Music Ally has been writing about the digital-music market in China for more than a decade, tracing its development from an almost-entirely unlicensed territory through to today, when China is the seventh biggest recorded-music market in the world, with hundreds of millions of people using streaming services from companies like Tencent Music and NetEase. In […]

Earlier this year, Australian startup Replica was announced as one of the latest cohort for accelerator Techstars Music: a company using AI “to create the next generation of games, films, music, and other media” providing “millions of ‘Replica’ voice actors on demand”. Now the company has been explaining more about what it does, and how it might be […]

Artists’ profile pages on Spotify include a ‘Fans Also Like’ tab, showing a range of artists considered to be similar to them. How does it work? Well, yes, it’s based on who fans of that artist also like, but Spotify has published a blog post outlining its methodology in a little more detail. “The more fans two […]

Earlier this year, AI-music startup Endel revealed plans to release AI-generated albums through a distribution deal with Warner Music Group. And it definitely *is* a distribution deal: headlines about Endel becoming the first AI to ‘sign to a label’ were wide of the mark. Five albums came out earlier this year: ‘Clear Night’, ‘Rainy Night’, ‘Cloudy Afternoon’, […]

Ice cream. Weepy movies. Three-hour gym sessions. Howling at the moon like a crestfallen wolf. All good ways to respond to being dumped. Or you could listen to Katy Perry’s new ‘Songs About Moving On’ playlist on Amazon Music, of course. It’s the first in a new series of playlists for Amazon under the banner […]

Forget the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ movie: it’s stream-ripping websites that are putting Queen on our internal jukebox regularly at the moment. Every few months, another one bites the dust. The latest to bow after being put, ahem, under pressure (sorry, we’ll stop now) is German site Convert2MP3, following legal action from industry bodies IFPI and BVMI. […]

A new Spotify / music publishing story broke on Friday, but there’s a bigger picture here: the increasingly-dispiriting story of the streaming service’s approach towards the publishing community, as well as the perception of Spotify by those publishers and songwriters. At a time when recorded-music revenues are going from strength to strength, what’s happening around […]

We enjoyed The Verge’s take on a new research project capable of turning a photo and an audio file into a singing / talking video portrait. “Finally, technology that can make Rasputin sing like Beyoncé.” It’s what we’ve all been waiting for! Or at least making Rasputin sing Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’, which would be suitably meta. Anyway, […]

A team working within African music distributor Africori has launched a series of playlists for global streaming services, which focus on music from Africa. The team is Afriquency, and its playlists include Afro Fresh Friday, Afro Vybz, La Fête (focusing on Francophone African music) and The New Collective (which focuses on emerging artists. “Africa is […]

Music Ally really has been trying not to go too far down the Donald Trump road of slinging the word ‘fake’ willy-nilly. That said, in the last two years we’ve ended up reporting on ‘fake artists’ (who turned out to be production-music artists releasing their work commercially); ‘fake uploads’ (from people repackaging old and/or unreleased […]

Indian music-streaming service Gaana is planning to test cheaper subscription options that separate out some of the features from its current premium tier. That’s according to CEO Prashan Agarwal, in an interview with the BusinessLine website. “We need to de-couple Gaana Plus offerings. Currently, there are three key benefits that a user gets from Gaana Plus: ad-free […]

Job title: Product Owner Responsible to: Head of Technology Location of work: Kings Cross, London   Main purpose of role Spinnup is a forward-looking, disruptive part of Universal Music, the world’s biggest group of record labels. As a digital distribution platform, unsigned artists use Spinnup to distribute their music to music services like Spotify and […]

Earlier this week, Facebook announced a new blockchain-powered currency called Libra, and a digital wallet for it called Calibra. Spotify was among the companies backing the plans by becoming a founder member of the independent Libra Association. Now Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has been talking about his hopes for Libra, including the suggestion that it […]

Facebook launching its own global currency was bound to provoke some criticism, and some close scrutiny of exactly what the social network is planning and how it will work. Three pieces are worth your attention today to understand how the initiative – backed by Spotify, as we reported earlier in the week – is being […]

Universal Music Group is following in the Spice Girls’ footsteps – not a sentence we ever expected to write in a Music Ally story – by remastering some classic videos for YouTube viewers in 2019. The Spice Girls, if you remember, started replacing their grainy old videos with spiffing new 4K-quality ones earlier this year. Now […]

One of the things holding back music virtual-reality startups so far as been the slower-than-expected growth of VR-headset ownership. Now startup MelodyVR is making moves to tackle that challenge. First: it’s launched a closed beta of its app for Android and iOS devices, with plans for a commercial launch this summer. It’ll offer the company’s […]

Music Ally has been talking for a while about the potential for live events combining music and esports. We’ve already seen music performances at major esports tournaments, of course, while MTV tested an esports/music festival in Singapore last year called Hyperplay. Now two of the more prominent figures in recent games/music crossovers – Tyler ‘Ninja’ […]

A report claiming that classical music could be ‘streaming’s next genre’ comes with an important caveat – to its credit, one that’s openly stated – that it was commissioned by a classical-music streaming service. Idagio enlisted research company Midia Research to survey 8,000 adult music consumers across eight countries, including the US, UK and Germany. […]

Vivendi appears to be paving the way for its planned sell-off of up to 50% of Universal Music Group to happen in 2020 rather than this year. That’s the gist, at least, of comments made by chairman Yannick Bolloré in an interview with Bloomberg (and reported on by Billboard) maintaining that the plans are proceeding smoothly. […]

Almost 20m people in Japan subscribed to a music streaming service at the end of 2018 – with both free and paid subscriber numbers set to rise further over the next few years as streaming revenues remain healthy The post Country Profile – Japan 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Here’s a generational test: do you remember Bebo? Did you have a profile on it? The social network’s heyday, in western Europe at least, was in 2006-2008, before an $850m acquisition by AOL that coincided neatly with Facebook’s emergence to leave Bebo trailing in its wake. Yet Bebo has continued to exist, through further acquisitions, […]

We know Teespring well for its work with music companies and artists around merchandise, but it also has a thriving business making merch for ‘creators’ – social and livestreaming-video stars. That’s more the focus for its latest announcement: a new partnership with Amazon’s live-video platform Twitch. It’ll enable viewers of Twitch streams to buy merchandise […]

Voisey is a music-making app that gets people to sing or rap over pre-produced beats, then create one-minute videos (including split-screen duets) to share with friends. Think Smule’s Sing! Karaoke meets TikTok. Voisey soft-launched in Norway in December 2018, then in the UK in January 2019, with plans to debut in the US this summer. The […]

British startup Roli has launched a series of inventive musical instruments. Its latest has been unveiled with a Kickstarter pre-orders campaign. The instrument is called Lumi, which is pitched as “the illuminated keyboard, app and song library that lets you play great songs and learn as you go”. You might compare it to music game Guitar […]

Perhaps we should start asking some pointed questions to any collecting society or label that *isn’t* announcing record royalties and/or payouts. New milestones are being set by the week in 2019, it seems. Canadian collecting society SOCAN is the latest example. In 2018 it paid out $320m to its members, representing 8% year-on-year growth, although […]

A Rolling Stone headline claiming that ‘fake streams could be costing artists $300 million a year’ could be seen as over-egging its story, given that the source is a single indie-label boss citing anonymous sources. Still, Hopeless Records founder Louis Posen *is* making a useful contribution to the debate about the scale of ‘fake streams’ […]

The boss of indie licensing agency Merlin will step down at the end of 2019. Charles Caldas revealed the news yesterday, having led the organisation since its earliest days in 2007. It’s an amicable life-choice decision, with plenty of praise for Caldas’ work in its wake. “Merlin and the whole independent community owe Charles a […]

The blame game continues in the row over how lyrics from Genius, complete with their unique apostrophe patterns, found their way into Google’s lyric search results. Genius had its say to the Wall Street Journal for the article that brought the argument to public notice, but now Google and one of its key lyrics partners, LyricFind, […]

Podcast production studio Wondery was founded in 2016, and is best known for shows including Dirty John – recently made into a Netflix TV series – American History, Business Wars and Dr Death. Wondery is also one of the biggest independent podcast publishers in the US, with a monthly audience of 7.4 million Americans in March 2019, and […]

In recent times, Snapchat has tended to come off worse in comparisons with Instagram, particularly when it comes to active users. There are now at least some bright spots: in Snapchat’s slate of original TV-style shows. One of them, ‘Endless Summer’ attracted 28 million viewers for its first season last year, according to The Hollywood Reporter. […]

British music-streaming / hardware startup Electric Jukebox was announced in October 2015, and launched in November 2016 in its home country – although it postponed its planned debut in the US citing Spotify’s songwriter lawsuits as the reason. Then, in August 2017, the company revealed a new product called Roxi and suggested that it would go public in 2018. Fast forward […]

The recent leaks were correct: music-streaming Spotify is on board as one of the first backers of Facebook’s new Libra cryptocurrency. The social network will launch a cryptocurrency called Libra in 2020, complete with a wallet developed by the company’s new Calibra subsidiary. And backing all this is The Libra Association, which Facebook says will […]

Fresh from launching a compilation album with gaming star Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins, Capitol Music Group is now building a studio in its Los Angeles HQ to help musicians follow in his game-streaming footsteps. “Because we know our artists have an affinity to game, we’re going to build out a streaming studio at Capitol Records in […]

The Pew Research Center has put out some new stats on Americans’ internet use: and specifically on their mobile internet use. “Today, 37% of U.S. adults say they mostly use a smartphone when accessing the internet. This share has nearly doubled since 2013,” it explained. “At that point, 19% of Americans named their smartphone as their primary […]

Spotify’s latest feature for brands advertising on its service is ‘podcast listener targeting’. It launched in 10 countries on Friday: the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. “With this feature, enterprise brand marketers will be able to reach Spotify Free users who have listened to podcasts on Spotify, verified by […]

Crowdfunding platform Drip began life as a project out of independent label Ghostly International: a way for indie labels and artists to raise money from fans through ongoing subscriptions. In early 2016 its founders announced plans to shut it down, before crowdfunding company Kickstarter swooped in to acquire it, with promises of a relaunch. That came in […]

Facebook has quietly (bar the odd leak) been working on its own cryptocurrency initiative for some time now. Reports suggest it will be announced tomorrow (Tuesday 17 June), complete with a consortium of partners offering governance for Facebook’s new coin, called The Libra Association. The Wall Street Journal broke the news that financial firms including […]

Oana Ruxandra will be Warner Music Group’s new lead of business development for recorded music, reporting directly in to CEO Steve Cooper. “A talented negotiator and collaborative leader, Oana has a first-class strategic brain and keen sense of how to get deals done swiftly and effectively,” wrote Cooper in an email to colleagues. “Oana, along […]

There are a number of popular genres in the podcasts market: true crime, comedy, sports, politics and technology among them. But music is also a thriving genre, with a variety of sub-formats exploring songs, artists and the culture around music. We’ve chosen some of the most popular and/or inventive shows, which make a great starting […]

Complaints about artists taking an unmerited share of songwriting royalties on songs written for them aren’t new: the phrase ‘change a word, get a third’ has been around for years. Now songwriter Ryan Tedder has come out swinging against the practice, in a speech at the National Music Publishers’ Association’s annual meeting. “In the entire […]

Streaming service Mixcloud launched its Mixcloud Select program in December 2018, enabling listeners to subscribe to individual curators (or channels) for a monthly fee of $2.99 or above. Now the company has been explaining how the revenues are shared out, in a blog post noting the fact that Mixcloud’s direct licensing deals “identify the ‘long form […]

Music firm LiveXLive, which focuses on streaming concerts as well as its Slacker audio-streaming service, has published its latest quarterly financial results. The company’s revenues grew by 29% year-on-year to $9.2m in the first quarter of 2019, although its net loss grew too: from $9.5m in Q1 2018 to $9.7m last quarter. LiveXLive also says that […]

Some Spotify subscribers have had its mobile app’s redesigned ‘Your Library’ screen for a while now, but as of yesterday it began rolling out to all of the service’s premium users. As we reported before, the screen now has two main tabs, ‘Music’ and ‘Podcasts’, with the latter providing an easier way for people to […]

There are big opportunities for the music industry in podcasts, but one of the big barriers is licensing: the cost and complexity for podcasters of securing the rights to actually play music in their shows. This was one of the clearest points made last night at the BPI and Music Ally’s ‘Pod Only Knows’ event […]

Facebook has published an update on Facebook Watch, the section of the social network devoted to premium videos. “We launched Watch globally less than a year ago, and there are now more than 720 million people monthly and 140 million people daily who spend at least one minute in Watch. On average, the daily visitors spend more […]

Having raised a $1.25bn funding round, and with its Fortnite game continuing to be a licence to print money, publisher Epic Games is on the acquisition trail. It recently bought Psyonix, the developer of popular game Rocket League. Now it has diversified into social media. Epic has bought startup Houseparty, whose “face-to-face social network” is […]

“Escape the harsh realities of the world,” suggests a new website launched for British band Bastille. With 2019 being what it is, that’s a good pitch: time for some light-hearted, sweet content that… Oh wait. “Step into the Doom Days house.” Perhaps not so light-hearted then. But it’s a fun marketing campaign for the band’s […]

Amazon has launched a new version of its Echo Dot Kids smart speaker, which was originally released in April 2018. The new version is louder and comes in new colours like ‘Frost Blue’ and ‘Rainbow’. The $70 device will also include a year’s subscription to Amazon’s FreeTime service, which gathers child-friendly content and Alexa skills. Amazon […]

Streaming service Pandora wants brands to make better, more effective ads for its platform. It’s latest move to help them do that is the creation of an in-house ‘audio consultancy’ called Studio Resonate. It’ll work with advertisers on “audio creative development, sonic branding and strategy services, as well as visual design, rich media production, web / […]

In May this year, the general assembly of collecting-societies body CISAC voted to expel Spanish society SGAE, temporarily, in the wake of the long-running controversy around ‘The Wheel’ (a system that saw some of the society’s members’ music played through the night on some Spanish TV channels, boosting their performance royalties). Now CISAC’s director-general Gadi […]

“Apple Music could be worth more than half of Spotify if Apple is forced to divest it to comply with antitrust-related actions,” claims a report on financial news site Barrons. Which, we have to say, is an extremely big ‘if’ right up front: thus far, complaints about Apple giving its own music-streaming service an advantage over rivals […]

Spotify has unveiled its latest algo-personalised playlist, Your Daily Drive, which is aimed at commuters in the US. “Music and news” is its thing: a mixture of familiar and new songs based on the tastes of each listener, but also “short-form podcast news updates” from outlets including the Wall Street Journal, NPR and PRI. Spotify says […]

Startup Jaxsta has been working on a huge database of music credits – from artists and songwriters to producers and engineers – for four years now. This week, the project has launched a public beta for music fans and industry folk alike to poke around. “We are proud to unveil what promises to be the world’s largest […]

After a spate of old and/or leaked songs from famous artists making their way onto streaming services without their permission, distributors are taking action. DistroKid has just revealed a partnership with audio-fingerprinting firm Audible Magic that will see it checking new uploads from artists to make sure they’re original. But what about recordings that have […]

There may be trouble brewing for Spotify in its home country, with the Swedish data-protection authority (Datainspektionen) launching a review of how Spotify handles requests for people to see what information it holds about them. “The authority has become aware that there may be some shortcomings in how the company handles registry extracts, including that […]

Lead: Email marketing is far from dead. We look at why it is still relevant, how email tools and platforms are getting smarter and where they are allowing users greater ways to target audiences, segment audiences and personalise messaging. Yet there are still many pitfalls, so in this issue we outline how to use email […]

More games stats? We got ‘em! Well, analytics firm App Annie has got ‘em, at least. It’s published some new data on the mobile games market, as a sub-sector of mobile apps. “33% of all mobile downloads and 10% of time spent on mobile are now games,” explained the company in its latest blog post. […]

US venture-capital exec Mary Meeker has, for many years now, published an annual slide deck on ‘Internet Trends’. Despite their famous length – this year’s, which was published yesterday, is 333 slides long – the reports are pored over by startups and fellow VCs alike, as an annual state-of-tech roundup of trends and stats. There isn’t […]

BeatStars is one of the websites where artists and producers can go to buy beats to use in their new tracks, and it’s currently enjoying a spell in the limelight thanks to being the source for the beat in Lil Nas X’s global chart-topper ‘Old Town Road’. The company has also announced a new milestone: […]

This week saw the Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP) in the US hold its latest Indie Music Publishing Summit in New York. The event included a presentation with Massarsky Consulting offering some new stats on independent publishers’ businesses. Among them: the news that performance royalties were 50% of indie publishers’ revenues in 2018 (at […]

Journalist Liz Pelly has emerged as one of the more thoughtful (without pulling any punches) critics of Spotify: for example her examination of the gender skews of its big playlists last June, or her look at the ‘streambait pop’ sound last December. Her latest article takes aim at Spotify’s “Big Mood Machine” – the service’s ecosystem of mood-focused playlists – and […]

