But if you talk to people who actually manage bands, they tend to say the same thing: These services are great for concert-goers, but few of the apps really deliver what artists need, which is complex analytics on large data sets of fans.

With Pandora’s artist management platform, called AMP, the company hopes to be that service. Launched in October, the software allows bands to see where their listeners are located and provides to artists detailed data about how fans respond (thumbs up, thumbs down) to different songs. This information can help with tour planning.

On Wednesday at the Code/Media conference Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren announced a new feature which is likely to excite artists, especially smaller ones with no advertising budgets to promote their tours. It’s a feature called Artist Audio Messaging and it allows artists to speak directly to their fans.

An artist can record a short message to be injected into playlists based around their music. He or she could use it to tell fans in a specific city about an upcoming show, or simply thank them for listening. Pandora, which makes the majority of its $712 million in annual revenue from ads, has no plans to monetize this feature. It’s more of a way to curry favor with artists. Westergren hinted that this is the start for a whole customer relationship management, or CRM, platform for artists.

Pandora P has an advantage over its competitors because of the size of its listener base and how many hours they listen. The company had 81.5 million active listeners as of last year, who listened to 20 billion hours worth of music in 2014. (Spotify is hot on Pandora’s tail with 60 million active users.) In an interview, Westergren said Pandora’s large set of data, which includes 50 billion thumbs up and thumbs down signals, is one of its most-overlooked advantages over competitors.

The news comes as Pandora experiences stronger competition than ever from iHeartRadio, YouTube’s streaming service, and Apple’s radio service. Meanwhile, the company missed its earnings expectations last quarter, sending its shares into a downward spiral. Westergren said that, like many times in Pandora’s 10-year life span, this is just another period that Pandora will have to weather. “There have been at least 20 ‘Pandora-killers,'” Westergren said in an interview. The only time the company saw a blip in the growth of its listening hours was when Apple’s iTunes radio service launched, he says. But even that quickly went away.

Happy Friday! After a tumultuous week in the markets, U.S. stocks look set to open down slightly on this last trading day of January. Burger joint Shake Shack makes its market debut today, and on the earnings front Dow component Chevron CVX reports results. Earlier, toy giant Mattel MAT said sales of its iconic Barbie doll fell for a third consecutive year in 2014. On Thursday evening Amazon AMZN beat Wall Street’s earnings expectations, but Google’s GOOG earnings and revenue missed expectations.

Here’s what else you need to know about today.

1. How fast did the U.S. economy grow at the end of 2014?

The Commerce Department released its first estimate of fourth-quarter growth this morning, and it wasn’t as strong as hoped. The U.S. economy grew by a 2.6% annual pace in the fourth quarter of 2014, down from the 5% pace seen in the third quarter. Economists had estimated that gross domestic product would grow at a 3.2% annual rate from October to December.

2. The State of the League.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell delivers his annual State of the League address in Arizona today. The football league has had a rough year facing a spat of domestic abuse scandals and the most recent “Deflategate,” where the Patriots were accused of using footballs that were inflated lower than required. Goodell will be answering questions on both those topics, as well as looking forward to what’s ahead. The Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks will take place on Sunday at 6:30 p.m.

3. Obama unveils biomedical research program.

President Obama is set to announce a new “precision medicine initiative” that includes plans to collect genetic information on one million Americans to support scientific research. Scientists can use the reams of genetic data to help develop drugs and treatments that address specific patient characteristics. It could eventually help doctors better match the drug that would be most effective for each patient, what’s more called individualized medicine. President Obama is asking for a starting sum of $215 million as part of his budget request for the upcoming fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

4. The earnings continue -- and an stock debut.

Chevron, Honda, and Mattel all reported their quarterly earnings this morning. Honda took a hit from the Takata airbag recalls. The Japanese automaker’s net profit fell 15.1% from a year earlier despite growing revenue. Mattel’s net profit fell 59% to $149.9 million for the quarter as sales of it’s trademark Barbie dolls plunged 12%. Lower oil prices are expected to weigh on Chevron’s fourth-quarter earnings when it reports this a.m.

Also in company news: Shake Shack starts trading today on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "SHAK" after raising $105 million. It priced its initial public offer at $21 a share last night, well above the expected range of $17 to $19 a share.

5. Spotify could be worth nearly $8 billion.

The music streaming service is looking to raise about $500 million in venture capital, according to the Financial Times. Spotify brought Goldman Sachs GS on board for its latest funding round, which could boost its value to as much as $8 billion. The private funding means Spotify is likely to put off an IPO, which many anticipated would come this year. Spotify’s current investors include Napster-founder Sean Parker, Technology Crossover Ventures and Sony Music. The streaming service last raised money at the end of 2013, when it secured $250 million.

