Last year, Deezer became the first DSP to actively promote and test a user-centric payment system. At the same time, the streaming service began properly rolling out its own artist analytics backend, Deezer Backstage, with a freshly launched landing page and a host of innovative features. The last time Deezer publicly reported on its MAUs […]

Lead: Influencers are a growing part of music marketing but tighter rules on what they can do (and how explicit they must be in declaring their interests), as well as a series of scandals, are making working here increasingly complicated – if not increasingly risky. Some are arguing they still have power, but others are […]

Cloudflare is the technology company that helps a range of websites fend off security threats and speed up people’s access to their content. It’s also controversial though, because some of those clients are piracy sites. Cloudflare has regularly been cited by music industry rightsholders as a problem, because they see it as protecting sites that […]

Rapper T-Pain posted a curious tweet earlier in the week. He claimed that someone had launched the f—ktpain.com website (we can’t put the full title in here as some spam filters don’t like profanities), perhaps to mock or troll him. So he decided to do something else. “I simply purchased it from them and now all the profit comes […]

“Begin your own journey and find yourself in our stunning retreat. Mindshower digital detox puts you back in control. RECONNECT. RECHARGE. REJUVENATE.” No, one of the daleks from Doctor Who hasn’t suddenly got on the wellness bandwagon. This was the introductory tweet from a mysterious new digital detox retreat called Mindshower. Which, as it turns out, […]

Artist Dave was the star of the Brit Awards earlier this week, with his new verse for his song ‘Black’ calling Prime Minister Boris Johnson a racist; drawing attention to the differing media coverage of the Duchess of Cambridge and the Duchess of Sussex (aka Kate and Meghan); calling for more conservation and less deforestation; and slamming […]

Genius, the lyrics analysis site, is bringing its content to linear TV for the first time through a deal with music media company Fuse. The ‘Genius x Fuse’ show will debut on 18 March on Fuse, which is available through platforms including Hulu, Apple TV, Amazon’s Fire TV and Roku. “The series will feature the best […]

Sometimes the statistics around how many people are streaming music – and how many are paying for it – can lead to confusion and misinterpretation. Recently, for example, we’ve seen one story suggesting that Amazon was “on course to overtake Apple Music” based on comparing an Amazon figure from January 2020 with one from Apple […]

This article is part of a new regular monthly series from Music Ally which highlights some of the top tips from our Learning Hub (www.learn.musically.com) The Learning Hub has been designed to help artists, creators and their teams to understand how to find, grow and engage with your audience around the globe.  It’s a part […]

Catalogue marketing used to mainly be about the 20th anniversary box set (with some demos and a couple of new photos added in) or about the same 15 songs in a slightly different order, popped in a slightly different sleeve and called a “best of”. Streaming has changed that completely. Plus, with popular music now […]

Single-DSP exclusives for music are increasingly rare, but as we’ve reported over the last year or two, the content around them, from videos to live sessions, is very much fair game. Justin Bieber is the latest example: he’s released an exclusive video for ‘E.T.A.’ off his new album ‘Changes’ on Apple Music. And according to Apple, it’s […]

A decade is a lifetime in digital music. Back in 2010, for example, digital made up just 29% of the global recorded music business, according to IFPI numbers. In that time, UK-based firm Mixcloud has gone from bootstrapped startup to having a library of over 50m radio shows, DJ mixes and podcasts that have come […]

Streaming service Pandora has launched a new ‘standalone’ app for the Apple Watch, which will let people stream music and podcasts directly to the smartwatch rather than via an iPhone. “The standalone Pandora app means that you can control your personalized listening experience directly on your Apple Watch without needing to pull out your phone […]

With the competition in India’s music streaming market only intensifying, telco Reliance Industries is giving its JioSaavn streaming service a financial shot in the arm. According to news site Inc42, Reliance has invested $19.6m in the service, nearly two years after the company acquired Saavn and merged it with its existing Jio Music to form […]

Country radio stations in the US have been criticised strongly in recent times for their male-dominated playlists. A study published earlier this month by SongData’s Jada Watson showed why: women accounted for just 10% of daily spins and slots in Billboard’s year-end country airplay chart. But now a separate study commissioned by country media brand CMT suggests […]

The lack of women nominated in some of the key mixed-gender categories at last night’s Brit Awards was a talking point even within the awards itself. Now Vick Bain, the former CEO of songwriters body BASCA (now the Ivors Academy) has published some thoughts on the issue of diversity in music awards ceremonies and festival lineups that […]

The latest startup to mix music and tourism is London-based Beatstravellers. “A social marketplace creating unique vacation options in the travel and music market,” is how the company describes itself on investor database AngelList. It wants to add a tourism strand when people travel to a festival, to help music fans see a bit more of the surrounding […]

