Pickasound

PICKAMUSICFESTIVAL: YOUR 2015 GUIDE

Yet again, festival season approaches. We want to make sure you’ve got lineup and ticket info to get your bad self in gear for another amazing collection of 2015 festivals. Where you gonna be Memorial Day weekend?!!?

So it’s time to face the facts that being a musician as a career is a really difficult (nearing impossible) goal to accomplish. The fame and recognition we all aspire to achieve is drowned out by the realities of declining record sales, shady record label deals, and a devaluation of music that puts a cup of coffee on par with the latest Beyonce single.

Yet despite all this, there are still 18 million music instrument players in the U.S, 200 million amateur musicians worldwide, and 12 hours of audio being uploaded to Soundcloud every single minute.

So, why are people still pursuing music? The straight answer is that it’s downright fun and personally rewarding. The issue is that rewarding doesn’t necessarily lead to cash in your pocket. So for the musicians that do have cash in their pockets, where are they getting it? According to the chart below, as of 2013, 28% of musicians’ revenues were being sourced from live shows, with music teaching accounting for 22%. This may sound encouraging, but let’s be honest: it’s way easier to upload songs online than it is to start a teaching career or earn significant money from performing live.

This is precisely where ‘Pickasound’ steps in. As a music social network dedicated to making online collaboration more efficient, we ask ourselves:

What if musicians had a platform that built sustainable revenue streams through content creation, where they could earn money from their contributions, remixes, and shared works? Wouldn’t that be better that trying to sell music to consumers who are already used to getting it for free?

Driven by a need for perfection; most musicians’ only ever release a tiny portion of the songs they create. Yet for all the time and effort it’s worth; sound-recording sales make up just 6% of a musicians income. But what if we could put a price on any piece of music an artist created? Could there be more opportunities out there to generate revenue simply by remixing, sampling and creating musical ideas?

On Pickasoud, we believe that the value of your music is equal to the level of creativity it brings to others through sampling and remixing. Today artists have fan bases that consist of both listeners and creators, and in order to understand what makes Pickasound truly valuable, it is important to first know how these groups interact with your music differently:

To a listener; your music is the fuel that allows them to carry out their day, performing other activities while your melodies play in the background. Your song is as important as the feeling it provides at that very moment, but a moment can only last for so long, and the listeners playlist is filled with thousands of songs that could just as well take them through any moment of their day. So how is yours any more valuable?

To a creator; your music is more than just a fuel to carry out the day. It’s an inspiration to create more! As creators, we love to look deeper into the sounds and melodies of a song because we have an inherent need to contribute to it. To the beatmaker; a single 5 second segment of your song can be enough to spawn a brand new song with a totally different vibe. Or an instrumental can appear as an open canvas to the singer/songwriter as they fill up the empty spaces with their vocals.

This is a perfect example of what we call active versus passive engagement. When it comes down to which group is willing to pay more for your music, it should be no surprise that those who actively engage with your content place a higher value on it.  

Pickasound is establishing an open and collaborative culture amongst both professional and amatuer musicians, making it easier than ever for you to monetize your songs from every stage of the creative process. We believe that this is the future of the digital music industry, and we are very excited to take you there!

Subscribe here to become an early beta tester of Pickasound:

What This Means for the Record Industry and What’s Next

As we partake on this fresh New Year, all eyes are on Apple and what’s to come next. We know about the new iPhone and iWatch, but the biggest mystery of them all is what’s to come with Apple’s music department. From an outsider looking in it looks as if Apple Music could be in a state of flux. Beats streaming service hasn’t panned out nearly as well as everyone thought it would, and the iTunes store hasn’t shifted from its gradual decline, but what really sparks everyone’s interest moving forward is the possibility of Apple calling it quits with the industry and becoming its own label. Lets keep in mind that it’s the one and only Jimmy Iovine at the helm of Apple Music right now.

  The reason for this being brought up is because of what Apple did with the iconic Irish rock band U2 this past year. This past September these two longtime partners decided to take a note from Jay Z and Samsung and release the album, Song’s of Innocence, to a half a billion iTunes users for free. The difference between Samsung and Apple was that with Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail you had the choice of downloading the app that would give you the album, where in Song’s of Innocence it downloaded automatically for you. This automatic release became extremely problematic because it sparked off many privacy concerns, and U2 eventually got to the point where they had to publically apologize for the stunt. Even though this release did not go as well as planned it does not at all mean that this is the end for automatic free releases by Apple.

