Apple's anticipated launch of a new music streaming service will be the "highlight" of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The company is expected to reveal a free, ad-supported internet radio that will expand the relatively small streaming market to hundreds of millions of iTunes users.

News outlets reported last week that after protracted negotiations with Sony delayed the project for months, Apple finally closed licensing deals with all three major music labels. Apple will sell ads through iAd and give recording artists a fraction of a penny for every play.

With little information available about the product, analysts are speculating whether Apple's streaming service will be a viable competitor to Spotify, Pandora and Google Play: All Access.

According to Forbes, Apple's internet radio service will be lucky if it snags 5 percent of the $1.1 billion music streaming market. Citing the lack of new hardware and the complex streaming business model that currently hinders Pandora's growth, Forbes predicted that Apple will fail to push into the crowded music streaming market like it did with mp3 players, smartphones and tablets.

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, thinks Apple is too late in the game and will have to present something radically different to stand out in the crowded world of internet radio.

"It's going to have to innovate," McQuivey told The New York Times. "It can't just be Pandora with an 'i' in front of it or Spotify with an 'i' in front of it."

The music service announcement comes at a pivotal time for Apple. Without another breakthrough product on the horizon, Apple's stock has dropped significantly, and iPhone sales are stalling.

Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, sees Apple's streaming service as more of a brand control effort than a product success.

"If Apple were to equal Pandora's Street revenue estimate in CY14 of $875 million, it would add about 0.5 percent to overall Apple revenue," Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, told Fortune. "More importantly, we view the music offering as an opportunity to show consumers that they can deliver new, useful services with great experiences to make up for disappointments in Mobile Me and Maps."

Also at Monday's conference, Apple is expected to reveal new Mac notebooks and a modern, minimalist iOS redesign.

In a move that's been hinted at by Spotify executives for months, Coca-Cola is putting the digital music service on its 8-ounce cans for Coke, Diet Coke and Coke Zero in the United Kingdom. The development heralds the companies' seven-month-old deal, while featuring the Spotify brand at the bottom of the "slimline" cans along with a Web address for their interactive "PlaceLists" app.

The app consists of a Coke-red map of the globe with clickable tags to songs that folks are listening to worldwide. Consumers can also utilize an augmented reality system from mobile marketing technology firm Blippar, enabling them to access tunes via smartphones and tablets.

While speaking with Adweek in December 2012, Jeff Levick, Sweden-based Spotify’s global ad sales chief, suggested that his company would appear on Coke packaging due to the firms' cross-platform deal. Atlanta-based Coca-Cola has invested as much as $10 million in the digital music service, making Spotify its go-to music technology when it comes to Facebook and other social media.

Lastly, per a Mashable report, Coke says Spotify-branded cans are not currently planned for the United States.

Here's a customer-service story that will be music to your ears. Someone on the Spotify team created a custom playlist yesterday thanking user Jelena Woehr for some positive feedback she gave the music service. The titles of the songs spelled out the message "Jelena/You Are Awesome/Thanks a Lot/For These Words/It Helps Me/Impress/The Management." The gesture was a big hit with Woehr, a community manager for Yahoo's Contributor Network. "Oh my god," she wrote on Facebook with a screenshot of the playlist. "Spotify customer care is ADORABLE." It's hard to tell whether this is a common thank-you trick for the Spotify team, but it's especially impressive in this case considering her first name isn't exactly common. "I'm still just mindboggled they found a song titled 'Jelena,' with the J and everything," she says. It's yet another example of how small gestures to customers can go a long way these days, whether you're fixing a broken cheeseburger for a girl with autism or replacing a boy's missing ninja.

Brands have another incentive for crafting compelling content marketing beyond engaging consumers—it might prompt other advertisers to pay to be included. Such was the case with Pereira & O'Dell's latest online Web series for Intel and Toshiba, The Power Inside, which drove a handful of marketers to sign deals for product placement within the branded storyline.

Spotify, Skype, Fossil watches and Skullcandy headphones are all paying for placements with merchandise rather than cash. The merchandise will be given to winners in weekly contests tied to the series and as giveaways when U.S. consumers buy a Toshiba laptop computer promoted by the series.

While companies with branded publications, such as Red Bull, sometimes sell ads to outside advertisers, rarely do branded online videos offer product placements to third-party marketers. The Power Inside is the third in Intel/Toshiba’s lineup of online social films, which combine Hollywood talent and production values with input and appearances by everyday viewers. Launching Aug. 15, it’s a six-part comedy featuring Harvey Keitel about aliens who disguise themselves as mustaches. The previous film, a romance called The Beauty Inside, snagged 70 million views and won a Daytime Emmy and three Grand Prix at Cannes last month.

