian service (WiMP/Tidal) and qualitative findings from interviews with consumers about their experiences with music streaming. Key discrepancies arise between the promise and the reality of streamed-music discovery, both for artists seeking new fans (and funds) and for audiences expecting streaming to supersede existing forms of musical exploration.
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