Musik Radio Promotions is now partnering with World Music Stage Radio Top 10 Countdown.  

Musik Radio Promotions, a division of Musik and Film records, is now the premier worldwide radio promoter on the planet.  We reach 250,000+ stations in 180 countries. Our artists chart worldwide.  MRP artists will now be featured weekly on the World Music Stage Top 10 Countdown.

World Music Stage Radio Top 10 Countdown is to become the juggernaut of new music distribution. Quickly becoming the fastest growing digital and radio platform for independent music. We are all about indie music, the emerging artists that make the music, and the fans that support them. From the internet, to social media and World Music Stage Radio, we’re taking exciting musical talent from around the globe, channeling it to every corner of the world and straight to your playlist with a download that directly supports the artist.

Every Saturday expect to be amazed as you tune in to hear Hall of Fame radio performer Dave Pratt as he introduces World Music Stage Radio’s top 10 weekly picks, hosts interviewswith celebrity guests and emerging artists. Connect via radio and mobile/internet platforms as we get right to the good stuff; music from every genre, culture and country. Here is where you connect with the best new talent you’ve ever heard as their sound touches the world. World Music Stage Radio is your conduit to the world’s best new music and the platform for artists looking for their lucky break. Every well-known artist started ‘somewhere;’ we plan to be the ‘somewhere’ that is everywhere for every music artists out there who dared to believe in their dream. We believe in them and so will you! Join us in ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier!’

Musik Radio Promotions and World Music Stage are looking forward to presenting the best in Indie Music every week. Stay tuned!

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Last month I stood onstage at a venue in Washington, D.C., and performed “I Am a Song” for a distinguished audience that included nearly 50 members of Congress. They seemed to enjoy my performance, as well as those of the other performers, including the Zac Brown Band, Yolanda Adams, Ed Roland and Warren Haynes. Now, Congress has the chance to show it appreciates not just music, but music makers as well.

Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle, like Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen, have been steadfast champions for music creators because they understand the important role of music in our state and in our nation. With a review of copyright underway in Congress, it’s time for all legislators to support music’s role in our culture and economy.

A 2013 report from the Music City Music Council stated that the Nashville area has more music industry jobs than any other U.S. city in relation to total population and employment numbers. This comes as no surprise to us. Everyone in Nashville reading this is either in the music industry or knows someone who is — whether they be a songwriter, studio professional or publisher. And everyone reading this is likely a music fan.

As a leader in the global music industry and with more than 56,000 music industry-related jobs in the Nashville area alone, Americans look to Nashville to pave the way for the music industry. Nashville is the safe haven where creative professionals can gather, collaborate and find a home in one of the many local venues that span the city — from the Gulch to SoBro and the central business district — and with an increasing amount of welcomed music genres.

While Nashville is the leader in the music industry, this leadership is not being adequately reflected in our nation’s capital.

The day after I performed that song for legislators, we met with Congressional leaders in Washington, D.C., to discuss the issues facing the music community. What are we asking for? Reform of our music licensing laws.

Today, music licensing is controlled by a confusing patchwork of laws and regulations that have not kept up with the changes in the digital music marketplace. The result is that these outdated laws prevent music creators getting paid fairly for the music they make. Songwriters are regulated by the Department of Justice. Recording artists aren’t compensated when the billion-dollar radio industry uses their music. And producers and studio professionals aren’t protected in copyright law at all.

The reality is that Tennessee and the Nashville economy depend on copyright. The music community has been operating off of copyright rules that were last revised more than 40 years ago — long before today’s Top 100 songs, and back when I was first learning to play the guitar. Modernizing today’s copyright laws will only continue to benefit our city and our state.

Reps. Blackburn and Cohen have shown their support for all music creators by co-sponsoring the Fair Play Fair Pay Act, the Allocation for Music Producers Act (AMP Act) and the Songwriter Equity Act. But we need every member of Tennessee’s congressional delegation to come together and support the music community by co-sponsoring these bills. It should be easy for our representatives to support this legislation. which will improve the lives of the creators who are the backbone of the music industry.