The upcoming film was opened up to other marketers—essentially offering them an ad inside an ad—as a way to save money for Intel. “Our budget is limited for promoting the film and for giveaways,” said Billie Goldman, manager of partner marketing at Intel. Third-party advertisers will help spread the word about the series via social, PR and paid media "beyond what we can do ourselves," she said. For outside brands, the draw is the quality of the work and the volume of the audience, according to P.J. Pereira, agency chief creative officer. “Having two previous films to show advertisers made a huge difference. They loved the earlier work [and social interaction]. It was a like party that they wanted to be part of.”

Sponsors this year for the CBGB Music and Film Festival in Times Square will be Coca-Cola, Spotify, Red Bull, MTV, Gibson Guitar, The Standard Hotel, Astral Tequila, J&R Music and Bust Magazine.

The free outdoor concert is expected to see Broadway in New York City closed to car traffic from 46th Street up to 54th Street between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Oct. 12.

About 30 bands are expected to play at the event and will be announced in coming weeks.

"Times Square is the crossroads of the world," said festival organizer Tim Hayes. "It's the most visited spot on earth ... We think it's the biggest stage in the world."

Overall, the 2013 CBGB Festival will feature more than 500 artists playing at 125 venues in Brooklyn and Manhattan between Oct. 9 and Oct. 13. The schedule also features more than 125 panel speakers from the music and film industries, and 100 screenings of music-related films and documentaries. 

CBGB, the movie, will also make its U.S. festival premier at the 2013 CBGB Festival. The historical drama's cast includes Alan Rickman as CBGB founder Hilly Kristal and Malin Ackerman as Debbie Harry, the lead singer of rock band Blondie. The movie is already airing on DirecTV's video-on-demand platform.

This year is CBGB Fest's second. In 2012, the lineup featured 300 artists and 125 speakers, but no film component and a smaller, four-block footprint for its Times Square concert, which featured bands like Duff McKagan's Loaded, Superchunk and The Hold Steady.

The festival is the main reincarnation of the classic NYC punk rock club. Opened in 1973, the venue was a breeding ground for bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads and more. The club closed its doors on the Bowery in 2006, and Kristal, who planned to re-open in Las Vegas, died from cancer in 2007.

Investors bought the CBGB name from Kristal's estate in 2008, but in 2010 filed for bankruptcy. The Las Vegas location never materialized. After a handful of lawsuits, the CBGB name (along with artifacts from the club's original location) ended up in the hands of Kristal's daughter, who in 2011 sold it to another group of buyers, including festival organizer Hayes, with ties to the club's history. 

In early 2012, rumors began swirling that they would also open a new brick-and-mortar location in Manhattan, hopes the brand's owners confirmed later that year. A new CBGB has yet to appear, though.

The delay is the result of a highly competitive Manhattan real estate market, said Hayes, one of the new co-owners. He and his partners have placed offers on two buildings on the Lower East Side but the deals did not come through—and they're still looking. 

"We're committed to doing CB's in New York," said Hayes. "We'd love to do it other places if it meant that we could support live music and inspire musicians and inspire freedom of expression and do all the things that CBGB's represented."

Like Kristal, they explored expanding to Las Vegas, said Hayes, but the opportunities weren't right. "We're here to grow it, but we're not here to sell out," he added. "That's a difficult balance but we're being patient."

There appeared to be an overabundance of digital music streaming services before Apple’s iTunes Radio became a reality last week, so it stands to reason that a shakeout—if it wasn’t already on the horizon—could now be only a matter of time.

Well-positioned players such as Pandora, Spotify and Clear Channel-owned iHeartRadio are probably going to be able to absorb hits from the new Apple competition, said Paul Verna, eMarketer analyst, though names like Rhapsody, Rdio, Slacker, Mog and others could be in trouble during the coming months.

"ITunes Radio is going to disrupt the space," Verna explained. "People's phones are their MP3 players these days."

Indeed, since consumers are becoming rapidly more mobile with their digital consumption, Apple could be in the cat bird's seat with the iPhone. Per ABI Research, 294 million consumers will utilize Apple’s mobile iOS system—just updated last week with iTunes Radio packaged in—by year’s end. And to Verna’s point, a big chunk of those users are already listening to a digital streaming service on their iPhones, giving Apple marketers device-level opportunities to push iTunes Radio that competitors simply don’t have at their disposable. To compare, 13-year-old Pandora has some 200 million users, leading the pack, while younger Spotify, on the other hand, has more than 24 million.

Marketers for the Rdios and Slackers of the world suggest that Apple will create more awareness around streaming music—benefitting players on the scene from end to end.

"Across streaming services, you are seeing a tremendous amount of momentum," said Carter Brokaw, chief revenue officer for Slacker. "And I think Apple's announcement has contributed to it. It's brought a lot more notoriety to the idea of streaming radio being a very big and viable business."

Verna from eMarketer added, "An all-boats-rising scenario is possible. At the same time, it could be that Apple's huge presence will take business away from others."

Mark Simpson, president of digital marketing firm Maxymiser, was blunt when predicting iTunes Radio’s impact.