Deezer is taking three of its biggest genre-based playlist brands – Rocket, Popstar and Certified – and turning them into a series of invitation-only live events in small venues. The series kicks off in Paris tomorrow (19 February) with Circa Waves and Twin Atlantic. The shows will also be recorded for Deezer Sessions as exclusives […]

We’ve written a lot about the big Indian streaming services like Gaana and JioSaavn, as well as emerging startups like Flutin. Now there’s a new name for the latter group. Ragya is a streaming service focusing just on Indian classical music: specifically ‘ragas’ designed to be played at specific times of the day. “We launched the […]

Is the latest pop plagiarism scandal going to engulf Justin Bieber? No, it is not. Well, it seems not anyway: an accusation from another artist, Asher Monroe, that Bieber’s ‘Running Over’ nicked one of his hooks has turned out to have an interesting explanation. The Verge’s Dani Deahl has done the digging: “It turned out no […]

In early 2018, HQ Trivia was the hot new thing in startup-land: an app where people could take part in a live-video game show and win real money. The company raised $15m in funding and at its peak had more than two million people playing at the same time. Since then, though, HQ Trivia has […]

YouTube has emailed its music users with an update on how it’s managing artists’ channels. Many now have an ‘Official Artist Channel’ on YouTube, but also their own channels, Vevo-branded channels, and ‘topic’ channels focused on their music. That’s all being rationalised. “If you previously subscribed to an artist’s topic or partner-provided channel, you’ll automatically […]

British band The 1975 have taken a leading role in talking about the climate emergency, as well as taking action to reduce their own environmental impact (for example with recycled merchandise). Now the band are trying something new: they’ll be selling a £15 reusable water bottle as merchandise at their upcoming round of gigs in […]

AI-generated music is an exciting but controversial topic within the music industry, but creative AI is also giving the advertising industry some ideas. One agency, Space150, has just trained an AI on the back catalogue of rapper Travis Scott, and used it to create a brand new ‘Travisbott’ track called ‘Jack Park Canny Dope Man’ […]

We confess to smiling at a YouTube video published from the official Fortnite channel (then shared on socials) titled ‘Watch How This Bear Made The Unlikeliest Of Friends’. The video is a rickroll: anyone clicking through will see Fortnite’s Fishstick and Polar Patroller characters (aka the fish and the polar bear) dancing to Rick Asley’s […]

YouTube remains the Billy Big Boots of the online video world, according to the latest report from mobile analytics firm App Annie. It claims that of the time spent in the world’s five most popular video streaming apps (on Android) YouTube accounts for 70%, well ahead of second-placed Tencent News’ 10% share. “Time spent in YouTube […]

Pearl Jam fans may well be going out into their back gardens this week and howling at the moon. No, this isn’t about ticket prices for their upcoming tour. The returning band have launched an augmented reality ‘experience’ called Super Blood Wolf Moon, ahead of the release of their new album’s lead single ‘Superblood Wolfmoon’ […]

The British music industry is gearing up for next week’s Brit Awards in London, and TikTok will be on board as one of the event’s key digital partners. The app will be live-streaming the  arrival of artists and celebrities on its official Brits channel, complete with a red-carpet live performance from Lewis Capaldi. The night will […]

Back in 2013, we reviewed Ninja Jamm, a music-remixing app launched by independent label Ninja Tune. It was good fun, and according to Ninja Tune, it was downloaded more than 600k times. Now it’s getting a sequel called Jamm Pro, which launched for iPad this week. It’s a more powerful music-production tool than its predecessor, complete with […]

Turkey could be on the verge of “an explosion” in music streaming, according to one veteran of the Turkish music industry, with new players coming to market and streaming subscriber numbers up sharply. Metin Uzelli, who has worked in the Turkish music industry for three decades, says that he has “high expectations” for the future […]

Turkey may have one of the lowest per-capita spends on music globally, but recent years have seen recorded music income grow significantly while new digital players have helped streaming numbers to boom. The post Country Profile – Turkey 2020 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

It’s a bit reductive to call Tim Sweeney just the ‘Fortnite boss’ – his company Epic Games has a big business outside that game too, from the Unreal Engine development platform to game series like Gears of War and (via acquisition) Rocket League. But it’s Fortnite’s success that has reinforced Sweeney’s stature within the games industry, […]

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears to be preparing for another crackdown on shady influencer marketing. Commissioner Rohit Chopra has published a statement that suggests the current regulations there need to be toughened up. “Misinformation is plaguing the digital economy, and recent no-money, no-fault FTC settlements with well-known retailers and brands to address fake reviews and […]

