Cultura Voice

SCIMIA – Album “Little Men In A Giant World” Electro beat time… Label Plaza Mayor Company Ltd Distribution Sergent Major Company Ltd – The Orchard LITTLE MAN IN A GIANT WORLD The first part of Scimia, this album balances between modernity and retro sounds. Indeed, through 13 tracks bringing together the 3 previous EPs (Awe, Pow and Tré), Scimia takes us into very different universes, between the glitter of the disco years and the brutality of today's techno. The influence of the 80s is very present on songs like Gin, Little Man In A Giant World or Danger, based on disco rhythms and New Wave sounds, but this is only a small part of the album. Indeed, we can find much darker and aggressive pieces like Electronic Warfare, Fit Of Rage, but also softer and melodic titles like Bonobo ... And even a classic cover on the 12th title. Finally, Little Man In A Giant World is an album full of collaborations. It will include singer Syd Alexander on Little Man In A Giant Wo...

Merlin, the global digital rights agency for the world’s independent label sector, has appointed Jeremy Sirota as the organization’s new CEO. Sirota joins Merlin from Facebook’s Music Team. While at Facebook, Sirota led the company’s efforts to license and acquire recorded music rights from independent record labels and distributors around the world, thereby enabling social music features across Facebook, Instagram, Oculus and Messenger. Based in both New York and London, he succeeds Charles Caldas who served as Merlin’s CEO since the agency’s founding in 2007. Sirota, a widely respected and experienced executive in music and technology, ‘has a proven track record for negotiating complex and strategic commercial partnerships, and for driving digital innovation across the recorded music business,’ according to the release announcing his appointment. Sirota also previously held a number of senior positions at Warner Music Group, culminating in his appointment as SVP and Head ...

It’s always an interesting debate within record labels: with all the resources dedicated to ‘frontline’ A&R in the music business how much is new music actually worth versus catalog material – i.e. the stuff that’s already been recorded, and is already popular? Last month we discovered, via the IFPI, that global record company A&R expenditure – the money that goes on signing an act, then recording and mastering their music – has greatly escalated in recent years. According to the data, record labels spent $4.1bn on ‘A&R’ in 2017, significantly more than the equivalent figure in both 2015 ($2.8bn) and 2013 ($2.5bn). This isn’t the only eye-popping stat about A&R to arrive from the record industry of late. An RIAA-backed report, published earlier this year, showed that US-based major labels signed a total of 658 acts in 2017, up 12% on the same figure from 2014. It’s worth pausing on that number for a second: six hundred and fifty eight. It means ...

Last week India-based Gaana claimed to be the country’s first music streaming service to hit 100 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs). Gaana’s Chief Executive Officer Prashan Agarwal then added that the platform expects to reach 200m MAUs in the next two years. Although Gaana’s latest milestone is impressive, it’s not alone: another hugely popular service in India, JioSaavn, has also surpassed the 100m mark, can reveal. According to sources close to the company, JioSaavn currently has  104m  MAUs as of today (April 29). Those same sources claim this figure is enough for the platform to stake its own claim as ‘India’s largest music streaming service’. For comparison’s sake, Spotify, today (April 29) that it ended Q1 2019 with 217m MAUs globally, and over 2m users in India. Within those 217m MAUs, Spotify counts over 100m paying subscribers. The JioSaavn platform in its present-day form is the result of a merger between Saavn and rival...

Share price-watching Spotify investors have been starved of good news of late, but this week has brought them a welcome boost. The market cap of SPOT grew nearly 7% at the bell on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday (November 26) – largely, it appears, thanks to reports suggesting that the loss-making company’s expansion into India may be back on. The major labels have played hardball with licensing Spotify in India this year: Daniel Ek (pictured) is believed to have originally been plotting a soft launch in the market over the summer, which never arrived. But now, according to Variety and Di Digital, Spotify could launch in India “within six months”. (That target date should, coincidentally, arrive shortly after Spotify’s current deal with Universal Music Group comes up for renewal.) This is an understandably exciting prospect for Spotify’s Wall Street supporters. India’s 1.3bn population is approximately seven times bigger than the 191m monthl...

Universal Music Group is yet to sell any of its Spotify shares which, according to MBW’s calculations, are currently worth around $850m. That’s led to much discussion in the artist community about what will happen when UMG does bank its 3.5% stake in the streaming company. One question has been asked louder than any other: will Universal follow the lead of Sony Music and pay out its artists’ contractual share of this cash  without  withholding money owed by their individual unrecouped balances? Writing on Instagram to announce her new deal with UMG, Swift wrote: “There was one condition which meant more to me than any other deal point. As part of my new contract with Universal Music Group, I asked that any sale of their Spotify shares result in a distribution of money to their artists, non-recoupable.” “AS PART OF MY NEW CONTRACT WITH UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP, I ASKED THAT ANY SALE OF THEIR SPOTIFY SHARES RESULT IN A DISTRIBUTION OF MON...

SCIMIA – Ep “AWE” The Intersideral Ship Digital & Physical Distribution Label Plaza Mayor Company Ltd The Orchard Scimia - Ep "Awe" on Itunes   Welcome aboard the Intersidereal Ship of Scimia, pilot of a musical company with only instrument on board An old augmented reality battery (pads and MIDI keyboard). The music-loving Gorilla embarked on a journey of exploration at the confines of the known electro universe, temporal edition Included, with Giorgio Moroder as chief mechanic, Charles Darwin as helmsman and Charlton Heston as cook. The simple desire to push the use of its instrument of and the limits of play offered by its activities in the Rock bands pushed Orso Samson to build a Synthetic universes based on loops, samples and sequences. The result is festive, dancing, heady. The first steps of the monkey-drum were made to the rhythm of from C2C and stuntman to drive him today to develop a sound that surfs between Kavinsky, Mr OI...