"It cannot fail to affect the space just because of audience," he said. "Any radio station is about audience. iTunes has a massive user base. Even if only 5 or 10 percent sign up, they are going to affect the on-demand radio stations that exist right now. I think we'll see a shrinkage in the number of players, while iTunes Radio grows into a significant player quite quickly."

Apple can also put big advertising dollars behind iTunes Radio, Simpson noted.

"It is obviously in their best interest to make it be as big as they can," he said. "A TV commercial might not be totally dedicated to iTunes Radio, but the service might be part of a larger Apple ad that highlights various products. And through their other products and services—they can promote the hell out of this if they want to."

Yet the big winners could be brands that purchase digital radio platforms' audio and display ads, said Lauren Russo, svp, director audio and promotions at media buyer Horizon Media.

"Greater competition in the space will lead to better pricing and/or value," she said. "But the digital audio platforms with the best content, user experience and scale will prevail."

While iTunes Radio may reshape the digital streaming business, the Apple product is far from a no-brainer at this point, other observers say. For instance, James McQuivey, principal analyst at Forrester Research, doesn't expect iTunes Radio to race past Pandora or Spotify to the No. 1 position.

"Remember, even on its own devices, Amazon Kindle books are the most read eBooks despite Apple's attempt to come in a change that business," he said. "That said, music is Apple's original customer relationship, and it does a decent job of it so the service should be at least modestly successful, if not dominant."

Locket, an Android app that pays users a penny each time they view an ad while unlocking their phones, may seem like a head scratcher of a business model. And yet, the two-month-old app has already attracted an impressive 150,000 users and a dozen campaigns ready to launch.

One major brand joining up is SunnyD. The orange-flavored drink this week will test Locket’s high-res promos, which target consumers by location, time of day, gender and other parameters.

“We want to reach mobile moms in grocery stores,” said Mark Ozimek, SunnyD’s brand manager. “There’s not a lot of ways of doing that … so she’s looking down, unlocking her phone—and our brand is there. If we have an on-sale product, we can connect her to our products, and we can give an incentive for her to engage with us.”

Bonobos, Spotify, Zipcar and Orbitz are among the other brands testing Locket ads. This past weekend, Scharffen Berger, owned by Hershey’s, geotargeted Locket ads around a wine-and-chocolate-tasting event at Napa Valley’s Beringer Vineyard that it and Locket co-sponsored. Those who clicked through the ads got an exclusive VIP invitation to the event.

“We feel we can break ground while reaching new potential customers,” said Sean Maurer, brand director at Scharffen Berger. “They [ads] are very beautiful. Before a consumer starts playing a game or checking their email, it is the first thing they see. Sometimes, people want a distraction so they turn to their phone. We are going to be right there with something extremely visual and engaging.”

Consumers are willing to view Locket’s ads so that they can scrounge up a little lunch money or save bit by tiny bit for a vacation—they certainly are not getting rich from it. Users ring up an average of $5 or so per week that gets credited to their accounts, potentially adding up to a few hundred dollars a year.

Analysts wonder if that’s enough incentive to grow the platform, however. Plenty of other startups have attempted to pay users to contribute content but ultimately failed.

“We can definitely increase that amount as we get more advertisers on board and generate more revenue,” said Locket CEO Yunha Kim. She added that her marketer clients so far have achieved clickthrough rates of 4 percent, which is quadruple the industry average. Brands are in constant rotation on the app, and typically run a variety of creative. Scharffen Berger ran a dozen different ads.

“A lot of users tell us that they are not in it for the money but [for] the surprise of waking up to the phone to see which ads we are showing that day,” Kim said.

Meanwhile, Locket has named its first sales chief, Charity Sabater, who held the same post at King, parent of the crazy popular game Candy Crush.

“Currently, many advertisers are trying to buy up the entire slot for Black Friday,” Kim said.

Michael Becker of mobile marketing firm Somo believes Locket has loads of potential. “As long as you have explicit, mutual, valuable exchange, then the consumer, the marketer and the marketplace win,” he said.

Maybe even if they’re winning just a penny at a time.

My Morning Jacket, Grizzly Bear, Divine Fits and The Wallflowers are playing a free concert in Times Square on October 12th, the centerpiece event of the 2013 CBGB Music and Film Festival.

James Murphy, of LCD Soundsystem, will DJ at the show. Some 30 bands are expected to play between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. 

Lisa Loeb also is among the Times Square performers. 

CBGB Fest, now in its second year, is the primary reincarnation of the famous punk rock club's brand. Coca-Cola, Spotify, Red Bull, MTV, Gibson Guitar, The Standard Hotel, Astral Tequila, J&R Music and Bust Magazine are sponsoring the Times Square show, which also will include a range of gourmet food vendors. 

Overall, CBGB Fest will feature more than 500 bands playing at more than 125 venues over between October 9th and 13th, as well as a hefty lineup of music industry panels and music-themed film screenings.

