Facebook Integrates Spotify Into Messenger

Facebook and Spotify are trying to make it easier for fans to share your songs. The latest version of Facebook Messenger now incorporates a button so you can quickly jump to Spotify to choose a song and then share it in the message.

While on the surface this seems like a great idea, the problem is that the integration isn't as seamless as expected.

It's a bit clunky to get to Spotify, although once there it's pretty easy to select the song you want. The real problem is for the person receiving the message, since the tiny "Open" button beneath the image isn't totally obvious. Once clicked, it then sends you to the Spotify app so you can listen to the song there.

Both companies are quick to point out that this is only an early version and the implementation will be refined over time.

Any time a social platform can be combined with streaming music distribution it's a good thing for both consumers and artists. Word of mouth is still one of the most popular music discovery methods, and anything that extends that is most welcome when it comes to social media.

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Sony Develops Real-Time Streaming Royalty Reports

In what may be a real breakthrough for artists, Sony Music has developed an app that shows exactly what their daily streaming royalty earnings are. The app also includes information about how these earnings impact their label advances as well.

Other features include other key information in real time, such as streaming volume across all platforms, airplay data, profiles by age, gender and location of listeners, and a heat map of areas of the world where the artist is currently popular. It also offers insight to the artist's popularity on social networks as well, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The app is only available to Sony artists in Sweden (where the app was developed) at the moment, but is expected to be rolled out to Sony artists globally later in the year.

This is a first for a major label, since it makes earnings a lot more transparent than in the past. Artist royalty statements have always been viewed with some suspicion as labels have traditionally used a variety of accounting tricks to limit the royalties owed, but the new Sony app gives at least some hope that this position may change in the future.

Although the Sony real-time app is a revolution for a major label, it's not the first of its kind. Kobalt has offered these features to artists and songwriters for some time.

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Facebook Encourages Ads With No Audio

There are a lot of videos on Facebook and many of those are ads. Facebook has now decided that your ad begin without audio so that you don't annoy the viewer or those around her, so it now encourages that you design your ads with the sound off.

It's been found that 80% of people react negatively when a video ad pops up and blasts the sound, and that reflects not only on the ad, but Facebook as well. That's why it's now incorporated new tools to help advertisers out with their silent ads.

It now offers a new automated caption tool for videos to help give context to an ad that's scrolling in your feed without sound. What's more, the caption tool learns and becomes more accurate over time, although the advertiser has the ability to review and edit the captions before posting.

The problem is that a study found that 41% of the video ads on Facebook were meaningless without sound, that's why it's now encouraging advertisers to rethink their ads to work minus the audio.

You may be advertising a gig or a new release, so keep this in mind before you post.

Here's more from Facebook that explains how the new capturing feature works.

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Facebook's Still Growing

Recently there have been reports that not only has Twitter use peaked, but it's even beginning to fall, with active users dropping from 330 million down close to 200 million.

That's a good example of what typically happens with social networks, where they're hot for a few years and then replaced with something newer and hipper.

The exception so far is Facebook, which continues to grow despite predictions that its use plateaued long ago. Indeed, it's active users are now up to 1.59 billion, and incredibly, still growing.

Facebook shared the following statistics regarding it's growth (especially in advertising) in an email to SocialTimes:

• There are more than 43 billion connections between people and businesses on the social network.

• Southeast Asia is the fastest-growing region, and the top five countries in terms of year-over-year growth were the U.S., Brazil, the U.K., Italy and Australia.

• 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook per day.

• There are 1 billion users on Facebook Groups.

• 80 million users on Facebook Lite.

• 500 million users on Events and 123 million events were created in 2015.

• More than 1 million advertisers on Facebook are creating ads via mobile devices.

• More than 20 million active pages are using the social network’s Pages application.

• More than 70 percent of Facebook’s 3 million-plus advertisers are outside of the U.S.

• More than 50 million small and midsized businesses are currently using Facebook pages, and more than 80 percent of the social network’s users in the U.S. are connected to SMBs. More than 2.5 billion comments are posted on those pages each month.

• The top three verticals building Facebook pages are services, local commerce and e-commerce.

You may find that more of your fans are currently on other platforms, but ignore Facebook at your own peril.

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Your Music Won't Be Played In China Anytime Soon

China is one of the most populated countries in the world with over 1.3 billion people, 75% of which listen to music regularly.

That said, the revenue generated by music is stunningly small (see the chart composed of data from the IFPI) and it looks like it's not going to increase anytime soon, at least for Western artists.

Only 10% of the population currently listens to non-Chinese music and that's going to drop, thanks to the government's recent declaration that any kind of content from foreign media companies will be blocked starting March 10th.

Companies like Apple and the New York Times who have invested millions in China just may be out of luck, and if your music or content was aimed that way, so will you. The big windfall that China promised may never take place after all, thanks to the protectionist policies of the Chinese government.

Then again, if the video below is what they consider hip, then maybe we're not missing anything anyway. It's a communist corruption rap featuring president Xi JinPing.

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Tidal's In Big Trouble

When Jay-Z bought the music streaming service Tidal last year the purchase was met with a lot of hope and controversy.

Hope because he was an artist and successful businessman who could steer the company in the right direction. Controversy because of the initial tone-deaf press conference where a who's who of artists were trotted out, all saying that they'd finally be getting their financial due now that Tidal was here.

Since then it's been all downhill. Just in the last 30 days:

• Tidal exclusively released Kanye West's latest album The Life of Pablo, which gained no traction on the Billboard charts since Tidal refused to release any of the user data to Nielsen. A total embarrassment for all.

• Yesterday Tidal was served with a class-action lawsuit for $5 million for failing to register and pay mechanical royalties to an artist in the U.S. This is exactly the same type of lawsuit currently pending with Spotify, and one that an "artist's company" would be expected to avoid.

• Today it's being reported that Tidal fired both its COO and CFO, after having fired it's CEO late last year. At this point, the company is left without any experienced leadership.

Jay-Z has reportedly been in talks with Samsung to buy Tidal, but one wonders why that company would even want it, since it already has a failing music service in Milk Music.

Tidal could have been an innovator and leader in the streaming sector, but instead it's just a mess. It's lead in hi-res music streaming was never exploited and even acknowledged once Jay-Z took over, and every month there's a new mis-step. Maybe Jay-Z isn't the businessman he's cracked up to be after all.

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MP3Skull Owes The RIAA $22 Million

When it thinks that there's copyright infringement going against its major label clients, the RIAA shows no qualms about slapping a lawsuit on the service, and it usually wins.

That was the case recently when the association won $22.2 million in damages from the filesharing site MP3Skull, a site that supplies download links to songs by popular artists.

The damages were determined by multiplying the 148 songs submitted as evidence by $150k each.

In this case though, the RIAA might not collect a dime since the identities of the owners is totally unknown.

MP3Skull now operates from the MP3Skull.yoga domain, and it has moved from .com and .to domains when they have been blocked via previous court orders in the UK.

Although the ruling allows the RIAA to size the domain, it can't get at the assets if it doesn't know where they are and who they belong to.

Here's the thing though - with streaming just about everywhere these days where a user can listen to any song at any time, why would anyone be bothered with downloading a pirated song?

The lawsuit may end being a moot point, but at least it shows that the RIAA is doing something to warrant the big bag of money that its clients put into it.

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