As sales pitches for an £18 digital album go, “It’s not v interesting / there’s a lot of it”, takes some beating. The download is actually an archive of 18 of Thom Yorke’s archived MiniDiscs from the mid 1990s. A blog post on the band’s website explained: “We got hacked last week – someone stole Thom’s minidisk […]

Music and virtual reality? It’s a creatively-exciting crossover, but commercially it has yet to make a significant impact, with the clutch of music-VR startups’ prospects tied closely to the (slower than the hype predicted) growth of VR-headset ownership. Music game Beat Saber’s million-plus sales are a bright spot, but otherwise there’s a strong sense that […]

Amid the hubbub of the E3 games conference in Los Angeles this week, research firm Futuresource Consulting has put out some new numbers on the global games market. They are, unsurprisingly, huge. The company claims that in 2018, global consumer spend on games software reached $132bn, including $63bn on mobile games and $28bn on console games. Other […]

Facebook launched its first Portal smart speakers – or rather, smart displays, since they came with screens – in October 2018. The 10 and 15-inch screened devices went on sale first in the US, using Amazon’s Alexa for their voice-control features, with support for Spotify, Pandora and iHeartRadio on the music-streaming side. Facebook hasn’t yet announced […]

Virtual-reality music game Beat Saber has been one of the success stories in VR so far. Released in May 2018, it sold its millionth copy in February this year. Now it’s going down the traditional Guitar Hero / Rock Band route of selling music in-game, in partnership with artists and labels. Yesterday, the band Imagine Dragons released […]

British music-industry bodies the BPI, AIM and MPA – along with the UK’s Department for International Trade (DTI) – are launching their latest trade mission to India. It’ll take place from 26-30 August, coinciding with the All About Music event in Mumbai. It’s the fifth year for the mission, which is open to artists, managers, promoters, […]

Spotify’s efforts to take its big playlist brands into the physical world continue. On 30 August, it will hold the latest in its ‘¡Viva Latino! Live’ series of concerts, based on its flagship Latin playlist. Bad Bunny and Nicky Jam will headline the concert in Miami. It’s also the first time that ‘superfans’ of the […]

2019 has brought some bumps to TikTok’s progress in India, including a brief removal of its app from Google and Apple’s app stores in April. However, the social video app is now firing on all cylinders again in India, telling the Economic Times that it has 200 million users in the country, of which 120 million are […]

A team of researchers at Stanford University have been showing off technology that they’ve created to perform “text-based editing of videos of talking heads”. What that means is, for a video of someone shot from the shoulders up talking about something, what they’re saying can be changed simply by editing its script. “The application uses […]

Last year, Spotify ran a New York accelerator program called ‘SoundUp’ for women of colour with ambitions to launch their own podcasts. It has since been repeated elsewhere in the world. Now it’s heading back to New York for its second year. 10 women will be chosen for the five-day program, with a panel of […]

Painting, Doctor Who and crowds playing Pokémon have all attracted healthy audiences on Amazon’s Twitch live-video service. Could round-the-clock AI-generated piano music be the platform’s next craze? Okay, it lacks the star (whether human or animated-monster) quality of those past trends, but music-AI startup Melodrive is giving it a whirl anyway. It has launched ‘Twitch plays Melodrive’, […]

Users of music virtual-reality app MelodyVR should be getting ready for more tappy feet and jazz-hands in their headsets over the coming months. The company has announced a deal with Broadway-musicals firm The John Gore Organisation (JGO). The pair will be creating a new joint venture to produce Broadway theatre content for VR, with JGO investing £5m […]

What do “elite upcoming lawyers from around the world” really think about file-sharing and copyright? A new study based on a survey of international LL.M. (Masters of Law) students at Harvard University has been trying to find out. “We expected lawyers to take highly conservative ethical positions on the issue of online copyright infringement,” wrote the […]

Mathew Daniel, VP international at Chinese streaming service NetEase Cloud Music, has criticised collecting societies while suggesting that direct payments to publishers could be a better model in China. “I have an analogy. Publishing is like a tomato-ketchup bottle. We are in the 21st century, and we are all still struggling with it,” said Daniel […]

There were some fun panels at the Midem conference yesterday, including an appearance from musician TheFatRat, the first signing to Universal Music and ESL’s Enter Records label. “I don’t see that I have to please two companies. I see that two companies have to please me! Which I think is a great thing. I see […]

One of the features artists and labels have most appreciated in Apple Music’s beta analytics are the ‘heat-maps’ of their streams, showing activity around the world. Now The Orchard is taking the idea and using it in a fan-facing marketing campaign for British grime star Skepta. His “streaming heat map” website is available to all, […]

The Norwegian recorded music industry has settled into the contented groove of a mature digital market with price rises for some streaming services having little impact on revenue or subscriber numbers The post Country Profile – Norway 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Research firm eMarketer has predicted a tipping point for Americans’ entertainment habits this year. “For the first time ever, US consumers will spend more time using their mobile devices than watching TV, with smartphone use dominating that time spent,” claimed the company, in its latest data-release. “The average US adult will spend 3 hours, 43 minutes […]

YouTube is one of the platforms most under pressure to tackle hate content in 2019, and yesterday it announced its latest moves. “Today, we’re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, […]

The late dance star Avicii (Tim Bergling) is getting his first posthumous album release this year: ‘TIM’. Facebook has announced that its Oculus virtual-reality division will be running a premiere of the new album on 6 June, through its Oculus Venues app. “We’re honoured to partner with Avicii Music and Geffen Records to bring the […]

Music analytics firm Chartmetric has a new acronym to shout about: CPP. It stands for Cross-Platform Performance, and it’s an attempt to provide a single metric that measures an artist’s performance across music-streaming services, social media platforms and other digital entities. In a detailed blog post explaining how the new metric is calculated, Chartmetric said […]

Music Ally first wrote about startup Super Hi-Fi in September 2018, when it announced a partnership with The Associated Press “to transform AP’s daily global news content into audio-based stories that can be seamlessly embedded into any digital music service partner”. The company’s focus is on “the space between the songs” on streaming services, with technology […]

One of the music-related antitrust complaints about Apple concerns how open (or not) its Siri voice-assistant is to streaming services that aren’t Apple Music. “Apple won’t allow us to be on HomePod and they definitely won’t let us connect with Siri to play your jams,” claimed the website Spotify set up to support its European complaint against […]

When Goldman Sachs published its ‘Music In The Air’ report in 2017, predicting trade revenues from paid streaming of $28bn by 2030, it sparked excitement and controversy in equal measure – the latter once people wondered which Goldman Sachs clients would most benefit from sky-high predictions. Keep your pinch of salt handy, then, for the […]

When the music industry criticises YouTube for the royalties generated by music videos, it’s driven by the assumption that music drives a LOT of YouTube viewing. But that’s often just what it is: an assumption, without much hard data to back it up. With that in mind, a new study by video and music analytics firm […]

The ears of senior Spotify execs will surely have been burning this afternoon, as veteran lawyer Dina LaPolt took the company to task in her Midem keynote over its appeal against new songwriter royalty rates in the US. Spotify was not the only streaming service to appeal: Pandora, Amazon and Google are too. But LaPolt, […]

The Midemlab startups contest is taking place at Midem today, and the fourth and final category was for experiential technologies startups. The jury for this category included Google’s Christian Behrendt; TheLynk’s Yvan Boudillet; Station F’s Marine Wetzel; Kuack Media Group’s Juan Francisco Saavedra Plata; and GP Bullhound’s Alon Kuperman. The post Midemlab 2019: experiential technologies startup […]

The Midemlab startups contest is taking place at Midem today, and the third category was for marketing and data/analytics startups. The jury for this category included Music Ally’s Paul Brindley; OneRagtime’s Stéphanie Hospital; Warner Music’s Tiago Correia; Q&A’s Suzy Ryoo; France Digitale’s Nicolas Brien; and Soundcharts’ David Weiszfeld. The post Midemlab 2019: music marketing and data/analytics […]

The second pitch session in this year’s Midemlab startups contest focused on music distribution and discovery startups. Disclosure: Music Ally was involved in choosing the finalists for this year’s contest. The jury for this session included Bluenove co-founder Martin Duval; Recochoku CTO Mikio Inari; Capitol Music Group VP of business development Ching-Ching Chen; Deezer’s Alexander […]

The slow-motion collapse of crowdfunding firm PledgeMusic has yielded a number of tales of artists owed money by the company, but now a group of UK music-industry bodies are trying to get a better picture of the effects. The Musicians’ Union is hosting an ‘impact assessment survey’ that will run until 25 June, supported by *takes deep […]

YouTube continues to build up the concert-ticketing features within its service. The latest example is a partnership with ticketing firm AXS, focused on the US. “Fans watching videos from YouTube Official Artist Channels will now see listings from AXS events included on the video page,” explained YouTube. “Taking the jump to the live experience is easier than […]

The Midemlab startups contest has become a key part of the annual Midem conference in Cannes. Today, this year’s finalists in four categories are pitching their technology and business models to panels of jurors, as well as the Midem audience. Music Ally is here – disclosure: we’re a partner for Midemlab, helping to choose the finalists […]

He’s been Lady Gaga’s manager and Spotify’s global head of creator services, but Troy Carter is now co-founder and CEO of Q&A, a new music company focusing on distribution, management and label services for artists. Today, he was also a keynoter at the Midem industry conference, interviewed on-stage by journalist Cherie Hu. The conversation saw […]

The music industry made around $7.1bn from streaming subscriptions in 2018, according to industry body the IFPI. That was 32.9% year-on-year growth, with subscriptions generating 37% of global recorded-music revenues. How can the music industry (and the streaming services) build on that growth in the coming years? What will drive the next spikes in paid […]

According to research firm Strategy Analytics, 86.2m smart speakers were shipped in 2018, up from 32m the year before. Meanwhile, rival Canalys reckons that the global install-base will be 207.8m by the end of 2019. Oh, and the same company thinks that China has just overtaken the US as the biggest market for these devices. […]

Spotify is signing direct licensing deals with some artists and testing the ability to allow others to upload directly to its platform. YouTube and Apple Music are creating content and putting marketing budget behind artists. And Apple Music has also acquired Platoon, the British startup which helped a number of emerging artists to develop, including […]

The film Gully Boy has been a huge hit in India, and it’s also reflected the emergence of an exciting new independent hip-hop scene in the country – something journalist Amit Gurbaxani wrote about for Music Ally in September 2018. Gully Boy is inspired by real-life rappers Divine and Naezy, and Divine (aka Vivian Fernandes) was […]

Streaming was the big driver behind the recorded-music industry’s 9.7% growth in 2018, according to the IFPI. In fact, streaming revenues grew by 34% to $8.9bn, accounting for 47% of the global total. At the end of 2018, there were 255 million users of paid streaming subscriptions, up from 176 million at the end of 2017. […]

TheFatRat is a German dance artist and producer (real name Christian Büttner) who’s also one of the early musicians to get involved in the world of esports – professional gaming. In November 2018, he was announced as the first artist to be signed to Enter Records, the label joint-venture founded by Universal Music and esports organisation ESL. Büttner […]

Apple is killing iTunes! So said dozens of headlines this weekend, which all lead back to a single sentence in a Bloomberg article claiming that “The company is launching a trio of new apps for the Mac – Music, TV, and Podcasts – to replace iTunes”. It follows up with “Without iTunes, customers can manage their Apple […]

Ninja Tune are looking for a Social Media Manager to work with the Head of Communications and Digital Marketing Manager across our roster of artists and our label social channels. Responsibilities: Manage the label social media channels day-to-day including content sourcing and copywriting Develop and work with the wider team on the overarching social media […]

We have been writing about T-Series, the Indian label and film production company that specialises in Bollywood soundtracks, for several years but have been most intrigued by its move onto YouTube, especially as it began to overtake PewDiePie in terms of channel subscribers (although that got very, very ugly on PewDiePie’s side). Now T-Series has just passed 100m subscribers, […]

Remember streaming exclusives? Everyone seems to have given up on them. Well, everyone except Tidal. It has announced that it has the exclusive on Originals, a posthumous album from Prince containing a number of unheard demos from the legendary artist, and it will be on the streaming service from 7th June. It appears this will […]

‘Growth hacking’ is very much a Silicon Valley phrase: a term used to cover a range of tactics used by startups when they’re trying to build a big audience very fast, in their early years.  Yesterday at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in New York, Vevo’s business operations and strategy manager Greg Duffy applied the […]

Bad news, record labels hoping to create the next ‘Old Town Road’ sized hit by making a song ‘go viral’ on social app TikTok. It’s easier said than done. “To really make stuff go on TikTok requires a lot of understanding. We tell labels all the time: you can’t just take a song and throw […]

US firm Vizu.al has built a client list of more than 300 artists, labels, festivals and agencies with its technology that’s capable of embedding video within emails sent out to mailing lists. Founder Matt Highsmith spoke at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in New York today, showing examples of campaigns that the company has powered […]

Around 62 million Americans are listening to podcasts on a weekly basis, according to the latest edition of Edison Research and Triton Digital’s ‘The Infinite Dial’ report, which was published in March 2019. Another research firm, Ovum, predicts that there will be more than one billion podcast listeners globally by 2020. No wonder music-streaming services […]

An artist’s keenest fans are their lifeblood in the modern music industry: the people who won’t just stream music casually, but will listen over and over again; share it with friends and the wider world via social networks; buy music, tickets and merchandise; and support the artists they love with a passion. At Music Ally’s […]

Music Ally wrote about the ‘dry streams paradox’ earlier this year in our Sandbox music-marketing report: it refers to the situation where millions of streams for a song driven by a popular playlist on Spotify or Apple Music doesn’t translate into engaged fans for the artist who recorded it. The topic was the subject for […]

Spotify launched its first bundled subscription with video-streaming service Hulu in the US in September 2017, for $4.99 a month. The company later rolled it out as a $12.99-a-month option for all American customers in April 2018, then dropped the price to $9.99 a month in March this year. Now a surprise: Spotify has ended […]

Record label Rehegoo Music is the latest company setting its sights on the background-music sector: providing curated music for businesses to play in their offices and public spaces. The label is offering a library of thousands of songs from “underground professional artists” with playlists based on various moods and genres – and the promise of new selections […]

French-Israeli singer Amir is the latest artist exploring augmented-reality (AR) technology, with the help of his label Warner Music France and startup HoloMe. The latter company has created a smartphone app, called Amir & Moi, which is available as a free download for Android and for iOS. The app features a video for Amir’s single ‘5 Minutes Avec […]

Hip-hop mixtapes website MixTape Monkey has an audience of 11 million listeners, according to its creator Mark Serrano. Interviewed by news site Startland, the Kansas City-based founder describes himself as an “enforcer” – by which he means he enforces a strict policy of quality on the mixtapes featured on his site. “If I donʼt believe you’re […]

Live-music startup Sofar Sounds has announced a funding round of $25m, led by VC firms Battery Ventures and Union Square Ventures. “It’s absolutely mind-blowing, and I’m excited for the opportunity this creates for Sofar to grow, creating new products for artists and tools for our global community to deliver on our collective mission to support […]

Remember when Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ was very much a US thing, with the controversy over whether it qualified for the country-music charts? Now it’s absolutely a global thing: last week, it dislodged K-Pop stars Blackpink from the top of YouTube’s global top-songs chart. ‘Old Town Road’ generated 73.6m views on YouTube in the […]

The Domino Music Group is looking for a Head of Technology working across both its Record Label and Publishing divisions to be based in our offices in London. The role is envisaged on a full-time basis, but we are amenable to discuss flexibility with candidates to accommodate other professional commitments. This role will report to the Board of Directors and work in […]

Back in November 2016, Music Ally got wind of a new startup called SuperRational in the UK, which was aiming to launch a blockchain-powered crowdfunding platform for music. We were a little early to the party, but SuperRational has been in touch to alert us to its new brand – Delic – and its plans to launch in beta […]

Music-marketing platform Linkfire is launching new ‘tiered membership plans’ to expand its customer base, with independent artists now among its key targets. The new plans include ‘personal’ memberships with pricing ranging from free to $25 a month, and ‘business’ plans aimed at labels, distributors and marketing agencies, which start at $50 a month. The move will also […]

If you were a a popular gamer on video service Twitch, how much do you think game-publishers would pay you to promote their new titles? According to the Wall Street Journal it’s between $25k and $50k an hour, for those broadcasters capable of drawing audiences of more than 15,000 simultaneous viewers. The report suggests that big publishers […]

New details have emerged on TikTok’s parent company Bytedance’s plans to launch its own music-streaming service. Bloomberg reports that the new service will launch this autumn “in a handful of territories, mostly poorer countries where paid services have yet to garner large audiences”. The countries aren’t named, but one clue comes from the news that Bytedance has […]

Since it was founded in 2018, Norwegian music firm Arctic Rights Management has built a roster of 30 songwriters and artists, while also representing various publishing catalogues. The company has just announced a milestone: more than 2.5bn streams of the top 100 songs that the company represents. There are some songs doing lots of the […]