Bravo's quartet of November premieres will include a cross-promotion deal with Spotify, which lands its first TV-focused partnership in the United States with this initiative. Spotify users will be pitched playlists for Bravo's The Real Housewives of Atlanta, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills ("Mother's Little Helper," anyone?), Vanderpump Rules and Thicker Than Water in the coming weeks.

The playlists will appear on the cable channel's Spotify page and will be embedded within each respective show page on BravoTV.com. Ads during the episodes will point to the lists of tunes, while Bravo and Spotify will team up to work real-time Twitter conversations with fans during the TV programs.

The playlists will be updated weekly by a deejay to reflect the developing themes of the episodes, such as romantic break-ups, make-ups and celebrations, per the companies' announcement today. The songs will be available via Spotify's mobile and desktop apps.

"Incorporating music allows us another creative dimension for engaging fans with our content beyond the screen and feeds our passionate fans the extra content they crave around their favorite Bravo shows," said Ellen Stone, evp of marketing for Bravo and Oxygen Media.

Sweden-based Spotify has inked similar agreements with television companies in the Nordics, according to a spokesperson.

The marketing world is a game of one-upmanship: Who can put on the better show and deliver the bigger surprise? So when your audience is leaders in marketing, how do you wow them? That’s where Roman Tsunder comes in with PTTOW!

The marketing event for marketers is one over-the-top stunt after another, and translated from comic book lingo, PTTOW! (pit-ow) basically means punch in the face. As an acronym it stands for Plan to Take On the World.

PTTOW! includes a number of top marketing leaders from major brands, media, advertising and technology companies. The main event of the year for the group is set for May in California, but it hosts a number of gatherings throughout the year. Most recently, PTTOW! held a private Cirque du Soleil performance in Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Snapchat, the tech startup that made disappearing photos famous, was at the Las Vegas show that shut down Love Theatre, Tsunder said. Snapchat is exactly the kind of new company PTTOW! looks to bring in, boosting its image as a youth-focused organization.

“One commonality of everyone in the group is that they’re focused on this next-generation consumer,” Tsunder said. “We’re close to every company focused on this audience.”

In past years, the main California conference brought together companies like the music streaming service Spotify and headphones maker Skullcandy. The Dalai Lama attended last year. This year, Tsunder named a number of new members and attendees, including the CMOs of Intel, PepsiCo, YouTube, and the CEO of Lululemon, Laurent Potdevin.

If you’re new to the event, here are a few key points to keep in mind:

• The companies at the event have combined marketing budgets of $48 billion.
• You may train with the Navy Seals.
• Hope you like helicopters, because Tsunder pairs random guests like the AT&T CMO and DJ Kaskade for in-flight meetings. Tsunder says sharing a helicopter with someone makes for a memorable experience.
• There will be parachuting and cigar boat races.
• You’ll be treated like a “head of state” with a personal “ambassador”—or valet—who will cater to you. If you like, say, herbal tea, PTTOW! knows it and will have some ready, Tsunder said.
• Will.i.am of Black Eye Peas fame is a regular.
• This is PTTOW!’s sixth annual conference and is set for May 7 to 9.
   

While the Internet of Things takes center stage when we talk about connectivity, the future of streaming music presents consumers with a whole new set of opportunities and challenges as it moves beyond the desktop and smartphone. With digital music now embedded in car apps, smartwatches, headphones, Google Glass and home appliances, the dizzying array of niche players has manufacturers confused about the right brand with which to align.

"There better be a breakout, otherwise there will be a shakeout,” warned a technology executive who works with several of the digital streamers. “They can’t sit there and rely on their desktop audience. It’s about the other devices. We will learn a lot this holiday season—who’s got the best partnerships?” Streaming music services Pandora, Spotify, Songza, Rdio, TuneIn, Rhapsody, Deezer, Slacker, iHeartRadio and Beats by Dre are all feeling the heat to either build market share or be tuned out. Just last week wearable tech company Jawbone bought social radio service Playground.FM on the heels of the better known Last.FM shutting subscriptions down.

Music’s heavy hitters welcome the proliferation of devices using their services. “At this point, I see it as a six-screen world, whether it’s Web, smartphones, tablets, in cars, in homes, TVs and now wearables,” noted Brian Lakamp, president of Clear Channel Digital, parent of iHeartRadio.

Spotify communications lead Graham James added, “The goal is to make Spotify ubiquitous across every platform.”

Lizzie Widhelm, Pandora’s digital vp, agreed. “There’s going to be lots of devices and lots of new places where consumers are connecting,” she said.

To Lakamp’s chagrin, the consensus among analysts is that Pandora and Spotify stand the best chance to win in the long run—mainly due to the former’s robust ad strategy and the latter’s popularity in Europe and with young Americans. (iHeartRadio’s execs contend that the power of Clear Channel’s terrestrial radio, billboard and concert franchises is being disregarded by such experts.)

But in some circles, the narrative—like the industry itself—is more fragmented. “There’s so much money being invested into this space by a lot of different players that I think it’s too early to call,” said Jaimee Minney, who was a three-year rep for Rhapsody before recently moving on to shopping app Slice. “There is going to be more consolidation though.”