Mobile industry conference Mobile World Congress is huge: according to the Guardian, it now attracts more than 100,000 delegates to Barcelona, and is worth around €500m to the city every year. So the news that this year’s event has been cancelled less than a fortnight before it was due to kick off is big news, if […]

A photo of a BTS stadium gig in Taiwan accompanies the latest announcement from Ticketmaster, signifying its ambitions in Asia. The company has acquired Taiwanese ticketing company Tixcraft, while also launching a Ticketmaster Singapore operation. “We have established two great bases with talented teams to support the bourgeoning live entertainment scene in Asia,” said Ticketmaster International […]

A Spotify regulatory filing has confirmed how much it’s paying for media and podcasts group The Ringer: “Cash consideration totaling approximately €130 to €180 million, a portion of which is deferred, subject to closing adjustments”. That’s between $141m and $196m. The filing, which is a more detailed version of the shareholders letter in which Spotify announced its […]

Back in November 2016, Spotify launched its first ‘bundle’ subscription with another digital service: meditation and mindfulness firm Headspace. The bundle still exists, although according to Headspace it’s only available in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands and the UK. Since that bundle was announced, Headspace has continued to grow: its latest press release notes that its app has been […]

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so if you have a partner (or an object of your affections) how are you planning to celebrate? Chocolates and flowers? Furry handcuffs and a glint in the eye? A brisk lecture about Valentine’s Day being a cynical creation of the greetings-card industry? Pfft. All of these things (especially the last […]

Spotify is launching a new feature aimed at songwriters, giving them their own profile pages on the streaming service, complete with playlists of recordings of their songs. ‘Songwriter Pages’ launches in beta today, accompanied by a tweak to Spotify’s existing track credits feature to make the names of songwriters taking part in the beta clickable, […]

Whenever Apple buys a startup not big enough to ping any regulatory radars, it has a standard statement that it gives to journalists requesting comment on the acquisition: “Apple buys smaller companies from time to time, and we generally don’t discuss our purpose or plans.” Now, however, Apple – along with Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Google and […]

Research firm Nielsen’s latest ‘Total Audience Report’ is its first to tap smart TV data from Gracenote, and focuses on American homes that are (in TechCrunch’s words) “capable of over-the-top streaming” – i.e. Netflix, YouTube etc. Among those homes, streaming accounted for 19% of the TV time in the final quarter of 2019. Netflix was the […]

We first wrote about Thematic in June 2018: it’s a startup founded by YouTuber (and all-round influencer) Michelle Phan, which specialised in licensing music for her fellow online stars’ videos. The pitch was “no membership fees, no licensing fees, no rev-shares” during its public beta, with all the music pre-cleared for use. According to a crowdfunding pitch from the […]

Fresh from signing up M.I.A. to fan-fund on its service, Patreon has opened an office in Berlin. It’s part of a wider expansion across Europe, with offices already in Porto and Dublin. Patreon is also allowing newly-signed-up creators to now price their tiers and be paid in euros, pounds or dollars –existing creators on the platform will […]

The UK’s Reading and Leeds festival made its first major lineup announcement for the 2020 edition yesterday, and is already coming in for criticism on the grounds of diversity. The three main headliners are all men (Stormzy, Rage Against The Machine and Liam Gallagher), and of the 18 artists so far announced for the festival’s main stage, […]

US satellite-radio firm SiriusXM owns Pandora, but now it has a minority stake in SoundCloud too. The company announced a $75m investment in the streaming service yesterday, which will see it also take two seats on SoundCloud’s board of directors. “We admire SoundCloud’s loyal and growing audience, its offering for creators, and its reputation and popularity in […]

There’s something of a talent war going on in the livestreaming video space, with several gaming stars (Ninja, most prominently) being tempted away from Twitch by big-money offers from Microsoft’s rival, Mixer. Another company in the live-video space is Caffeine, and it’s just hauled in a big name: musician Drake. Caffeine described it as a […]

A growing number of artists are making their views known in the debate about how best to tackle the climate emergency. One of the thorniest issues for our industry, however, is touring. Ocean conservation organisation Project Zero has a new tool that might help. It’s called Zero Carbon Roadie, and it’s a ‘carbon calculator’ specifically for touring […]

Music is different to other creative acts: there’s a palpable barrier to entry compared to, say, photography. Jambl aims to change that by making music-creation fun, simple and entertaining, but with a full industry vertical behind it. Can hits be made, remixed, identified, and fully exploited, all in one platform? Jambl, which recently received half […]

US tech-industry body the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) counts Amazon, Facebook, Google and Pandora among its members. It’s also, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, not a fan of the European Copyright Directive. The body has submitted its views on “onerous intellectual property-related regulations, aimed at US Internet companies” to the US Trade Representative, including a section […]

