It’s Friday everyone, and I imagine you all woke up bright and early this morning, with smiles on your faces, just filled with anticipation about the day ahead and a weekly round up soon to arrive. Well, it’s here, back and better than ever. Well not necessarily better than ever. But here all the same.
On the blog this week as per usual, a run down of the Next Big Sound chart - with a little SXSW action baked in:
The second piece this week is on using data for A&R, based on the research that our data scientist Victor Hu has been doing as of late. This is the very first post for our brand new Forbes blog (yay!).
(p.s. do not make fun of me for my corny bio. As a journalist I try really hard to never write about myself, hence I am not particularly great at it. Thank you in advance,)
In other news - a lot going on with streaming this week.
Formerly MOG, renamed Daisy (or maybe Beats Music, who knows) when purchased by Beats Electronics, and rebranded as the new global streaming service all about data transparency, has just landed a good chunk of funding. The investment group behind it also owns WMG:
Here’s Zack O’Malley Greenburg from Forbes’s take on it.
More from Warner this week, they just signed a licensing deal with Google around their proposed streaming service. The result of talks with other labels to come.
Facebook is launching the redesign of their News Feed this week, which of course means a whole lot of fuss and muss about Zuck is up to this time.
Here is a breakdown from Hypebot on what this will mean for artists:
And of course another glowing article about the charms of Chris Brown, who just continues to overwhelm me with his graceful manner, infinite patience, and allround splendor.
Which brings me to graph of the week. Check out this trend in Rihanna’s Twitter. Here is the graph of her new followers in the time frame since rumors started circulating that she and Brown were hooking up again. Note the massive drop in late September that she never really recovers from - this coincides with Rihanna telling Oprah she still loved Brown and defending his actions, and the two of them making out at the VMAs. I guess people don’t like that, huh?
I came across this week’s video while curating the Next Big Sound chart this week. If you haven’t heard of Fifth Harmony before, these girls have been on Xfactor and this is their cover of Frank Ocean’s Thinking Bout You. Not bad, huh?
That’s all folks. Happy Friday! I’ll b heading down to Austin tomorrow for SXSW, so next week you can expect some stories from what is sure to be an amazing music festival.
Liv Buli is the resident data journalist for music analytics company Next Big Sound. Buli is a graduate of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and her work has appeared in Newsweek Daily Beast, The New York Times Local East Village, Hypebot and more.