While music services like Rhapsody, Songza and Slacker have technological strengths, the belief is that they will either be acquired or go away entirely. Investor cash flow cannot last much longer, and deep-pocketed retailers could jump into the fray. Walmart has been a rumored entrant (the big box retailer declined to comment), which is interesting after Amazon last week included Pandora, iHeartRadio and TuneIn as part of its Amazon Fire TV entertainment products suite.

Beats by Dre’s headphones are its cash cow, but its new curated music service Beats Music is growing users by the thousands daily. Its larger strategy befits a digital music universe that’s colliding rapidly with physical devices. Even so, not all observers are bullish on Beats. “They are probably too late to the game,” contended Forrester analyst James McQuivey. “It’s going to come down to Pandora and Spotify.”

Automakers may prefer this sort of consolidation. Adding $100 to $300 for a bundled service won’t phase shoppers already shelling out $40,000. “We’ve heard auto guys talk about offering a bundled music service,” said Ty Roberts, co-founder of music tech company Gracenote. “Obviously, automotive is global. And right now they are partnering with music services in each region. They could really use one go-to streaming service and then ship it around the globe.”

Update: An earlier version of this article suggested that Last.FM had shut down altogether, but the company says it is focusing on leveraging partnerships with other services.

Specs
Who Reid Scott
Age 36
Accomplishments Stars as Dan Egan on HBO’s Veep (Sundays at 10:30 p.m.); voices Turbo in the Netflix animated series Turbo FAST
Base Los Angeles

What’s the first information you consume in the morning?
I head straight to my email and then after that, the Huffington Post. It’s such a guilty pleasure. I love me some Pat Kiernan in the morning. I turn on NY1 while I get ready and get the local news, weather and traffic before I leave.

Were you a political junkie before you started doing Veep?
I kind of was, yeah. My family has been mildly involved in politics, so I’ve always had an interest in it, but all the research we got to do for Veep and the access that we had to people on the Hill during our prep time before Season 1 was amazing. It really fueled that fire.

Were there any TV shows or media outlets you used for your research?
Obviously The West Wing was a big one. In terms of rags, I read a lot of Politico, a lot of The Hill. Beyond that, I’d just pick up bits here and there from places like Reddit and Twitter.

Tell me about your social media diet.
I’m fickle when it comes to social media. I was an early adopter of Facebook, but then I was also an early adopter of leaving Facebook. These days, Twitter’s pretty much it for me, and even so, it’s usually more for professional purposes.

Who do you follow on Twitter?
Michael Ian Black cracks my shit up. I can pretty much read anything that guy does. Tim Simons, one of my co-stars from Veep, is getting really good on Twitter. Also Mo Gaffney, the comedian. She’s incredibly funny.

You’re getting married in June. Have you been sucked into the Pinterest wedding vortex yet?
Oh yeah, my fiancée is way on top of that. I actually had no idea how to use Pinterest, or what Pinterest even was, until we got engaged, and now I’m a total pro. It’s actually great for the wedding—we’ve gotten so many great ideas.

What TV shows do you watch?
So many. Like The Americans. I think it’s one of the most underrated television shows ever. Game of Thrones is a big one for me. True Detective blew my mind. I can’t wait for Vikings to come back—I watched Season 1 in probably three days.

What’s your favorite app?
The one I probably use the most is Google Maps because I live in Los Angeles, and it’s super confusing out here. And Spotify, duh. I’ve discovered so much amazing music from that thing.

Any games?
I was a big fan of Angry Birds Star Wars edition because I’m a dork. And there was a game called Real Racing that I absolutely loved. I got so into that thing. I played it for months straight.

How do you wind down before bed?
My fiancée and I are huge Family Guy fans, so one of our favorite things to do is curl up in bed and watch an episode or two before we go to sleep.

With Apple reportedly buying his music brand, Dr. Dre is ready for the billionaire title, or as R&B singer Tyrese Gibson said in a video posted online, "The Forbes list just changed in a big way." The video from last night of the rap producer in a celebratory mood suggests that the West Coast record mogul believes a $3.2 billion sale of Beats Electronics to Apple is imminent.

The video shows Gibson playing hype man for Dr. Dre, who says he's about to be "the first billionaire in hip-hop."

The rapper, who helped launch the careers of Eminem and 50 Cent, founded Beats Electronics, which makes high-price headsets. Beats would be Apple's biggest purchase ever, and a number of close Apple watchers are struggling to see the point.

Apple would bring a visionary music executive, Jimmy Iovine, who owns a large stake in Beats, into its ranks to help respark iTunes. But hiring-based acquisition is hard to justify at that billion dollar price tag, Apple observers say.