Music professionals should not be overlooked, nor should their valuable contributions be diminished. No place understands this more than Nashville. Music is integral to who we are as Americans. It’s not only part of our soul, but our livelihood and national culture. We need more voices. We need harmony. Use the hashtag #SupportMusic when you are online to let everyone know that you love music and support music makers. And let your local representative know how important music is to you. Visit grammy.com/action to get involved.

Jim Lauderdale is a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter. He is the musical host of Music City Roots and co-hosts “The Buddy and Jim Show” on SiriusXM Radio.

Courtesy of The Tennessean. Musik and Film believes this is long overdue

The following primer comes from Robert Klembas of Rebeat Digital, a provider of digital distribution, royalty accounting, Music Enterprise Software (MES) solutions.  This is the first in a 12-part series.

No matter if you are completely new to this industry or have already gained some experience in the music business – the term “mechanical royalties” has either crossed your path already, or is definitely bound to do so (probably sooner than later).  And there is good reason for this piece of key industry lingo to be making headlines again and again over the past months.

But what exactly is this term that everybody in the know seems to be talking about?

Mechanical royalties: this definitely sounds legal, financial, somewhat technical even, and, well — probably very, very dull.  Yep.  There we go.  Oh, didn’t you want to clean up your desk for ages?  And mum, you were supposed to call her days ago right? Watering the flowers?  Perfect moment now, really.

But here’s the thing: fighting the urge to stop reading this might prove to be really, really beneficial for you.  And this is not meant in some airy intellectual, spiritual or metaphorical way.  It is meant in the sense of plain ol’ money.  Dough.  Green.  In other words: understanding the concept of mechanical royalties does not only raise your industry cred, but is truly of vital importance to your financial income in the music biz.  So if you have made it this far in the article, why not let the houseplants fight their lonely battle against thirst a few minutes longer and follow us down the rabbit hole? Here we go.

The Basics: what a mechanical license is – and what it isn’t.

If your first guess is that mechanical royalties (or “mechanicals”, as they are commonly referred to) have something to do with copyright, then you are spot on.  In music, any original combination of words and/or melody may be copyrighted.  While authors in the US need to fixate their original composition in a tangible medium, such as a recording or a notation on a piece of paper, works by authors in Europe and other parts of the world directly obtain copyright protection in the very moment of their creation, without any need to be transfixed or registered. Either way, with copyright being established, both the US Copyright Act and pretty much all international copyright laws grant the author of a copyrighted work several exclusive rights:

– to reproduce the work, i.e. to create physical or digital copies of it;

– to prepare derivative works, i.e. to create adaptations, parodies, translations;

– to distribute copies of the work to the public, i.e. to sell CDs, vinyl records, downloads, streams, etc.;

– to perform the work publicly, i.e. via public broadcast on TV, radio or good old live gigs;

– to display the work publicly (more common in fine art);

– to perform the work publicly by means of digital audio transmission.

Each of these exclusive rights leads to different streams of income that distinguish and shape whole segments of the music industry.  With regard to mechanical royalties, it is the rights of reproduction and distribution that our focus of interest is on.  Consequently, the right for these two uses is also known as mechanical right.

The term “mechanical,” by the way, dates back to when copies of a musical work were physically reproduced.  Think piano rolls, phonograms and the like.  Even though we are now selling songs in a wide range of digital ways, the term mechanicals has stuck, as it is essentially the same line of thinking that applies when selling a physical and digital copy of a song recording.  And since we’re at it: “royalties,” you might have guessed it, refers to the fact that whoever creates such reproductions of your songs will have to pay the copyright owner a fee in exchange for the right to do so.

An important exception to this is the use of your songs in TV shows, films or the next Hollywood blockbuster.  These are not covered by mechanical licenses, but instead require a so-called synchronization license, which needs to be obtained separately. The same goes for the public performance of a musical work, which requires a license for performing rights.  Finally, always keep in mind that a mechanical license is all about the composition, not the actual sound recording containing the same.  Reproducing and selling existing sound recordings requires a different kind of rights known as master rights.