If a pop star wants to go away, can they ever really ”go” away? In an age of always-on communication, the marketing fires can never go out completely; but the longer they stay away or the quieter they are, the harder it is to make a convincing return. We speak to marketers about how they […]

It sometimes feels like we are living in an age of permanent anniversaries – where 10th, 20th, 25th and 50th album anniversaries all seem to crash in on each other. For a long time, the remastered or deluxe album reissue was the main way to mark these occasions, but streaming and social media (and the […]

French startup Symphonia claims that its iPhone app is “the future of music composing”. Released this year, it uses AI to help people turn their musical ideas into actual music. “Just sing a melody. And Symphonia automatically detects the notes you sing and magically transforms them into amazing musical instruments in MIDI format,” explains its App Store blurb. “Thanks […]

US live-music and streaming firm LiveXLive has published its latest financial results, including a warning about the company’s financial viability over the next 12 months. LiveXLive generated $9.7m of revenues in the final quarter of 2019, up by 8.2% year-on-year. However, operating expenses of $17.6m nudged the company into its latest quarterly net loss – $8.8m – while […]

There’s a theory that if music streaming wants to grab more listeners and advertising revenues from radio, it needs to become a bit more radio-like. From Spotify’s ‘Your Daily Drive’ playlist blending podcast clips and music to startups like Stationhead and Super Hi-Fi, there have been various moves on this front. Now another startup is […]

Project Panther Bidco is the parent company of Aspiro Group, which in turn is the parent company of streaming service Tidal. Because Project Panther Bidco – originally created as the vehicle for Jay-Z to acquire Tidal – is based in the UK as a legal entity, it files financial results here. Cue figures on how Tidal’s […]

Google’s Chrome browser will soon stop showing videos that include certain kinds of ads, and the policy will affect YouTube as well as other websites. The changes are outlined in a blog post from Google describing “three ad experiences that people find to be particularly disruptive on video content that is less than 8 minutes long”. They […]

A symbolic moment for Twitter almost 14 years after its founding: for the first time, its quarterly revenues surpassed $1bn ($1.01bn, to be precise, an increase of 11% year-on-year). The company’s share price rose on the news, following fears that its advertising revenues were slowing down. Twitter uses its own metric of MDAUs (monetisable daily active users) […]

British YouTuber KSI is a social media sensation. His YouTube channel has 21m subscribers, while his November boxing match against fellow influencer Logan Paul was described as “the biggest amateur boxing match in history”. KSI has also been releasing music for some time: his first single came out in 2013, while in November 2019 he […]

Justin Bieber’s new YouTube documentary series, Seasons, is already a record breaker. The show’s first episode was watched 32.7m times in its first week, setting a new bar for the ‘most-viewed premiere in its first week’ for a YouTube Original show. Not that viewing tailed off there: the first episode has since grown to 42m views on YouTube. Subsequent […]

It’s clearly the week for starry seed investors. Snafu Records has Abba’s Agnetha Fältskog but another new startup, Iris, can boast Queen drummer Roger Taylor as one of its early backers. Its promise: “a revolutionary new audio technology that heightens audio quality whilst simultaneously activating the brain”, which (if all goes well) will be integrated by […]

Analytics firm Wiseapp has published some new estimates for YouTube’s popularity in South Korea. Well, its popularity on Android smartphones anyway. The company reckons that YouTube had nearly 34 million Android users in South Korea at the end of 2019, up 6% year-on-year. This, in a country with a population of 51.5 million, as TechCrunch points […]

We’ve written about Google’s experimental division Area 120 before: for example when it launched a project called Fundo to explore crowdfunding for social stars, or when it made a co-viewing app for YouTube called Uptime. But Area 120’s latest project is of direct relevance to the music industry. It’s called ‘Demand’, and it’s a partnership with live-music brand […]

Paul Pacifico, CEO of UK indies body AIM, used his speech at the organisation’s AIM Connected event in London this week to talk about post-Brexit challenges for musicians. “We are working alongside our colleagues at the Musicians Union and other partners at UK Music to promote the idea of a ‘touring passport’ to try to […]

British music/tech startup Audoo has launched an equity crowdfunding campaign, in which it will attempt to raise $250k of funding at a valuation of £6m. CEO Ryan Edwards launched the campaign last night at the latest demo day of the Abbey Road Red incubator in London, which Audoo is currently part of. The company is focused on helping […]

Abbey Road Red, the music/tech incubator run by Abbey Road Studios in London, held its latest demo event last night, including an update on its portfolio. “We have now incubated 15 companies across all areas of the value chain, who together have raised $40m and are collectively worth $200m,” said Abbey Road boss Isabel Garvey, […]