In fact, Wall Street hopes this deal scratches like a bad record. Here are the concerns:

1. Beats headset sales are about $1 billion a year, according to a recent International Federation of the Phonographic Industry report, which would be a small boost to Apple's $180 billion business.
2. Beats streaming service, a monthly subscription model for all-you-can-listen music, may not transfer industry licensing agreements in a sale. It's unclear whether the music rights, attained by Beats, could be utilized by Apple.
3. Apple, which upended the music industry with iTunes in 2003, has been slow to reinvent its music offering while the rest of the music world has moved toward subscription and free streaming models. "Apple needs to get in the game, but do they need to spend $3 billion to buy Beats?" analyst Colin Gillis of BGC Partners said.
4. If Apple is going to pay big bucks, why not buy Spotify? In fact, that streaming-subscription company is based in Stockholm, Sweden, which means Apple could use its foreign cash that wouldn't be taxed by Uncle Sam thanks to loopholes.
5. Apple has never run a separate brand. If it buys Beats Music service, Gillis asks, "Will Apple do the right thing?" Will the subscriptions be available on Android or Windows phones? "That would be an interesting change of culture," he said. Apple has reportedly considered expanding iTunes to rival platforms.
6. Apple has other pressing needs and could buy any company, some on the wish list for investors: Yelp, the payments company Square, Twitter, or even Yahoo, analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray said.
7. The perception of Apple is that its most creative days are behind it, and buying innovation has never been part of the strategy. A Beats acquisition plays into the narrative that Apple is no longer capable of homegrown hits like iPods, iPhones and iPads.

Meanwhile, check out the aforementioned video.

Messaging app Tango is following in the footsteps of competitors like BlackBerry Messenger with the launch of media channels users can follow. Tango Channels is still in testing and will be available early this summer, CTO Eric Setton told Adweek. 

Early media partners include Spotify and AOL’s Huffington Post and TechCrunch, he said. There will be five channel categories: entertainment, news, lifestyle, sports and music, and about 50 media brands at launch, Setton said.

“The channels were designed with brands in mind to allow them to actually showcase their content to our members,” he said.

Tango—known for messaging, gaming and music sharing—said there would be opportunities for brands to show ads in its channels. The app already sells native ad space through Twitter’s MoPub mobile network, and they show up within users’ feeds.

“Channels have that option as well to have ads interspersed through channel feeds and we will share in that revenue so it’s actually a revenue generator for partners to have channels on Tango,” said Jenn Caukin, a Tango rep.

Brands own their channels and Tango would help them capitalize on their content, Setton said.

“It’s a marketing opportunity for the brands we’re bringing on board to expose content to a large mobile community,” he said.

Tango has 70 million monthly active users and 200 million registered users. It competes with WeChat in China and Line in Japan, and 30 percent of its user base is in North America, according to the company.

Another rival, BlackBerry Messenger, launched brand channels in March to let publishers like Rolling Stone and Disney post content and sell ad space in feeds.

In March, Tango raised $280 million, most of that coming from China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. 

Harvey Weinstein is turning movie-making into matchmaking with a marketing campaign on Spotify to promote the summer romance flick Begin Again.

The Weinstein Co. created a digital hub that connects to the music service, which is being called a “Tinder for Music.” Spotify users hit the “connect” button to find other Spotify users with similar musical tastes.

Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley, Hailee Steinfeld and Adam Levine star in the summer romance. 

The Spotify subscription music service lets people collect digital albums and follow each other. In that sense the marketing campaign is just another extension of how users already connect there. 

Music streaming services like iTunes Radio and Pandora have been developing new ways for brands to get involved. In March, Peet’s coffee started piping a specially branded Pandora station into its shops.

The Begin Again marketing campaign starts Monday, and will promoted on Spotify, directing people to the movie’s hub to show off trailer and other material. They did not reveal how much the campaign cost.

Rhapsody has purchased two music tech companies today: Schematic Labs, the makers of SoundTracking, and music discovery startup Ex.fm

VentureBeat reported on Rhapsody's acquisition of Ex.fm, which cataloged what songs online listeners tuned in to and then used that data for personalized recommendations. Ex.fm decided to shut down its service late last year, reversed that decision, and then once again announced it would be shuttering its services in May. The financial details of the acquisition were undisclosed.

"By teaming up, we can build the ultimate music service with an amazing social discovery engine backed by Rhapsody’s catalog of over 30 million songs," Ex.fm said in a statement.

It's unclear what the startup's role will be with Rhapsody, but VentureBeat postulates that it "seems likely that they’ll end up working on some aspect of the newly launched digital radio service UnRadio on T-Mobile."

A few hours after the Ex.fm development came to light, Schematic Labs revealed that it had been acquired by Rhapsody. In a blog post, makers of social music app SoundTracking reassured users that the service would  "continue to offer the ability to share the soundtrack to your life" while also promising it was "busy cooking up exciting new features to take advantage of Rhapsody’s 30-million track global streaming catalog."

Both acquisitions come in the wake of Rhapsody's recent announcement that it now has over 2 million subscribers for its premium music services. The company seeks to build on its recent success with the new additions, while building UnRadio's capabilities.

