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blockchain ticketing

Ticket Fraud: Is Blockchain the Future of Ticketing?

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Imagine you are trying to buy tickets to a sold-out show. Your only option is to buy on the secondary market. You bought the ticket for three times the face value and there are no guarantees the ticket you bought is actually a valid ticket. It’s now the night of the show and you get to the door, and your ticket doesn’t scan. This type of fraud (ticket scams) is the worst feeling for any music fan. You cannot get into the show, and even worse, you cannot get your money back from the scammer because they have disappeared. How does the music industry combat fraud at this point? The answer may actually come in the form of blockchain ticketing.

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best party speakers

Most Bang for Your Buck, Best Party Speakers for Summer 2021

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Discovered some great tunes you want to share with the world this summer? As certain parts of the world begin opening up and people can party together again, you might be on the hunt to upgrade your sound systems. 6AM scoured the internet to bring you some of the best options for party speakers. What’s best? No aux cord is necessary. Groove to your music through Bluetooth this summer in various environments and at various price points.

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Steve Lawler COVID-19

Steve Lawler Reflects on COVID-19 As An Opportunity to Reset

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There’s no running from Coronavirus (COVID-19) even as much as you try to avoid the media and news outlets. COVID-19 dominates conversations and headlines, but for U.K. electronic artist Steve Lawler COVID-19 hit a little too close to home. While he couldn’t be tested, Steve Lawler exhibited COVID-19 symptoms back in March and went into self-isolation before the U.K. government announced a national lockdown. “I was in lockdown three weeks before everyone else. […] I’m getting to spend more time with my children than I ever did,” says Lawler over the phone.

Now as some parts of the world are entering three months of social distancing, Steve Lawler sees how COVID-19 continues to impact the dance music industry: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

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Electronic Beats Explores How Tech is Changing DJing With Richie Hawtin, Laurent Garnier, Rebekah and More

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Telekom’s Electronic Beats’ latest video mini-documentary explores how tech is changing the world of DJing by drawing from the opinion and experiences of some of the world’s top DJs in techno and house.

Key players of the industry such as Richie Hawtin, Laurent Garnier, Ellen Allien, Steffi and Rebekah were tapped on the shoulder to provide their insights on the subject, thus able to provide a perspective that, in some cases, spans over three decades of personal experience.

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“The Bitcoin for Music: How Choon Is Disrupting The Music Industry” an Interview with Co-Founder Bjorn Niclas

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Choon is a music streaming service and digital payments ecosystem powered by the Ethereum blockchain and designed to solve some of the music industry’s most fundamental problems.

A venture co-founded by partners Gareth Emery, John Watkinson, Bjorn Niclas, and Matt Hall, Choon is set to be launched next year. While it is considered a music startup, it also has a clear component in financial technology since it aims to try solving many of the issues many artists have right now with streaming services utilizing cryptocurrency-based solutions.

Choon will be built on the Ethereum blockchain, something Emery says he has been enthusiastic about since 2013. In addition, the service will have its own payment token called “NOTES” and a feature called “Smart Record Contracts,” which would presumably help create more effective contracts and, according to Choon, replace many of the procedures for licensing and contracting at present.

Choon promises to distribute half of the total overall NOTES token supply directly to artists over the next five years through a system called streaming for mining, plus an ambitious 80% returns for artists from streaming packages revenues, higher than the standard 70%, which has been decreasing as per recent negotiations with major labels by companies such as Spotify. While it may be seen as a concern, many contend that the real problem lies in where the money is going. Labels, distributors, publishers, artists are splitting up majority of the revenues, while the writers, engineers and producers get the scraps . Also many of the contracts are so opaque and complicated it is hard to know if one is being paid fairly.

We sat down with co-founder Bjorn Niclas to learn more about Choon and its Beta launch.

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SoundCloud Allegedly Doesn’t Have Enough Money To Survive Past 80 Days

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Reports have begun surfacing that SoundCloud may truly be on its last leg.