“But wait a minute,” I hear you say, “this is MY work! What if I don’t want the next best guy to manufacture and sell copies of it?”  Right you are.  After all, copyright grants the owner a monopoly over time – and monopoly usually means having some sort of control over something.  So far, so good.  But unfortunately, monopolies also have the tendency to distort and even hamper the market, which often means less money to be made for all, including you.

To solve this dilemma, copyright law has come up with a clever way of making copyrighted works accessible for use, while at the same time protecting the rights of the owners.

Right of first use, compulsory licenses and statutory rates

One of the key benefits of obtaining copyright for a new original work is the right of first use.  As the name suggests, it provides the copyright owner with the authority to decide on whom, when and at which rate the right of the first commercial release of their song shall be granted.  This license of first use may also be withheld if the applicant, say, a record label, is unwilling to pay the amount demanded.  This is a direct effect of the monopoly mentioned earlier.   However, as so often in life, you can’t have the cake and eat it.  Once first use has been established and your work has been made available to the public, anyone can request a license to record, release and distribute their own version of your song.

Additionally, copyright law stipulates that you may not deny such requests – it is a compulsory license, meaning a license you must grant, no matter if you like it or not.  Fortunately, however, licensees applying for such a compulsory license have to meet important criteria in order for the license to be effective:

• they must serve a notice of intent, or NOI, to the copyright owner either before or within 30 days after distribution of the first recordings of the song; and

• in exchange for making use of the license, they must pay the copyright owner a licensing fee typically referred to as the statutory rate.

Failure to meet these criteria leads to the compulsory license not being effective, which, in turn, establishes copyright infringement — a serious issue not to be taken lightly.  As a matter of fact, however, it is not very common for a compulsory license to be disputed – after all, this is where the money starts rolling back in for the copyright holder.  But wait a minute— where can people interested in reproducing your work acquire a license in the first place?

Publishers and collecting societies

Managing all aspects involved in the business of mechanicals is a lot of administrative work.  Most authors therefore do not take over these jobs themselves, but license the copyright of their compositions over to publishers.  Clearing of mechanical licenses, collection of mechanical royalties and accounting and reporting of the same to the corresponding authors are some of the key services publishers perform in this field.  In exchange for their work, publishers typically take a 50% share in all income generated from the exploitation of a song’s copyright.  Consequently, this also includes income from mechanical royalties.

In order to streamline the administrative processes involved with these tasks, publishers, in turn, tend to license their copyrights to collecting societies or mechanical licensing agents. Companies and individuals seeking to acquire a license usually apply for the same via a web form or clearing service hosted by these agents.  In the US, one of the most important providers of mechanical licensing and mechanical royalty services is a privately-owned company named Harry Fox Agency (HFA).  On behalf of its publishers, HFA issues mechanical licenses to record labels and manufacturers that want to record and reproduce recordings of copyrighted musical compositions, as well as to various digital music services and distributors that want to clear mechanical licenses for the catalogue offered digitally.

In exchange for their service, HFA currently take a commission rate of 11.5% of all payments collected. In addition, they also charge fees to aggregators and digital music platforms for the service of mechanical license clearing. After deduction of their fee, HFA then pays out the mechanicals collected to the corresponding publishers, who in turn pay the authors’ share to their composers. Outside the US, publishers often license their work to their corresponding national collecting society. In a similar fashion, they offer to take over many of the aforementioned tasks involved with administering mechanical licenses.

Coming up next: bring on the dough!

Congratulations on making the first steps on our path down the slippery slope of mechanical royalties. You have now gained a good understanding of the basic concepts of mechanical licenses and what role they play in the music industry. “But come on now”, you say, “just how much money are we talking about really?” In the next installment, we will have a close look at the different kinds of sales that require mechanical licenses (physical, download, streaming, etc.) and the revenues you can expect from them. For now, make sure you have a look at the key takeaways from this introductory chapter. And hey, don’t forget about them plants.

Key terms presented:

• Mechanical license: a license that grants permission to record, reproduce and distribute copies of copyrighted musical compositions.

• Mechanical royalty: fee to be paid to copyright holders in exchange for obtaining a license to record, reproduce and distribute copies of copyrighted musical compositions.