By TIME staff

Spotify and Sony Network Entertainment International are launching this spring a premium music service called PlayStation Music, offering over 30 million songs as background music to PlayStation games.

The service will initially only be accessible on Sony SNE game consoles and Xperia devices worldwide, reaching 64 million players logged into the PlayStation Network (PSN).

"This partnership represents the best in music and the best in gaming coming together," Sony president Andrew House said in a statement. "We're thrilled to make Spotify the foundation of our strategy with PlayStation Music."

PlayStation Music will replace Sony's Music Unlimited service, which will close in 19 countries March 2015. However, Music Unlimited subscribers will benefit from a month of free access to PlayStation Music until March 29, 2015. And Sony, which posted lackluster sales targets recently, is pushing for better integration into PlayStation brands by converting Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited into PS Music and PS Video.

"As a gamer and PlayStation 4 user myself, I'm super excited to be able to soundtrack my FIFA 15 Arsenal matches later this spring," said Spotify founder Daniel Ek.

By Victor Luckerson, TIME

Apple has reportedly snapped up a music analytics service as it plots out a future for Beats Music and iTunes.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple recently purchased Semetric, an analytics firm that tracks the way fans consume various forms of entertainment across the Web. The company could give Apple insight to create a music service that gives artists greater opportunities to interact with fans.

Apple would not comment on the acquisition news directly. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," company spokesman Colin Johnson told TIME.

Apple is planning to integrate Beats Music directly into the next version of its iOS mobile operating system, according to the New York Times. It may drop the price of the subscription music service from the industry-wide standard of $10 per month. It's not clear what Apple's plans are for iTunes, which has seen steep declines in music sales as users flock to streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube.

Apple has reportedly snapped up a music analytics service as it plots out a future for Beats Music and iTunes.

The Wall Street Journalreports that Apple recently purchased Semetric, an analytics firm that tracks the way fans consume various forms of entertainment across the Web. The company could give Apple insight to create a music service that gives artists greater opportunities to interact with fans.

Apple would not comment on the acquisition news directly. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," company spokesman Colin Johnson told TIME.

Apple is planning to integrate Beats Music directly into the next version of its iOS mobile operating system, according to the New York Times. It may drop the price of the subscription music service from the industry-wide standard of $10 per month. It's not clear what Apple's plans are for iTunes, which has seen steep declines in music sales as users flock to streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube.

By Victor Luckerson, TIME

Spotify is ringing in the new year with a new userbase milestone. The music streaming service announced Monday that it has reached 60 million active users and 15 million paying subscribers who shell out about $10 a month for an ad-free experience.

The new figures imply that Spotify's growth rate is accelerating. The company announced in May that it had reached 40 million users and 10 million paying subscribers. In November, amidst controversy over Taylor Swift pulling her entire music catalogue from the service, Spotify revealed that it had 50 million subscribers, 12.5 million of whom were paying customers. Now the company has increased its user base by another 10 million over the course of just a few weeks.

Spotify leads the market of on-demand music streaming services by a large margin. Deezer, the second-place service, has 16 million active users and 6 million paying subscribers.

Oscar is a New York health insurance company with a consumer Web sensibility. Alfred, the Boston firm named after Bruce Wayne's butler, provides errand-running services like groceries and laundry for a monthly fee. Benny, also in New York, offers freelance workers insurance, accounting and tax services. Lulu--again, of New York--is an app that lets girls anonymously rate guys they know. Clara, based in the Bay Area, provides a virtual service to do things like scheduling meetings.

Startups are choosing human names for a simple reason: to humanize the software they're selling. Many young tech companies make software that replaces a function once done by a person. We increasingly conduct the business of our lives through the screen of our mobile devices. Many startups believe that in order to win a customer’s trust, they need a human touch.

Jacob Brody, founder of Benny, says he chose the name because he wants his company to be seen as a trustworthy helper, not a faceless corporation. "We wanted to create software with soul," he says. "Benny has your back. He's your buddy and dependable."

Five examples does not make this a full-fledged trend, at least not yet. Still, startup naming is a faddish endeavor. You can often tell what era a startup comes from based on its name.

Is the company’s name a kooky word with too many vowels, such as Google GOOG or Yahoo YHOO ? It was probably founded in the Web 1.0 era of the mid-to-late 1990s.

Is the name in question a kooky word with not enough vowels, like Flickr, Tumblr, or Twttr, the original name for Twitter? It's from the Web 2.0 era of the mid-2000s.