The purchases appear to strengthen Rhapsody's position in a fragmented digital music marketplace led by Pandora, Spotify and iHeartRadio.

Following in the footsteps of competitors Pandora and iHeartRadio, Spotify is launching video ads to help monetize its 30 million consumers who stream digital music. The first brands to run campaigns will be Ford, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Target, Wells Fargo and NBC Universal Pictures.

Soon, music lovers can watch a brand video on Spotify’s mobile app in exchange for 30 minutes of free music play. It's called a Sponsored Session. Brands can also buy a desktop version of the ad, called a Video Takeover.

Members of the free service will opt in to watch the ads. And members who pay Spotify’s $9.99 monthly subscription fee won't see the ads.

The feature is similar to Hulu’s "Branded Entertainment Selector" video ad where viewers can choose to watch one long ad (as opposed to multiple ads) before watching their show or movie without interruption.

"Our audience is incredibly engaged, so we are delivering an advertising experience that enhances their time spent on Spotify and connects them to the music and brands they love," said Spotify CBO Jeff Levick in a statement on the company's blog.

Spotify says it will begin testing the ads during the fourth quarter with the initial group of brands. Going into 2015, the format will become available to all marketers.

The company tested different timespans for the "Sponsored Sessions," from as little as 15 minutes of music play to as long as an hour, and found that 30 minutes was the sweet spot for the best opt-in rate, reports Ad Age.

Levick declined to say how much the ads cost, but he did reveal they are priced at a premium to make up for lost revenue during the half hour free of ads.

Digital video will bring in $6 billion this year, according to eMarketer. A healthy chunk of that number—$1.5 billion—will come from mobile video ads. "Desktop has historically been the larger source of impressions in terms of where ad revenue is coming from. Mobile in the last nine months has accelerated and become that," Levick told Ad Age.
 

Few things are as evocative of memories as music and Spotify is using that emotional connection in a new online and social media push that invites Spotify users to share their songs and the real stories behind them.

The #thatsongwhen campaign, from Ogilvy & Mather in New York and sister shop David in Miami, is the initial part of a larger marketing effort for the streaming music service. It begins in the U.S. and will subsequentially roll out to the U.K. and Germany, with localized content in each market.

“Music has always been a huge part of our users’ lives,” said Erin Clift, Spotify’s vp of global marketing and partnerships. "Our consumers' love of music and their telling other people about that passion has helped fuel our growth. We were looking for a way for our users to not just be spectators of the stories but to be creators of the stories.”

Three of the millennials’ stories were made into online videos. In one clip, a young woman describes the time she and her teenage gymnast friends formed a secret committee to paper trees with toilet tissue, as Ludicrous' “Roll Out” plays in the background. In another video, a guy tells the story of an unrequited crush he had as a 9-year-old to the tune of TLC's  “Waterfalls.” The final video features a hipster recalling that when he was laid off from his job, he heard White Snake's “Here I Go Again” as he exited the building. The campaign also features Vine celebrities Vincent Marcus and Kenzie Nimmo.

“The realness of this campaign is the key point,” said Ogilvy New York president Adam Tucker. “We wanted to tap into the truth about music and it was really important to tap into real people and their feelings and the songs that inspire them.”

Corinna Falusi, the ecd on the effort, added that Spotify is “more of a technology company. Other music companies use big celebrities and big shiny stars. With Spotify and its Swedish heritage, music is a very personal experience.”

Specs
Who Ken Marino
Age 45
Claim to fame Stars in the new NBC series Marry Me (premieres Oct. 14 at 9 p.m.); played Ron Donald on Party Down; screenwriter (Wanderlust, Role Models)
Base Los Angeles
Twitter @KenMarino

What’s the first information you consume in the morning?
My alarm clock is on my iPhone, and so I grab that, and then out of habit I usually check either my Huffington Post app or I’ll go to Twitter and see what’s going on there. Then my wife will say, “Stop going straight to your phone. Get up and live your life.” And then I turn the phone off.

Who do you follow on Twitter?
Well, there’s God. I follow God, who’s really funny. I follow Michael Ian Black who’s ridiculously funny. Josh Malina I follow. Always interested in what Marc Maron is talking about and who’s on his show. And I’ve been following [Marry Me co-star] Casey Wilson, actually, so when I go into the hair and makeup trailer, I can act like I know exactly what’s going on in her life. She’s always impressed by that.

What’s your favorite app?
I just got the SportsCenter app. That’s pretty good. Let me see … I have so many lame apps. This is going to be such a bummer. One that I go to a lot is Deadline Hollywood. I look at it, and I’m like, “Why do I care about 90 percent of the things on here?” And yet I can’t stop looking at it. Oh, you know what app I use all the time? My Spotify app.