• Right of first use: exclusive right of an original copyright holder to exercise the first commercial release of their copyrighted musical composition.

• Notice of Intent: notification to inform the copyright holder of the request to obtain a compulsory license.

• Compulsory license: a license to record, reproduce and distribute copies of copyrighted musical works without express consent of the copyright holder.

• Statutory rate: Mechanical royalty rate established by copyright law to be paid for the reproduction of a copyrighted musical composition.

• Harry Fox Agency (HFA): Agent that administrates mechanical rights on behalf of affiliated US music publishers.

Musik and Film  and Musik Radio Promotions  can consult and help you get your royalties

Musik Radio Promotions  Works with Radio all over the world. We work with The European Top 200 chart this week we had numerous artists we promoted in the Euro Chart check them out

It’s that time again where tens of thousands of aspiring musicians will wait for hours in line for a chance to perform for the producers of the Voice which gives them a chance to perform for the “blind auditions” in front of the celebrity judges which gives them a chance at making it on TV! Look mom, I’m on TV!

I’ve never been a huge fan of these singing contest shows for the simple fact that they aren’t meant to help musicians. They are meant for ratings. And The Voice has been great at garnering ratings (and helping the JUDGES careers out). I can count on one hand how many former Voice contestants have gone on to become stars. Actually, I can count on one fin. Because fins have no fingers… never mind. NONE. Just remember that getting into this thing.

Yes, former contestants and winners have gone onto (or continued their) successful music careers, but if you’re doing this to be a star, you’re in it for the wrong reasons. Hell, if you’re in music for fame and fortune, you might as well give up now. Music ain’t about that. And people see through false motivations and can sniff out inauthenticity a mile (or iPhone screen) away.

That being said, yes, The Voice has given many musicians’ careers bumps. You still have to be the one to drive your career. And you cannot (and should not ever) rely on others to run your entire career for you. Even if you win the whole damn show, you better surround yourself with people who believe in you, the artist, and want to stick with you for better or worse. Because, yes, right after you place well on the show there will be trophy chasers pounding down your door. You don’t want them. You want a manager that says “I’m not working with you because you were on The Voice, I’m working with you despite it.”

And you definitely can’t expect the labels to help you out.

“In that time, we do so much great shit for these singers, and then they go to a record label that I won’t mention. But they go to a record label that fucks it up. Record labels are — our business is the worst right now. No one knows what they’re doing.” – Adam Levine

So, with all that said and you still want to audition for the TV SHOW, (yes, it’s a TV show, not meant to make musicians famous, but meant to increase ad buys during said TV SHOW) then here is what you need to do to win your audition.

These points are taken from many conversations I’ve had with former contestants who were bound to secrecy by the show for fear of a $100,000 fine. No joke. So, obviously, I’m not mentioning names here.

Pick The Right Songs

For the open call auditions, they want you to prepare two songs a cappella. No tracks or instruments are allowed. Open calls move quickly because they’re just trying to weed out all of the crap “talent.” For the callbacks/private auditions you can have accompanists (or accompany yourself) and they want you to prepare three songs – at least one song without your instrument (you can sing to a track).

Pick songs that have been popular in the past 5 years. The reason for this is at the callback audition they require it. So you might as well prepare these in advance and hope you get a callback.

And make sure that at least two of your songs are up beat. If you’re going to the open call, make them both up beat. At the callback/private audition, you can have two up beat and one chill tune. But it’s best to keep them all upbeat. However, if you can sing “Hello” like Adele, then go for it.

The casting directors (judges/producers) are looking for authenticity. They’re looking for artists. Not musical theater performers. They are looking for, yes, strong voices, but this doesn’t mean you need to be a belter or have vocal acrobatics. Just show what you do best. Some of the top 10s of previous seasons didn’t sing like Christina Aguilera or Brian McKnight. They sang like themselves. If you sound like Ray Lamontagne, Lorde, Halsey or Norah Jones, great! Pick songs that work in your vocal style and range.