More than 5m smart speakers were shipped in the US during the first quarter of 2019, which represents around 22% year-on-year growth, according to research firm Canalys. But wait: the US is no longer the biggest market for these devices in the world, having been overtaken by China. In fact, 10.6m smart speakers shipped in China […]

Much as in the rest of the world streaming income has been on the rise in Poland. But this has not – for the moment – come at the expense of physical sales with Poland 32% up on physical product in Q1 2019 The post Country Profile – Poland 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. […]

Looking for a spicy hot-take of the day that doesn’t involve Game of Thrones? Try this one from journalist Mike Isaac. “The permanent social internet is dying. The impermanent social internet will need to replace it. And it will be even more difficult to make money on such an internet than it was before.” That’s the […]

Have you heard the acronym ‘PAI’ yet? It’s one to remember, standing for Personal Artificial Intelligences: digital avatars based on real people, with AI technology powering their interactions with humans. Gizmodo has an interesting profile of a startup called Oben which is working on this technology. “This startup, with its 100 plus employees, is betting that in the future, […]

TikTok may be taking over the western world (in terms of downloads at least, as we reported last week) but its parent company Bytedance has just launched a new app in China. It’s called Feiliao, although TechCrunch reports the English-language version of the name is ‘Flipchat’. “Here are your familiar chat, audio and video calls. In […]

Apple Music has enlisted its latest brand to be a playlist curator: dance-music company The Night League. It has created a series of playlists that will sit within Apple Music’s ‘Sounds of Ibiza 2019’ hub, including collections based on specific Ibiza club brands like Ushuaïa, Hï Ibiza and ANTS. Guest DJs and residents from the clubs are […]

This weekend saw the ‘WISE’ conference take place in Beijing, with a lineup of Chinese and international speakers from the music and media industries. Music Ally was there to report back on some of the discussions relating to our industry: particularly a debate over how or if platforms like TikTok (Douyin in China) plan to […]

TI Media (formerly magazine publisher Time, Inc’s UK subsidiary) is selling two of its key music properties to BandLab Technologies, the company behind the BandLab music-creation app. NME and Uncut are the brands in question: the former is the digital-only incarnation of the famous weekly music magazine – the print edition closed in 2018 – […]

Spotify has unveiled its first hardware: a voice-controlled speaker for cars that will stream music and podcasts. However, ‘Car Thing’ isn’t a commercial product… yet. Instead, the speaker is being used for a test in the US with “a small group of invited Spotify Premium users” according to the streaming service. Those people will install […]

“Do You Need Your Own Podcast?” asks Spotify’s latest blog post aimed at artists. The tone of the article is clearly encouraging them to give it a go, ideally via Spotify’s own Anchor podcast-creation app, which it acquired earlier this year. “A podcast is a great way to establish your personality as an artist and expand […]

There are already a number of companies making it possible for fans and high-wealth individuals to invest in musicians, from the familiar crowdfunding platforms like Patreon to the likes of Royalty Exchange. The latest startup falling into the latter category is Amplify, which is planning to launch a private beta of its service this summer. “Amplify […]

Music-rights firm Revelator has launched its ‘digital wallet’ app for musicians, called Artist Wallet. It’s the company’s app that uses smart contracts to process streams and pay out royalties faster. “When a song is streamed online or played on the radio, rights holders are notified directly on their mobile device, and can safely access and cash out […]

British collecting society PRS for Music has a new incoming CEO. Andrea C. Martin will be taking up the position on 17 June, with a background as president and CEO of three international business units with Readers Digest Association; MD of data services for the UK’s Royal Mail; and president of security-tech firm ADT Canada. […]

Given the growth in paid streaming, few people in the music industry are genuinely running around panicking about the existence of ‘stream-ripping’ websites. That said, industry bodies and anti-piracy execs within rightsholders *are* continuing to tackle sites that help people turn streams into free, unlicensed downloads. The latest evidence of this crackdown paying off comes […]

A couple of weeks ago Lee Parsons, the CEO of distributor Ditto Music, posted on LinkedIn about his recent appearance at a blockchain event in Bangkok. “Could Ditto Music have an announcement coming up? Watch this space,” he wrote. A fortnight on, and the space to watch is investment site AngelList, and a listing for something called Bluebox, which […]

Social app TikTok may be at a point in its lifetime where big numbers around its growth are counter-productive – at least in one specific context: licensing negotiations with the music industry. The bigger TikTok gets, the keener rightsholders will be to point out how important music has been to its growth, and why any […]

YouTube has launched a couple of new ways to advertise on its platform, which may be of use for artists or smaller labels who are lacking the time and resources for creating and editing video ads. One of them is called Bumper Machine, and it’s a tool for creating the six-second ‘bumper ads’ that YouTube says […]

British collecting society PPL has announced its figures for 2018, revealing that its collections grew by 13% to £246.8m on behalf of performers and rightsholders. That included 5% growth (to £83.6m) for its ‘broadcasting and online’ category, although the biggest spike came with a 43% rise in international collections to £70.9m. PPL also paid out […]

Since its launch in 2017, we’ve known Gimme Radio as a metal brand: an app for streaming a round-the-clock radio station playing metal, with an array of DJs. By late January 2019 it had nearly 130,000 registered users, but was also making it clear that it had plans for other genres: starting with country, with dance, hip-hop, […]

Ticketmaster has unveiled a new feature for its digital-ticketing technology, called SafeTix. It’s about tying every ticket to the buyer’s smartphone via “an encrypted barcode that automatically refreshes every few seconds”, as well as NFC technology (if supported by their phone) that means they can ‘tap in’ when entering venues. “For fans, SafeTix will provide the […]

Composer John Zorn is the latest musician to go public on his experience with troubled crowdfunding platform PledgeMusic. Zorn used the site in 2018 for the release of his 11-album box-set ‘The Book Beriah’, raising $197,559 in the process. Now Zorn has told NPR that the money is still owed to him, as PledgeMusic prepares to go […]

It isn’t easy being Spotify. It’s harder being Spotify in India, a country where the launch of the world’s number one audio-streaming service has been the subject of much speculation and controversy. Now that’s it here, without most of the Warner Music Group catalogue and that of Saregama, India’s oldest record label that owns the […]

UK public-service broadcaster the BBC is hoping to jog people out of their algorithmic comfort-zones with recommendations in its BBC Sounds app. The broadcaster’s director of radio and education James Purnell announced the plans at the Radio Festival 2019 conference in London. “The BBC rests on three foundations: to entertain, yes, but also to inform and educate. […]

Beatport is taking its latest shot at launching a subscription service for its DJ customers. It’s called Beatport Link, and launched in beta yesterday as a way for DJs to stream the Beatport catalogue directly to their performance software, during sets. The first software to support it is Pioneer DJ’s WeDJ, which is aimed at beginner […]

Soundtrap is the cloud music-studio startup that Spotify acquired in November 2017. Since then, the tool has continued to develop, including partnerships with schools and collaborations between emerging artists. Now it’s also part of Spotify’s push into podcasts, with the launch of something called Soundtrap for Storytellers. Spotify is describing it as “a cloud-based one-stop shop […]

From unintended consequences of its core features to deliberate abuses of the way it made users’ data available to developers, Facebook is firefighting on several fronts in 2019. It should come as no surprise that its attempts to pivot to what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls a “privacy-focused social platform” are going to have an effect […]

With the EU Copyright Directive passed but still to be implemented by the different member states, the issue of the ‘value gap’ certainly hasn’t gone away. At the heart of this debate is the argument that ‘user-uploaded content’ services, most notably YouTube, that use music as such a core part of their business should be […]

Dance label Anjunabeats wants more of its music to be used by people streaming their gaming sessions on Amazon’s Twitch platform. “Starting today, we’ve made 350+ tracks available to soundtrack your @Twitch livestream!” tweeted the label earlier this week. “Throw down without fear of being muted with our playlist of Twitch-ready tracks here.” That’s a link to Spotify […]

Nashville-based startup Soundstripe is a production library that licenses its catalogue to video producers of all levels, from YouTubers to advertising firms and filmmakers. The company says it has issued more than 2m of its ‘micro-licences’ since it was founded in 2016. Now it has raised $4m of Series A funding to continue growing the business, adding […]

There’s a flurry of headlines along the lines of ‘Spotify tests its own version of stories’ today, referring to the ephemeral posts that have become the driving force for apps like Instagram and Snapchat. That’s not quite the case: Spotify *is* testing a new feature called ‘Storyline’, but it’s not about the company’s 217 million […]

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2019 overnight, and there are plenty of big numbers as you’d expect. Overall revenues grew by 39.4% year-on-year to RMB 5.74bn ($855m) as TME recorded an RMB 987m ($147m) net profit – as usual benefitting from the fact that a significant chunk of its […]

Country star Maren Morris is the latest artist to get an ‘Artist Spotlight Story’ from YouTube. It debuted on 10 May: a 15-minute mini-documentary that tracks Morris’ journey from “from her early days singing in honky-tonks, to becoming a songwriter in Nashville, to climbing the charts and breaking new ground in country music as a Grammy-winning performing […]

Having signed up more than two million users in India after its recent launch there, Spotify has now made its Spotify Lite app available in the country too. It’s a stripped-down version of Spotify’s smartphone app which is just 11MB in file-size, and is designed to be used in “slow network conditions”. The app has been […]

This is one of those figures we’re slightly cautious about, as it doesn’t come directly from the streaming service in question. But it does seem as if ‘I Don’t Care’, the new track from Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber, has set a new record for single-day streams on Spotify. That’s based on a figure shown this […]

Earlier this month, Rolling Stone announced plans to launch its own US charts, tracking the top 100 tracks and top 200 albums on a daily basis – rather than the weekly update of the established Billboard rankings. Its partner in the launch is Alpha Data, the company formerly known as BuzzAngle Music. The launch was announced […]

Uber went public on Friday, and the event spurred David Israelite, the boss of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) in the US, to voice his latest criticism of Spotify. “Question: what are the differences between Uber and Spotify? Both are tech cos (not transportation/music cos). Both lose money. Both went public and enriched owners […]

Musicians who are breaking through should be aware of any skeletons lurking in the cupboard of their past social-media posts, according to Andy Varley from music company Insanity Group. “In a generation where more and more artists are growing up through social media, you might have used Twitter as a conversational playground discussion platform as […]

Crowdfunding firm PledgeMusic’s imminent administration looks set to get messy, with the inevitable scrutiny of how the company got into a financial hole – and crucially, what happened to the money raised by artists using the platform, who are still owed payouts. UK Music boss Michael Dugher wants the relevant watchdogs to get involved in […]

There have been a few calls from prominent figures in recent months for Facebook (and other tech giants) to be broken up. The latest person suggesting this fate for the social network is its own co-founder though: Chris Hughes, who worked on Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg in its earliest days at Harvard. In an op-ed for […]

The new European Copyright Directive, complete with its Article 17 (formerly 13) on liability for user-uploaded-content platforms, is about to be passed into law, and then transposed into the legislation of the EU’s member countries. But will there be some effects on musicians beyond improving the bargaining power of their rightsholders when sitting down to […]

Spotify is testing a design tweak to its mobile app that gives podcasts more prominence in the ‘library’ screen for its listeners. Bloomberg reported yesterday that the new layout involves two main tabs at the top of the screen to switch between ‘Music’ and ‘Podcasts’, with sections for new episodes of shows that you follow; shows that […]

Apple has internally modelled how a user-centric system of music-royalty payouts would work, in an effort to understand its potential impact on artists and labels, according to Crispin Hunt, chair of songwriting body The Ivors Academy. “They said ‘Be careful: we’ve modelled how this comes out’,” said Hunt, in a panel session about user-centric payouts […]

With its broad and diverse roster of new stars and legendary artists, Warner Music Group is home to a collection of the best-known record labels in the music industry including Asylum, Atlantic, East West, Elektra, FFRR, Fueled by Ramen, Nonesuch, Parlophone, Rhino, Roadrunner, Sire, Warner Bros., Warner Classics and Warner/Chappell Music, one of the world’s […]

A new report aims to shed more light on the “hidden barriers” encountered by artists with ‘access requirements’ – a term covering a range of impairments and health conditions. The report is the work of British music-charity Attitude is Everything, which interviewed 96 musicians, songwriters, DJs and producers from the UK about their experiences. Half […]

The latest label exploring the crossover between music and esports is 777 Music, which has launched its own esports division. The company says it’s keen to explore the potential for genres beyond electronic-music to reap the rewards of pro-gaming partnerships. It has launched an online community for music and gaming fans, and is setting up […]

Music firm Create Music Group has launched a new app aimed at songwriters. It’s called ‘Splits’ and it aims to help writers nail down the royalty-splits for their work as early as possible in the process. The promise is that it takes just a few taps to create a new agreement, add collaborators with their […]

Deborah Dugan has been confirmed as the new president and CEO of the US Recording Academy, replacing outgoing boss Neil Portnow. Dugan has promised that she is keen for the organisation to use its platform “to affect positive change” – including around diversity in the music industry, an issue which saw Portnow cause controversy last […]

The co-founder of stricken crowdfunding service PledgeMusic has confirmed that it will shortly enter administration. Benji Rogers, who has been volunteering his services to help the company out of its financial hole, admitted defeat in a blog post yesterday. “I am sad to report that this effort has not met with success and that PledgeMusic […]

Google hasn’t revealed how many paying subscribers its YouTube Music subscription service has, and it’s been a long time since we saw any numbers for its existing Google Play Music. Now Bloomberg has tried to plug that gap with a report mooting a number for the combined figure of both services. “Google’s paid music services have eclipsed […]

With its broad and diverse roster of new stars and legendary artists, Warner Music Group is home to a collection of the best-known record labels in the music industry including Asylum, Atlantic, East West, Elektra, FFRR, Fueled by Ramen, Nonesuch, Parlophone, Rhino, Roadrunner, Sire, Warner Bros., Warner Classics and Warner/Chappell Music, one of the world’s […]

The impact of streaming in what is now the tenth largest recorded music market in the world could lead to “three to five years of significant growth” – and “the sky’s the limit” says Sony Brasil’s president The post Country Profile – Brazil 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Every generation has its folk devil – the one thing that is apparently going to corrupt and destroy “the young people”. The hula hoop, radio, Hollywood, TV, rock ’n’ roll, Cabbage Patch Kids (maybe), acid house, computer games. On and on the list will roll. The current one (apart from Fortnite) is social media. But a […]

For a number of years, in part to try and steal a march on YouTube, Facebook has been encouraging native uploads from creators (i.e. posting videos straight to Facebook rather than linking to external sites). Now it is courting filmmakers and saying that it will, over the coming months, add “a series of ranking updates” for videos. […]

There are flashpoint moments like Cambridge Analytica or major data breaches, but privacy concerns remain a low rumbling noise in the background for most people using online platforms and connected devices. At Google’s I/O conference this week, the company took steps to address this. Well, a bit. It will apply stricter controls on tracking users. […]

Kieron Donoghue – founder of Humble Angel Records and former VP of global playlists strategy and curation at Warner Music – has been blogging about the trend of “playlist stuffing” that he has been spotting on streaming services. As songs qualify as a stream and, therefore, a payment after 30 seconds, he says a key tactic has […]

Hands up who ordered a new music chart. Anyone? Anyone at all? Bueller? Bueller? Oh, Rolling Stone did. It is launching in the US and is intended to compete with Billboard’s own charts. The big difference here is that this is designed as a daily chart rather than a weekly one and will lean more heavily […]

Warner Music Group has published its numbers for the fiscal second quarter (ending 31st March 2019) and the headlines are that total revenue across all parts of the business was up 13.2% and that it saw net income of $67m compared to a net loss of $1m in the same period last year. Digital was, […]

A judge in the Bombay High Court in India has ruled against streaming and download service Wynk in its long-running licensing dispute with record company Tips Industries. It is a protracted story but, in brief, Tips and Wynk had failed to agree licensing terms back in 2017 and this saw Tips requesting that its catalogue of […]

“Auntie – what’s the weather going to be like today?” This is not some reference to Mary Poppins or Paddington but rather to the fact that the BBC is reportedly working on a voice assistant rival to Alexa and Siri. It is being dubbed “Auntie” internally but will probably not be the official name it launches […]

The new Madonna album, Madame X, is out next month but leads singles ‘Medellín’ and ‘I Rise’ have not exactly set the charts alight. Which will make the set up to the album that little bit trickier. Perhaps as part of an accelerated media campaign, Madonna’s team has been talking to Billboard about the use of new […]

Danny Rukasin and Brandon Goodman co-manage Billie Eilish and they have been talking to MBW about the stealth development underpinning her career and how her debut album – When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? – is having to work in the streaming and playlisting era. “While playlists drive single consumption, albums can be […]

First it was a device, then a streaming platform/archive and now it’s going to be a book. Neil Young, the audiophile’s audiophile, is making his mission to improve digital audio the centre of a new book that will be out in September. Young has co-written the self-explanatory To Feel The Music: A Songwriter’s Quest To Save […]