Is it two words jammed together with a capitalized letter in the middle--so-called camel case--such as NetSuite N , LinkedIn LNKD , YouTube, or BuzzFeed? Who knows. That style trend, a blight to copy editors everywhere, will simply not die.

Does the company’s name end in a cutesy suffix like Chirpify, Spotify, Ghostery, Findery, Bitly, Contently, Artsy, or Etsy? It was probably born in the last eight years, as evidenced by this chart. Many companies in this category took advantage of readily available domain names from Syria or Libya, ending in .sy and .ly, respectively.

In fact, choosing a startup name used to be all about scoring the domain name. That has become less important with the rise of mobile, where users find apps in by searching an app store. If a URL is too expensive, a startup can add a word like "app," "get" or "use” to its name. Foursquare’s Swarm uses SwarmApp.com; Confide uses GetConfide.com. Some apps have simple one-word names but use a foreign country’s URL suffix, like Secret, which uses Secret.ly, Vine, which uses Vine.co, or Whisper, which uses Whisper.sh.

Our trendy human-named startups Alfred, Lulu, Oscar, Clara, and Benny have taken the same tack. Their websites? HelloAlfred.com, Onlulu.com, HiOscar.com, ClaraLabs.com, and UseBenny.com.

Another troubled retailer reports earnings today, and following yesterday’s news of new home construction dropping slightly, this morning we’ll see how the market for existing home sales fared in October. Here’s what else you need to know about.

1. Best Buy’s boost

Best Buy BBY actually had a decent earnings report this morning, sending shares up sharply in pre-market trading. Earnings came in above analysts’ expectations, and revenue was up a bit compared to the same quarter in 2013.

2. Arizona sues GM

There’s another bit of bad news for GM’s GM CEO Mary Barra: The state of Arizona is suing the automaker for $3 billion, arguing the automaker put the public at risk by concealing safety defects to avoid the cost of recalls.

3. Homes sales, again

Another key piece of housing market data comes in today, and experts think that, like the new home construction number, it likely slipped a bit last month. Sales last month were running a bit below the year prior. A possible reason is investors are not buying homes to rent, or flip. Today’s report from the National Association of Realtors will come out at 10 a.m. ET.

4. Alibaba gets into bonds

Alibaba BABA remains a darling of Wall Street, and today it’s getting into the bond game. Just two months after its IPO caused a media frenzy, the Chinese e-commerce company is issuing an $8 billion bond round, according to Reuters. If the IPO is any indication, expect interest to be feverish.

5. Will T-Swift reconsider Spotify now?

Spotify streams are going to be counted as part of the Billboard 200 rankings, reports the New York Times. For calculating the top albums of the week, 1,500 streams from Spotify and other streaming services will count as a sale. This is the biggest change to the charts since 1991, when hard sales data came into use.

The pop star recently pulled her entire catalog from the streaming music service, calling the company's business model a "grand experiment." It kicked off a flurry of questions about the viability of Spotify's business. Swift appeared on both the covers of Bloomberg Businessweek and Time last week. Understandably, Spotify would prefer we talked about anything but Taylor Swift today.

On a conference call this morning, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek announced the company has partnered with Uber, the on-demand car service, to provide its music streaming services inside Uber vehicles. Uber customers can control the music during their car ride from their phone. Both the Spotify and Uber apps will promote the service.

"One of the big things is, 'How do we get into the car, and how do we truly how do we get into that space and allow people to play their music?' Ek said. "Instead of doing car integrations, we think about, 'What is the next generation of transportation systems?'"

Ek said Spotify continues to seek partnerships with automakers that would put its app into in-dashboard operating systems. But many younger people are skipping out on buying their own car altogether, thanks to on-demand car services such as Uber, Lyft and others. "This is a way to reach a younger, more millennial audience in cities who are taking up Uber in droves," he said.

Ek and Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick declined to comment on whether the partnership would involve any financial elements, such as revenue-sharing. "For Uber, its just sexy and interesting and fun for our users to bring everything into the car," Kalanick said.

The launch begins in select cities -- London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Nashville, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Stockholm, Toronto and Sydney -- on Friday, and will be rolled out globally in the coming months. It’s only available through Spotify's premium service, which users access for a monthly subscription fee or a free seven-day trial via the Uber app.

Swift, the subject of the magazine's latest cover story, admitted coming to a revelation about Spotify that she simply "didn't like the way it felt" having her music so readily available at such a low price point. For instance, she received just $500,000 in the last 12 months, according to an earlier Time story.

"Well, they can still listen to my music if they get it on iTunes. I'm always up for trying something," Swift told Time. "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," she added.

