The Great Gatsby

The Renowned American Classic The Great Gatsby is a hauntingly tragic saga filled with desire, greed, power, and most of all love. We all grew up reading this beautiful piece by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and have grown to appreciate the powerful emotions this book induces from its readers.

The novel was first transformed onto screen in 1926, and four times since then. The latest attempt was made by director Baz Luhrmann, who created a brilliant show of flamboyance and extravagance. However the movie wasn’t the only thing that was flamboyant; the new soundtrack of Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby was a complete surprise to its listeners when it released on May 7, 2013.  The score and the soundtrack are usually an integral part of the filming process, but often overlooked by the audience as a memorable part of the film. But for The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann made sure that his film’s soundtrack is not overlooked!

Director Jack Clayton’s 1974 version of the Great Gatsby was filled with soft ballads that illustrated the love between the main characters Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan; as well as included Jazz and Ragtime Orchestra pieces, which were popular genres of the 1920’s.

Luhrmann on the other hand, used renowned artists like Jay-Z, Fergie, Florence + the Machine, and The xx to transcend the film into the 21st Century.  He cleverly used Hip Hop, Rap and Dance Music to portray the celebration of the nouveau riche of the 1920’s. An example of the ingenuity can be seen in the remake of Beyonce’s hit Crazy in Love, which was performed by Emile Sande along with Brian Ferry Orchestra that incorporated Jazz into the track to unite the 1920’s with the 2000’s.

NSM Music has brought its customers the new Great Gatsby Soundtrack to experience firsthand the brilliance of Baz Luhrmann’s selection for his new movie. Select the Featured Tab on your Jukebox’s home screen to bring The Great Gatsby to life at your location today!

JukeboxNext at NARM MusicBiz 2013

SVP Bob Cooney is at the 2013 Music Biz conference in LA this week looking for collaborators on our #jukeboxnext project. NSM is looking to power the next generation of location-based music services. If you are an app developer or have a passion for music and mobile technology, tweet Bob @scdude and let’s make music together.

Top 35 Apps for Bars and Restaurants

As more an more bar goers get smartphones, smart bars and restaurants are paying attention to the promotion and efficiency benefits they can get by leveraging social networks and other apps on smartphones.  Check out the top 35 apps below, and drop a comment to let us know which ones you are using.   

35 Top Restaurant Apps [Infographic]
35 Top Restaurant Apps [Infographic]
Compliments of QSRweb.com

Digital Jukebox Music Update – March 20, 2013

Hopefully everyone’s St. Paddy’s Day hangovers have subsided by now and you’ve gone through your leftover corned beef!             

We have had an exciting few weeks at NSM with our new music additions, most notably being the prolific and highly anticipated, Paul Simon!   All in all, we have added more than 2,000 new tracks for you to enjoy, from Colin James, to Julieta Venegas, to Joan Jett.   My recommendation:  Check out the new music from Solange (aka Beyonce’s little sister).  I saw her open up for Estelle a few years ago and she blew me away.  Recently, the other Ms. Knowles killed the Fader Fort Presented by Converse showcase at Austin’s South By Southwest. 

In other music news, our newest licensing partner, ULTRA Music, had some successes for their artists this month.  Alexandra Stan’s “Mr. Saxobeat”, a dance staple of last summer, was featured on the new reality show from TBS: King Of The Nerds;  Benny Benassi’s “Control” makes an appearance in the movie 21 & Over, in theatres now; and Rihanna’s “Only Girl In The World” was performed on American Idol!  Also, our fearless tech support leader Tom Kopf’s other girlfriend, Katy Perry, hit a huge sales milestone: She is now 6x platinum with over 6,000,000 digital downloads of “Firework”! (Tom, you totally have a chance now that Katy and John Mayer are over…again.) 

We have two new members of the NSM family as well.  Our engineering wonder, Kam, welcomed a baby girl at the beginning of the month, and customer Julie from JR’s 24/7 Bar in Las Vegas is now awake 24/7 with her new addition!  Congratulations to the new parents!                           

We Love Our Digital Jukebox Customers

Managing a music library for internet jukeboxes is a challenge.  There are millions of tracks available based upon our licenses.  But having millions of tracks on a digital  jukebox doesn’t make sense.  It just clutters up the browsing experience.  While half of the users of a jukebox know what they want to hear and use search to find it, the other half don’t.  They browse the touchscreen interface looking for something that fits their mood, the environment or the moment.  So filling the interface with millions of tracks just doesn’t work for half of our customer.

One way we try to manage this is to let our bar owner customers make music requests online. This ensures that we are adding the music that bar patrons actually want to hear.  While we admit this is not a perfect solution, it is one that many of our customers have embraced. 