Any discussion of what streaming services do (or don’t) pay out is always going to get people’s blood pressure up. Are streaming services saving the business? Or are they part of a Big Tech turbo-conspiracy to exploit (and rip off) creators? Kim Bayley, CEO of ERA, has waded into the debate and argues that accusations […]

Hypebot is reporting that PledgeMusic has gone into pre-administration as its future now hangs in the balance. According to sources, a buyer for the troubled crowdfunding platform is still possibly in the wings seeking to acquire it – but is deliberating. “UK based corporate advisory FRP has been named to contact potential buyers and value the […]

It is a dispute that has been brewing for a long time and which went public in recent months. Now, according to the FT, the European Union is preparing to formally investigate Spotify-led anti-trust complaints about Apple and its App Store. In brief, Spotify is arguing that Apple is “tilting the playing field to disadvantage competitors” […]

  COMPANY: Sofar Sounds reimagines live events through curated, secret performances in intimate settings in more than 420 cities around the world. POSITION TITLE: Artist Community Manager REPORTING TO: CEO LOCATION: Ideally Boston. We will consider candidates in NYC as well. RESPONSIBILITIES: The Artist Community manager will work closely with a small, scrappy team to ensure every Sofar artist […]

Our incredible Neighbouring Rights team has come a long way since the start. The team is close-knit and dedicated and is looking to hire a highly organised, self-driven and detail oriented Executive Assistant to support the MD in brand new London office in the heart of the City overlooking the Thames. Our MD manages a […]

Dating at festivals has come a long way since the days of drinking seven cans of mind-altering cider then finding a friendly face in the crowd. In 2019, inevitably, the culture of swipe-right dating apps is coming to music festivals too. Specifically, Tinder has added a ‘festival mode’ to its app, to help people hook […]

Universal Music wants to build its business in Africa: that’s been clear for some time now. In July 2018 it announced an expansion in French-speaking Africa with a brief to sign up emerging artists there, as well as launching Universal Music Nigeria as a hub for its expansion in western Africa. There too, signings were a key part of […]

YouTube says that its livestream of the first weekend of the Coachella festival last month set a new record: 82m live views, up an impressive 90% on the figure for 2018’s event. “After nine years of success in the desert, we’re doubling down on music festivals, starting with a new two-year partnership to live stream […]

When we think about smart speakers and voice control, we tend to think about people controlling music. But there’s also potential for them to be interacting with advertisements too. Spotify has announced that it is testing ‘voice-enabled’ ads in the US for some of its free listeners. For now, the ads are for content on […]

The 20 startups that will be pitching as part of the Midemlab startups contest in Cannes this June have been revealed. The contest saw 177 startups apply, with the final 20 chosen by Music Ally and Bluenove. In the music creation and education category, the finalist are Big Ear Games, Endlesss, Jambl, Muzeek and Lonofi. For […]

A few years ago, Spotify UK was urging labels to adopt an ‘on air, on stream’ policy with new tracks – meaning that as soon as they were played on the radio, they should be available on streaming services too. In 2019, the notion that this was ever even a debate may seem bizarre, but […]

Lead: TikTok is far more than a novelty app for people to whip up memes that have a shorter shelf life than a carton of milk. It is now breaking acts and songs in a way that other platforms cannot. We look at what the music industry is doing to capitalise on its phenomenal growth […]

For once, here’s a story in the Music Ally bulletin that you can tell a passing 10 year-old, and watch their jaw drop. The publisher of craze-popular game Fortnite is buying the developer of also-hot game Rocket League. That means Epic Games is acquiring Psyonix, for an undisclosed amount, with the deal expected to close in […]

Video-streaming service Hulu now has 28.1 million customers in the US, including 26.8 million paid subscribers and 1.3 million people on ‘promotional accounts’. The company revealed the new figures at its latest showcase in New York. The news means Hulu has added 3.1 million customers since the start of 2019 – it ended last year with 25 […]

Clio Music, the global advertising and marketing awards born of the original Clios, recently announced their 2019 juries for music marketing and the use of music in advertising. Currently, the program is open for entries with the next submission deadline scheduled for May 17th. Clio Music highlights top creative marketing and advertising in a broad […]

There’s something we missed in Facebook’s raft of announcements at its f8 developer conference earlier this week. The company is “opening Instagram to the entire Spark AR creator and developer ecosystem”. What’s that? Spark AR Studio is Facebook’s tool for developers to build augmented-reality content, thus far mainly focused on its Facebook Camera feature. Now, that’s fully […]

It’s often assumed that you can’t make money from any ‘skills’ (the smart-speaker equivalent of apps) for voice assistants like Alexa. Actually, Amazon launched a feature called ‘in-skill purchasing’ in the US last year to enable exactly that. Now the feature is expanding globally, starting with the UK, Germany and Japan. “Soon, developers from around […]

Dance artists RAC and Goldroom (aka André Anjos and Josh Legg) have launched a new label called Minerva Music. Its twist: it has put blockchain technology at the centre of its distribution strategy. The company is working with revenue-tracking startup Stem, as well as blockchain firm Ujo Music. RAC is no stranger to the latter, having […]

A new website has launched in the UK called Music for Dementia 2020, and it’s part of a campaign to make music “available for everyone living with dementia by 2020”. This is based on research suggesting that music therapy can “reduce the often-distressing symptoms of dementia, such as agitation, apathy and anxiety”, but also the awareness […]

Research firm SuperData Research has put out some new numbers around ‘XR’ technology – an umbrella term that includes virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR). It includes some new figures on the install base of VR headsets, which SuperData reckons reached 14m by the end of 2018, but will grow to 51m by […]

There will be plenty of sceptics scoffing at their keyboards today, when they catch sight of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in front of a big ‘The future is private.” slogan. The image is from his keynote at Facebook’s f8 developer conference yesterday, which saw the company doubling down on its new-found enthusiasm for privacy. “Over […]

Here’s a startup so new, its website isn’t quite up and running yet. However, Los Angeles-based Audzilla does sound interesting from its just-added profile on investment site AngelList. “Audzilla is a music technology that allows fans to create one of a kind fan generated videos at live events by streaming the high definition audio from the soundboard […]

Instagram wants people to start buying the clothes and accessories that their favourite celebrities (‘influencers’ included) are showing off in their posts. It’s launching a new feature called ‘Shopping from Creators’ next week, with a small group of public figures on Instagram. “Instead of taking a screenshot or asking for product details in comments or […]

We’re not sure how intentional the nod towards the ’50 Shades’ books is in the title of new website 50 States of Music. Perhaps it’s better not to ask. But the site is a good thing: launched by US music-industry bodies A2IM, ASCAP, BMI, the RIAA and SoundExchange to pull data together showing music’s economic value […]

Music Ally is many things to many people. Some know us only for the free articles we post on this website; others for our subscription-based bulletin and reports; and others for our training, events, consultancy and/or marketing work with artists. We thought now would be a good time to put those pieces together and explain […]

“Maybe what I’ll say is this: I’ve done 10 years of this. I’m going to let someone else take on the internecine warfare that seems to be endemic to the music industry!” Even when he’s playing a straight bat to a sensitive question – in this case, one about whether songwriters deserve a bigger slice of […]

There’s a new startup hoping to make an impact on the Japanese concert-ticketing market. Zaiko has just raised its first round of seed funding according to IQ, and is rolling out its white-label service, which will help promoters, venues and artists to sell tickets directly to fans. The funding came from investors including VC firm North Base Media […]

Gaana’s chief executive Prashan Agarwal isn’t content with the impressive growth so far in the number of Indian people streaming music. “The penetration of music streaming is only 10% in the Indian market with around 150 million users. The market needs to grow to 600 million in the next 2-3 years,” he told the Business Standard this […]

Music distributor TuneCore has hit its latest milestone: $1.5bn of distribution revenue for its independent artists. That’s after earnings of $83m in the first quarter of 2019, up 21% year-on-year. This follows a 28% increase (to $308m) for TuneCore’s distribution income in 2018 as a whole. The company noted that YouTube monetisation showed particularly encouraging […]

Marketing agency Motive Unknown boss Darren Hemmings’ latest blog post goes in hard on the world of streaming right from its title: ‘Music Streaming Services Are Gaslighting Us’. His argument: “At every step of the way, streaming services are essentially gaslighting us that this ecosystem is an amazing new development. Just like Silicon Valley in […]

Her fans made a sterling effort, but Taylor Swift’s new video didn’t quite knock BTS off their perch holding YouTube’s record for a video’s most views in its first 24 hours. Their ‘Boy With Luv’ generated 74.6m in that period, while Swift’s ‘Me!’ video with Brendon Urie ended up getting 65.2m views in its first 24 hours. […]

British artist Nao has a new video, produced by Sony Music UK’s 4th Floor Creative division in partnership with Microsoft. The video is for Nao’s track ‘Orbit’, and gets fans to put in their birthday to generate a video driven by their astrological sign. There’s more interactivity as the video continues, with fans’ input adjusting the […]

We reported on Amazon’s latest financial results last week. In the official filing, the company revealed a music stat! Albeit one bundled in with video. “Total video and music expense was $1.5 billion and $1.7 billion in Q1 2018 and Q1 2019,” reported Amazon. “Total video and music expense includes licensing and production costs associated with […]

The idea of ‘top-up’ crowdfunding-style payments within music-streaming subscription services is something Music Ally has floated in the past: the idea that (for example) Spotify’s billing relationship with its subscribers could be used to help them spend a dollar or two a month more on individual musicians, likely in exchange for exclusive content and other […]

British collecting society PRS for Music saw its collections grow by 4.4% to £746m (around $965.4m) in 2018, setting a new record. £603.6m was distributed to members, down 0.2% year-on-year “caused by processing delays at our joint venture partners”. PRS said that its international collections were up by 9.1% to £280.6m, while income from digital […]

Music distributor Record Union has joined the debate around mental health within the music industry, with a survey of nearly 1,500 independent musicians conducted in late March and early April this year. It’s the latest snapshot into a career that can take a toll on people’s wellbeing. One headline: 73% of musicians surveyed said they had ever […]

Spotify has published its financial results for the first quarter of 2019, including a significant milestone: 100 million premium subscribers. That’s up from 96 million at the end of 2018. and 75 million a year ago. Spotify now has 217 million monthly active users overall, so its ‘conversion rate’ is now just over 46%, up […]

mtheory is seeking a motivated, curious, team-oriented and organized individual to work closely with managers, artists and mtheory teammates to facilitate client success in today’s music market. The Marketing Director will work as a key project manager across all aspects of global marketing campaigns, at the direction of mtheory senior management to execute and implement […]

Have you heard of OpenAI? It’s a non-profit artificial-intelligence company backed by Tesla founder Elon Musk and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman among others, with a claimed mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work – benefits all of humanity”. […]

There are plenty of opinions about Netflix’s Mötley Crüe biopic ‘The Dirt’, based on our social feeds. But what impact has the film had on demand for the band’s music? A press release for the band suggests that it’s paying off. “The age demo for fans streaming Mötley Crüe’s music includes a much younger demographic. […]

Charity Help Musicians UK is planning a new fundraising drive, after increasing its spending to support individuals and organisations in the British music industry with wellbeing and mental-health issues. The charity spent £6.2m on its ‘Creative and Health & Welfare’ program in 2018, a rise of 23%, while its payments were made to 14,255 individuals […]

There’s a new album by Prince coming out: hurrah! But it’s an album of cover versions: boo! But wait, it’s covers of songs that Prince himself wrote for other artists to record: hurrah again! ‘Originals’ will be released on 7 June through a partnership between the Prince Estate, Warner Bros Records and Tidal, with the streaming service […]

Facebook’s latest quarterly financials show the company’s business rolling on, with revenues up 26% year-on-year to $15.1bn in the first quarter of 2018, and a net profit of $2.43bn. The latter figure is down from $4.99bn a year ago, but consider this: Facebook’s latest net income factors in a $3bn legal expense – money set aside […]

Philadelphia-based R&B star Pink Sweat$ is the latest artist to get the Apple ‘Up Next’ treatment, following in the footsteps of the likes of Billie Eilish, Juice WRLD, Bad Bunny and H.E.R. The campaign will include a short film (shot on an iPhone XS for some double-branding sparkle) talking about his background and creative process […]

“The experience begins with the opening of an AR portal. Walk through it to explore an augmented cave where you can find and interact with hidden glyphs while still being able to see out into the real world…” No, not the introduction to the latest Pokémon Go-style game. It’s Google’s blog post about its latest collaboration […]

The MI.MU gloves were made famous by artist Imogen Heap, who developed them as a wearable controller for ‘gestural music performance’. A Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in 2014 didn’t quite hit its target, but the gloves have since been used by a range of artists – including Ariana Grande in 2015 on her world tour – while the company set […]

Spotify’s partnership with Genius to provide ‘Behind the Lyrics’ information for tracks is pretty cool, eh? Well, not so much if you’re an artist who disagrees with the information that’s being presented. Hayley Williams of Paramore is one example: she took to Twitter this week to complain about the notes for the band’s track ‘Hard Times’. @spotify […]

Google and Apple removed social app TikTok from their app stores in India last week, but it will now be returning to the stores, after the state court in Tamil Nadu overturned its ban. This, in turn, has spurred India’s federal government to tell Google and Apple that they can make the app available again. […]

If you’re keen to follow the debate about which entity should run the soon-to-be-created Mechanical Licensing Collective in the US, fill your boots on the official Copyright Office regulations site: it has published hundreds of submissions from industry bodies and individuals in support of one or other of the two groups (the MLC and AMLC) competing […]

Are you frustrated with the size of your fanbase? Tired of banging your head against a brick wall with ticket and merchandise sales? Unable to reconcile your streaming figures with the number of genuine fans? Then you might be suffering from The Dry Streams Paradox. What’s that? It’s the challenge that a growing number of […]

Streaming revenue in Sweden increased another 8% in 2018 to make up 90% of total music sales. The inevitable question is how long can the Swedish market – long an aspirational model to the global music industry – continue to grow? The post Country Profile – Sweden 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music […]

Apple CEO Tim Cook has returned to the theme of stronger regulation of big technology companies, although it’s clear he’s thinking mainly of *other* big technology companies like Google and Facebook. “I think there are some serious issues with tech. I think that even though I’m deeply a free market person in mindset and believe […]

Two social networks that have faced challenges around their user-growth published their latest quarterly financial results yesterday. So how are Twitter and Snapchat doing? Twitter’s financial numbers were good: revenues up 18% year-on-year to $787m and a net profit of $191m for the quarter. However, its number of monthly active users (MAUs) was down by six […]

UK-based Muso, which tracks online piracy and provides marketing tools for music companies to target that audience, has raised £3.5m (around $4.5m) more funding. It’s not a new round, but rather an extension of its existing Series A round, taking it to £6m ($7.8m) in total. Investor Harwell Capital was responsible for the additional injection […]

Napster remains a consumer-brand streaming service, but the company’s energies are focusing ever-more keenly on its B2B business, and ‘powered by Napster’ services launched by brands and other partners. Now Napster’s parent company Rhapsody International is making a new push with that strategy in Asia, via a partnership with Vietnamese tech company GNT. The pair […]

Music Ally reported recently on figures from US industry body the RIAA, which showed that the US Latin-music business grew by 18% in 2018, with streaming generating 93% of its revenues. Now research firm Nielsen has been talking about some more stats around the consumption of Latin music in the US, in its opening remarks at Billboard’s Latin […]

Electro band Blood on the Dance Floor’s music has been removed from Spotify, after the streaming service decided that it flouted the company’s policies on hate content. That’s an important point, as the news comes as the band’s frontman Dahvie Vanity (real name: Jesus David Torres) is facing accusations of sexual assault from at least […]

Industry veteran Sylvia Rhone has been promoted again: she’s now chairman and CEO of Sony Music label Epic Records, having joined it as president in 2014. She’ll report directly to Sony Music boss Rob Stringer, in a role leading the ‘overall creative direction and management’ of a label that includes Camila Cabello, Travis Scott and […]

Music Ally has interviewed Popgun CEO Stephen Phillips before a couple of times (here and here) – he’s a reliably-interesting thinker about the future for AI-generated music. Now he’s been talking to Soundcharts for the analytics company’s new series of video interviews. “We really love the idea that all of this is just playing on a broader trend of […]

Music Ally reported last week on the success of K-Pop group Blackpink, specifically on YouTube, where they topped its weekly artists chart with 342m views for their music. Now they’ve been unseated… by another K-Pop group. Yes, BTS are sitting proudly atop this week’s YouTube artists chart, with 307m views for their music in the week […]

The latest esports startup tapping celebrities for investment is Gen.G, a company best known (to outsiders anyway) for its ownership of the Seoul Dynasty franchise – a team that plays in the official esports league for the game Overwatch. The company has raised a $46m funding round, with actor/musician Will Smith among the investors chipping […]

Some of its thunder may have been stolen by YouTube Music’s free, ad-supported launch on Google Home and other smart speakers, but Amazon has nevertheless launched its own free tier for Alexa-enabled devices. As reported prior to the launch, the tier is supported by advertising, and can be used by people without a Prime membership. […]