Do you generally listen to music on Spotify instead of buying it?
I do. I feel guilty, but it’s so great. I was just talking to a musician friend of mine about it, and I was saying that what’s great about Spotify is that I’ll look up an artist whose early stuff I didn’t really listen to before—like, I’ll start listening to early Elvis Costello and then I’m a bigger Elvis Costello fan. Recently I was like, “Hall and Oates, what was their first album?” And I went back and listened to it and it was awesome! I get on this kick of listening to musicians’ first couple of albums, and that’s hard to do without Spotify. I probably wouldn’t buy an album because I don’t know whether I’d like it or not.

What TV shows do you watch?
When I get home from work, I want to watch something mindless, so my wife and I will just kind of fall asleep to House Hunters International [laughs]. But as far as comedies and stuff, Louie is amazing, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I just started watching Transparent. Oh my god, it’s so good! I love it. Jeffrey Tambor just kills it.

What’s on your reading list?
I just picked up a book called Assholes: A Theory by Aaron James. He breaks down what makes people assholes [laughs]. I thought that was an interesting book because, before Marry Me, I’ve been playing a bunch of different versions of an asshole, and so I wanted to read this book to see if I’m in the ballpark for who these guys are. I also started reading Kazan on Directing, which I’ve always wanted to read. I’m a slow reader, so it’ll probably take me about 10 years to get through those.

How do you wind down before bed?
Cocaine. Just lots and lots of cocaine. I know that goes against the grain, but it puts me right down. You want me to give you a media answer? Sometimes I’ll hit myself on the head with my iPad a couple of times and just knock myself out.

It would probably be a totally buried, obscure footnote if his comedic peers like Marc Maron, Kristen Schaal or Todd Barry were products of the same career path. But there's Jim Gaffigan, posting his early to mid-1990s credentials as an Ogilvy & Mather copywriter on LinkedIn.

Seriously, how many entertainers who have been on TV, like, a thousand times have a LinkedIn account? Though it seems to fit perfectly with the Indiana-bred redhead's clean, regular-guy brand of comedy that can be traced back to his advertising days.

"I used to write a [New York Times] print ad every Friday for American Express," Gaffigan said. "It was, you know, humor-motivated.... And then they woke me up to fire me, because I was doing stand-up at night, and I was so tired [laughs]. No, I learned a lot from working in advertising, about word economy and trying to get to the heart of the matter. I think it definitely informed my stand-up."

Unless you are a stranger to his Hot Pockets bit, you know he's serious. And in the last decade or so, everything has come full circle for the 48-year-old funnyman.

Gaffigan has starred in some 200 TV ads for the likes of Saturn, ESPN, Sierra Mist and Rolling Rock. His latest commercials are for Holiday Inn Express, where his pair of two-minute videos have racked up close to a million YouTube views in the "Stay Smart" campaign. (One spot can be seen below.) The campaign—a collaboration between Funny or Die and WPP agencies Ogilvy, Possible, Hill+Knowlton and Mindshare—has extended to BuzzFeed, Spotify, Wired and Pandora. Additionally, Gaffigan took over Holiday Inn Express' Twitter handle on Sept. 14 while appearing at the Funny or Die-backed Oddball Comedy Festival. Here's Gaffigan's take on the campaign and advertising in general.

Are the longer-form videos for digital harder or easier to do than 15- or 30-second TV spots?
I think it’s probably easier the more time you’ve got. There isn’t this expectation of, "We’ve gotta turn this around and get this right pretty quick." So there's a lot [of time] to improvise. And in the case of Holiday Inn Express, it was a man-on-the-street thing. Therefore, it could have gone a lot of different ways, and I think because it was long form we could get a lot of different pieces in there.

In other words, it is more like your regular work when compared to a spot.
Oh yes, very much so. And you know, I used to write commercials, and I’ve appeared in a lot of commercials. Usually you kind of watch the 15, and you go, "I wonder what the 30 is?"

What made Holiday Inn Express a good fit for you?
The thing that really thrilled me was that the campaign—[in terms of] the brand approach—was using humor. And you know, it’s either a funny or amusing commercial, or it's not. And I think that there's some brands that do funny well, and Holiday Inn Express is one of them.

Like other comedians, you are active on Twitter. Would you ever sign off on writing one-off tweets for brands?
I've been offered money to tweet, and it's funny because, you know, the Holiday Inn Express people kind of got it. They're like, "All right, so, you're gonna do a Twitter takeover of our page when you're at the Oddball comedy festival." And I'm like, "Fine. You know, I don't have any problem doing that." But some brands are so not Internet-savvy. They're like, "We'd like 500 tweets." And you're like, "I could never do 500 tweets."

OK, you have a new book out later this month, Food: A Love Story. Outside of promoting it here and there and pushing your upcoming shows, how else do you use Twitter?
I try and use it as a notebook, you know, if I come up with an idea. I think there’s a savviness among social media users that, you know, as long as you’re not discussing, like, horrible famine, it’s OK. And you can quote me on that.

[Laughter.]  
Yeah.

You know what this backstage could use, a breakfast bar with bacon and cinnamon rolls. #StaySmart#OddballFest ^JG

— Holiday Inn Express (@HIExpress) Sept. 15, 2014