  If you remember, in Facebook’s first few years they launched an extremely controversial new part of their product called the “News Feed”. At first the public hated the “News Feed” and like Song’s of Innocence pleaded a lot of issues concerning personal privacy. The point I’m trying to make is that News Feed is still around and is Facebook’s most important part of their product. Back then Facebook like Apple and U2 publically apologized for “News Feed”, but instead of pleading to public demand they decided to not take it away, but instead to reform what they already had. This is what will happen with Apple and their new method of mass music distribution.

Well, we made it! As 2014 comes to a close, we want to bring you back to check out some major events which defined the music world throughout the year. If you didn’t see our favorite music collab picks for the year, check ‘em out here. Happy reading!

Warner Music Group and Shazam begin collaborating, where Warner has exclusive access to Shazam's user data and Shazam has exclusive access to Warner content. Warner primarily wants to utilize the data for A&R, but also for marketing purposes.

Spotify acquires The Echo Nest for reportedly $100M, which leads the industry in music intelligence, displaying the important role data crunching has in the music industry. This change promotes user customization and better recommendations.

Amazon launches Prime Music, a streaming service for Prime members offering 1 million tracks (versus Spotify's 20 million). Despite this difference, Amazon has one of the highest rankings of paid subscribers and aims to continute to grow their user population.

Apple buys Beats for $3M; cofounders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine in turn join the Apple team and Apple acquires the streaming service Beats offers. Many believe was a smart move for Apple considering that iTunes sales have fallen rapidly with the popularization of streaming platforms like Pandora and Spotify.

SoundCloud signs licensing deal with Warner Music and will pay royalties to artists for the first time in their history, but receives both skepticism and criticism. Time will tell!

Taylor Swift pulls her music from Spotify, which possibly marks the biggest industry event of the year, due to her celebrity and musical influence. The choice receives criticism and Spotify responds well, but Swift stands by her original statement, going on to break her personal sales record, selling over a million records in the first week of sales… for the third time.

YouTube begins offering music streaming service, offering a paid service to customers who wish to enable offline and ad-free listening. YouTube also beings offering video-free songs as a part of their new service.

As music listeners and industry geeks alike, we know there is much to look forward to in the year 2015, on both the business end and music end. Personally, I look forward to summer festival lineup announcements (look forward to another master list like last year’s), seeing where SoundCloud and YouTube go on their personal ventures to change up their platforms, and for a new James Blake LP! Wishing you a safe and happy new year.

Well it’s that time of year again! The joyous season of looking back on all that the year had to offer, which, in the music blogosphere, consists of the systematic ranking of albums. Rollingstone, Pitchfork, Spin and all the others have already announced their favorites, but since Pickasound is a network of collaborators, we decided to rank our top 5 favorite collaborative albums of 2014. These are records in which artists from originally separate projects came together to form something spectacular. The following albums have really stood out to us and have made us prouder than ever to be part of such a creative industry.

5. Jason Feathers – De Oro

            De Oro stands as a testament to modern and unpredictable behavior in the music industry. Jason Feathers is the unlikely duo of indie-rock superstar Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Volcano Choir, and indie-rapper Astronautalis. The record wasn’t publicized on a grand level, but rather leaving fans to remain curious about the project that was to come. The music on De Oro is proven to be as mysterious as the record’s campaign. Vernon’s howling vocals and auto-tuned perfection in conjunction with Astronautalis’ rhythmic rapping make for an immensely satisfying swamp-rock album.

4. Sisyphus - Sisyphus

            Sisyphus is comprised of three renowned musicians coming together to bring each of their styles to one album. Sufjan Stevens delivers with his iconic soft-spoken vocals, Son Lux with his quirky electronic beats and Serengeti with his hip-hop influence to one of the most unique collaborations in recent years. However, the highly varying mixture unites in an ultimately smooth and rewarding sound you are guaranteed to not hear anywhere else.

3. Inventions - Inventions

            The collaboration of Eluvium, an expert in classical music, and Explosions in the Sky, experts in instrumental rock, has led to nothing short of pure atmospheric bliss. The duo of Inventions is sure to satisfy fans of similarly ethereal artists like Sigur Ros and Julianna Barwick. The self-titled album forms a soundtrack for listeners to meditate to, relax to, and become inspired by. The glowing synths and echoing vocals evoke visuals of gorgeous sunsets, desolate mountaintops and everything that is good in the world.

2. Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett - Cheek to Cheek

            The idea of Lady Gaga singing in a style other than mischievous glam pop may seem like a foreign idea, but she absolutely kills it on Cheek To Cheek. Perhaps it was the influence of Tony Bennett that brought her closer to planet Earth, but the two partaking in the lost art of swing music is truly a charm to behold. The album is short, yet satisfying as Bennett recalls his jazzy style that helped him achieve his legendary status and Lady Gaga recalls her powerful and versatile vocals. Gaga has clearly proven to be more than just a collection of bizarre red carpet outfits, but rather one of the most flexible and multi-talented singers of this generation.

1. Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2

Hey music makers!

              We haven’t posted anything on our blog in a while so we figured its time to catch you up on Pickasound! Basically we’ve been spending a lot of 2014 developing the website. This includes intensively working with developers to create our product of the Pickasound music player and surrounding website. The structure behind our player is largely uncharted technology, so it has been taking us some time to really perfect what we are trying to create and fix all the bugs. This past year has also been filled with fun networking events and demos that we’ve been partaking in with hopes of expanding our community and meeting other cool people doing cool things.

            We are also now allowing beta testers onto the site in its current state to try it out and give us some feedback on how they feel about it so far. Our ultimate goal at the moment is to work on perfecting Pickasound to the fullest extent possible so that when it is officially released to the public, our users will be able to seamlessly take full advantage of everything the website has to offer. If you would like to become a beta tester, shoot us an email at [email protected] and we will be more than happy to set you up!

            All of our founders and partners are still full-time college students so things have been pretty hectic for all of us, but you can expect a more polished and official product in the first half of 2015. We want to sincerely thank you for supporting us by following us and checking Pickasound out.

We had the chance to speak to Nick Van Horn of Chicago punk-rock band The Liqs. The band formed in the wake of Van Horn and collaborative partner Esteban Miranda’s project called The Mirandas. In late 2013, The Mirandas began to fade, so put Nick and Esteban reignited their garage-rock fuzziness as The Liqs.

Together, the band picked up bassist Sergio Stryker and continued to record and perform. Although Van Horn tends to write almost all the songs by himself, jamming is where the collaborative process flourishes. “Esteban has a great style, very fast fills and is one of the most creative drummers I have ever played with,” he told us. “Sergio has a very simple yet creative style with the bass. His playing always makes the band sound heavier and we try to be as heavy as possible.”

The band depends on one another for a song to take fruition. “When you get a bunch of people collaborating sometimes it doesn't work so good and sometimes it’s fucking amazing,” he said “and everyone that is jamming gets into it and it just feels great.”

     Guess who's back out on the scene? Blake Harnage and Sierra Kay, both previous members of the alternative-rock band VersaEmerge (Fueled By Ramen), have re-emerged as VERSA: a newer project with a darker, electronic sound. Their debut EP release Neon just dropped in January and features three brand new tracks from the duo. Blake offered us some insight into their creative processes and focus on artist collaboration!

     Blake and Sierra have been working together for seven years now, beginning with the project of VersaEmerge in which Sierra sang and Blake mainly played guitar and sang for. Throughout the years, collaboration has been a major part of the success of their projects; Blake explained to us that "music without collaboration is usually music that could be improved upon," since it's so easy to get lost in the details of something you've heard over and over again. In order to finish a piece, he finds it to be vital to share with others.

     The duo begins their creative process with everything from fun rhythms, to chord changes, to odd noises produced with Blake's gear. In the case of their VERSA single "Neon," the two originally had much of the song in place working independently from Blake's studio in their home state of Florida, but ultimately invited a couple of friends to collaborate. They were fortunate enough to collaborate with two other writers in London, but mentioned that Skype sessions had been resorted to when necessary.

     The challenge of collaboration has been prevalent in the life of VERSA. Blake admitted to us that because of scheduling conflicts and geography, it's been tough to produce Neon. From the day they began to work on "Neon," at least a year and a half passed before its official release because of the difficult nature of collaboration. He explained that the best work comes when you can forget about the process and shift more focus into the actual product. In the past, Blake has even incorporated original iPhone voice memo ideas into finished mixes; the weight and vibe of the original idea outweighs the sonic quality for VERSA, where expensive gear can sometimes get in the way of a song's integrity.