Lead: With pretty much everything available at all times, the fundamentals of catalogue marketing have had to bend to the needs of the streaming market and the social media landscape. There is still a role for the deluxe anniversary boxset, but finding new ways to shake up the old and shine new light on both […]

Since its launch in October 2010, Instagram has evolved significantly, introducing plenty of features that have since become essential in music marketers’ toolkits.  One constant in its suite of features have been hashtags, which still present a crucial opportunity to boost an account’s visibility on the platform and help it to be discovered by new […]

Social app Snapchat ended 2019 with 218 million daily active users, having added 31 million during the year as a whole – 17% year-on-year growth. That’s according to parent company Snap’s latest financial results, which were published yesterday. Is that growth in users helping Snap to turn a profit? No, it is not. Snap’s annual revenues grew […]

Who said Spotify’s premium tier is advertising-free? KFC Arabia has found a way around that, taking over the profiles of three artists in a campaign run by advertising agency Memac Ogilvy. “KFC teamed up with three major artists from the region—Flipperachi, Moh Flow, and Shébani—to place imagery of Kentucky Burgers in their cover photos, bios, […]

Peter Quicke isn’t just the managing director of independent label Ninja Tune and chair of British indies body AIM. He’s also a co-founder of Music Declares Emergency, the working group set up last year to drive the music industry’s response to the climate emergency. At AIM’s London conference this week, AIM Connected, Quicke addressed what […]

Spotify published its latest quarterly financial results earlier today, followed by an earnings call with analysts in which CEO Daniel Ek talked about its just-announced acquisition of media and podcasts firm The Ringer. “If you up-level this conversation and think 10 years out, the trend we’re investing in is that radio is moving online, because […]

Spotify has published its latest financial results, for the final quarter of 2019, and thus the entire year too. The music streaming service ended 2019 with 271 million monthly active users (MAUs), up 31% year-on-year, having added 23 million in Q4, and 64 million over the year as a whole. 124 million of those active users […]

Sony Music’s recorded music business saw its revenues grow by 11.4% year-on-year to $1.16bn in the final quarter of 2019, according to the latest financial results for its parent company. That included a 20.6% increase in streaming revenues to $669m, accounting for 57.7% of the total. Meanwhile, Sony’s music publishing business generated $365m of revenues […]

US music streaming service Pandora ended 2019 with 63.5 million monthly active users, representing an 8.5% decline year-on-year as the service lost 5.9 million listeners. Its total ad-supported listener hours for the year also fell, by 9.5%, to 13.4bn. However, Pandora ended 2019 with nearly 6.2 million ‘self-pay’ subscribers, having added 251,000 over the course […]

The Verge’s headline about Justin Bieber’s latest marketing campaign is pretty tart: ‘Justin Bieber is increasingly desperate for ‘Yummy’ to go viral on TikTok’. Ouch. It refers to Bieber’s Super Bowl campaign with restaurant chain Chipotle, which was heavily focused on TikTok, and videos made by influencers on that app. Bieber launched an official profile on […]

Last February, music licensing platform Songtradr acquired UK-based Big Sync Music, which focuses on sourcing music for brand campaigns. The following month, Songtradr raised a $12m Series B round of funding to help it expand globally. Now the company has announced that Big Sync Music is launching in four new markets – Australia, New Zealand, France and Germany. Big […]

Sony Music’s thirst for podcast partnerships shows no signs of being quenched. This morning, the major label has announced its latest such alliance, with veteran UK-based radio and podcasts production company Somethin’ Else. “Under the agreement, Somethin’ Else will work with Sony Music to expand its leadership position in the UK market. In addition the […]

Reed Midem has announced the latest keynoter for its Midem conference in Cannes this June. Artist Akon will be talking about his career so far, his collaborations with a host of artists, and how he sees the globalisation of the music industry. “I want to be able to open up the diversity with different artists from different […]

TikTok isn’t just about musical videos, and some of its non-music content has already sparked controversies around moderation and censorship issues. India, which is TikTok’s biggest international market right now, is a particular hotbed of sensitivities when it comes to political statements. The BBC has a lengthy piece about the growth of “shadow banning” – where restrictions are […]

Apple Music is pressing on with its work to sign up external brands and music companies as playlist curators, alongside its in-house editorial team. The latest to join is independent music retailer Rough Trade, which will be maintaining some Apple-exclusive streaming playlists. “Launching as a curator on Apple Music to champion the most exciting new […]

Patreon has snagged another prominent musician to use its platform to fund their work. M.I.A. has launched her page on Patreon, offering fans the chance to spend $5 or $10 a month to support her art. And ‘art’ is the right word: her Patreon isn’t just about music. “I’m doing a Patreon, because I make so […]