Reports earlier this week that Amazon was preparing to launch a free music-streaming tier for its Echo smart speakers sparked a drop in Spotify’s share price. So what effect will today’s news that YouTube Music is launching a ‘free, ad-supported experience’ for Google Home speakers have? In fact, YouTube Music’s free audio tier will work […]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal interest in AI voice-assistants is well known: in 2016 his personal mission for the year was building an AI ‘butler’ named Jarvis. Now the social network is working on a voice assistant to serve its 2.32bn users around the world. CNBC was first to report on the plans yesterday, claiming that a team […]

Bandcamp has launched a new vinyl-pressing service for independent artists and labels using its platform. Well, we say ‘launched’ – its official debut is later this year, but it was announced yesterday along with four pilot campaigns to show how it’ll work. It’s a Qrates-style service that combines vinyl with crowdfunding. “Our new vinyl pressing […]

If you’re directing fans to stream a new track by an artist, what happens if they’re tapping on that link on their smartphone, but are on the free tier of a service like Spotify? That’s one of the questions raised in our latest Sandbox music-marketing report – and answered by Cindy James, VP of streaming […]

It’s getting more expensive for foreign artists to play live in China, thanks to new tax regulations on overseas performers and ticket sales. That’s bad news at a time when ever-more western artists are eyeing China with intent, thanks to the boom in legal music-streaming services owned by companies like Tencent and NetEase. Now Chinese […]

Sorry, make that *three* pieces of new legislation in Europe that have implications for the music industry. Alongside the new copyright directive and new platform-to-business regulations, there’s also a crackdown afoot on ticket-buying bots. Yesterday, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted to outlaw the use of bots to get around maximum-limits on buying tickets, […]

K-Pop! It’s big on YouTube, Spotify and all manner of other global digital platforms, thanks to the likes of BTS, Blackpink and other artists following in their footsteps. Now blogging platform Tumblr is getting in on the action by launching its own dedicated K-Pop hub. It’ll be curating posts from fans already publishing on Tumblr, as […]

If you, like us, are curious about the implications of music generated by artificial-intelligence, then we can thoroughly recommend the latest article by The Verge journalist Dani Deahl. She’s been talking to lawyers about some of the “messy questions” around authorship of AI-generated music, particularly when the AIs have been trained on a body of copyrighted […]

The European Parliament has voted to approve its *other* big piece of new legislation that has significant implications for the music industry. That would be new regulations “to improve fairness and transparency of online platforms” – referred to as ‘platform-to-business’ legislation for short. The rules will apply to technology companies running online platforms of all kinds: search […]

Lead: what digital marketing trends are most underrated or simply misunderstood in 2019? That’s the question we put to the music marketing community and got them to hold forth on the subject. This resulted in a lot of ideas and a lot of new paths for marketing this year and beyond. Campaigns: TikTok goes all […]

In December 2013, Beyoncé managed to release her eponymous fifth solo album as a complete surprise to fans and the music industry alike, bar a small, trusted circle of insiders and digital partners. Nearly five and a half years on, she’s repeated the feat, albeit with a live album rather than a new set of studio […]

Spotify and Pandora are throwing their energies into podcasts… but now so is the largest major label, Universal Music Group, via a partnership with podcast publisher Wondery. The pair have signed a deal to develop original podcasts based on the label’s catalogue, artists and labels. No specific shows have been announced yet, but when they […]

Netflix published its latest financial results yesterday, and there was a lot to shout about. The video-streaming service added 9.6 million paid memberships (i.e. subscribers) in the first quarter of 2019 – a record – taking it to just under 149 million in total. Of those net new adds, 1.7 million came from the US and […]

Bring popcorn – and a cushion to hide behind for the worst details – for Wired magazine’s deep, deep dive into ’15 months of fresh hell inside Facebook’, which was published yesterday. “Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here’s how that turned out,” is […]

In recent years, the traditional discipline of radio-plugging has been joined by playlist-plugging, with people who specialise in pitching tracks to streaming services’ playlist curators. Now get set for a new variant: podcast-plugging. British radio-promotions firm Blueprint Radio has launched a new division called Blueprint Pods, which it says will focus on matching artists “with podcasts […]

Spotify and Apple Music have both updated their lists of ‘preferred’ music distributors in recent weeks, with Fuga the prominent new addition to both. The company is now listed alongside The Orchard as a “preferred label distributor” for Spotify, which (in the company’s words) “meet our highest standards for providing quality metadata and protecting against infringement”. Meanwhile, […]

A number of prominent artists have suffered from ‘fake uploads’ to streaming services recently, including Beyoncé, Rihanna and SZA. Attention has focused on how these artists’ old recordings were uploaded to DSPs as ‘new’ albums under different artist names, with distributors under the microscope. Now CD Baby has signed a deal that could help it […]

Germany’s collecting society Gema has reported its latest financials, revealing that it generated revenues of €1.02bn in 2018 (around $1.15bn) while paying out €859.5m to its 74,000 members that year. The revenues were actually €55m down on 2017’s total, although Gema was quick to point out that “considerable extraordinary income” in 2017 skewed its total […]

We’ve reported a few times recently on the way Indian and Latin American artists are dominating the upper reaches of YouTube’s global artists chart. Last week, though, they were trumped by a pop band from South Korea. No, not that one. Blackpink were the top artist on YouTube for the week of 5-11 April with a mightily-impressive […]

Social app TikTok hasn’t been blocked in India: people who’ve downloaded the app there are still using it. But is *has* been removed from Apple and Google’s app stores, meaning that new downloads are currently barred from those official sources. The news is a setback for TikTok in what’s become one of its biggest markets. […]

Music Ally wrote about Luminary earlier this year: it’s a US-based podcasting startup that emerged from stealth mode brandishing pre-launch funding of $100m, plus plans to launch more than 40 podcasts with hosts like Lena Dunham, Malcolm Gladwell, Trevor Noah and Conan O’Brien. But the company was more than just a podcast production-studio: it had plans […]

Thomas Hesse used to be the digital-business boss at Sony Music, but nowadays is an angel investor and startup founder (of still-stealthy Jamm Music) in his own right. He’s also written a column for Billboard that may hint at what the latter company is planning. His focus is on the music-streaming world’s equivalent of “whales” in casinos: […]

Europe’s new copyright directive has passed its latest legislative hurdle, winning the approval of the European Union member states, after being voted through by the European Parliament last month. “With today’s agreement, we are making copyright rules fit for the digital age. Europe will now have clear rules that guarantee fair remuneration for creators, strong […]

There is plenty of optimism surrounding the South African music industry as revenue growth returned in 2018 and numerous streaming services launched in a country just setting out on its digital music journey The post Country Profile – South Africa 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Apple recently announced plans for a subscription-based games service, Apple Arcade, which will offer games across iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple TVs for a single monthly fee – with no advertising or in-app purchases. Due to launch later in the year, the service appears to be getting a significant investment. “Several people involved in the […]

With the European Copyright Directive having made it through its approval vote in the European Parliament, could attention be about to switch to the US in the arguments over safe harbour? Maybe not straight away, but an interview with the US speaker Nancy Pelosi by tech site Recode is worth a read. In it, she’s asked about Section […]

As if the hoo-ha around the return of Game of Thrones on 14 April (in the US timezones) wasn’t exciting enough, it seems Taylor Swift may be preparing something for later this month. Swift’s website currently hosts a countdown – just over 10 days and 20 hours at the time of writing – while billboards have […]

As an industry, we’re familiar with the idea of remasters in the audio world, where classic albums are revamped and released for modern listening kit / audio quality. We don’t think as much about videos getting the same treatment, but if you’ve ever been down one of those YouTube rabbit-holes with music videos from the […]

By all accounts, Billie Eilish’s set at the Coachella festival was a big hit – levitating bed and all. And Instagram has gotten in on Billie Fever by launching a camera filter based on her. Tubefilter reported that it “gives users’ skin a plastic glean and also fully blacks out their eyes, while a strobe-light flashes in […]

2019 is going to be a very big year for K-Pop stars BTS, spurred by their new mini-album ‘Map of the Soul: Persona’. Milestones are already tumbling. The band’s ‘Boy With Luv’ video smashed YouTube’s single-day viewing record, notching up 78m views in its first 24 hours last week. That takes the record from another K-Pop band, […]

When we wrote about songs by certain Hong Kong artists being removed from Chinese music-streaming services last week, we noted that it appeared to be local services as well as Apple Music, despite initial headlines focusing on the latter. However, back in the US it’s Apple’s involvement in this censorship that’s drawing criticism from politicians. “It’s […]

British startup Curve Royalty Systems has launched a new ‘enterprise-level royalty processing’ service, which is already being used by independent labels Hospital Records and Cooking Vinyl, among other clients. The company was co-founded by Richard Leach, former digital sales and strategy director at distributor ADA; Tom Allen, former digital distribution manager at Essential; and Ray Bush, who […]

Amazon’s live-video service Twitch announced plans to launch a karaoke-style game called ‘Twitch Sings’ in October 2018, providing its community of creators with a way to sing solo or duets, while getting viewers to suggest songs and challenges. In March this year, the game (still in beta) spawned an X Factor-style contest called Twitch Sings: Stream Star, […]

In the music industry, we’re now fairly comfortable with the fact that every major streaming service has pretty much all the recorded music: exclusives are increasingly rare. In the streaming-video world, of course, it’s a very different story: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and other services have access to different portions of the catalogue of TV shows […]

Props to Bloomberg for its punchy intro to a report about how Amazon is managing its Alexa voice-assistant platform. “Tens of millions of people use smart speakers and their voice software to play games, find music or trawl for trivia. Millions more are reluctant to invite the devices and their powerful microphones into their homes out […]

Music Ally is thinking about podcasts a lot at the moment, given the interest in that world from Spotify, Pandora and other music-streaming services. These companies have the chance to innovate around content, technology AND business models for podcasts, so we’re keeping an eye on interesting stuff that independent companies are up to around those […]

Once upon a time, ‘views’ were the big metric that counted on YouTube. Then it moved on to ‘watch time’, but if you want to know what’s next, Bloomberg’s latest article is well worth a read. It claims that YouTube has “introduced two new internal metrics in the past two years for gauging how well videos […]

We’ve already reported on claims by research firm eMarketer that Snapchat’s UK users are falling, under intense competition from Instagram’s growth. Now the company has put out its estimates for the US, and the trend is similar. “For the first time, Snapchat will lose monthly US users this year, with growth expected to flatten in 2020,” claimed […]

Music Ally cooled on the idea of ‘music messaging’ startups some time ago: there were a bunch of them, and sustainable business models/consumer interest was thin on the ground. But the intersection of music and messaging in other ways – streaming services integrating with Facebook Messenger, for example – is very interesting. Can Project Wave change our […]

The US in particular has seen several ‘digital jukebox’ startups in the last decade: often focused around people requesting songs from a smartphone app to play in the bar/space where they’re hanging out. Requestify, from Norway, is interesting because it’s doing more than just that. So yes, it’s a “fully app-driven social jukebox designed to […]

Instrumental – which describes itself as a “data science-driven talent discovery business” – has partnered with live agency Coda to offer data on and insights into the fastest-growing acts that are self-releasing as well those on major or indie labels. Instrumental will create bespoke tools for Coda that will track acts across a variety of […]

Julian Casablancas of The Strokes and Cult Records has been speaking to Billboard about his various music projects, his record label and dealing with the creative process. But buried in the middle of the interview he talks about his dislike and distrust of most streaming services – and what their rise means for artists and labels. “In […]

Ben Relles has been named as the new head of innovation at YouTube, a role that will see the video platform move deeper into interactive programming and live specials. He was previously head of unscripted (i.e. reality/documentary etc.) content at YouTube. There was a huge buzz around interactive TV late last year when the Bandersnatch episode […]

If an esports company exists and a US pop star or major label doesn’t buy a stake in it, does it even exist? That existential conundrum is not one that OverActive Media, the company that owns esports brand Splyce, will have to worry about now as The Weeknd has just invested in it. The Canadian company […]

Speaking on the Freakonomics Podcast (which handily also transcribed the interview), Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder and CEO, spoke at length about the streaming service’s history, its future plans and its relationship with both musicians and music industry. He talked about his past and why growing up in Sweden in the 1990s – and the country’s […]

Cosmetics company Lush has announced that it is shutting down its Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts in the UK. It will instead deal with customer queries on the phone, on its website or over email (how very 2002). Across a series of tweets (they were no doubt fully aware of the irony here), the company said […]

If you’ve ever been to an ‘open-mic’ concert, you’ll know how they work: musicians turn up with their instruments, sign up to take part and then wait their turn to play a few songs. Now there’s a startup trying to do that in the online world. It’s called MicTurn. “Choose from a list of online venues, […]

Music Ally has seen a few startups try to make ‘co-listening’ a thing in our history, from Turntable and the original incarnation of Soundrop a few years ago to the radio-like Stationhead now. Next to try is a US startup called Jam Session, which is currently in beta. It’ll be an app that “lets you listen […]

Sometimes we spot a new music/tech startup on investment site AngelList with not much information on what it’s doing, but the people involved will make us prick our ears up. Renaissance is the latest example. The US startup has an interesting tagline – “What happened in 1300AD will happen again, soon” – and it’s listed in […]

A new music-based game has launched that claims it will create “new revenue and promotional opportunities for the music industry”. Beat The Intro says it has licensed “millions of tracks” already and, as its name suggests, tests how well users know music and how quickly they can identify a track. A short song intro is played […]

A business update posted on Polaris/Brighter IR, the investor relations site,  and dated 9th April says that the loss of MediaMarktSaturn as a customer has put the future of 7digital in serious doubt and that it will have to urgently raise new capital in order to keep going. “[T]he Board’s current view is that the […]

A new post on the Spotify for Artists blog outlines updates to the Spotify Ad Studio feature where clients will get access to a new set of streaming conversion metrics that can show how users on the service’s free tier respond to their audio ads. “How many people who heard your ad checked out your music on […]

Launching initially in the US, XITE (pron: “Excite”) is a new music video app that will be available on Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Comcast X1 Xfinity – and it will be coming soon to Roku. It has deals in place with all the majors as well as a number of indies and will offer […]

The top bosses at YouTube, including CEO Susan Wojcicki and global head of music Lyor Cohen, are in India to mark the launch of YouTube Music there, announcing the app has been downloaded 3m times in its first week. (In comparison, Spotify said 1m people had signed up for the service during the first week […]

Yesterday we reported on music streaming service Boomplay raising $20m to expand across the African continent having signed a licensing deal with Warner Music Group last month. Now uduX, a new streaming service based in Nigeria, has signed its first licensing deal with a major label – Universal Music Group. (UMG was also the first […]

In yesterday’s bulletin, we covered the arrival of Spotlight, a new initiative on TikTok designed to help break new acts from South Korea and Japan on the short-form video platform. We wondered then if royalties were being paid on music used this way and what rightsholders would make of it all. We didn’t have to […]

Two years ago, Chris Bevington – Spotify’s director of global partnerships and business development – was one of four people tragically killed in a terrorist attack in Stockholm city centre. A further 15 people were injured in the incident. The Chris Bevington Foundation has been set up in memory of Chris with the aim of […]

In the wake of the white supremacist terrorist atrocity in Christchurch, New Zealand, last month in which 50 people were killed and 50 more were injured, the Australian government has passed strict new laws around the type of content that can be streamed on social media channels. This was in response to the terrorist in […]

The Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK is investigating how three major companies – Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo – are handling renewals for their online gaming services. The CMA will look at the T&Cs they offer users alongside how they process subscription cancellations and refunds. At the heart of this is the issue […]

Actor and activist Jameela Jamil has interviewed Lizzo – creator of some of the greatest singles of 2019 so far – about issues around body positivity on Instagram. Jamil has been using her social media presence to call out advertisers and creators of “quick diet” “remedies” who use body shaming to sell their dubious products. […]

TikTok, the short-form video app that has been downloaded over 1bn times to make it the new centre of gravity in the meme world, is looking to court new acts and help break them on the platform. Its new Spotlight feature allows artists to digitally audition for the company and the successful ones will be put in […]

The IFPI’s global sales figures for 2018 were, once again, all about streaming driving the industry’s recovery. The overall market was up 9.7% (both downloads and physical declined sharply), while streaming jumped 34% and now makes up 46.9% of revenues globally. The jostling for dominance in this booming market is something that will continue apace, […]

We’ve become used to musicians investing in startups, and not just as individual angel investors either. Snoop Dogg, Nas and Linkin Park are among the artists who’ve set up proper venture capitalist vehicles. Now US VC firm Loud Capital wants to help more celebrities, from musicians to esports stars and influencers, turn investor. It has launched […]

Talking of Snapchat… the social app has created its first multi-player game, Bitmoji Party. It is part of its Snap Games arm and will be one of six planned games – the other five being created by third-party developers and exclusive to the app. Players compete against friends across a series of mini games and […]