PICKASOUND UPDATE!

Hello to all of our lovely blog followers!

So lately we've been sharing a bunch of news in the music scene regarding the collaboration of artists. We are doing this because we believe that collaboration is essential in today's industry. However, we also don't want to lose focus on what Pickasound actually is: a music tech company in Boston with big dreams of simplifying online music collaboration. We quickly found at the conception of our company that designing our Pickasound Music Player would be a bit of a difficult process. So it is with great excitement that we announce that the player is currently in the process of being built and we should have a prototype available for beta testing in the coming months!

              There are few bands in the Boston indie music scene right now as abuzz as Dinoczar. The trio of garage-punk rockers recently signed to Northeastern University’s Green Line Records and released their debut EP Ghouls.

            The band started out in Laguna Beach, hometown to members Aaron Swartz and Paul Dunne. While attending high school together, they drifted into the same circle of jam sessions and realized that the two had some great musical chemistry between them. In 2011, the two moved to Boston to attend Northeastern, all the while recording demos with basic music equipment. It wasn’t until a student organization was putting on a local artist showcase in October 2013 that the duo decided to actually perform the songs they had written. The only issue was that they were one member short so they scooped up bassist Jake Cardinal and had officially become Dinoczar. One week after performing at the artist showcase on campus, the trio signed to Green Line.

            Throughout college, however, Aaron and Paul traveled often, interning in various cities. Aaron spent a semester in London, then LA, now San Francisco and Paul spent a few months working in Austin, TX.  All the moving around has made it difficult for the three to stay cohesive. Their method of recording and sharing ideas is basically recording beats and riffs on an iPhone voice recorder and sending the files back on forth, evolving the idea with each send. They believe that most software is too complicated to record with, especially when thousands of miles away from one another. However, when playing in the same room, Dinoczar has been able to officially complete entire songs in just a few days.

      Upcoming hip hop artist Shawn Thomas has just dropped his debut EP Few and Far Between after over two years in the making, working with a variety of musicians through various collaboration processes. Being a rapper, collaboration has always been important to Shawn in order to work closely with his producer as well as other musicians on the record. Shawn considers music collaboration to be an integral part of music creating in general, and has certainly put an emphasis on this in his new release.

      Shawn’s influences include Atmosphere, Sage Francis, Mac Lethal and Grieves. Creating this album presented a challenge for Shawn, since the studio he recorded in is in Hyannis, MA, while he balances a life of school and work in Boston. Through many emails and lengthy commutes, Few and Far Between finally came to full fruition for its March 11th debut.

      During the creation of Few and Far Between, Shawn Thomas released a video for the last track on the EP, “Here Come The Drums,” which you can see here. He calls this song the “first instrumental of the batch that caught [his] ear immediately and [he] started to write right away.”

            One night at Northeastern University in Boston, Lee Schuna got a phonecall from Anjimile Chithambo who said she had found her musical soulmate, Drew Wilcox. Lee grabbed her guitar and the three headed over to a practice room on campus that night and started jamming. The trio soon decided that they wanted to officially work together in their own band: Modes.             Although Modes is a cohesive project, each member distinctly draws influences from their own sources. A quick glance at their facebook page would tell you that Anjimile hails from Texas, while Drew from Chicago and Lee from Wisconsin. Even their influences vary from bandmember to bandmember, Drew drawing inspiration from Radiohead and Sonic Youth, whereas Anjimile grew with Brand New and Emily with Warpaint. Before that night, each musician had been working individually on separate projects - Drew working as Eskimo Rangers, Lee working as The Vacuum Party and Anjimile releasing solo music that she continues to record.             Luckily for the three, they had met and formed at school, so collaborating together in person wasn’t too difficult. Shortly after forming, however, Lee temporarily moved to Brooklyn to work at indie label Captured Tracks. Therefore, the band’s creativity was inhibited and recording was halted. During this time, Lee commented on MP3s sent to her by her band members, but was unable to contribute to them in a simple manner for over half a year. After returning to Boston, Modes had started working on a forthcoming EP.             When asked about the interaction during the songwriting process, Lee explained, “Music doesn't care if you know each other or not. All you need is creative energy that works well with someone else's, and that's how it happened.”             Modes doesn’t have any recorded material out just yet, but check out each band member’s individual work at the links below. We certainly look forward to hearing more from them.

The Vacuum Party Anjimile Yvonne Eskimo Rangers