The Music Managers Forum (MMF) and YouTube have announced the list of 20 managers who’ll be taking part in their UK-focused accelerator programme this year. The chosen 20 represent 66 artists, songwriters and producers between them, with the MMF stressing their diversity on several grounds: “Over half the group are based outside London. 40% are female, and […]

Before TikTok (and the Musical·ly app it merged with) took the world by storm with music-soundtracked short videos, there was Dubsmash. The lip-syncing app was a craze back in 2015, but that popularity quickly ebbed away, and then Musical·ly and now TikTok took its core feature and ran with it. But Dubsmash isn’t dead. Far […]

Around one in five people in South Korea now subscribe to a music streaming service, as the country’s golden age for music – and for the music industry – shows little sign of abating. Recent industry estimates suggest that the total number of paying music subscribers in South Korea, across all domestic and international platforms, […]

Imagine Music Ally’s surprise this morning when we read in a Wall Street Journal profile of Indian music streaming service Gaana that it now attracts ‘152 million monthly users’. Surprise, because it was only mid-December 2019 when we were reporting on the company reaching 125 million monthly users, having added around 3.1 million a month since hitting the 100 […]

Spotify has made a small change to its desktop application that is causing some ripples of discontent among its community of playlist creators. The change is on the ‘Discovered On’ section within artists’ profiles on Spotify, which shows which playlists are the top sources of people discovering those artists’ music. Until now, the playlists were […]

Music apps firm Algoriddim has updated its djay app, both the desktop and smartphone versions, to allow integration with Tidal and SoundCloud for both live audio and video mixing. Users do, however, need to either be Tidal subscribers or have a SoundCloud Go+ premium subscription to avail of the new features. The VJ side of it comes […]

US performing rights organisation BMI has settled its rates dispute with the Radio Music License Committee (RMLC) and signed a deal that will cover radio royalties from 2017 to 2021 – a date span that clearly illustrates how long the dispute has lasted so far. “The new license carries a rate that reflects the strength of […]

In February 2019, Music Ally reported on a new investment fund being created by former BMG exec Zach Katz, working with manager Scooter Braun, cryptocurrency firm Ripple, and Something Gold boss Shara Senderoff. Raised In Space Enterprises would be looking to invest between $500k and $5m apiece in music/tech startups. In November last year, the fund led a […]

Usually when Music Ally reports on Amazon’s financial results, we add in a sentence noting that the company hasn’t disclosed any useful numbers for its music services. This time round, the reason is different: the company already disclosed some earlier in the month, when it revealed that it now has more than 55 million Amazon […]

Standing astride a hugely successful domestic output, the South Korean music industry is thriving across the genres and 2019 figures are expected to show another strong period of growth The post Country Profile – South Korea 2020 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant may be clever, but we’re not sure whether we’d class any of them as entertaining conversationalists. But Google has a new chatbot, called Meena, which may point to a future where these entities can sustain a conversation for much longer without making you (metaphorically) look frantically over their shoulder for […]

Shock news: Facebook made a shedload of money in 2019! The social network’s latest financial results cover the final quarter of 2019, but also the full year. Facebook’s revenues grew by 27% year-on-year to $70.7bn, although its net profit narrowed from $22.1bn in 2018 to a mere $18.5bn in 2019. As for user metrics, Facebook ended 2019 […]

UK industry body the BPI has announced the latest recipients of the British government’s Music Export Growth Scheme (MEGS) funding, which helps local artists with ambitions to grow their audiences abroad. 20 artists are sharing £261.5k in the 17th ‘wave’ of MEGS grants, which are funded through the government’s Department for International Trade (DIT). There […]

The latest startup hoping to use digital wizardry to help people learn to play instruments is Canadian firm Musiculus. The company has launched its first web apps (with native versions to come) as part of what it calls “the only all-in-one online music learning tool that will teach you a systematic approach to understand, learn, and […]

The Music Ally Japan Digital Summit in association with Linkfire and the Orchard and supported by MQA will take place at the Future 7 venue in Tokyo on Wednesday 22nd April.This one-day event, part of Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit series of events, will focus on digital strategy and digital marketing. With sessions including how to […]

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has long been a thorn in the side of secondary ticketing firm Viagogo. Now it’s also training its sights on StubHub, the company that Viagogo is in the process of buying for $4.05bn. The CMA has told StubHub that it may face court action unless it makes some key changes to […]

Gismart is the company behind music creation apps such as Beat Maker Go, Piano Crush and DJ It. Those apps have, as of December, been downloaded over 500m times. Now American band Judah & The Lion are using the Beat Maker Go app as part of the promotion for their new album. This is all […]