Swift pulled her catalog of music in its entirety on Nov. 3. Spotify boasts 50 million users total, including 10 million paid subscribers.

The decision to pull her music library from the app came a week after the release of her album 1989.

She added, "And that places a perception of value on what I've created. On Spotify, they don't have any settings, or any kind of qualifications for who gets what music. I think that people should feel that there is a value to what musicians have created, and that's that."

In July, Swift wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about the subject of music sales and the future of the album. "This shouldn't be news right now. It should have been news in July when I went out and stood up and said I'm against it. And so this is really kind of an old story," she told Time.

Read the rest of this article on Time.com.

Read next:

Go Behind TIME's Taylor Swift Cover With Photographer Martin Schoeller

Taylor Swift's Spotify Paycheck Mystery

By Jack Dickey, TIME

Taylor Swift has been paid less than $500,000 in the past 12 months for domestic streaming of her songs, Scott Borchetta, the CEO of Taylor Swift's record label, the independent Nashville-based Big Machine, told TIME Wednesday.

His statement is the latest salvo in an increasingly heated disagreement between Swift and Spotify. The disagreement has sent ripples through the music industry, with the country's most successful musician removing her work from an admired new online music model.

According to Borchetta, the actual amount his label has received in return for domestic streams of Swift's music--$496,044--is drastically smaller than the amount Spotify has suggested the artist receives. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said Tuesday that the label for an artist of Swift's popularity could expect to receive $6 million in the next year from the streaming service as the site's audience grows. Borchetta said his label had made more from streaming Taylor Swift's videos on the video site Vevo than it has from putting her music on Spotify.

A Spotify spokesperson told TIME that the total payout for Swift's streaming over the past 12 months globally was $2 million.

"The more we grow, the more we pay artists, and we're growing like crazy," said Jonathan Prince, Spotify's global head of communications and public policy. "Our users, both free and paid, have grown by more than 50 percent in the last year, which means that the run rate for artists of every level of popularity keeps climbing. And Taylor just put out a great record, so her popularity has grown too. We paid Taylor's label and publisher roughly half a million dollars in the month before she took her catalog down--without even having 1989 on our service--and that was only going to go up."

On Nov. 3, Swift pulled her entire catalog from the streaming service, which claims over 50 million users, more than 10 million of whom have paid subscriptions. No artist today can match Swift's popularity: her new album 1989 has sold nearly 1.7 million copies nationwide in its first two weeks on sale, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Swift and Borchetta both say that removing her music from Spotify is meant to make a larger point.

"The facts show that the music industry was much better off before Spotify hit these shores," Borchetta said. "Don't forget this is for the most successful artist in music today. What about the rest of the artists out there struggling to make a career? Over the last year, what Spotify has paid is the equivalent of less than 50,000 albums sold."

At first, Spotify asked Swift to come back in a blog post. But after Borchetta said on a radio show on Nov. 7 that he had been hearing from other artists and managers who also want to leave Spotify--country star Jason Aldean just pulled his latest album from the service--Ek posted a broader defense of Spotify's model. He claims Spotify has paid $2 billion to labels and publishers since its founding in 2008, and says the service, through its mix of paid and ad-supported subscriptions, is replacing revenue the music business had lost to piracy.

This isn't the first time a major recording artist has tussled with Spotify. In October 2013, Radiohead's Thom Yorke pulled his solo songs off the site to protest the size of its payouts.

-With Matt Vella

For an exclusive interview with Swift and a profile of the 24-year-old pop star, visit Time.com Thursday morning.

By Dan Kedmey, TIME

Spotify's CEO on Tuesday aired his frustration with Taylor Swift's critique of the streaming music service, arguing that his company's revenue sharing agreements ensure that musicians get paid for their work and serve as a bulwark against online piracy.

"We started Spotify because we love music and piracy was killing it," wrote CEO Daniel Ek in a post on Spotify's official blog. Ek said that Spotify had paid a total of $2 billion to music labels and their associated artists since Spotify launched in 2008, a sum he argued wouldn't exist had fans downloaded the music through pirated websites.

Ek's defense came in the wake of pop artist Taylor Swift's widely publicized decision to pull all of her music, save one song, from the streaming service last week. Swift has previously criticized Spotify's payments to musical artists -- which average less than a penny per played song -- as inadequate compensation for artists.

"When I hear stories about artists and songwriters who say they've seen little or no money from streaming and are naturally angry and frustrated, I'm really frustrated too," Ek wrote in the post. "We will do anything we can to work with the industry to increase transparency, improve speed of payments, and give artists the opportunity to promote themselves and connect with fans."

