Music Tectonics

Digital experiences in fitness have been a growing phenomenon since before the pandemic, but that growth has only accelerated since March due to the high demand for online content. Hear from Lauren Pufpaf, Co-founder of Feed.fm, as she explores the integral role of music in the time of digital fitness, smart mirrors, even bluetooth ovens. Find out how Feed. FM is helping businesses share music wit...

Music marketing has become more and more intertwined with video. How can indie artists tap into video's power to engage listeners without breaking the bank or learning a whole new skillset? Diarmuid Moloney, founder and CEO of Rotor, explains how his platform automates and streamlines the music video creation process. Starting with just a song, musicians and their teams can focus on creative decis...

What does it mean to personally invest in an artist? Hear from Adam Cowherd, CEO & founder of AmplifyX, a platform that's introducing a new financing solution for artists and a new asset class for investors- the first and only such platform that's SEC and FINRA compliant. The AmplifyX model lets upcoming and established artists retain control of their own intellectual property and career decisions...

As the pandemic hit and music teachers scrambled to find new technology to support remote learning, many turned to Solfeg.io. Hear about how music and education intersect from Toms Rusovs, CEO and Co-founder of Solfeg.io, MidemLab 2020 winner in the Music Creation & Education category. Toms explores how this new learning tool supports learning in over 10K schools by breaking down popular songs to...

Musicians are suffering and venues have closed. Rishon Blumberg of Brick Wall Management explores how artists are adapting to stay afloat during this global pandemic and navigate a world without touring. From Instagram livestreams to drive-in theater style concerts, what's working to fill the gaps? How are live albums and concert merch changing in the time of livestreaming? Artists are using this...

Video gaming platforms have become essential lockdown music festival venues even as new livestreaming platforms keep coming out of the woodwork. Find out what makes popular games and virtual concerts such a great match from Alex Perrien, CEO of Genesis, the leading provider of virtual events on the Minecraft platform. Alex discusses how his company creates unique event experiences, from the Blocke...

You'll get more than you bargain for in this episode, when BPI's Casandra Strauss moves from giving an overview of the Music & Tech Springboard Programme to providing a compelling list of categories that music tech companies can help solve in the music industry from A&R to music discovery among casual listeners. Think of British Phonographic Industry (BPI) as the UK equivalent of RIAA. Think of St...

From panda-cams at the zoo to live acoustic guitar sets from the bathroom, OnNow. TV is a one-stop shop for all things livestream. Hear how  Co-founder Matthew Addell's decades of experience in digital music led to creating the world's largest index of global live streamed events- in just a few weeks. Adell explains how the OnNow. TV platform helps viewers discover livestream events of all kinds h...

Releasing and marketing music today generates tons of data. How do you make sense of all those Spotify streams, YouTube views, TikTok videos, Shazam searches, even Wikipedia pageviews? Chartmetric CEO Sung Cho explains how his company processes and visualizes publicly available data on 2.5 million artists to put all those numbers in context. Find out how Chartmetric helps artists, managers, indie...

Pandemic lockdowns revolutionized how people consume music overnight. After gathering and analysing the resulting data, Mark Mulligan of MIDiA Research offers his insights and predictions for the future of streaming, live events, and the unexpected blooming of new use cases for music. How have music fans' need states changed, and how does the industry need to change to meet them? How will live str...

For musicians in lockdown, trying to jam with friends or teach lessons on a videoconferencing app like Zoom or Skype is like putting toothpaste back in the tube: it's just not built for that. Find out how JamKazam was built for musicians to play together in real time from CEO David Wilson. Host Dmitri asks what makes JamKazam so different from those videocallling apps? How does JamKazam deal with...

Now that everyone has posted their black box on Instagram, now that large music and tech companies cut their $150 million checks, what anti-racism efforts will endure in music tech? Hear from leaders who were working to bring Black people into positions of creativity and leadership long before the murder of George Floyd: Tarik Moody (Radio Milwaukee & 88Nine Labs), Keisha Howard (Sugar Gamers), an...

When Jovanka Von Wilsdorf wrote songs for a virtual pop star, she found herself falling in love with humans again. The spaces between art and tech, human and artificial intelligence, is where the Berlin-based songwriter, artist profiler, and speaker feels at home. Jovanka tells irregular host Tristra Newyear Yeager how she got there, from touring and recording with her band Quarks, to writing hit...