There is a lot going on in this TikTok video featuring musician Nicky Jam and YouTuber Teala Dunn: a motorbike chase, a fight scene, drones and a daring, tracksuited car-park-clambering escape. Published through Sony’s official TikTok profile (that’s big Sony, the overall company, rather than its Sony Music subsidiary) it claims to be “the most epic TikTok […]

As podcasts have become more strategically important both to music streaming services and to the music industry, so Hot Pod News has become one of our trusted sources for information on the podcasting world. Its latest piece, written by music-industry journalist Cherie Hu, explores something less podcast-y: the economics of ’24-7 Lo-Fi Hip-Hop YouTube Livestreams’, […]

Streaming service Deezer has revealed some of the results from a survey of 8,000 people in the US, France, Germany and Brazil about their music-listening habits. Among its claims: that 54% of respondents say they are ‘listening to fewer albums than 5-10 years ago’. Nearly 40% said they prefer playlists, while one in 10 ‘feel […]

Apple Music has steadily been creating spin-off Beats 1 radio shows for its big editorial playlists, with the alternative-focused ‘ALT CTRL’ the latest to get the treatment. Beats 1’s Hanuman Welch will host the weekly radio show, which will focus on the latest alternative tracks to hit the playlist, as well as an interview with whoever […]

Nielsen’s SuperData subsidiary has published some new figures for the ‘XR’ (‘cross reality’) market – essentially AR, VR and hybrids of the two – including the latest estimated sales figures for the top virtual-reality headsets. The company claims that Sony’s PlayStation VR and Facebook’s Oculus Quest were the top sellers in the final quarter of 2019, with 338k and […]

The Keychange initiative – led by Reeperbahn Festival, PRS Foundation and Musikcentrum Öst – is about getting companies and events in and around music to sign up to a 50/50 gender balance pledge by 2022. As part of this push, it has revealed the 74 artists and industry professionals (drawn from 12 countries in Europe and North […]

In November 2019, we reported on the latest lawsuit filed against Spotify by music rightsholders: Sosa Entertainment and its sister firm Pro Music Rights. Sosa was claiming that it had not been paid the full royalties for more than 550m streams of its catalogue. Now Pro Music Rights is targeting Spotify’s rivals too, with copyright infringement lawsuits […]

Apple reported its latest quarterly financial results yesterday, for the final quarter of 2019 – the company’s fiscal Q1. They were good: “Apple’s highest quarterly revenue ever,” according to CEO Tim Cook, who highlighted sales of iPhone 11 smartphones as well as new records for Apple’s services category (which includes Apple Music) and Wearables, Home and Accessories category […]

Earlier this year, Music Ally reported on YouTube’s plans to launch a Justin Bieber docu-series as part of its ‘originals’ slate. The series will include 10 episodes, with the first four released yesterday. As a gauge of demand for the series, the first episode was released 15 hours ago at the time of writing, and has already been […]

A growing number of artists have been taking advantage of Spotify’s Canvas feature, with its eight-second video loops accompanying tracks instead of static artwork. Now Spotify is encouraging artists to spread those videos on social media. “Starting today, artists in the Canvas beta can share Canvases to their Instagram Stories, broadening the reach of their […]

In certain social-media circles, it’s been a familiar sight to see people sighing wistfully about how much they miss Vine – even though that app’s short-video creativity is alive and well on TikTok. Still, there’s been some excitement about the fact that Vine’s original co-founder Dom Hofmann was working on a new app for sharing six-second […]

Earlier this month, a report by app-analytics firm App Annie offered its estimates for (among other things) the most lucrative mobile games of 2019, based on consumer spending. Top of the list was a game called Fate/Grand Order, a turn-based tactical RPG that was first released in 2015. Like all the biggest mobile games, it’s free to […]

2020 looks set to be the year when a new AI-music startup (or at least a research project) pops up every week. This week’s entry is DeepJams, which falls somewhere between the two. It’s a graduate project from UC Berkeley exploring ways to use machine intelligence to augment traditional music composition. “We are applying the latest […]

Sony Music has introduced a new reporting structure for its operations in Asia and the Middle East. This will involve the creation of a series of hubs in the regions that will report to Sony’s headquarters in New York. As part of the restructuring, Denis Handlin (who has overseen Sony Music’s Asia Pacific operations for […]

Consultancy firm Midia Research has published an interesting blog post triggered by the curious (and highly lucrative) afterlife of Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ through TV shows and now streaming playlists. Toto’s ‘Africa’ and Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ are also under the microscope. “The three songs illustrate the development of the song economy,” […]

