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Spotify gets serious about its country music curation
Country music fans are flocking to streaming services and Spotify's latest hire shows the company is taking that segment of its audience seriously. The streaming service nabbed SiriusXM's John Marks to head its curated playlists for the genre. If you'll recall, Spotify, and other services, have made a big push with playlists built by both the artists themselves as well as notable personalities in the biz. While you may not recognize the name, Marks has a knack for discovering new talent and budding acts before they make it big time. For example, he was spinning tunes from artists like Florida Georgia Line, Brandy Clark, Chase Rice and others before they became popular. Spotify already has deals in place for exclusive country releases and to promote emerging acts, as it's already posted content from artists like Hunter Hayes that can't be streamed on-demand anywhere else. If you look to curated playlists to find new music, just know that Spotify's country collections are now in capable hands. [Image credit: ABC via Getty Images]
Instagram dives into curated content with a dedicated music account
Instagram uses its official account to promote notable snapshots on the social network, and has been doing so for quite some time. But now, the filter-driven app will serve up a daily look at music "around the globe." Through the @music stream, the folks behind the software will highlight music photographers, designers working on album art, instrument makers and fans in addition to current stars and emerging talent. It'll even offer 15-second lessons from time to time. Musicians are a big part of Instagram's user base, where artists can share updates and connect with fans, so it makes sense that the subject would get its own channel. In fact, BuzzFeed reports that around 25 percent of the app's 300 million accounts belong to those folks.
Bing Boards introduce curated content, alliteration to search results
Bing might not yet have achieved true verb status, but it's definitely making all the right moves to get there. The latest twist on search? Curated content in search results. It's an experimental feature at the moment -- live in the US, but possibly not all territories just yet -- that delivers collections of images, videos or links relating to your query a-la Google's Knowledge Graph, but curated by a person (not an algorithm). Microsoft's testing the waters with a hand-picked selection of food and lifestyle bloggers right now, but hopes to expand this to more topics as the idea grows. Head to the more coverage link if you want to see what these cards might look like, in the meantime, time to dust off that abandoned spreadsheet blog?