Truth be told, things haven’t looked well for the streaming company for the entirety of 2017. Despite still being hugely popular and ahead of its competitors as far as some of its offerings go, the company has had financial problems for years now and they have only been getting worse. This resulted in 40 percent of its staff getting laid off last week and statements from its founders that it may not have enough money to see it through the year.

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Behind the Fake News: The mp3 Is NOT Dead, It’s More Alive Than Ever

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In the past few weeks you have likely read several articles, or at least headlines, proclaiming that the mp3 format is dead or will die soon. Some of these even came from authoritative sources in terms of music and technology, leading many to blindly believe that the death of mp3 was in fact real, and leaving many others to wonder what would happen as a result.

Resident Advisor stated that the “era of mp3 is over,” while those at Fossbytes announced that the “mp3 format is officially dead,”  and elsewhere at Gizmodo they announced that “developers of mp3 have officially killed it.” All these headlines, just like the countless others who followed suit with the hasty announcement, rushed to declare the death of the most popular audio compression format in circulation without examining all the facts. Interestingly enough it appears that they all regurgitated the same sensationalistic headline without properly reading the original statement of the Fraunhofer Institute and, above all, without confronting it against the sheer reality of the mp3’s role in today’s technologic world.

First of all, let’s examine what really happened: the only recent news, if we can really call it such since it’s been known for years, is that the latest American patents related to the mp3 format expired on April 16th, while in Europe they had all expired by the end of 2012. A few days later, on the 23rd of April, the Fraunhofer Institute, the former patent holder, published an official press release according to which the license for the mp3 format will be closed as the institute focuses its efforts on the AAC format.

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SoundCloud’s Strange Sex Bot Spam Market

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If you’re a SoundCloud user it’s likely you’ve been at the receiving end of some peculiar sexual advances via the platform’s private message system.

Are they real people or are they just bot messages? Does anyone actually click the links? How much money do they make? These are just some of the questions you may have asked yourself after receiving a few of these strange messages.

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Rebekah Hits Back To Accusations That She Is Faking Her DJ Sets

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Another weekend has gone by and here we are again having to witness an artist having to provide rebuttals for accusations that they are faking their DJ sets.

While it’s not clear if the nature of the accusations are sexist in nature, we cannot deny that we have not seen it all before with Nina Kraviz, The Black Madonna, Nastia and others: the mansplaining and sexist comments of hundreds if not thousands who are quick to get to a keyboard to accuse female artists of not producing their own tracks or faking their DJ sets. This week it was the turn of Rebekah, and it wasn’t the first time she has had to defend herself either.

The British techno producer and DJ, who is in the midst of her Fear Paralysis Album Tour which sees her play live hybrid sets all over Europe and North America, had to take to her Facebook profile to fend off accusations of fake DJ sets. “So yet again it’s been brought to my attention that people think that I am fake djing in my sets. Firstly I will explain yet again that I play with Traktor with four channels open, to do this they are all beat gridded and synced, yes I use sync because I would rather spend time doing more interesting things like layering and quickly switching between tracks than beat matching, anyone says shit about this I will block you,” she began, before diving into a more in-depth explanation, complete with live video recording, exposing the lies behind the accusations received.

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Wheel: A Record Player Without Needle

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A record player without needle? It’s 2017 and it seems like even that is possible, as Wheel introduces a minimalistic record player devoid of an external needle arm.

Truth be told, the Wheel player that is being manufactured by Miniot doesn’t look much like a record player at all. Its simplistic approach means that there are no extremities or components beside the base the record sits on.

How does the record play then? Wheel has explained that the vinyl is able to be played thanks to an “invisible” needle that sits below the record, allowing for the vinyl to be exposed with no obstruction. The Wheel can also be hung vertically on a wall as decoration, and can be played while in this position also.

The Wheel will retail for a not-so-modest price of $850 / £806, although those backing the Kickstarter campaign can benefit from a 30% discount. Nearly $160,000 has been pledged thus far, surpassing the original $53,000 goal by leaps and bounds.

 

 

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