This morning, we received a request from Charlie Budimir at the Lamp Lounge in Cheyenne Wyoming.  Charlie sends us lots of requests and most of them are interesting. But this one lit me up and I had to share.  Here’s the video on YouTube.  Enjoy, Cameo’s Word Up!  Thanks Charlie!

Embedly Powered

This has everything to do with Digital Jukeboxes

The Verge has a great article today on the costs associated with running a streaming music service and the challenges the companies providing these services have in reaching profitability.  Services like MOG (which just sold at rumored fire-sale price to Beats Audio), Spotify and Pandora are paying licensing rates around 70% of their revenue.  The conclusion of the article is they need massive advertising revenue to attain profitability. If you are at all interested in the space, you should read the article

Even Apple, which used music to build their Post-PC-Era device dominance beginning with their ubiquitous iPod, reportedly breaks even on its music business, making up with very high gross margins on its hardware. 

What does this have to do with Digital Jukeboxes?

As I have documented on this blog in several posts under the “Licensing” heading,  music licensing for Digital Jukeboxes is cumbersome and complicated.  And as the Verge article points out, expensive.  In fact, licensing for Digital Jukeboxes is more expensive than streaming music services, because we have to clear our own publishing, PLUS pay the Performance Rights Organizations like ASCAP and BMI. 

Despite this, NSM offers the best value in the music industry.  An unlimited buffet of music for a flat rate of $49 a week.  And while we might not have caught up with our competitors music catalog yet, we are working hard and closing the gap every day.  The digital feeds integration is coming along and we are adding thousands of songs each week. 

And we work hard on keeping our hardware costs low too.  Our jukeboxes are manufactured in Europe to exacting standards, not in China like our competition. We offer a warranty 3-times longer than our competition. We give you 2 amplifiers in every jukebox.  And we just upgraded our bill acceptors to the Mars brand, which increased our cost, increased the products’ reliability, but we held the line on our price. 

So when you consider what you get when you purchase an NSM Digital Jukebox: value, reliability, great service and increased profits for your bar; remember that it’s not necessarily been easy to provide such a tremendous offering.  We’ve been working hard at it for more than 60 years now. 

 

Andy Mac’s in Pueblo Colorado

We love our digital jukebox customers.  We love their bars.  And we love when patrons are having a great time in their bars.  We especially love it when they’re dancing.

One of our newest customers is Andy Mac’s Sports Grill in Pueblo Colorado. This bar near CSU- Pueblo looks like they know how to have a great time.  Check out this YouTube video, and stop by and put a few bucks in their new NSM Digital Jukebox if you’re in the neighborhood.

Embedly Powered

Owning a Jukebox is About to Become a “Privilege, not a Right” in Georgia

If you are a bar owner in Georgia, you need to pay attention.  A new bill, HB 487, which just overwhelmingly passed the state legislature, is going to restrict your rights in what some already are saying is an unconstitutional manner.  The bill, which on the surface seems like a video poker bill, actually moves the oversight of coin-operated amusements from the state Department of Revenue to the Georgia Lottery Corporation.

As part of the proposed legislation, new fees are being imposed.  A bar owner will have to pay $500 per year to have up to 5 machines, plus $25 per machine.  Route operators are faced with even bigger bills, as the annual fees escalate with the number of machines a business owns.

This section is lifted directly from the bill “The General Assembly finds that the ability to operate a bona fide coin operated amusement machine business in this state constitutes a privilege and not a right. Further, in order to prevent the unregulated operation of the bona fide coin operated amusement machine business, the General Assembly is enacting the procedural enhancements of this article which will aid in the enforcement of the tax obligations that arise from the operation of bona fide coin operated amusement machine businesses as well as prevent unauthorized cash payouts.”

The local media is playing this off as a way to regulate video poker, but the bill specifically includes all coin-operated amusements, and names jukeboxes explicitly.

If this bill is signed, the Georgia Lottery Corporation will have the sole authority to determine if it’s citizens can legally operate a jukebox in their bar. If you have any concerns about this, you should call the Governor’s office today.   http://gov.georgia.gov/contact-governor-domestic-form

 

Digital Jukebox Music Update – March 8, 2013

February was a busy month in the music world. Parlaphone Records announced its new partnership with Warner Music Group, the South by Southwest party flyers are starting to circulate, and The Grammys were actually entertaining this year! Newcomers like Gotye, Frank Ocean, and fun. were the big winners this year, as well as Grammy favorite, The Black Keys. I personally thought Rihanna and Carrie Underwood’s performances were the highlight of the evening, although some of the guys at NSM Headquarters thought Katy Perry’s dress was the real star of the show.

