My Top Music Tech Launches Of 2015 – Nick Rizzuto, Fame House

We've been asking some of the new music industry's best and brightest for their top 2015 launches in music tech. Here, Nick Rizzuto, the Marketing Manager at digital marketing agency Fame House, shares his top 5.

Nick Rizzuto is Marketing Manager at digital marketing agency Fame House, where he helps couple new technology to the needs of the agency’s many music & entertainment clients. His top 5 most significant innovations in music tech for 2015 are:

Periscope – Remember that this time last year, Periscope wasn’t yet a thing (as proven by this Google Image search of the word ‘Periscope’ last December). In 2014, the primary peer-to-peer live streaming app was FaceTime. There were one-to-many solutions like Ustream or Google Hangout or Twitch, but Periscope removed the perception of this type of live streaming as a desktop-native experience. It brought to mobile devices a type of interaction that was previously reserved for venues and stages. Of course, Facebook’s forthcoming Live product, an unforeseen VR solution, or a yet-to-be-launched dark horse could easily prove to be the dominant choice for artists in 2016 and beyond.
Streaming Personalization (Spotify’s Discover Weekly & Pandora’s Thumbprint Radio) – Spotify’s Discover Weekly is a godsend for existing users but the streaming personalization wars have officially begun with the introduction of Pandora’s new Thumbprint Radio. A custom machine-learning radio station that never ends and is built based on your specific lifetime listening habits? This is what Beats 1 should have been from the get-go. Content exclusivity will continue to be a conversation in 2016 but streaming personalization is where users will be won.
Patreon’s Mobile App – It’s early days, but I’m eagerly optimistic about the newly-launched mobile experience for Patreon. Although far from novel features, the ability to receive push notifications with artist updates and to then interact with artists and other patrons from your phone unleashes the platform, which was previously constrained to a desktop-only portal and email notifications. Music may not currently be among the most-backed categories on Patreon, but the platform is certainly an ideal mechanism for artists to galvanize fans and crowdsource the creation of art on an on-going basis. Now with an accompanying mobile app and the reduced friction that the app allows, I’m looking forward to more artists seeing the light and adapting Patreon as a direct-to-fan distribution mechanism. (Disclaimer: I am a member of Team Amanda Palmer and work on her digital operations as part of my role at Fame House, so this could be seen as a bias. You could choose to discount my endorsement of Patreon for that reason, but you’d be wrong!)
Hive – In 2010 it was newsworthy that OK Go had a store that incorporated TopSpin E4M widgets. Now, “action-for-media” solutions that require users to perform some action (such as subscribing to your email list or following you on social media) are used daily, and are much improved and plentiful – with options ranging from Unlock.fm to Stereoload to Show.co to Toneden. All of these platforms have nuanced differences, approaches, and benefits, but Y Combinator alumnus Hive.co is the superior choice across the board because of its flexibility and unprecedented, CRM-style fan analytics profiles. For these reasons, Hive is increasingly coming up as the solution to many a digital marketing problem that we face every day at Fame House.
Jukely – Technically Jukely’s pivot into becoming a “Netflix for Concerts” subscription service happened in 2014, but, even at the end of 2015, the platform still feels like it’s a well-kept-secret beta. This year’s millions of dollars in funding, word-of-mouth virality, and love from users on social media all seem to imply that there is a healthy amount of user growth happening. Anecdotally, Jukely has several avid early adopters amongst the music nerd-ridden team here at Fame House. If Jukely continues on their current trajectory, spends their funding well, and perhaps reduces the cost to users, the platform could be well on its way to becoming a staple amongst avid fans of live music.