✖️ Female music startup founders 👩‍💻 Spotify + Tencent share swap? 🇨🇳 Buying cats on the blockchain 🐱

I get asked a lot whether I know any female founders at music tech startups. Conference organisers and journalists are trying to do a better job at diversity, but unfortunately it’s not always easy. Let’s change that.

I’ve made a start at this list - together with some wonderful people on Twitter. If you think anyone is missing, please use this form to add them. And please don’t feel excluded if you don’t identify as male or female - drop me a note & I’ll figure out a more inclusive name for this list.

In June this year, Spotify trialled a ‘Sponsored Song’ feature on a limited number of free accounts. At first glance, it seems innocuous. Segregated within its own label tag above the playlist tracks, it provided a space where major labels could pay promote their own releases as if it suggested by Spotify.

Nice follow up on Chartmetric‘s recent deep dive into streaming playlist data. The title says it all - now read how Mark Mulligan breaks it down.

More by Mark Mulligan: a good take on the 10% share swap that Spotify & Tencent Music are currently discussing before Spotify goes public.

At Slush Music, Raine Group partner Fred Davis offered advice on ‘how to spot a giant’, while Techstars Music MD Bob Moczydlowsky provided an update on how that accelerator is approaching things.

Cool convo between Cliff Fluet and Jaak founder Vaughn McKenzie about the state of blockchain. Fluet: 

“The music industry has a pretty fixed playbook with how it tries to deal with new technology. It’s a deny, destroy, dominate strategy. And it can sometimes take 20 years until you see something like mass adoption. But I think with blockchain it’s been really quite different.”

It’s easy to grasp how users will see AR content through screens, and later glasses, but how will they hear augmented reality?

Research firm Juniper predicts a growth from 43 million devices in-use in 2017 to 285 million in 2022.

Amid record amounts of capital raised by VCs worldwide, and a sharp rise in the number of private “unicorns,” there has been a quiet, barely noticed implosion..

An analyst from Loup Ventures has projected that, by 2022, Apple will spend $4.2 billion on its lineup of original video content for Apple Music.

Launched a few days ago, CryptoKitties is essentially like an digital version of Pokemon cards but based on the Ethereum blockchain.