By Nolan Feeney, TIME

Taylor "Music Should Not Be Free" Swift pulled most of her catalog from Spotify today, which prompted the streaming music service to respond like only an awkward high-school boyfriend would: with a mixtape full of not-so-secret messages.

A 15-song playlist from the account @SpotifyCares called "Come back, Taylor!" spells out the following message with its song titles: "Hey Taylor, we wanted to play your amazing love songs and they're not here right now. We want you back with us and so do, do, do your fans."

Perhaps Swift would change her mind about never ever getting back together with Spotify if artists earned more than a fraction of a cent per song stream. (Or if Spotify came up with a less random playlist.)

Speaking at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference over the summer, shortly after Swift penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing the free streaming music movement, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said he expected Swift to eventually embrace free streaming.

By Charlotte Alter, TIME

Taylor Swift has decided to remove her music from Spotify, the company announced in a pleading blog post Monday. The only song of hers remaining on the service is 'Safe & Sound,' from The Hunger Games soundtrack.

"We hope she'll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone," Spotify posted, noting that 16 million of its users have played Taylor Swift music in the last 30 days and that she appears on 19 million playlists.

Swift refused to allow her 2012 album, Red, on Spotify when it first debuted, but it later appeared for Spotify users to enjoy. Her most recent release, 1989, never appeared on Spotify. The artist has also been vocal about her thoughts on music sharing.

"Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently," Swift wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this year. "It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.”

(Spotify CEO Daniel Ek actually spoke at Fortune‘s Brainstorm Tech conference over the summer, shortly after Swift’s WSJ op-ed appeared, at which time Ek said he expected Swift to eventually embrace free music streaming.)

Spotify even created a playlist in honor of the absent superstar, called "What to Play While Taylor's Away." It includes artists like Katy Perry, Leagues, Ed Sheeran, and One Direction -- which is awkward for Taylor's ex, One Direction's Harry Styles.

The post ended on a note of desperation, "P.S. Taylor, we were both young when we first saw you, but now there's more than 40 million of us who want you to stay, stay, stay. It's a love story, baby, just say, Yes."

This post is in partnership with Entrepreneur. The article below was originally published at Entrepreneur.com.

By Nina Zipkin, Entrepreneur.com

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is often known for his ability to understand what makes a company successful and for having some contrarian points of view. Following the sale of PayPal to eBay EBAY in 2002, Thiel founded global hedge fund Clarium Capital Management, technology company Palantir and venture capital firm Founders Fund, which has invested in companies like Spotify, Oculus and SpaceX. Thiel was also Facebook’s first outside investor and currently sits on its board. Through his Thiel Foundation, four years ago, he created the Thiel Fellowship for up-and-coming entrepreneurs under 20, who are each given $100,000 and two years to eschew higher education and work on a venture of their choosing.

Known for his strong opinions about hot-button topics like education, company culture and competition, Thiel has been in the news of late promoting his new book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, which he co-wrote with former student Blake Masters, and was based upon the notes that Masters took while taking Thiel’s computer science course at Stanford. The authors aim to rebuff the notion that innovation is dead and instead delve into how entrepreneurs can explore new technologies and create fresh inventions in current fields and “uncharted frontiers.” We caught up with Thiel to talk about the value of being na?ve and finding inspiration off the beaten track.

Q: Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently when you were first starting up? How did you learn this lesson?
A: When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me — from high school to college to law school to professional life. When I was working at a New York law firm, that path came to a dead end. All the aspiring lawyers on the outside wanted to get in but all of the people I worked with wanted to get out. It was like Alcatraz but all you had to do to escape was walk through the front door. So I left. And that experience helped me realize how many things in the world might be possible and valuable, yet ignored by most people, simply because they are not found on any conventional track.

Q: What do you think would have happened if you had had this knowledge then?
A: If I’d realized how arbitrary it was, I might have gotten off the track a lot sooner. I know I would have thought about it more carefully. But there’s no way to run the experiment twice.

Q: How do you think young entrepreneurs might benefit from this insight?
A: An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role. Because of that uncertainty, there’s always a temptation to reach out for some kind of guide, whether it’s old business school case studies, or, more likely, the most recent moves of the firms that you perceive to be competitors. Reacting to them can at least give some idea of what to do. We’re so used to competing on tracks that entrepreneurs can quickly get caught up in incremental battles with each other, almost without realizing it. But defining yourself by a competitor means giving up the most important reason to be an entrepreneur: You can do something new in the world that won’t be done unless you are the one to do it.

Q: Besides inventing a time machine, how might they realize this wisdom sooner?
A: I don’t know. How to teach people to do what hasn’t been done is a great riddle. It’s because schools tend to breed a kind of process-oriented conformity that I started a fellowship for young people who want to learn by getting something done in the real world — precisely so they can begin charting their own path as early as possible.