One of the contestants I spoke to said he made the mistake of choosing “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga for the prerecorded track to sing to. He used the karaoke version (which sounds just like the original). He bounced around singing Lady Gaga after he just finished a Coldplay song on acoustic guitar. The judges loved his Coldplay song, but the Lady Gaga threw them and they stopped him and said, we love you, but we’re going to pass because you’re too inconsistent

You have to have an established understanding of who you are as an artist. Not just a good singer. Home in on your style and your sound. Then show it off.

Dress The Part

It should go without saying, but you should dress like an artist. If you aren’t a working musician, this may seem awkward for you. If you work a 9-5 corporate job with a dress code and hang out with only your non-musical, non-artists friends, this will feel extra uncomfortable. Don’t go in there looking like a soulless corporate hack. They will judge you based on your look long before you open your mouth. Go in dressed like an artist. One that fits your personality. Your sound. Your style. If you don’t have an outfit in your wardrobe now, go shopping. Look up your favorite artists and study their wardrobe. You can use that as inspiration, but of course, make it your own.

Ladies, don’t show up in your tight, short clubbing dress. It’s unoriginal and this isn’t a beauty contest. Dudes, don’t show up in cargo shorts and Birkenstocks. Unoriginal.

Remember, they are looking for artists. Be an artist!

Own The Room

The show isn’t just casting good singers, they are casting good personalities. They are casting characters for their TV SHOW. Ok, I’m done hitting you over the head with that.

When you walk into the room, you want to OWN the room. You’ll have a bit more time at callbacks to shoot the shit with the casting directors/judges and you definitely should. And you want to initiate conversation. Don’t go in polite. Don’t go in like an arrogant asshole either. Go in confident and say something to them right away. It should feel and seem off the cuff. It should fit your personality and showcase what makes you special (aside from your voice of course). If you’re boisterous, be boisterous from the moment you walk in. Crack jokes, talk about what you just experienced in the hall. Be different. Be unique. If you have a dry sense of humor, tell a joke, quietly in the mic that works with your personality and the situation. Make them laugh. If you’re goofy be a goddam goofball. If you’re a tortured artist, then, you get the point. Don’t say the same boring thing everyone else is going to say “uh, thank you for your time.” Bleh!

You want to bring in good vibes with you. Relaxed vibes. You may have those butterflies raging battles on 3 fronts in your belly, but you want to project an air of confidence. It’s almost just as much how you carry yourself as it is how you sound. Of course confidence can’t replace a crappy voice, but it will help.

At callbacks/private auditions there will be mics, stands, keyboard, monitors, cords for you to plug your guitar in. Your gear should work. Triple check it the day of. Replace you batteries in your guitar. Change your strings. Make sure the pre recorded song you have (for callbacks or the private audition) is pulled up on your (charged) iPhone and that your phone is in airplane mode or Do Not Disturb so you don’t get a phone call that interrupts your performance. Don’t Snap the 4 hour waiting process only to drain your phone to its death – unable to play the track you’re supposed to sing to. Maybe bring a battery pack with you just in case.

Know Your Story

If you make it past the open call and past the callbacks, you will be sent to “casting” directly following your callback vocal audition. This is where they will bring you to a room with a camera and a casting director and they will ask you questions about your life. This is for them to find the most interesting people with the most interesting stories. You know all those backstory montage intros before many of the contestants’ blind auditions? These come from the casting session. Make sure you have at least one really interesting thing about your life: Tragedy, things you’ve overcome, interesting family history, current job or volunteer organization. Something that sets you apart. What is your “story.” Because they want to know. And if you don’t have one it will be that much more difficult for them to justify bringing you on the show.

Are you a working musician? What’s the most interesting show you’ve had. Best? Worst? Why are you a musician? What kinds of shows do you play? How long have you been performing?

Is your great uncle John Coltrane? Is your husband Andy Grammer (shoutout to Aijia!). Is your daughter autistic? Do you work 3 jobs to support your family? Are you a teacher? A camp counselor? These are all interesting things to talk about. Come up with the most interesting thing about your life before you get to the casting room and you’ll have a much easier time talking about it and winning over the producers when they watch the tape.

