A Quick Update...

Fumigations suck.

My apartment building’s being fumigated for termites this week. I’m not one to make excuses for myself, but (ok, you can cue in the violins here…) because of the necessary preparations for the fumigation, I wasn’t able to write this week’s post. I know that life gets in the way sometimes, but I can’t help to feel a little guilty of not following through with my goal of creating a weekly post. That being the case, instead of promising a post once a week on my blog, I’ll be posting once every two weeks from here on out.

This extra week will also give me a bit more time to write up more fleshed out posts. I have a couple interesting posts in the pipeline covering topics from the UX of Amazon Alexa to Deezer, but again, I need a little more time to produce better content, instead of spewing the content out for the sake of having a post for the week.

All this being said, I thought I’d leave you guys with some thought-provoking figures I came across in Statista’s Digital Economy Compass 2018 report that was published early this year.

When it comes to biometric technology, I would have expected wearables to outpace smartphones until the market’s saturated. However, according to Statista, smartphones will outpace wearables in 2019 in terms of the share of the technology that will include biometric sensors of some sort.

What are the implications for health and fitness related companies? Clearly there’ll be more consumer data to collect, but, when looking at the evolving digital landscape from the music industry perspective, this type of data provides further opportunities to contextualize music/playlists - a obvious unique selling proposition for major music streaming players like Spotify and fitness-related startups like Studio, which are working towards building “exciting digital experience far beyond what a traditional treadmill offers”.

UMG & Marketing in the Music Industry

Mixing Board

I've been completely infatuated by the business of entertainment for some years now. As I reflect on my interest in this industry, I can boil it down to a couple points:

  • The growth of media streaming platforms, their business models, and how the different players within the streaming ecosystems capture value

  • Connected devices causing a shift in consumer behavior as it pertains to media consumption

  • Monetizing intellectual properties as a form of passive income

The entertainment industry is undergoing major changes and it's all pretty exciting. 

In the back of my mind, I knew I was going to end up working in the industry soon or later. Guess it looks like it'll be sooner than later.

I'm proud to announce that I'll be working as an Artist Brand & Insights Strategist at Universal Music Group starting next month.

As I wrap up my grad program and gear up for my new role, I've been studying up on the industry. In doing so, I came across Bobby Owsinski's Inner Circle music podcast - a highly recommended podcast series for anyone interested in the music industry. In the episode below, industry veteran & Music Executive Ted Joseph talks about radio promotion, retail store co-op advertising, and more during his time as Head of Marketing at Warner Music.

Stream On

Spotify: One of the handful of monthly subscriptions I don't mind dishing out a few bucks for. While most on-demand video-streaming services rely on new content to draw viewership, the consumption of music on the Spotify platform relies on its back catalog, hence its significant marginal costs - the royalties it pays the music industry.

The music-streaming company filed to go public last week. With competition like Amazon Music and Apple that have an overwhelming amount of financial backing, in addition to the cost of revenue that Spotify has to pay to record labels, it's going to be interesting how Spotify navigates the music-streaming seas. At the same time, there's potential to leverage the data acquired from their platform (I recently saw a tweet that mentioned that Metallica was adjusting their concert playlist in particular cities based on local Spotify listening data) and for the company to launch its own record label. Whatever the case, Spotify's expected to make a big splash when its shares begin trading.

In light of the upcoming IPO, I thought it was worthwhile to share a bit about the business.