I taught a class at Stanford for the same reason — because I wanted to tell students that they don’t have to accept the paths laid down by their schooling or by their competitors. But fundamentally it’s something people have to figure out for themselves.

Q: What are you glad you didn't know then that you know now?
A: If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That’s why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done. And it turned out to be true: PayPal worked. But if I’d had more experience, I’m sure I would have shied away from the risk and done something much more boring. This is one of the reasons that young people can have a strange advantage in technology in that they haven’t yet been brainwashed into thinking that current methods are inevitable.

Q: What is your best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
A: The most important thing is simple: Start with a small market and dominate that first. Big markets are tempting because they seem full of opportunity but most of that opportunity will be for others to compete with you. Instead focus your ambition on a definitively superior solution to a specific problem.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity

Related from Entrepreneur.com:

How Competition Created an Industry That Changed the World

Beat Your Competition Into the Ground

The 3 Most Important Characteristics When Hiring at a Startup

But as a recent New York Times article points out, Tower Records is alive and well in some countries, especially Japan. The piece describes the Japanese as “CD loving,” noting:

Japan may be one of the world's perennial early adopters of new technologies, but its continuing attachment to the CD puts it sharply at odds with the rest of the global music industry. While CD sales are falling worldwide, including in Japan, they still account for about 85 percent of sales here, compared with as little as 20 percent in some countries, like Sweden, where online streaming is dominant.

The article offers other statistics that purport to show the Japanese love for CDs, noting that there are still 85 Tower Records stores in the country that pulled in $500 million in business last year. But, of course, large revenue doesn’t say anything about the health of the business. In 2005, the final year that a Tower Records was open in the U.S., it operated 89 stores and did $430 million in sales. The next year, there were no Tower Records in the U.S. whatsoever.

Meanwhile, CD sales in Japan continue to decline at a double digit pace, falling 17% from last year. What’s unique about Japan is not so much that they like buying their music in physical form, but that buying music digitally, either in mp3 form or through streaming services, never really caught on. That likely has more to do with the Japanese music industry’s stubborn refusal to make buying music or subscribing to streaming services easy.

iTunes launched in Japan in 2005--four years after its U.S. debut, and Sony Music Japan didn’t allow its titles to be sold via iTunes until 2012. That means until just two years ago, a large section of what the Japanese would want to buy online couldn’t be purchased on the world’s most popular digital music store. Meanwhile, the big, global players in streaming, like Spotify, Deezer and rdio, have all been unable to reach agreements with the Japanese record industry to offer their services there. Some domestic streaming services are now starting to pop up--total streaming service revenue in Japan was up 204% last year--but the streaming industry is still playing catch up with the West because of its late start.

Meanwhile, the practice of renting CDs is still quite popular in Japan, as copyright law there makes such an industry legal there, unlike in the U.S. This makes it quite easy for listeners to rent an album at 10% of the price of buying it and just rip it to their computer. And, of course, just like in the West, music piracy is very popular in Japan. The Japanese record industry estimates that for every song legally downloaded in the country, 10 are stolen. The problem is so bad that in 2012, Japan passed one of the strictest anti-piracy laws in the world, in which violators can be subject to a 10-year prison sentence and a roughly $100,000 fine.

And finally, we shouldn’t look past the fact that Japan has the highest median age in the world. Even in much younger America, it’s the older folks who buy most of the CDs. As people age, they tend to become set in their ways when it comes to purchasing decisions. And since Japan has a higher percentage of older people than any other country, it follows that it would have a larger market for physical music.

But make no mistake about it, Japan’s music industry is shrinking, just like the one in the U.S. The convenience of listening to music online is too great, and with the ease of streaming songs on YouTube for free, or outright stealing it, the Japanese public is increasingly questioning why it should pay for CDs. The Japanese record industry might have helped keep CD sales higher than in other developed nations for a few years longer by resisting digital music sales and streaming services, but it can’t delay the inevitable forever.

Spotify has always touted its ability to "make the pie bigger," meaning, even if record sales fall, Spotify's increases the amount of money consumers spend on music. To whit: 10 million subscribers who pay $120 a year for Spotify Premium accounts; the average amount of money US consumers of music spent on it during the peak of the CD boom was just $68.

Spotify argues that it helps indie artists get discovered. Pop star Lorde first broke out on Spotify, thanks to some help from the infamous Napster founder and Spotify investor, Sean Parker. Australian rapper Iggy Azalia did as well, and most recently, sing-songwriter Ed Sheeran.