The Private Audition

Most of the working musicians I know have been invited to a private audition (as have I). I believe it happens in every city they hold an open call. The way the producers find musicians to invite to the private auditions is mostly through YouTube. And they aren’t just looking for YouTube stars with millions of plays or subscribers. They’re just looking for good talent. It should go without saying, but if you’re a working musician you need some great videos of you performing on your YouTube channel. It’s also helpful to have a BandCamp profile (easiest way to search for artists in designated locations) and of course a Facebook Page.

How To Rehearse

Now that you have the logistics of your audition worked out, you still need to prep! You should rehearse your songs until you can sing them in your sleep. You should film yourself performing them and critique your video. Setup two cameras (phones), one close on your face and one pulled out to see your entire body. If you’re not a veteran performer, it will take a bit of work to look and feel natural performing. So you’ll need to work extra hard at this.

Don’t fake the performance, though. The judges will be able to tell. Feel the music. Be the music. Get to the core meaning of the song. You should ooze personality when you’re performing. Whatever your personality is.

What’s the old joke? How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice practice practice! Same is true for Team Adam!

Ari Herstand is a Los Angeles based singer/songwriter and the creator of the music biz advice blog Courtesy of Digital Music News 

Now if you don’t want to audition for The Voice . Musik and Film can help you with a record label distributed by Sony , Worldwide radio promotion by Musik Radio Promotions  PR and all the tools you need to make it as a Indie artist

In Luke Bryan’s 2014 smash “Play It Again,” magic happens when a girl’s favorite hit of the day drifts across the airwaves and out of pickup truck speakers on a breathless Georgia summer night. Bryan’s been waiting all evening to make his move, and his tan-legged crush has been waiting just as long to hear this one song until — here it is. She lights up, takes Bryan’s hand and the pair dance and kiss through the fade-out. “Play it again,” she says on repeat, and Bryan would if he could. “I’d give that DJ my last dime,” he croons. But all he can do is keep “scannin’ AM, FM, XM,” desperately hoping for an encore.

The premise doesn’t seem so ridiculous to Scott Borchetta. “[Fans’ and artists’] relationship with country radio, it’s still the Number One source of discovery in country music,” the Big Machine Label Group CEO tells Rolling Stone Country. All Access Music Group country editor and veteran radio programmer R.J. Curtis echoes Borchetta. “From every piece of research that I’ve seen and reported on, it’s still the most important methodology for an artist to get mass appeal,” he says. “Country fans rely on radio to discover new music.”

The numbers back up those claims. According to a 2014 study conducted by market research and media polling firm Edison Research, 75 percent of listeners discover new music on terrestrial radio, trumping SiriusXM (20 percent) and Spotify (18 percent). That’s certainly true for country music. Per Nielsen, it is the “top national format among Millennials and Generation X’ers.”

According to an April 2014 story in The New York Times: “Country has been one of radio’s biggest success stories over the last decade. While the number of country stations has remained relatively stable over that time, at about 2,100, country’s share of the audience has been gradually increasing, with about a 15 percent share among people 12 and up, according to Nielsen.” In short, more people are listening to country radio stations.

“We dedicated all of 2014 to radio,” Scotty McCreery tells Rolling Stone Country. “This is a relationship business; it’s all about folks being friends.” Cultivating and maintaining those relationships paid off for McCreery; the 21-year-old 2011 American Idol winner’s 2014 single “Feelin’ It” cracked Billboard’s Country Airplay chart’s Top 10.

“Radio is truly the reason I am allowed to do what I do,” Chase Bryant, a new act on Red Bow Records, tells Rolling Stone Country. “They are the gatekeepers. Without country radio, you’re not going anywhere. It’s all kind of up to them sometimes.”

Though Swift identifies as a pop singer now, it’s country radio that made her a superstar. While reaching her stratosphere of success might seem ambitious for country hopefuls like Rhett or Bryant, becoming bona fide arena headliners isn’t such a lofty goal. Each spent the last couple years working their way up bills topped by the likes of Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean and Brantley Gilbert. Even in these, the music industry’s darkest economic days, Nashville is producing dozens of relatively young arena headliners, including Eric Church, Miranda Lambert, Blake Shelton, Jake Owen, Lady Antebellum and Florida Georgia Line, who headline a sold-out show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden this week.