OK, it’s only one country, but the numbers from eMarketer are still interesting and tap into the issue of just how sustainable multi-platforming is in social media. The research company is saying this year will be the first since its launch that Snapchat user numbers in the UK will decline, calling it an “exodus” and […]

Midem’s Midem Artist Accelerator competition is now in its fifth year and it has revealed the names of this year’s finalists. They are: Acido Pantera (an EDM act from Colombia); Alexander Oscar (a pop act from Denmark); Anya (ditto); Blanche (a pop act from Belgium); Bo Bingen (a rock/alternative act from Japan/UK); Dalex (an urban […]

Mood-music playlists have become a popular part of the streaming ecosystem. Check the growing audiences of Spotify’s ‘Peaceful Piano’ (5.2 million followers), ‘Sleep’ (3.2 million) and ‘Deep Focus’ (3.1 million) playlists, as examples.Artists whose tracks get on to these playlists can get impressive, long-lasting spikes in their stream-counts. But recent headlines about an artificial-intelligence startup […]

Deezer has announced that former Sony Music, Apple Music and BBC man Nigel Harding is its new VP of artist marketing. He’ll oversee the streaming service’s team that works with artists and labels on campaigns, including its Deezer Next program for emerging talent. He’s joining from Sony’s Nothing Else Matters Records, where he was co-director, […]

“Imagine hearing the silky smooth voice of John Legend answering your pressing questions everyday. Or narrating your local weather forecast. Or singing you happy birthday,” wrote Google’s Manuel Bronstein in a blog post yesterday. No, Legend isn’t back on the dating market. Instead, he’s lent his voice to Google’s voice assistant, Google Assistant – albeit only […]

Facebook has published a case study of how artist Esperanza Spalding used the social network (and Instagram) to drum up excitement around her latest album ’12 Little Spells’ – including driving Spotify streams of it. “The roll-out included premiering each music video on Facebook and IGTV, talking to fans through comments and Facebook Live and converting the […]

It’s no secret that streaming service Google Play Music will be shutting down, as its parent company concentrates its energy on YouTube Music. The process of phasing out the older service is stepping up, with the closure later this month of the Google Play Artist Hub. This was the way independent artists managed their profiles […]

Red Bull is shutting down its well-regarded Red Bull Music Academy program of lectures, workshops and concerts, as well as its Red Bull Radio website. The closure is the result of the company’s relationship with consultancy Yadastar coming to an end, with the latter firm having managed both projects for Red Bull. “After 20 years […]

Working directly with independent artists is on the agenda of every major music-streaming service in 2019. But of course, it’s also intrinsic to YouTube as a platform, for creators of all stripes. YouTube Music has a specific initiative for musicians called Foundry, which has been running since 2016 as a way to choose a crop […]

When Music Ally thinks about ideal preparations for going public, bankruptcy protection isn’t high on the list. But US radio group iHeartMedia is trumping our assumptions: this week, it filed to go public, in an IPO that could raise up to $100m. The news comes just a couple of months after the company won approval for […]

Lead: Tighter regulations around retargeting have made the job of digital marketing much trickier to navigate. What this has meant is that marketers have to get smarter. We speak to those working around these rules about why – if they put the work in – this can be more blessing than curse. Campaigns: Billie Eilish […]

The challenge of levering children off their favourite app is one being grappled with by parents across the world, whether it’s YouTube, Fortnite, TikTok or Roblox. Now the Chinese government is introducing regulations that will crack down on one particular sector: ‘short-video’ apps including TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin and rival Kuaishou. “From June, all such […]

British startup VRJam is seeking $500k of seed funding to continue developing its technology for live ‘XR’ streams of music and other entertainment performances in virtual and augmented reality. The company, which emerged from stealth mode at the London Music Conference last year, is offering 5% of equity in return for the desired seed funding, which it […]

Deezer is launching a new hub for Korean pop music on its streaming service. The new K-Pop channel will feature programmed playlists (including some from guest artists like iKON and Stray Kids). “K-Pop is one of the world’s fastest growing genres and is resonating with more and more fans. Deezer’s streams of the genre have already increased […]

There’s a view being put about that on-demand music-streaming services will ultimately kill radio – admittedly, it’s being put about mainly by on-demand music-streaming services for now. What do radio moguls think about it all? Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia, has been offering a counter-view. “Between 70 and 80 percent of Spotify users say the […]

From being Lady Gaga’s manager and an investor in startups to Spotify’s boss of creator services, Troy Carter has been a prominent figure in the music industry’s digital evolution in recent years. Now he’s returning with a new company called Q&A, co-founded with J. Erving and Suzy Ryoo (who previously worked with Carter at investment […]

Four consistent years of global growth is something to swell the record industry’s heart, and the 9.7% rise in 2018 means it is approaching double-digit growth – a big change from the double-digit decline that defined the first decade of this millennium. There’s an increasing focus on the role that emerging markets – or ‘high-potential […]

Global recorded-music revenues grew by 9.7% in 2018, according to industry body the IFPI. Its annual Global Music Report, which is published today, reveals that strong growth in streaming revenues more than made up for the continued decline in sales of CDs and music downloads. The headline figure is $19.1bn: that’s the total revenue for […]

Who knew? Billie Eilish is quite popular with music-streamers, as well as with the streaming services. Billboard reports that her album ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ is on course for more than 170m on-demand audio streams in the US alone in its first week. Although just as impressive is its predicted total of […]

When we talk about what voice assistants and smart speakers mean for music, we tend to focus on interactions with the music itself: people asking Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri to play certain tracks and artists, or other kinds of requests eliciting personalised streams of music. We don’t talk so much about how those music […]

Position:  Director, UK Sales and Marketing Location:  London, UK Reporting to: Director, International Sales and Marketing   The Orchard is a fast growing company that is leading the way in both the distribution and artist service sectors. We have 42 offices worldwide and are extremely proud of the international approach to the business we take. […]

Governments and regulators should be doing more to make internet companies like Facebook accountable for their impact on free speech and society more generally… says Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, the social network’s CEO is trying to get in ahead of, well, the governments and regulators who want more oversight of his company, by stressing that he […]

Pianist Lang Lang likes to have fun with technology: we remember him playing ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ on-stage using an iPad and the Magic Piano app back in 2010, for example. On Friday, he released his latest album ‘Piano Book’ through UMG subsidiary Deutsche Grammophon, and there’s some inventive digital shizzle going on around it. […]

Should some of Spotify’s big playlists be more diverse in terms of the artists featured on them? Yes… says Spotify’s head of music, culture and editorial in the UK, Austin Daboh. He was talking at radio DJ Annie Mac’s London conference on Friday about diversity. “I think it starts from the team. On my team […]

Research firm IDC has published its latest predictions for shipments of ‘smart home devices’ – a category that includes smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home, but also home-security, lighting, smart thermostats and video-streaming gadgets. Music Ally is most interested in smart speakers, obviously: IDC reckons that 144.3m of them will ship globally this year, and […]

Music publishers are currently engaged in verbal fisticuffs with a group of music-streaming services, and Spotify in particular, over the group’s plans to appeal against new songwriter royalty-rates set by the US Copyright Royalty Board (CRB). But in a valedictory interview with Variety on his last day as chairman and CEO of publisher Sony/ATV, Martin Bandier suggested […]

Original content is a big strategic focus for the major streaming services in 2019, as is ‘claiming’ as many rapidly-emerging artists as possible, in terms of creating said original-content for and with them. Billie Eilish, whose debut album ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ is out today, looks set to become one […]

Newsflash! People quite like apps, and spend a fair amount of money on them – and that’s probably going to continue for the foreseeable future. And on that bombshell, we return you to your regular music-industry bulletin… No, research firm SensorTower has at least put some numbers on this predicted growth for the apps market. “User spending […]

British broadcaster the BBC has just published its ‘annual plan’ for the next year, outlining its strategic priorities. One of them is its BBC Sounds app, which the corporation says has now been downloaded more than 1.8m times in the UK, and attracts a weekly audience of more than one million listeners. “A major part of our […]

We know Drake likes Fortnite: he’s one of the highest-profile musicians to play (and stream video of it) online, with gaming star Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins. And we know Drake likes investing in the games world: in October 2018 he chipped in to a funding round for esports startup 100 Thieves, along with artist-manager Scooter Braun. Now Drake […]

“Yeah, I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road. I’m gonna ride ’til I can’t no more…” If you just read the lyrics, you might well think that ‘Old Town Road’ by Lil Nas X was a country track, even if the couplet “My life is a movie, bull ridin’ and boobies” makes […]

We’re getting used to chatting to smart speakers, but what if Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri manifested themselves as actual robots? Strange though it may seem, Amazon is thinking about the idea. “The only way to make smart assistants really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world,” said Rohit Prasad, head […]

Social app TikTok is under a *lot* of scrutiny in 2019 over the younger end of its community. In February, the company agreed to pay $5.7m in a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over violations of children’s privacy laws, before blocking access to its app for children aged under 13 in the US. Now the company is […]

Lauren Wirtzer Seawood, Instagram’s head of music partnerships, is leaving the company. She joined in November 20015 after a previous role heading digital for Beyoncé’s company Parkwood Entertainment. In an Instagram post revealing her departure, Wirtzer Seawood said she was “off to new adventures” but did not give further details. She was a respected leader […]

US firm LiveXLive has bagged the rights to live-stream 17 of US radio group iHeartMedia’s events this year, including various festivals, as well as licensing and streaming rights for some smaller events like album launches and live performances. The deal will also see iHeartRadio getting a channel on LiveXLive’s online-video service. The latter company says that it […]

In December 2018, streaming service Mixcloud launched a new program called Mixcloud Select, to enable curators and channels on its platform to charge fans monthly subscription fees. Yesterday, the company announced a new group of musicians and curators who are going to be using the feature. They include The Pharcyde, Anja Scheiner, Worldwide FM, Dekmantel, J. […]

Artiphon is one of the startups exploring the potential to create new musical instruments with a digital twist. It raised $1.3m in a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in 2015 to make its first device, the Instrument 1.The $399 device is a MIDI controller designed to work like a guitar, piano and/or drum machine. A few years on, […]

Good playlist curators are in demand in the modern streaming market. The latest service shouting about its tune-pickers is SoundCloud, which launched a selection of new “handcrafted” playlists yesterday. They include the rap-focused ’Noise and 808s’ and ‘Drippin’; electro playlist ‘Speed Bumps’; ‘DTFunk’ which promises to soundtrack “a freaky first date”; and ‘The Morning Mourning Playlist’ for […]

For the benefit of readers mercifully unfamiliar with the current state of British politics, Boris Johnson is one of the prominent figures in the UK’s ruling Conservative Party – and one of the main contenders to replace current Prime Minister Theresa May when she steps down. So the music and tech industries alike will be […]

Earlier this week, we reported on figures published by research firm eMarketer, suggesting that Spotify might overtake Pandora for US listeners by 2021. Now the company has broken out some more of its predictions for the US market, this time focusing on Amazon’s music-streaming business. “Amazon Music will cross 35 million monthly listeners in the US this […]

Downtown Music Publishing’s parent firm is acquiring AVL Digital Group, the company that includes distributors CD Baby, DashGo and Soundrop, as well as video-monetisation outfit AdRev. In its announcement of the deal, Downtown noted that AVL’s companies work with more than 900k artists, labels and rightsholders, while distributing / making money for more than 10m tracks in […]

According to research firm Strategy Analytics, shipments of smart speakers grew by 169% in 2018 to 86.2m units globally, driven by Amazon Echo, Google Home, and devices from Alibaba, Baidu, Xiaomi and Apple among other companies. At next week’s AIM Connected conference in London, the opening panel will be discussing “smart devices’ effect on streaming”. […]

When we think of the musical genres that are benefitting most from streaming, it tends to be hip-hop, R&B, dance and pop. And when we think about the genres that may be getting something of a raw deal, jazz and classical often spring to mind. And yet… in both genres, there are artists who are […]

Playlists have been referred to as everything from the new album, the new compilation, the new greatest hits, through to the new radio, the new MTV and more. Whether you’re a pop act trying to build a truly global audience or just trying to make a living from making mood music, if you’re not on […]

If labels and managers in the music industry aren’t thinking about ‘deepfakes’ already, it’s an area that they should be looking into. Reuters defines deepfake videos as “video that has been stripped of context, mislabeled, edited, staged or even deeply modified through CGI – at times for political or commercial gain”. For example, what seems […]

Amid all the excitement around new distribution platforms for podcasts, there are also some tensions. For example, British broadcaster the BBC has pulled its catalogue of shows from the Google Podcasts app, as well as Google Assistant. The Beeb explained why in a blog post. “Last year, Google launched its own podcast app for Android users […]

Afrobeats artist Burna Boy is the latest musician to get a ‘YouTube Artist Spotlight Story’ produced by Google’s video service. He’s the first Nigerian artist to be chosen as an ‘artist on the rise’ by YouTube Music, to recognise the way he’s building an audience around the world with his videos. YouTube also provided some stats to […]

The latest executive to depart Spotify is its comms director for EMEA, Alison Bonny, after nearly eight years at the streaming service. Bonny joined the company shortly before it launched in the US in 2011, and has since been a prominent figure on the communications and PR side of the business, as it launched in […]

SoundCloud wants to beef up its subscriptions business which, remember, isn’t just about music listeners paying for its ad-free tier. The company also has a thriving business in ‘creator’ subscriptions for pro features around uploading their music and audio content. Anyway, the next move in that upbeefage is a new executive, Anthony Gabriele, who is joining […]

Apple Music will add 3.8 million new users in the first quarter of 2019… on Android devices. This, at least, is the claim by research firm SensorTower, in its latest report. It also reckons that Apple Music has now been installed 40m times from Android’s Google Play store since its launch in 2015 – and that […]

Spotify is rumoured (although not, as yet, confirmed) to be holding some ‘town-hall’ events to explain to songwriters why it’s appealing against new royalty rates set by the US Copyright Royalties Board (CRB). Now publishing/songwriting bodies the NMPA and NSAI are planning their own event to tackle the topic from their perspective. It’ll take place […]

Music company BMG’s revenues grew by 7.5% in 2018 to €545m (around $615m) according to the latest financial results published by parent company Bertelsmann. CEO Thomas Rabe said that organic growth was key to the company’s overall progression. “BMG benefited in particular from the expansion of its recordings business, which grew strongly during the reporting year; […]

Until now, there’s been a clear split within Spotify’s own playlists: some are programmed by humans – the streaming service’s editorial team – and others by algorithms: its personalised playlists like Discover Weekly, Release Radar and Daily Mix. Now those boundaries are blurring: some of Spotify’s human-curated playlists will now be getting a dash of […]

The European Copyright Directive has been approved by members of the European Parliament. In a vote this morning, MEPs approved the new legislation: 348 cast their votes in favour, while 274 voted against. The post MEPs approve European Copyright Directive (including Article 13) – 348 votes to 274 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Apple held its services-focused press launch last night, and as predicted there were announcements of new subscription-based video, news and games products. Apple TV+ will launch later in the year with original shows from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams, as well as the ability to subscribe to other providers (through […]

The news that a series of albums generated by the technology of startup Endel are being released through Warner Music is spreading far and wide. There are some clarifications being made about how the relationship has been presented, though. It’s not a ‘record deal’, for example: it’s a distribution partnership. Journalist Cherie Hu has done some […]

The “gilets jaunes” movement in France has had a significant negative impact on physical music sales, with protests peaking at the end of the year when those sales are typically at their strongest. This followed a 12-month period when France added 1m streaming subscribers The post Country Profile – France 2019 appeared first on Music […]

We’ve learned not to describe Pinterest as a social network: the company is more often described as a ‘visual search engine’ – although its chosen pitch is as a place “where more than 250 million people around the world go to get inspiration for their lives”. That pitch is from Pinterest’s S1 filing as it prepares to […]

If independent artists are wary of crowdfunding platforms in the wake of PledgeMusic’s well-documented recent problems, can they go it alone? One is trying: British musician Laura Kidd, who records under the name of She Makes War. She was actually one of the artists affected by PledgeMusic’s payout problems, having used the site for her […]

“It’s just green mate”. “What is this???” Fans were initially confused about an Instagram post from artist Jax Jones late last week: it was just a green square. Which brought back memories of Tidal’s launch teasers for us, although the more-recent parallel is the infamous ‘orange square’ influencer campaign for the ill-fated Fyre Festival. This is entirely […]

Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins has become one of the go-to influencers in the gaming world in recent times: Electronic Arts reportedly paid him $1m to promote its new game Apex Legends earlier this year for example. Meanwhile, he’s also firmly on the music industry’s radar thanks to his compilation partnership with Universal Music, as well as his live-streamed Fortnite […]

We reported last week on startup Endel’s announcement that its music-creating AI had signed a major-label deal with WMG. As the news spread, some artists have been having their day, including electronica artist Holly Herndon. “Well that escalated quickly, although it seems like this is simply a repackaging of procedural generation composition systems that have […]

Apple Music’s iOS app appears to be getting a spring-clean ahead of tonight’s big services press-launch from its parent company. 9 to 5 Mac reported that the app’s ‘Browse’ screen has been freshened up. “Previously, the Browse tab was laid out with a single horizontally-scrolling carousel of featured content and then a list of navigation options, […]

