Beatseeker

Does anyone still listen to albums? Is the album format dead? In this episode we discuss the rise and fall of the album format with Jeff Breithaupt. Jeff is the lyricist half of the award-winning Breithaupt Brothers songwriting team; the co-author of two books on pop music in the 1970s; and Vice President for Media and Communications at Manhattan School of Music. With streaming now accounting for...

WTF is an NFT and WTF does it have to do with music? What are social tokens? In this episode we speak to George Howard, Professor of Music Business Management at Berklee College of Music, and the founder of GHS, a strategic consulting firm. George is a columnist for Forbes, and has authored a book called “Everything In Its Right Place: How Blockchain Technology Will Lead To A More Transparent Musi...

How can musicians make a living in the age of streaming when they earn fractions of a penny per Spotify play? In this episode we talk about the changing economics of making music with musician, poet and writer Damon Krukowski. Streaming platforms have been a great innovation for consumers but this invention is not universally loved by musicians.  We speak to Damon about what it was like to ma...

Learn how companies like Musiio are making tools that automatically tag tracks with descriptive data, like: mood, genre, tempo, key, instrument and energy. A human might painstakingly tag a few tracks or even a few albums, but what about hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of tracks? Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do what it does best: automating the tagging process. We speak wit...

How do music charts work? How does a song get on Billboard’s Hot100 ? How have the charts had to adapt over the years to stay relevant as new ways of listening to and purchasing music have come into play? We speak with chart analyst Chris Molanphy, who explains the charts, how they are always evolving and why they are so important to the industry. We discuss a variety of charts, focusing mostly on...

How does Discover Weekly work? We speak with Music Hacker Hall of Fame inductee Paul Lamere , part of the team that created Spotify’s Discover Weekly service. Discovery Weekly automatically creates a playlist of 30 new songs for you to discover each week. We learn about its early roots in the Echo Nest platform, how it works today and some tips for listeners to optimize their own weekly discoverie...

We’ve come a long way from the days when we browsed the shelves of HMV and Sam Goody or asked the record store dude what albums to buy. Radio play and late night talk shows still connect artists to new fans, but these are quickly becoming the old way to find new stuff. Beatseeker explores the changing world of music discovery. While there are plenty of podcasts about new music, Beatseeker digs int...