“Live Nation recently reported that audiences for its country concerts grew 50 percent last year to seven million,” The New York Times noted in April 2014, “and the company said that it now views country as one of its two fastest-growing genres, along with electronic dance, the hot youth trend of the moment.”

One thing country’s stadium- and coliseum-filling stars — from recent graduates Bryan and Aldean to veterans like Keith Urban and Kenny Chesney — have in common is they all arrived at that point by way of radio airplay. And most wouldn’t have gotten that airplay were they not on a major label. In that sense, country radio and the Music Row machine are the last stronghold of the old music business, where major labels and terrestrial radio can launch superstars who go platinum with first-week sales, and fresh faced-singers can work up from clubs to arenas in a matter of a few record cycles.

Musik Radio Promotions can get you the indie artist heard and played around the world in 180 countries

In 2012, the duo scored a Number One with their wistful country-rocker “Angel Eyes.” Three years later, after three subsequent singles stalled before cracking the Top 30, the band was dropped from Sony. Now, by Overton’s metric, they don’t exist. Or rather, by country radio’s rubric, they don’t exist. At least not to radio listeners.

But part of the programmers’ job as gatekeepers is to be ahead of trends, when they’re rising and when they’re falling. And if country radio’s hive-mind is growing as cynical of bro country as its critics, the way the tea leaves are reading doesn’t bode well for the still-stadium-packing sub-genre. “As we look at 2015, I think we’re entering into a period where we’re not going to see a lot of that [bro country] stuff anymore,” Curtis says. “I think everybody is trying to be aware of that [paradigm shift] — they’re trying to see what else is coming down [the pike] and what else could be successful for them.”

Musik and Film sees a shift back to Country Rock, Southern Rock and Original Country. A shift where a Indie artist can get airplay and get heard. MAF’s division Musik Radio Promotions gets airplay in 180 countries for its artists

Courtesy of Time

Taylor Swift’s recent decision to yank her music off of Spotify, the online music streaming service used by more than 50 million people, has become the latest episode in the battle over the music industry’s diminishing profits.

One central mystery in the drama: just how much do artists make when their songs are played on the service? We used Spotify’s stated payout range – $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream – to calculate how much the top 50 songs streamed globally earned artists in 2014. See the bar charts below for each song. The payout range represents the top and bottom figures for each song as described by Spotify’s latest publicly available formula.

Spotify provided its “per stream” range in 2013 in an attempt to you release and oush your music  satisfy curiosity about the company’s royalties formula, which factors in total revenue made by Spotify and total streams across the site, both unavailable to the public. Regardless of the exact per stream payout each month, Swift’s chart-topping single “Shake It Off” earned more than any other song in October. But having spent only 7 weeks on Spotify, Swift’s single can’t compete with the top 20 best-paying songs from the first 10 months of 2014, like Calvin Harris’s “Summer,” which could have netted the Scottish singer $1.7 million.

Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has said that since the company was founded in 2008 it has paid out $2 billion to record labels and publishers, half of that total in the last year alone. In a recent blog post, he said that an artist of Swift’s size could earn $6 million by streaming her music on Spotify in the past year.

When contacted by TIME last week, a Spotify spokesperson said Swift had earned $2 million off global streaming of her music in the past year. Swift’s record label, Nashville-based Big Machine, said last week that it had received exactly $496,044 for domestic streaming of Swift’s music over the past 12 months.

While few are going to fear that Swift is about to go begging, the fact that the country’s best-selling artist believes Spotify devalues her work could have a major influence on whether other artists stick with the service.

“I’m always up for trying something,” Swift told TIME about joining Spotify. “And I tried it and I didn’t like the way it felt. I think there should be an inherent value placed on art. I didn’t see that happening, perception-wise, when I put my music on Spotify. Everybody’s complaining about how music sales are shrinking, but nobody’s changing the way they’re doing things.”