The rate of growth in global streaming revenues (retail, not trade) is going to slow down every year between now and 2026. Boo! But wait: those revenues are going to more than double between 2018 and 2026. Hurray! This is all according to Midia Research’s latest report, which forecasts that global streaming spending will grow from […]

As part of the recently-passed Music Modernization Act (MMA) in the US, a new ‘Mechanical Licensing Collective’ (MLC) will be created to license and administer mechanical rights in that country. Two groups are competing to be awarded the contract, and details of their plans have now been published, as part of the process. Billboard has […]

Will Spotify’s launch in India trigger a price war among competing music-subscription services? It’s possible: JioSaavn has just slashed the price of its annual JioSaavn Pro subscription by as much as 75%. That’s according to a report on the website NewsBytes. “Previously, the plan was available at Rs. 999/year, but now, you can get the same […]

Last August, research firm eMarketer predicted that Spotify would overtake Pandora to become the most popular (audio) music-streaming service in the US by 2022. Now that company has revised its prediction, in Spotify’s favour. “According to our latest forecast on digital music listeners, Spotify will surpass Pandora in terms of users by 2021—one year sooner than we predicted […]

B2B digital-music firm 7digital is to get a new leader, after CEO Simon Cole announced plans to step down. His replacement will be John Aalbers, the former boss of Arts Alliance Media. Aalbers will replace Cole on 1 April, and will also join 7digital’s board. Cole said that today’s news is a planned transition, albeit […]

Music Ally has for some time been covering the emerging wave of startups exploring AI music: algorithms trained on catalogues of existing music, with the aim of then being able to create their own new melodies – and even entire tracks. Thus far, the most prominent commercial model for all this has been that espoused […]

There’s a really interesting stat in the latest profile of Apple Music’s work with artists: more than 800,000 of its users have already pre-added Billie Eilish’s new album, which comes out next week. Pre-adds being Apple Music’s version of ‘pre-saves’ on other streaming services – and which unlike those rivals, is built in to its […]

Last May, Vevo announced that it was going to phase out its owned-and-operated website and mobile apps, focusing instead on being a distributor for music videos and selling ads around that content. Vevo.com still exists but mainly as a glorified holding page, with users being pointed instead to youtube.com/vevo where the company has more than […]

Have you heard about ‘dry streams’ yet? They’re streams that come without a great deal of interest in the artist themselves: for example, on mood or activity-driven playlists on streaming services where listeners aren’t necessarily noticing who made the tracks. We’ve been exploring the phenomenon in our latest Sandbox digital-marketing report. “Being featured in large […]

You may have noticed that K-Pop band BTS are just a little bit popular around the world. That’s now translating into financial success for the company behind them, Big Hit Entertainment. The firm reported a 132% growth in its annual revenues to 214bn won (around $190m) in 2018, with an operating profit of 64.1bn won […]

Google has been exploring the potential for AI-created music for a while now. Today, it’s making its latest experiment public, and in a high-profile way: in one of the ‘Doodles’ promoted on the homepage of its search engine. It’s an AI-powered Doodle that celebrates composer Johann Sebastian Bach. “An interactive experience encouraging players to compose a […]

Splice is one of the most popular online tools for creating music – and accessing samples – with more than 2.5 million users according to its latest figures. That growth, having added a million in the last year, is exciting investors too. Splice has just raised a $57.5m Series C funding round, with VC firms […]

New figures from industry body the BPI show that streaming subscriptions accounted for 54% of British labels’ income in 2018, as the revenue from these subscriptions grew by 34.9% year-on-year to £467.6m (around $615m). That contributed to a 32.8% rise in all music-streaming revenues for labels to £516.4m, with ad-funded audio-streams generating £19.1m (up 25.8%) […]

Lead: The Dry Streams Paradox is when there is a huge gap between the number of streams an act gets and the number of fans they have or can reach. Just because someone plays one of your songs, it does not follow that they even know what your name is. Does this all mean that […]

WIN (Worldwide Independent Network Ltd) is looking to hire a Network Development Director, to start immediately. The job is a senior and pivotal position within our organisation, being the main point of contact between WIN as an organisation and its network of independent music associations. The role will require someone with superior industry knowledge and contacts, […]

Google was rumoured to be launching its own games console at the GDC event this week. Actually, the big reveal was something slightly different: but still a big move in the games world. Google’s new thing is called Stadia: a new cloud-gaming service that will let people play games by streaming them on TVs, laptops, […]

Ever since it was founded, crowdfunding platform Patreon has charged its creators 5% of the revenues they make from their fans (or ‘patrons’). Now the company is upping its share on some campaigns, with a new tiered system. A basic ‘Lite’ tier will still have a 5% revenue share for Patreon, but people who want […]

Rumours that Instagram was going to do more with e-commerce have been bubbling for a while. Yesterday, the Facebook subsidiary revealed its latest moves. “Today, we’re introducing checkout on Instagram. When you find a product you love, you can now buy it without leaving the app,” explained Instagram. For now, this is based around products […]

There’s a little bit of confusion around the name of this new app: its profile on investment site AngelList refers to it as Tuner, while its website refers to it as Brassroots. We’ll surmise that a rebranding is underway, although from what to what we’re still unsure about – it’s also possible that Tuner is the company name and […]

Chances are, when asked who the first K-Pop artist with 20 million YouTube subscribers was, many people would guess BTS. But no: their BangtanTV channel currently has 16.2 million subscribers, while the first Korean star to break through on YouTube, Psy, has 12.7 million. So take a bow girl-band Blackpink, whose channel has just crossed the […]

Australian singer/songwriter Dean Lewis is the latest artist to get Apple’s ‘Up Next’ seal of approval. The nod comes ahead of the release of his debut album ‘A Place We Knew’, although Lewis’ music has already notched up more than 1bn streams globally, of which 750m-plus were for his track ‘Be Alright’, and another 200m […]

Soon, it’ll be quicker to list the music-streaming services that *aren’t* streaming into podcasts as an additional content format. Middle Eastern / North African service Anghami is the latest, having added more than 250 shows from more than 40 local podcast studios, as well as global shows from outside the MENA region. “The local podcasting community is […]

The UK’s Commons Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has published its report on the future for the UK’s live-music industry, suggesting that despite a “boom” in concert and festival attendance, there are “stark challenges” for the market. While the report is focused on this one particular country, we think there are plenty […]

Google might be launching a games console this month, but it’s not the only tech company ramping up its gaming activities. Snapchat may be on the verge of launching its own games platform, albeit one within its app rather than on a physical piece of hardware. “The mobile game platform, internally codenamed ‘Project Cognac,’ will […]

Musician and producer T Bone Burnett has spoken out before on the relationship between technology companies and artists. Last week at SXSW, he gave a speech outlining how he feels about all this in 2019. “It must be becoming obvious to most people by now: the fact that we are in a battle. A battle […]

We wrote about AI-music-creation startup Boomy in January, after spotting its profile on an investment website. The company then opened up its private beta-test earlier this month, enabling people to play with its system to “generate beautiful, creative songs in seconds with artificial intelligence”. Now founder Alex Mitchell has published a blog post explaining a bit more […]

There’s a long line of standalone apps that tried to help people discover music and artists, and/or offered social features around that. It’s hard to think of any that became sustainable businesses, but the better ideas *did* ultimately become part of music-streaming services’ core features. That’s why Music Ally is always keen to explore new […]

Creative-industries group Europe for Creators is raising a rumpus about the way YouTube has been promoting its campaign to change the proposed European copyright directive on its own platform. The body published an open letter to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki claiming that “YouTube has been actively using its own services to influence public opinion, often […]

Moby has a new album out, and it’s streaming exclusively on one service: but NOT a music-streaming service. Although we rather gave that away in the headline, didn’t we… Yes, ‘Long Ambients 2’ is being made available exclusively through meditation app Calm, with six tracks designed to help people relax and get to sleep. Calm has […]

Sound Diplomacy has been working with a range of cities to improve their musical infrastructure. Now the company has published a manual setting out the principles of its process, boiling them down into 13 points. The topline pitch: “Cities can be made richer through enhancing education and supporting live venues, investing in music-tech and including music in […]

Warner Music Group has become the second major label to sign a direct licensing deal with African digital-music service Boomplay, following Universal Music’s deal in November 2018. WMG’s deal covers a catalogue of 1m songs for 10 countries: Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Boomplay will make the music […]

We wrote about the latest figures from Germany earlier this month: recorded-music revenues fell slightly in 2018, according to industry body BVMI, but it described this as a “steady plateau” as the industry there transitions from physical sales to streaming. Now BVMI boss Dr Florian Drücke has been talking to Music Ally for our latest […]

The latest country to declare its recorded-music figures for 2018 is France, through industry body SNEP. It’s positive news too: a third consecutive year of growth, albeit a “modest” 1.8% rise in 2018. “For the first time, the revenue generated by digital has exceeded that of physical sales and now accounts for 57% of global sales,” […]

Spotify filed a complaint with the European Commission over Apple’s stewardship of its App Store earlier this week, but now Apple has hit back with a statement criticising Spotify’s “misleading rhetoric” – including jabs at the streaming service’s recent appeal against new songwriter-royalty rates in the US. “At its core, the App Store is a […]

The post Country Profile – Germany 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Stormzy isn’t just an award-winning grime rapper: he’s also a book-publishing mogul. Well, he has his own books imprint anyway: #Merky Books, which is part of the Penguin Random House empire, and published his own ‘Rise Up’ book last year. Now the imprint is looking to highlight some emerging writers. It’s launching the #Merky Books New […]

In today’s data-rich (some would say data-overloaded) music industry, the role of chief information officer – CIO – is increasingly important for large music companies. So Universal Music Group’s appointment of Dan Morales as its CIO is notable news. He joins from a similar role at eBay. “With Dan as CIO, we are adding an […]

Fresh from being bought by Spotify, the staff of podcasting firm Gimlet Media have announced plans to unionise – which would make them the first US podcasting company to do so. “As Spotify’s reported $230 million acquisition of Gimlet makes clear, however, Gimlet is no longer the small, scrappy operation memorably documented on the first […]

The UK’s Musicians Union (MU) is the latest industry entity to launch a mentoring scheme for women. It’s working with SheSaid.so, the group which has already been active in this field. In the MU’s case, its scheme will see 20 women chosen: 10 mentors and 10 mentees, who’ll meet every month, while also attending bi-monthly […]

Japan was set to introduce a new law cracking down on illegal downloading of copyrighted content, but the government is now going back to the drawing board, after complaints from both sides of the debate around online piracy. “We have yet to eliminate the worries of both copyright holders and users. We should work on […]

The IFPI is due to publish its Global Music Report for 2018 next month, but as usual, consultancy firm Midia Research is getting in early with its own estimates – although perhaps in an effort to avoid any tensions with the music body, this year its figures aren’t coming out the same week as the […]

WIN (Worldwide Independent Network Ltd) wishes to hire a Co-ordination Manager, to start immediately. The job consists of a broad remit to assist the organisation in various aspects of administrative work and to provide support for a small team, as well as taking on key information gathering and communication tasks. The position is outward facing […]

Apple’s next press event is on 25 March, and it’s expected to focus on services – including the long-rumoured launch of a Netflix-style video-streaming service. Analyst Wedbush has published its thoughts on what this could mean. “If Apple executes with minimal speed bumps and aggressively acquires content given the company’s massive installed base and unmatched brand loyalty […]

What I’ve got you’ve got to give it to your mummy… even if you have to break in to an ancient sarcophagus to do it. Yes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are heading to Egypt to play a concert at the Great Pyramids of Giza later this week, and it’s just been announced that the gig will […]

Music virtual-reality startup MelodyVR has announced four new licensing agreements, focusing on the publishing world. The deals include UMPI (part of Universal Music Publishing Group); Sacem; Ascap and BMI. “As MelodyVR continues to expand, these four music licensing deals enhance our opportunities for content creation and distribution on a global basis. Following a successful 2018 and with […]

The controversy last year around de-playlisting R. Kelly and XXXTentacion has likely put Spotify off the idea of going further and removing artists’ music from its platform unless the content itself is hateful (e.g. neo-Nazi lyrics). But the recent documentaries about R. Kelly and Michael Jackson is spurring a debate about what role (if any) […]

There’s some new criticism of the proposed European copyright directive from an unexpected source: the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression. David Kaye holds that post, and he’s published his concerns about the Article 13 section of the legislation, which relates to copyrighted material on user-uploaded-content platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud. “Article 13 of the […]

Startup InChorus Group is launching a platform that it hopes will help to measure incidents of bias and harassment within the music industry. The company wants to help people report “microaggressions” within their workplaces, before providing those companies with anonymised feedback – the idea being that people can blow the whistle on such behaviour without fear of […]

The Orchard has an immediate opening for a Stockholm-based territory lead. The position will lead the local team and act as relationship, strategy, and contact for key labels in Sweden.  Driving efficient communication and best practices, setting and attaining goals, developing staff, and articulating and operationalising the company’s value proposition are critical to the candidate’s […]

Spotify is filing a complaint against Apple with the European Commission, accusing the latter company of anticompetitive behaviour in the way it manages its App Store, and thus gives its own Apple Music streaming service an advantage over rivals. “In recent years, Apple has introduced rules to the App Store that purposely limit choice and […]

Yesterday, Music Ally was at the Quantum conference in London. It’s a one-day event within the London Book Fair with a focus partly on new technologies and trends. One of the companies speaking was a startup called Almost Tangible which, in the light of Spotify’s push into non-music content, we found interesting. The company is trying to […]

Of all the things Facebook could have done in response to Democrat politician Elizabeth Warren’s suggestion that it should be broken up for abuse of its power, temporarily blocking the Facebook ads that she’d booked to promote her plan was probably the most foolish. The social network claimed it was because “they violated our policies against use […]

I Am Pop is one of the startups trying to help musicians and music brands make better use of messaging apps in their marketing. It’s already working with artists signed to labels including Sony Music, Warner Music, AWAL and PIAS, and now the company has a new €2m funding round to help grow its business. I […]

Snapchat has its lenses, Instagram has its face-filters, and now YouTube has its own augmented-reality effects, which can be used in ‘stories’ posted to the video service. They’re a mixture of animated face-masks, hats and sunglasses that can be used in short videos posted by YouTube creators who have access to the ‘stories’ tool – which […]

We are looking for a talented individual to join our creative and independent team, based in the West London office. The Digital Marketing Coordinator role is a key part of the marketing team and reports to the Head of Marketing, working across all releases on the label as well as sub-labels such as NovaMute. This […]

It’s been a few months, so it’s time for another rumour about Apple making an augmented-reality headset or goggles or similar face-worn device. This time it’s KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who’s often quoted making predictions about future Apple products, with a decent record of accuracy (or at least: better than Music Ally’s record – […]

We’re ashamed to confess that we haven’t given that much thought to the artwork for the programmed playlists on music-streaming services. That said, we suspect a fair few of those services haven’t really made it a priority either, beyond ensuring the right artist or mood-signalling image is present with the correct corporate branding. So it’s […]

Things have gone a little quiet around music and virtual-reality technology in recent months, don’t you think? There are still startups developing the technology with apps and services up and running, but the hype around VR possibly being The Next Big Innovation for live music has certainly died down. Perhaps partly as the interest in […]

Benji Rogers was one of the earliest people in the music industry talking about the potential of blockchain technology, and he founded a company – DotBlockchain – to try to deliver some of that potential. Now he’s moving on. “As of today, I will be departing the epic and amazing company that I co-founded, DotBlockchain […]

We’re well aware of the ‘don’t bore us – get to the chorus!’ maxim (cheers, Roxette!) for popular music in the modern streaming era. But that can now seemingly be extended to ‘don’t bore us – get to all the songs with good choruses quickly on the album please!’ At least, that’s the gist of an […]

We’ll be honest: there are lots of reasons that US Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren thinks the biggest technology companies should be broken up: and none of them are directly about what the benefits might be for music listeners, artists and the music industry. But given the ongoing debate about ‘platform-to-business’ regulation – how the […]

Position:  Senior Manager, UK Retail Marketing Location:  London, UK Reporting to: Director, International Sales and Marketing   The Orchard is a fast growing company that is leading the way in both the distribution and artist service sectors. We have 42 offices worldwide and are extremely proud of the international approach to the business we take. […]

The idea of ‘co-viewing’ online video is a good one: people watching simultaneously around the world while text-chatting with friends and/or strangers. It’s one reason YouTube’s new ‘Premieres’ feature is working well for artists and other creators, and it was also a good idea when Vevo invented it as ‘Watch Party’ a few years ago […]

The Chemical Brothers have a new track out today, called ‘We’ve Got To Try’, which is marvellous. But the veteran dance duo also released another track this week called ‘WGTT15000BPM F1 NEEEUM MIX’ that’s more curious. Not least because it’s only three seconds long (and thus won’t be earning any royalties on streaming services, which […]