We at NSM Digital Jukeboxes have been doing our very best to fulfill your internet jukebox requests and grow the catalog. We’ve added a little something for everyone’s favorite jukebox this month:

Hopefully you’ve taken note of the new additions, and please keep those requests coming!

NSM had some exciting updates this month in regards to digital feeds ingestion. As you may know, we have been manually adding music by request as our engineering team in the UK works on integrating with the digital music feed services from the various labels.  This is a very difficult and time consuming process.  As of last week, we have the Warner Music feed up and running.  This means regular, recurring updates of new releases from the Warner family directly to your internet jukebox, and tons of back catalog to fill out artist libraries that might have been lacking.

With EMI now a part of Universal Music Group, we are trying to figure out the most efficient way to get those feeds up and running next, as UMG has not yet determined exactly how they will be handling the EMI content.  In the meantime, we will stay busy ingesting Warner content and hopefully have good news of EMI and UMG in the coming weeks.  Thanks to all our customers for their loyalty and patience as we work together to develop the most current, relevant and profitable jukebox music service in the country.

And be sure to check out the featured tab on your NSM Digital Jukebox for some St Patrick’s Day drinking songs.  May your taps pour true and your tills stay full of green! – Elyse

 

Digital Jukebox Music Licensing 103

In the last two editions of this blog, Digital Jukebox Music Licensing 101 and 102, I covered the three main kinds of licensing required for a digital jukebox, as well as the specialty licenses required for Karaoke and Video Jukeboxes.  I also delved into digital jukebox MFN’s and the JLO.  If it’s been awhile since you read those posts, or you are new to this blog, I encourage you to go back and read those now, so this next piece makes more sense.  Now we get to answer one of the most common questions about digital jukeboxes: why are some artists not available?

With digital jukeboxes excepted out of compulsory licenses for mechanical rights and the Jukebox License Agreement, digital jukebox companies are left having to manually clear all their music manually.  This means contracts with major and independent record labels, PRO’s and thousands of publishers. And with no laws or rules governing these business arrangements, each entity can hold out for whatever they believe is a fair deal. 

Significant Holdouts

Most music is licensed from the labels and the publishers.  There is efficiency in a model that allows a network to license thousands of artists and hundreds of thousands of songs under a single agreement.  While the deals tend to require large up-front advances, many times these advance payments are recoupable, meaning that the “per-play” license fees are set off against the advance.  So if a network pays $X million to Label “A” no more payments would be made to Label “A” until the per-play fees exceeded the amount of the advance.  This arrangement guarantees the label and publisher that they will get a minimum amount in license fees over the term of the contract, making the deal worth their while. 

However, some bands retain the rights to their recordings or publishing, and band management can negotiate their deals directly.  Sometimes these bands demand advances that are nowhere close to recoupable.  Since royalties are often based upon a per-play rate, large advances for small catalogues are unlikely to be recouped.  Which means it can be economically unfeasible to do these types of deals in the nascent days of a network’s growth. As networks grow, these deals become more feasible.  This is why you see new artists added to networks over time.  And why only Touchtunes has The Beatles.  They are the only network large enough to justify what had to be a significant advance. 

Reclaiming Their Copyrights

A little known impact of the 1978 Copyright Law is that under certain instances, beginning in 2012, performers will be able to reclaim the rights to their recordings from record labels, and songwriters will be able to reclaim ownership of their songs from publishers.  According to the New York Times:

When copyright law was revised in the mid-1970s, musicians, like creators of other works of art, were granted “termination rights,” which allow them to regain control of their work after 35 years, so long as they apply at least two years in advance. Recordings from 1978 are the first to fall under the purview of the law, but in a matter of months, hits from 1979, like “The Long Run” by the Eagles and “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer, will be in the same situation — and then, as the calendar advances, every other master recording once it reaches the 35-year mark.

The provision also permits songwriters to reclaim ownership of qualifying songs. Bob Dylan has already filed to regain some of his compositions, as have other rock, pop and country performers like Tom Petty, Bryan Adams, Loretta Lynn, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Waits and Charlie Daniels, according to records on file at the United States Copyright Office.

This stands to have a significant impact on the digital jukebox providers, as more and more artists potentially reclaim the ownership of their works, more and more individual deals will need to be struck.  As noted above, sometimes these deals are not economically feasible from an advance payment perspective.  And they are always burdensome from a time and effort perspective.  So as hard as licensing music for jukeboxes is today, it looks like it’s only going to get harder. 

Read More:

Record Industry Braces for Artists’ Battles Over Song Rights – NY Times

Echos, Insights for Independent Artists – Music Publishing 101

History of the Jukebox Licensing Office (JLO)

Rightsflow – Compulsory Licensing

Loading...
Increase Profits from your Digital Jukebox
Free Whitepaper