Charts aren't just about bragging rights for Stephen Blackwell, Alpha Data president. Charts rank top songs to bring people together, forge chart-topping hits into cultural touchstones, and point the way the culture as a whole is moving. Formerly known as BuzzAngle, Alpha Data analyzes over 50 billion streams from more than 50 DSPs daily to provide insights to the music industry and power Rolling...

This is a milestone: it's the 100th episode of the Music Tectonics podcast! In 18 months, Dmitri Vietze and Tristra Newyear Yeager have explored 100 music tech topics and interviewed innovators in Los Angeles, New York, Cannes, France, and isolated at home. They got together on zoom to recap what's changed in the music tech industry since the podcast launched in December 2018. How has TikTok matur...

Music festivals, sports events, and all kinds of entertainment have a common goal: reach fans and sell tickets. Ten years ago, Darshan Kaler built Tradable Bits to be a bridge between the entertainment industry and fans' digital lives, and the company has been innovating in the collection, analysis, and activation of fan data ever since. Find out how Darshan went from bringing the Olympics to your...

With the unprecedented pandemic, musicians are looking for new ways to collaborate across long distances. They're finding that the Trackd app already offers a lean, mobile recording and collaborating experience. Grant Tilbury, explains how Trackd lets artists capture moments, edit multi-track audio, and release "Virtual Vinyl" to social media all on one's smartphone. Learn how Trackd was born out...

What goes on in your mind when that chorus hits and you get shivers, when you lay down a track and know that one was THE take? Neuroscientists have been digging into these and other questions of music, emotion, and cognition for decades. David Rosen, PhD and Brian Owens of AI and neuroscience startup Secret Chord Laboratories explore our brains on music and how the science of creativity and recept...

When music venues in Los Angeles were shut down as part of Covid-19 safety measures, Ari Herstand knew that he wanted to help the artists and performance spaces weather the financial shortfall. With a couple of friends, he launched "UnCancelled Music Festival", a live-streaming enterprise that organizes performances and collaboration between musicians from across the country. Now he is busier than...

If you're interested in the world of music equipment retail, you have heard of Sweetwater. More likely than not, you are a customer that has contributed to its over 700 million dollars in sales. But how did the company become one of the biggest catalog and online retailers for music? Founder Chuck Surack sits down with Music Tectonics host Dmitri Vietze to explain his humble origins touring around...

SXSW hosts a music tech hackathon every year, and 2020 was no exception. Except this was the year everything changed: the huge music and tech conference was cancelled due to the coronavirus.  We're not going to let that stop us, however. To honor the spirit of the hackathon, we've brought together some of the mentors and thought leaders involved to talk about how music tech can transform our lives...

If you are still trying to grasp best practices for monetizing recorded music in the streaming era, Label' Logic's Jay Gilbert lays it out for you with no hesitation on this episode. Music Tectonics host Dmitri Vietze dives headfirst into Jay's world of helping artists and managers understand the variety of experiences you can create for fans, the truth behind Spotify playlists, the role of your c...

After selling his festival cruises company to Norwegian Cruise Lines, entrepreneur Andy Levine returns with his new startup Topeka, which gives artists an opportunity to get paid for online fan conversations, digital house concerts, and Zoom serenades. Music tectonics host Dmitri Vietze finds out from Andy why he started the new endeavor, and how it is well-suited for the current Shelter-at-Home m...

What happens when your concert matchmaking platform comes to a screeching halt thanks to social distancing? Side Door co-founder Laura Simpson joins host Dmitri Vietze to talk about how the pandemic's crisis is leading to a new type of ticketed yet intimate performance. Laura talks about how she does not think artists should be forced to play for free, and the types of reactions they are seeing fr...

If anyone could see the immediate deluge of concert cancellations when COVID-19 became the planet's immediate reality, it was ubiquitous concert-discovery platform Bandsintown's co-founder and managing director Fabrice Sergent. Listen to his conversation with host Dmitri Vietze, as he describes how he watched 100,000 concerts get canceled in just a couple of weeks. He translated his team's passion...