Spotify wants its editorial and artist and label-relations teams to work “more in alignment” in the future, at least in the Nordic territories: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. That’s according to Johan Seidefors, head of content, Nordic, at Spotify. He was talking in the streaming service’s session at the by:Larm conference in Oslo last […]

It’s Friday 8 March, which means it’s the annual International Women’s Day. Expect plenty of activity from pretty much every digital music service, with curated playlists and other content galore. Which is great, albeit also may raise questions about how today’s celebration can be carried through to the playlist-curation and artist-partnership decisions taken by these […]

The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) in the US has given Amazon and Spotify both barrels over their decision to appeal against the recent songwriter royalty rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board. Yet it seems other companies are also appealing. Spotify, Google and Pandora have confirmed that they have asked the US Court of […]

The phrase ‘attention economy’ has been on the lips of plenty of music-industry people for years now, as we recognise that music is competing for attention with games, video-streaming and other forms of digital entertainment. That’s one of the reasons Music Ally writes regularly about the mobile games market – another being that there are […]

Facebook’s relationship with privacy? It’s complicated, although critics of the company (like Tim Cook, who’s just been rebranded by Donald Trump as ‘Tim Apple’) might use a few other words. Yet after a bruising period of controversies surrounding privacy and user-data on its platform, Facebook appears to be pulling something of a pivot. “As I think […]

Twitter has launched a new analytics tool for people and companies posting video on its platform. It’s called Timing is Everything, and we think it could be quite useful for musicians. “Timing is Everything displays historical data showing when audiences are on Twitter watching and engaging with video,” explained Twitter in an announcement blogpost. That means whoever […]

The latest artist to benefit from a partnership with location-based marketing startup Landmrk is former One Direction star Louis Tomlinson. He’s promoting a new single called ‘Two Of Us’ with a digital scavenger hunt using the Landmrk for Music platform that the British startup unveiled in December 2018. “I’ve hidden some video clips in hotspots around the […]

In January, we discovered a new startup trying to use artificial intelligence to create music: Boomy. It was touting technology to “generate beautiful, creative songs in seconds with artificial intelligence – for your fans, your friends, your business, or just for you” with the promise of a web-based private beta, and mobile apps to follow. Yesterday, Boomy opened […]

We’re not sure how well-known Fearne Cotton is outside the UK: in Music Ally’s homeland she’s become a familiar face and voice through her TV and radio broadcasting. Now she’s become the latest curator on Apple Music. This is a proper partnership: Cotton is maintaining four different playlists on the streaming service, which is promoting […]

The news had already leaked that The Orchard co-founder Scott Cohen had been poached by Warner Music Group, but there has been speculation about what, exactly, his role would entail. Yesterday, WMG dished the details: Cohen will be its new chief innovation officer, recorded music, reporting directly to the label group’s recorded-music boss Max Lousada. […]

Spotify had more than one million people using its service in India a week after launch, but what were they listening to? The company shed some light on that last night in a blog post. “What we found is that Indians are starting off strong by listening to musicians and tracks from around the globe, with […]

The recent $5.7m settlement between TikTok and the US Federal Trade Commission was the biggest ever fine in a child-privacy case. But the amount pales next to the amount TikTok’s parent company Bytedance lost in 2018, according to a report by tech site The Information. It claims that Bytedance’s losses were $1.2bn last year, after making […]

Global music body the IFPI has named the top 10 ‘best-selling digital singles’ of 2018. And in a sign of how streaming is changing the dynamics of the biggest hits, six of them were actually released in 2017. For example, the top track of 2018 was ‘Havana’ by Camila Cabello, which came out in September 2017. […]

Spotify wants its editorial and artist and label-relations teams to work “more in alignment” in the future, at least in the Nordic territories: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. That’s according to Johan Seidefors, head of content, Nordic, at Spotify. He was talking in the streaming service’s session at the by:Larm conference in Oslo last […]

Original content is all the rage at Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services, so why shouldn’t Pandora join the party? Its new parent company SiriusXM has created a dedicated ‘content team’ at Pandora to focus on music, sports, comedy, politics and entertainment. That said, this new team is made up of existing execs: Pandora’s VP of […]

In lots of countries around the world, the recorded-music industry has bounced back to growth. Last week, for example, the RIAA announced that US revenues grew by 12% in 2018. In the UK, the growth last year was 8.9% according to the BPI and ERA. The story in these countries is that the growth in […]

This year’s The Great Escape festival and conference will take place in Brighton, UK, from 9-11 May. The conference part will include three dedicated strands run by CMU: focusing on music education, digital dollars and digital music-marketing. The latter will include a keynote with Cassandra Gracey, president of Sony Music’s 4th Floor Creative division. Speakers […]

This isn’t really an industry story, it just seems like a marvellous project that we wanted to flag up. Music Memory Box is, according to its Kickstarter listing, “a simple kit that you can fill together with meaningful objects, music and photographs. All three combine together to help unlock and recall memories in a simple and […]

If you’re reading this, Daniel Ek and team, we have another idea for what the existing podcasts ecosystem is missing: traditional British boozers! But UK band Blossoms are here to change that with the launch of their own ‘Blossoms Pubcast’, recorded in the pub in Stockport that inspired the band’s name. “In the first episode Tom, […]

Earlier this year, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) set a deadline for secondary-ticketing sites to improve the information they provided about tickets listed for resale. Most complied, but Viagogo has been under scrutiny on this point: on 24 January, the CMA raised concerns and told the company to “make any necessary changes without […]

Sound Diplomacy has been working for some time with a range of entities to help cities build better music strategies. Now it’s expanding its activities to the US, with a new office in New Orleans. “I believe Trump’s election has made people think more about how they want to express themselves separately from the federal […]

We know Spotify is splashing up to $500m on podcast acquisitions this year, but the company’s wider strategy around spoken-word content is also coming together. The Verge has done a good job of bringing together the various strands of Spotify’s plans, including recent comments from various executives. It includes the company’s determination to bring its music-discovery algorithms […]

Spotify is live in India, but its dispute with Warner Music Group continues, over the way it sought a statutory licence for works owned (partially or wholly) by publisher Warner/Chappell. Now the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) has weighed in to the row, firmly on the side of Warner/Chappell. “Music publishers worldwide work in […]

The Middle East is currently a big strategic focus for global streaming services like Spotify and Deezer, but they face competition from established local service Anghami. Now it has released some new figures on its business, in an interview with MBW. “A significant number over 1m are paying for Anghami, which is, as my memory serves, […]

Last week, Music Ally reported on the latest figures from US industry body the RIAA, including the fact that the number of paid music subscriptions in the US grew by 42% to 50.2 million in 2018. That was an annual-average figure, rather than a year-end figure. Anyway, research firm MusicWatch has now published its own figures […]

Former BPI and Spotify research exec Keith Jopling is now working with Midia Research among other music companies, thinking about big-picture strategy. His latest blog post, published for Midia, explores what the next evolution might be for music-streaming playlists. “There is plenty of scope for further creative development of the format. We are far from ‘peak […]

The crossover between video-game Fortnite and music artists is beginning to pick up pace. We’ve seen Marshmello’s Fortnite concert and Weezer’s in-game island, but now K-Pop star Jung Chan-woo is getting the treatment. Chan-woo is a member of popular band iKON, and he’ll now be getting his own ‘skin’ (a playable character/outfit) plus ‘emote’ (dance […]

We recently wrote about music-streaming service Gaana’s growth to 80 million active users, making it a leading service in its home country India. Yet Gaana is keen to build its brand around the world, including the US. This June, it’ll hold its second Gaana Music Festival Stateside, in Holmdel, New Jersey and Mountain View, California. RadioAndMusic reported that […]

Ticketmaster recently shut down its secondary-ticketing websites GetMeIn and Seatwave in Europe last year, shifting the option for fans to resell tickets to its own platform instead. Now could eBay be getting rid of its secondary-ticketing division StubHub? It’s possible, albeit with a sale an option rather than a shutdown. eBay has announced “a strategic review” […]

British ticketing app Dice has been expanding in Europe for some time, but now it’s targeting the biggest music market of all: the US. The app is now available in the US with a roster of concerts initially in Los Angeles and New York, including exclusive partnerships with a selection of venues. The launch isn’t […]

SZA, Beyoncé and now Rihanna. Yes, the ‘fake album’ scam hasn’t been wiped out just yet: fans got overexcited this weekend at the surprise release of an album called ‘Angel’ released by an artist called ‘Fenty Fantasia’. Fenty, of course, being Rihanna’s own fashion and beauty brand. “While Rihanna was indeed the singer on the […]

Spotify launched in India last week, amid a controversy surrounding its licensing – and a legal injunction filed by Warner Music Group. That row continues, but how is the Indian launch going otherwise? Spotify has confirmed to Music Ally that a week after launch, it now has more than one million users in India. That’s […]

Another day, another podcasts startup attracting significant investment, amid the wider excitement around the spoken-word format. This time it’s a Los Angeles-based startup called Luminary, which is launching a slate of more than 40 podcasts including the likes of Lena Dunham, Malcolm Gladwell, Trevor Noah and Conan O’Brien as hosts. What’s more, the New York Times reports that […]

Classical-music composer Ludovico Einaudi clearly isn’t afeared of hard work: he’s just signed a new deal with UMG’s Decca Records to release seven albums in seven months. The project is called ‘Seven Days Walking’, and kicks off with the 15 March release of an album called ‘Seven Days Walking: Day One’. The other six albums […]

This Friday (8 March) is International Women’s Day, which has become something that pretty much every music-streaming service throws its weight behind in some way, particularly curated playlists. Amazon Music, for example, has roped in a bunch of ‘guest curators’ from the artist world this year, and it’s a super selection: *takes deep breath* Jess […]

There has been some uncertainty around the relationship between B2B digital-music firm 7digital and retail group MediaMarktSaturn in recent months. In January it emerged that the companies were in talks over the future of MediaMarktSaturn’s Juke music service, which 7digital powers. Now that’s been settled. “Under the Agreement, 7digital has accepted settlement of, and release […]

As part of the by:Larm festival last week, Spotify published some stats on the gender diversity of the 50 most-streamed songs in Norway last year. Spoiler: the stats were pretty discouraging. “Of 203 songwriters behind the 50 most streamed songs of 2018, only 11,3% were women, and only one of the 83 producers behind the […]

YouTube has a big problem this week, and it’s nothing to do with European copyright reform. The video service has been under fire for its policies around protecting children who feature in videos on its platform. Why? Because of reports about child predators leaving suggestive (or worse) comments on such videos. Yesterday, YouTube outlined how it’s trying to […]

If you’d asked us who the next music artist would be to work with Fortnite after Marshmello’s recent in-game concert, it’s fair to say Weezer wouldn’t have been our obvious choice. Yet Weezer it is: the band have their very own island in the latest season of the popular game, called Weezer World. Mashable reports that it’s […]

Spotify continues to look towards the television industry for executives capable of supercharging its push into podcasts and other non-music content. Having Dawn Ostroff from TV network Lifetime to be its chief content officer, Spotify has now returned to that company to recruit programming executive Liz Gately. Billboard reports that she’ll take a role as head of […]

We reported earlier this week on moves afoot in the US to modernise / replace the longstanding ‘consent decrees’ governing licensing in the US. Now collecting societies BMI and ASCAP have published an open letter setting out their views on what should happen. They are calling for an “orderly transition” with new decrees that would […]

De La Soul’s classic albums were due to be released digitally for the first time this week, but the launch has now been postponed by label Tommy Boy after a succession of critical social-media posts from the rap trio. “Because Tommy Boy has not had the opportunity to sit down together with De La Soul […]

Reading a report about India earlier this week, we spotted a reference to the music-streaming market there needing to go beyond subscriptions and advertising for its revenues. How, though? Consultancy firm Midia Research has published its answer: telcos. “To unlock the scale opportunity, streaming has to look beyond subscriptions, and also beyond ad supported,” claimed founder […]

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For people who aren’t using iTunes or Spotify to get their podcasts, Pocket Casts is one of the better independent podcast apps. Now it’s making an interesting leap from smartphones to smart speakers, courtesy of its new Alexa skill. “You can play any of your podcasts by name, ‘Alexa, ask Pocket Casts to play the latest […]

Music/tech startups are being invited to apply for this year’s Midemlab competition, which will see its final pitch sessions take place at the Midem conference in Cannes this June. Deezer and Japanese service Recochoku are the official partners for this year’s event, with jury members from companies including Google, Sony Music, The Orchard and Warner […]

Spotify was recently under fire for the way playlist-pitching works for labels on its platform, but the company sees the playlists-submission tool it launched in July 2018 as a positive for artists. Its latest blog post outlines how the tool has worked for one artist, Nashville-based Conner Youngblood. After submitting his track ‘The Birds of Finland’ using Spotify’s tool, it […]

Indian digital-music service Hungama has published a report – Sound of Fame – which outlines some of the trends on its platform in 2018. The company said that its user base grew by 48% last year, with a 22% increase in average listening-time per user. The number of streams on Hungama Music tripled in 2018, but the […]

Artificial intelligence is a hot ticket in the music industry and is spinning off in a variety of exciting new directions. It is being used to create music but also to power recommendations, to better understand the contexts of listening and to patch the leaks in the hull of metadata. It is, therefore, the Swiss […]

Lost Girls is the musical duo formed by artists Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden. They opened the by:Larm conference in Oslo today with an original commission, ‘Chill List’, which zeroed in on the impact streaming-playlist culture is having on artists and their music. The piece blended music with Hval’s (spoken) words, which were also shown […]

Early on in our coverage social-video app Musical.ly, we warned that its large audience of pre-teens represented a big risk for the company, in terms of staying on the right side of children’s privacy legislation like COPPA in the US. Yesterday, that particular hammer dropped – on TikTok, whose parent company Bytedance acquired Musical.ly before […]

Facebook is launching a ‘Fan Subscription’ feature where creators (including, potentially, musicians) will be able to charge fans for access to some of their content. Now the terms of the deals that creators will be expected to sign have been revealed, in a document leaked to TechCrunch. It shows that Facebook will take up to 30% […]

US regulator the Federal Trade Commission has created a new task force which it says will be “monitoring competition in US technology markets, investigating any potential anticompetitive conduct in those markets, and taking enforcement actions when warranted”. This, after a succession of news stories about how the biggest US technology companies are running their businesses […]

Apple Music execs will have been cheering the Oscars ceremony on Sunday. Not because they all love Sophie from Peep Show (well, not just that) but because another winner on the night has just curated a playlist on the music-streaming service. Double Best-Supporting-Actor winner Mahershala Ali is behind the ‘Represent: Mahershala Ali’ playlist on Apple […]

British rapper Giggs is the latest artist to experiment with augmented-reality (AR) technology. In this case, Island Records has created an AR experience with a rooted physical location: a mural on a wall in Shoreditch, London. The idea is that fans download an app called AR E2 (QR codes will be provided on the wall […]

In December, independent trade body WIN announced that its CEO Alison Wenham was stepping down, but no replacement was announced at the time. Now that gap has been filled, albeit without the same job title. WIN’s director of legal and business affairs Charlie Phillips is stepping up to a new role as chief operating officer, […]

British startup AI Music has been talking since last year about its plans for ‘shapeshifting’ music – using AI to shift recordings between different genres and moods. Recently, the company released its first demonstration app, showing how music listeners can interact with its technology. The app is called Ossia, and for now it’s available as […]

We reported yesterday on UMG boss Sir Lucian Grainge’s keynote at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. Now more details are emerging about what he talked about, including non-mobile devices like smart speakers. Grainge talked about the challenges for labels of a voice-driven world. “Our experience is people can’t ask for a song when […]

US radio group iHeartMedia has announced its latest acquisition: a Greek company called Radiojar, which offers “a centralised, cloud-based audio playout platform”. According to iHeartMedia, the deal gives it “a platform to easily combine or parse individual audio elements such as DJ voice tracks, music and broadcast spots to create, manage, distribute and monetise streams, […]

Crunch time for Europe’s new copyright directive will come sometime between 25 March and 28 March, it was revealed yesterday. That’s because the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee has approved the final text of the directive, as agreed by the ‘trilogue’ between the three key European political institutions. That means the draft legislation will now be put […]

Pretty much every social-media service now has ‘stories’ as a format, so why shouldn’t music-streaming services? However, Pandora’s launch of a ‘stories’ feature isn’t what you might expect (i.e. short video clips that expire after 24 hours). Instead, it’s a format that blends podcasts with playlists. “Podcasts can tell stories about music, but generally don’t include full […]

Even as the row over Spotify’s publishing licensing in India rages, so attention is switching back to the US, where the Department of Justice is mulling a shakeup of the long-established ‘consent decrees’. “The Justice Department in the coming weeks is expected to call for public input on whether it should modify or terminate two […]

Job description Who are we? Primephonic is a digital music start-up that has been dubbed by the media as ‘the Spotify of classical music’. With the best 100% classical music streaming service we are reinventing the digital classical music experience and reigniting a global passion for the genre. Classical music lovers are currently heavily underserved […]