Weekly Round-Up from Incentify 👋🏻
This week, we exclusively talk about Gene Simmons, the frontman of 70s Rock Band KISS, as he lashes out against the Music Industry 🤬
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Happy Friday everyone!
This newsletter has become more of a weekly, rather than a daily affair, but as long as you’re here, let’s keep this thing going 🤘🏻
It has been another interesting week in Music
💽 Kanye West FINALLY dropped his new album ‘Donda’
🦉Drake put up billboards all over America 🇺🇸for his album ‘Certified Lover Boy’
🎧 European EDM Festival Tomorrowland launched their own Record Label
🎥 YouTube Music crossed 50 Million paid subscribers.
However, today I’ll be talking about Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and $400 million worth legendary frontman of the 70s band ‘KISS’: Gene Simmons 🎸
![Gene Simmons condemns "evil" politicians, continues support for COVID-19 vaccine mandate](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1464080f-d6c6-4b0f-b37a-fa445f3944b5_2000x1270.jpeg "Gene Simmons condemns "evil" politicians, continues support for COVID-19 vaccine mandate")
Before we get into that, a quick update on our end at Incentify 📝
The engineering team pulled through big time this week, and we have all of our functionalities back upon the application.
What can a user do now?
✅ Sign up using Google/Facebook/Apple
✅ Set their name/username/Bio
✅ Link Spotify/Apple Music Accounts
✅ Import all their Playlists and convert them into Clubs
✅ Share these Club links with anyone
✅ Discover other Clubs on their feed
This is how the home screen looks like as of now 👇🏻
If you’ve ever faced an issue of sharing a playlist with someone only to find that they use another streaming platform, our platform-agnostic clubs have got you covered 🦾
Bored of algorithmic suggestions by streaming apps?
Incentify’s ‘Discover Feed’ will sort you out with playlists from people sharing your music taste, from around the world 🌎
Interested to check this out for yourself?
DM us on Instagram or Twitter, or just drop a comment here and we’ll get in touch with you!
Moving onto the topic for today…
Gene Simmons rips into the Music Industry 🤬
72-year old American rockstar better known by his stage name- ‘The Demon’, Gene Simmons ripped into the music industry in an explosive interview with the magazine ‘Us Weekly’, earlier this week.
The outspoken KISS star is known to rile up other musicians in the industry but now has taken aim at illegal downloaders for "robbing" new artists of the chance to make a proper living from their music.
Why does this interest me so much?
Isn’t this yet another example of a ‘has-been’ in the music industry, trying to relive the glory days of Music?
Well, yes and no.
Simmons made some really interesting points when trying to explain how different the music industry is now 👇🏻
"By and large, new artists will never have the chance that we got, because record companies would give us millions of dollars — once we got successful — as an advance, non-recoupable, with a royalty system and all that.
"And so we didn't have to work day jobs. Now if you're a new band, you can't make a living because all the freckle-faced college kids — who, by the way, hate me — because what I'm saying is it's robbery.
You're robbing by downloading and filesharing that music. It doesn't affect me; our band came before when it was a real business.
Basically, Simmons spoke about the time when because Record Labels were making so much money selling albums for around $10 a piece, they could afford to give multi-million dollar advances to successful bands like KISS 💰
Those bands did not have to worry about their next pay-check, and could simply focus on creating new music.
On who is to be blamed for this, Simmons continued to talk about how the failure of Record Labels to act on early music download websites such as Napster led to this spiral effect of the Music Industry falling into a dud for more than a decade.
Check out a snippet of his interview, it makes for a fascinating look into the mind of one of the most successful rock stars on the planet 👇🏻
Our take on this?
Simmons makes some valid points about the value of music being eroded with streaming ‘commoditizing’ it but ultimately has failed to appreciate the beauty of the free markets.
Yes, it isn’t quite like the heydays of the 70s, 80s & 90s when there were big bucks to be made in music, but blaming streaming for the decline is an ill-informed call.
If anything, streaming pulled the industry from out of an abyss, after it faced an uncertain slow death in the decade between 2001 and 2011, when music piracy was at its peak 📈
Today, any artist is able to leverage the internet and build their own audience using multiple social media platforms, something which was exclusively controlled by the Record Labels back in the day.
So, is everything perfect right now?
Far from it.
Artists still struggle to monetize their work if they go independently, and Record Labels are bound by the copyright laws made for the analog music world and choked into the digital streaming era of today.
I’m personally bullish on Web 3.0 and Blockchain to disrupt this space, and at this point, it might sound like a cliche, but that’s the very reason for the existence of Incentify too.
More on that as we keep building🛠
Have a good weekend guys 🍻
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