But what about the big artists,which have become the music industry's last bastion of profits? Recently Taylor Swift, one of the biggest stars in the world, penned a op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, touting her optimism about the future of music. It was both panned and praised: on one hand, it's easy for a mega-star like Swift to be optimistic. The outlook is good because I can sell records! On the other hand, Swift was smart to recognize the importance of forming direct connections with fans via social media.

But Swift has been slow to embrace streaming. While her songs are available on YouTube, she withheld her last album from Spotify and other streaming services. (It was eventually added to the platform long after the release.)

At Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen today, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek weighed in on the prickly issue of mega-stars like Swift. "I think she made a lot of great points in her article," he said, "And there are a few artists that can do totally without giving their music away at all. They don't need any promotion. They are attracting an audience that will go physically buy their CDs, and Taylor is one of them."

He noted that ACDC is another example of a company that did great without digital distribution. The band had an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart and sold lots of albums. But that's not the reality for most artists, he said. "For most artists, they are doing super well by streaming. Ed Sheeran is the best example, he went straight into number one on Spotify."

Spotify can help promote the "long tail" of indie acts. But doesn't it need artists like Swift and ACDC to keep fans happy?

"We're certainly doing everything we can to convince her," Ek said. "I actually don't believe that she'd be worse off putting her music up for free as well. There's no right answer here, and sure there's some speculation. She can do without free streaming now. But I believe she'd be better of doing it for free. I think if you fast forward three or four years from now, she'll be on streaming as well."

And then there’s iHeartRadio, the streaming music service owned by terrestrial giant Clear Channel. The company today announced it has crossed 50 million registered users.

That reach makes Clear Channel's streaming offering a formidable competitor to Pandora P , Spotify, Apple AAPL , and Amazon AMZN . But Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman is not as concerned with Internet radio as one might think. Digital radio makes a lot of noise, but only accounts for 10% of the overall radio market. (A market that, conveniently, is dominated by Clear Channel.)

"If it were not for the fact that radio is so large, you'd say, 'Wow these are big numbers,'" Pittman tells Fortune. "There are one billion FM radios in the US and 160 million smartphones and 160 million PCs, so it's still a subset of the FM marketplace."

Pittman doesn't believe streaming hours will overtake traditional radio in his lifetime. "Music collections always replace each other and radio always tends to be yet another choice," he says. "Satellite didn't kill FM. AM didn't kill FM. (Streaming music) one more choice and one more device you can listen to the radio on."

With that perspective, why would Clear Channel waste resources getting 50 million people to use a streaming service like iHeartRadio to begin with? The product draws resources from a number of Clear Channel's businesses, including live shows, tech, operations and advertising. As Pandora’s investors know too well, it is not cheap to license music streaming rights from the record labels.

The short answer, Pittman says, is growth. He maintains that digital is an important growth area for the business, even if the $17 billion or so that advertisers spend on radio each year is slow to move over to the Web.

Clear Channel and iHeartRadio have considered selling subscriptions or downloads to monetize, similar to their competitors, Pittman says, but for now the company plans to stay "above the fray” in its relationship with record labels. “They’re in the business of selling the music and we’re not,” he says.

In 2012, Clear Channel made strange bedfellows when it joined forces with Pandora to lobby Congress to lower the rates their services were required to pay artists to stream their music online. The companies eventually backed down from that effort in order to focus on a different political tact.

Since then, competition for digital media consumption has only increased. And while the audience is significantly smaller than that of traditional radio, it’s hard to ignore the shift in time spent from radio to streaming. Pittman admits that Web radio is a more fragmented marketplace than the near-monopoly his company enjoys in terrestrial radio. Online, people “tend to have a favorite and then they bounce around a couple different services,” Pittman says. Each service has different strengths, but for radio stations on digital, iHeartRadio is a go-to, he says. “If they’re going to radio, clearly they're using us.”

Update: A previous version of this article said iHeartRadio has 50 million monthly active users. It has been corrected to say the service has 50 million registered users.

For a different (more buttoned-up?) point of view, Fortune polled music executives for their picks for the song (or songs) of the summer. Here’s what the C-suite thinks you’ll be listening to at the pool or the beach.

Chris Mu?oz, SVP of national sales for Univision Radio:

"My pick as the 'song of the summer' is “Bailando” by Enrique Iglesias, featuring Descemer Bueno & Gente de Zona. It's already tracking very well, and I'm sure it will continue to increase in popularity during the summer months. I love this song's rhythm and catchy Spanglish lyrics.

“'Adrenalina,' the World Cup anthem by Wisin, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin will also be among everyone's favorites as millions celebrate and stay tuned to the biggest sporting event in the world this summer."

