journovampire writes: Pandora has revealed that it’s paying a 10, 000th of a dollar more to music labels and artists than it was in 2014. From the article: “Pandora has revealed that its royalty payments to SoundExchange, the US licensing body which collects performance royalties on behalf of record labels and artists, have just increased by 8%. The news was confirmed in a call with investors following Pandora’s Q1 fiscal results announcement on Thursday (April 23), in which it posted a three-month net loss of $48.3m. In what Pandora CEO Brian McAndrews called a scheduled annual step-up, Pandora has from January 1 been paying out an average $0.0014 per ad-funded stream and $0.0024 per premium stream to SoundExchange.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Pandora Paying Artists $0.0001 More Per Stream Than It Was Last Year
Even if making digital music has never been easier for beginners, a lot of the work DJs and producers do remains relatively opaque to less experienced people. A new music format could help change this. Read more… 
rDouglass writes: MuseScore, the open source desktop application for music notation, has released version 2.0 for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. This release represents the culmination of four years of development, including technical contributions from over 400 people. In addition to a completely new UI, top features include linked parts (good for pieces with many instruments), guitar tablature, flexible chord symbols, and fret diagrams. The program integrates directly with the MuseScore.com online library of scores, and music written with the application can be displayed and played using the MuseScore mobile app. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Flickr user Elizabeth has a great-looking desktop that puts her music front and center. Plus, it’s really easy to set up. Here’s how she did it. Read more… 
journovampire writes with this story about how much artists make on Spotify. “Pandora founder Tim Westergren has claimed that the company is paying out ‘very fair’ sums to artists, despite its per-stream royalty weighing in at just one sixth of Spotify’s. The digital personalized radio platform has previously gone on-record as saying that it pays music rights-holders approximately $0.0014 for each play of their tracks: Westergren blogged in 2013 that Pandora pays ‘around $1, 370 for a million spins’. That’s around 80% smaller than Spotify’s per-stream payout, which officially stands somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
BlackBerry is trying to destroy the best thing it ever made. Not the line of hardware keyboard phones, or the less-relevant-than-ever BBM service. I’m talking about the music video. That mind-blowingly earnest and inexplicable REO Speedwagon cover about BlackBerry 10 . It’s gone now. What the fuck, BlackBerry? Read more… 
Jay-Z is buying the Scandinavian music streaming company Aspiro—which currently runs to music services—for $56 million, in a bid to take on Spotify. Read more… 
Pro Tools is the industry standard for digital audio production, but if you wanna get with the pros, you’ve always had to pay. No longer! Now, there’s a free version of the software targeted at beginners, and that rules. Read more… 
Audiophiles have a laundry list of reasons why you should be buying your music on vinyl, but with DJ Qbert’s new album Extraterrestria, aspiring turntablists now have a reason to skip the MP3s too. Using printed MIDI technology from a company called Novalia, the artwork in the vinyl’s sleeve doubles as a DJ controller for Algoriddim’s djay iOS app. Read more…