This week on Digital Music Trends Andrea Leonelli, Kevin Breuner (CD Baby Marketing Director) and Mike McCready (MusicXray CEO) discuss the introduction of Spotify Connect, the hypothetical scenario of a musicians strike from streaming, Twitter's new commerce focus with the appointment of Nathan Hubbard, artists' demands on live audiences (for example the no mobiles/photos policy), Jay-Z premiering the "Holy Grail" video on Facebook, Trent Reznor's Spin interview (he wants $10), Shazam's new Twitter preview, the VMA sales lift for the artists performing (who got the most?) and what happened with Miley Cyrus, Vevo's deal with GEMA, Yahoo Music's redesign and Echo Nest back-end help and finally a cool project to get local U.S. libraries to help promote local music.

And you can find this week's show notes with links to all the stories on https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/c...

I really hope you enjoy the show, have a great week and 'till next time!

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This week's show is sponsored by media law firm Sheridans, at http://www.sheridans.co.uk, we thank them for their support of Digital Music Trends.
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Andrea Leonelli
http://www.digitalmusictrends.com
http://www.twitter.com/digitalmusictr...

Show timeline:

00:24 Introduction
01:55 Mike talks about how he went about building his relationship with Future Music Forum it Barcelona, we chat about the conference
04:13 Kevin updates us on the latest news about CD Baby
05:50 Spotify unveils Spotify Connect. Many speaker manufacturers have jumped on board. Will the general public pay attention?
09:50 What could Spotify do to raise customer awareness about this function? Will people even realize that the option exists?
11:50 Looking at a Billboard piece on a hypothetical Spotify strike, is it a feasible possibility?
17:00 Where will streaming position itself in US over the next few years, and will it cause another wave of the abandonment of CD?
24:10 Will Twitter's new commerce strategy help the music industry increase record/merchandising/ticket sales?
29:52 A few artists lately have been banning mobile phones from gigs, is it ok for artists to make such demands of fans? Is it even reasonable to think fans will stop carrying phones/cameras to gigs?
34:40 Jay-Z released his new video "Holy Grail" featuring Justin Timberlake exclusively on Facebook for the first 24 hours, was using Facebook as a video hosting platform a good move and what is Facebook's play here?
37:53 Short break featuring our sponsors Sheridans
40:50 Sales projections for the acts that performed during the VMA's. Does a boost on social media always lead to an increase in sales?
44:47 We chat a bit more about Nine Inch Nails after Trent Reznor's new interview with Spin.
53:40 Vevo manages to strike a deal with GEMA and is set to launch in Germany
56:10 Yahoo relaunched music.yahoo.com, also went through with a deal with the Echo Nest, a music intelligence service, hoping to improve their music database system. Given Yahoo!'s huge traffic how relevant is it for music and should artists pay attention as to their positioning on the platform?
59:42 Hypebot picks up on local NPR coverage about local libraries building streamable and downloadable collections or digital music from local artists, will this drive music communities in small to medium sized towns?
1:02:45 Outro