David Zedek, president of global concerts, Live Nation:

"Problem," Ariana Grande, featuring Iggy Azalea
"Love Runs Out," One Republic
"Ain't It Fun," Paramore
"Am I Wrong," Nico & Vinz
"Sing," Ed Sheeran
"Birthday," Katy Perry

Charlie Hellman, VP of product, Spotify. (If you have a Spotify account you can listen to his entire playlist.) Here are a few of the tracks:

“Summer,” Calvin Harris
“Fancy,” Iggy Azalea
“Youth,” Ben Khan
“Storyline,” Hunter Hayes
“La La La,” Naughty Boy
“Jealous (I Ain’t With It),” Chromeo
“Boom Clap,” Charli XCX

And Tim Westergren, founder, Pandora Media, offered a few songs that always remind him of summer:

“Wishing You Were Here,” Chicago
“Brian Wilson (live),” Barenaked Ladies
“Amsterdam,” Box Set
“The Swimming Song,” Loudon Wainwright III
“Fall on Me,” REM

It’s actually not that new: Businesses have been selling monthly subscriptions for all sorts of goods and services for years--magazines like Fortune come to mind. But more recently, all sorts of unexpected industries have started dabbling in subscription-based business models, offering anything from online software to toothbrushes to genome sequencing for a flat monthly fee.

One of the companies leading this charge is Zuora, a Foster City, Calif.-based startup founded by former WebEx and Salesforce.com CRM executives. The company sells software that helps other firms move towards a subscription-based revenue business model, including tools for billing, accounting and analytics. This week, Zuora unveiled the latest version of what it calls “relationship business management” software--a suite that lets companies transition and maintain a shift from a traditional to a subscription-based revenue model. (And yes, Zuora sells its product on a subscription basis.)

“[Relationship business management solutions] are an emerging class of software focused on building, managing and optimizing the ongoing customer relationships that are the lifeblood of a subscription businesses,” the company says in a recent press release.

But the real news is that more and more industries are dipping their toes--a rare few even jumping in head-first--to a subscription-based, recurring revenue model. At an event hosted by Zuora this week, several of these companies came together to discuss the shifting landscape and its opportunities and challenges. At the obvious top of the subscription-based model list are cloud software companies like Salesforce.com and Box, which have always charged a monthly per-user fee for their online enterprise products. But this week’s event was also attended by a telecom firm, an online toothbrush seller and a biotechnology company, among others. Their reasoning? People today would rather subscribe to services than pony up the cash to own products.

Innovators like Netflix NFLX , Zipcar CAR and Spotify have certainly proven that subscriptions can work for more than just software. Should all industries make the switch?

The answer is complicated. Subscriptions should certainly be an option for consumers, regardless of the product type. Consumer behavior, especially among younger people, is changing, and the need to own and house goods--from music to cars to physical documents--is waning. While Wall Street grapples with how to evaluate some of the subscription-only companies (? la Box), it has clearly worked up an appetite for a recurring revenue model that gives companies all sorts of new ways to engage with old and new customers. But transitioning isn’t easy, and each company needs to evaluate the needs of its customer base--and how subscriptions could potentially open the door to new users.

Case in point: Last year, Adobe Systems ADBE decided to transition its software suite for creatives to the cloud. The move was far from flawless--a recent hours-long outage irked users--but the results have mostly been positive. The company says 20% of customers that are purchasing the updated online tools weren’t Adobe customers before the switch. And now that the software is cloud-based, Adobe can better track how customers are using it and constantly push updates to individual users.

“We were really trapped inside the box that we shipped--both literally and figuratively,” David Wadhwani, SVP and GM of Adobe’s digital media division, said at this week’s event. (Adobe is not a Zuora customer.)

Other companies who have made the switch have found they’re able to attract a broader customer base by offering a subscription-based model, which has a much lower upfront cost to consumers. But the transition is sometimes easier on the customer than on the company, where the transformation to a new business model can be incredibly disruptive to the way sales and marketing is run. (Incentivizing and commissioning salespeople with this model is particularly challenging).

“It is an organizational issue,” says Mark Field, CTO and VP of software services at LifeTech, a biotech company owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific TMO . “Our processes were set up to support selling instruments.”

Zuora and its investors are, of course, extremely bullish on the growth of the subscription economy, and believe there are lots of untapped industries that will also jump on the bandwagon, from manufacturing to legal services to education. And even if you’re not buying your toothbrush via a monthly subscription service, chances are you’re already part of the subscription economy yourself. The way we consume movies, listen to music, or even drive around in cars, is changing. Zuora hopes the trend will continue.