technologies like voice assistants have
made it easier to discover new music,
according to Nielsen. That number
drops to 54% for teens and 44% for all
music listeners, which is still impres-
sive for a segment that didn’t exist in a
meaningful way half a decade ago.
Device ownership has changed
as well, according to Nielsen. As
expected, Amazon still controls a
large portion of the smart speaker
market, with 48% of owners stating
they own a version of an Echo. But
surprisingly, Facebook’s Portal has
overtaken Google’s Home devices in
market share, at 36% compared with
35%, according to the study. Several
analysts who spoke to Billboard were
shocked by the numbers Nielsen is
reporting for the Portal, given the
privacy- related public- relations
debacle the company has brought on
itself over the past 18 months and the
complexities of getting into smart
speakers in the first place.
“It’s difficult to enter that market
and challenge those incumbents,” says
Werner Goertz, a research director at
Gartner. “The best example for that
is the Samsung Galaxy Home, which
doesn’t seem to be coming because of
those definitive barriers that were set
up by the incumbents.”
Globally, the smart speaker market
has plenty of room to grow, with only
3% of music listening time taking
place on smart speakers, according
to the IFPI’s Music Listening 2019
report. The United States outpaces
the world when it comes to music
usage on smart speakers, where 34%
of people have used a smart speaker
to listen to music in the last three
months, compared with 30% in the
United Kingdom and 22% in Germany,
according to the study.
Despite the lackluster global growth
for smart speakers, music labels need
to figure out how to deal with voice
assistants — a discovery tool that doesn’t
easily lend itself to music promotion —
and fast. Amazon recently announced
the Voice Interoperability Initiative,
an agreement signed by more than 30
companies including Spotify, Tencent
and Sony Audio Group, to make sure
devices work with multiple voice
assistants, which would theoretically
allow users to summon assistants
like Amazon’s Alexa and Micro-
soft’s Cortana on the same device or
smart speaker.
“All three of the major music
companies have significant ef-
forts underway to examine how to
optimize the reach and discover-
ability of catalog music via voice,”
says Miller. “Record companies are
beginning to think really hard about
what this is going to mean for them
for front line and catalog, but in
particular for catalog — given the
dramatic move toward streaming as
the dominant source of monetizing
music over these last five years. It’s
uncharted territory, frankly.”
22.71B
1.4%
TOTAL ON-DEMAND
STREAMS WEEK
OVER WEEK
Number of audio and
video on-demand
streams for the week
ending Sept. 19.
798.0B
32.1%
TOTAL ON-DEMAND
STREAMS YEAR
OVER YEAR TO DATE
Number of audio
and video streams for
2019 so far over the
same period in 2018.
13.08M
0.4%
ALBUM
CONSUMPTION UNITS
WEEK OVER WEEK
Album sales plus track-
equivalent albums plus audio
streaming-equivalent albums
for the week ending Sept. 19.
MARKET WATCH
R
OBERT HUNTER —
the lyricist, poet and
songwriter who died on
Sept. 23 at the age of 78
— wasn’t a member of the Grateful
Dead in any traditional sense. But
as the band’s “in-house lyricist,”
he helped write the majority of its
most memorable songs — from
the poetic “Dark Star” and the
autobiographical “Truckin’ ” (which
included the signature line “What
a long, strange trip it’s been”) to
its lone hit single, 1987’s “Touch
of Grey.” Jerry Garcia, with whom
Hunter usually collaborated on
songs — and with whom he was
inducted into the Songwriters Hall
of Fame in 2015 — called him “the
band member that doesn’t come
out onstage with us.”
Hunter shaped the Grateful
Dead as much as any of its mu-
sicians, giving a band known for
psychedelic improvisation a lyrical
voice that ranged from aphoristic
to deliberately cryptic. The songs
he helped write for Workingman’s
Dead, like “Casey Jones” and “Un-
cle John’s Band,” evoke a mythic
America, while “Box of Rain” and
“Ripple” from American Beauty
have an almost oracular quality —
they can be quoted in high school
yearbooks, but also stand up to
deep reading.
A performing musician as well
as a lyricist, Hunter released two
well-regarded solo albums on
Round Records, a label co-founded
by Garcia, and several more on
Relix Records. He rarely toured
and preferred to stay behind the
scenes, but when the Dead was
inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall
of Fame in 1994, he joined the
other members onstage — the only
nonperformer to do so.
“As much as anyone, he defined
in his words what it meant to be
the Grateful Dead,” wrote bassist
Phil Lesh after hearing of Hunter’s
death. “His lyrics, ranging from old
border ballads to urban legend,
Western narratives and beyond,
brought into sharp focus what was
implicit in our music.”
Hunter — born Robert Burns
in Oceano, Calif. — met Garcia in
Palo Alto, Calif., when they were
both teenagers. They began to play
music together, initially in 1961 as
the short-lived duo Bob and Jerry.
Hunter soon became a key
figure in the Grateful Dead’s in-
volvement with psychedelic drugs.
Along with author Ken Kesey, he
was an early volunteer test subject
for LSD and other psychedelic
chemicals in a Stanford University
study that was later revealed to be
sponsored by the CIA. Hunter later
drew on the resulting halluci-
nations for the lyrics to some of
his early songs, including “China
Cat Sunflower.” After mailing his
writings to Garcia, he was invited
to meet with the band in 1967,
beginning a relationship that would
last for decades.
In addition to his work with the
Dead, Hunter wrote songs with
Bruce Hornsby, Jim Lauderdale,
Los Lobos and Little Feat, among
others. His most prominent
songwriting partnership outside
the band was with Bob Dylan, with
whom he wrote two songs for
Dylan’s 1998 album Down in the
Groove and all but one on 2009’s
Together Through Life. (“Hunter
is an old buddy,” said Dylan when
Together came out. “We both write
a different type of song than what
passes today for songwriting.”)
“The songs were about other
worlds, other times, other places
than most of the audience had
ever experienced,” says guitarist
Warren Haynes, who joined the
Dead when they re-formed follow-
ing Garcia’s death in 1995. “They’re
not just songs, they’re stories, and
they took place not in the here
and now, but in some place that
requires imagination.”
ROBERT HUNTER
1941-
BY ALAN LIGHT
Hunter at the
Songwriters Hall
of Fame in 2015.
“ THIS IS A SHIFT IN
THE WAY THAT WE
FUNDAMENTALLY
ASK FOR THE
INFORMATION AND
ENTERTAINMENT
THAT WE WANT.”
—LARRY MILLER,
NYU STEINHARDT
18 BILLBOARD • SEPTEMBER 28, 2019
● CHANCE THE RAPPER enlisted United Talent Agency for representation in all areas and touring outside the U.S. and Canada. ● Virgin Group acquired the KAABOO music festival.
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