With the Grammy Awards now done and dusted, organiser the Recording Academy can turn its attention fully to dealing with the fallout from the last two weeks – a boss on administrative leave; allegations from both sides that need to be investigated; and calls from outside for the organisation to speed up its promised reforms. The […]

Will the next TikTok – i.e. a social app craze – be about making music? Norwegian / British startup Voisey hopes so. Its app aims to combine early SoundCloud’s zealous userbase, early Hype Machine’s excitement of discovery; Snapchat’s intimacy; and TikTok’s front-facing camera appeal. Its songs are created in two ways: producers can upload short […]

Artists and their managers are unhappy with their streaming royalties in Germany… but for once it’s not streaming services who are the target of this unrest. MBW reports on 14 managers and lawyers representing popular artists in Germany, who have written to the three major labels plus BMG questioning whether the way they pay out streaming royalties […]

British music-industry bodies played an important role in the lobbying process leading up to last year’s European Copyright Directive, including its Article 13 (which became Article 17 in the final legislation) section covering online platforms’ responsibilities around user-uploaded content. The concern for the Brits, however, was always its imminent exit from the European Union (‘Brexit’) […]

Nonprofit organisation She Is The Music is campaigning to support women in the music industry, as well as to increase their numbers. Its focus so far has been on songwriting camps, mentorship programs and a global database of professionals, and now it has some heavyweight backing – including funding – from a range of companies in and around […]

If co-founder Olly Barnes’ infectious optimism is correct, Voisey is a phenomenon-in-waiting. It’s an app that has the potential to shake up how songs are made; tap into hitherto locked-away artistic talent; develop a new breed of pop star and pop songs; and maybe even bypass the traditional label system. Sounds too good to be […]

Back in May 2019, we caught on early to something new from distributor Ditto Music called Bluebox. It was described as “a platform to streamline the music industry supply chain and bring modern technology to an industry lacking transparency, framework, and structure” with blockchain involved somehow. Eight months later, Bluebox has been officially unveiled. It’s now described […]

NPR and Edison Research have published their latest ‘Smart Audio Report’, based on a telephone survey of 1,002 people in the US, focusing on smart speakers. The study claims that 24% of American adults – around 60 million people – now own a smart speaker. That’s up from 21% in December 2018, 18% in December 2017, and just […]

And so the saga continues… In December, the US Recording Academy’s task force on diversity and inclusion published a report offering 18 reforms and recommendations for change at the body. In the wake of the last week’s ructions at the organisation, the task force has now issued a statement expressing its “shock and dismay” at the allegations surrounding the […]

TikTok and indie licensing-agency Merlin have announced a licensing deal covering use of music from the latter’s member labels “wherever the platform is available around the world”. The deal is effective immediately, and financial terms have not been disclosed. Cue warm words from both sides. “Independent artists and labels are such a crucial part of […]

Lead: Don’t call it a comeback. Actually, DO call it a comeback. Fans today not only expect all the music in the world to be instantly available, they also expect every pop star to be available at all times. But musicians need to step away from the limelight and off the promotional treadmill every now […]

Time for another shuffle of the deck of buzzy tech terms. The ‘blockchain of machine learning’ perhaps? How about the ‘big data of storytelling’? Or maybe ‘the social media of AR’ then? The latter is the description of Octi, a startup describing itself as “the first people-powered social AR platform. Founded in 2016, it has raised […]

Prajakta Kohli is one of the emerging wave of young Indian YouTubers growing their audiences on the video service. Her channel MostlySane has nearly 4.5 million subscribers, and she’s just launched an original series called ‘Pretty Fit’, which is about getting fit by doing some unusual non-gym activities – tilling land, harvesting sugarcane etc. Anyway, her guest […]

We suspect Billie Eilish will be picking up a Grammy or two (or more) this weekend. Ahead of that event, she’s reached a new milestone on YouTube: 25 million subscribers to her official channel. Eilish is one of fewer than 20 artists to reach that total, according to YouTube. This growth in her following is paying […]

In September 2019, startup studio Betaworks announced plans for an initiative called Audiocamp, promising to “invest in and mentor start-ups building on top of the latest advancements in NLP, or inventing new mobile, voice-enabled experiences and utilities, or engaging audiences in new ways of finding and supporting their next favorite audio programming, or developing new social listening […]

Streaming service Mixcloud has launched its own in-house brand consultancy, Loud. It will be headed up by founding partners Kazim Rashid and Ben Lawrence. Rashid is a visual artist and was previously head of UK marketing at Warp while Lawrence spent the past nine years as head of brand partnerships at Mixcloud. “We help global brands […]

Downtown Music Holdings, the parent company of Downtown Music Publishing and Songtrust, is buying distributor and music/tech services company FUGA, for an undisclosed amount. The deal comes just 10 months after Downtown made a splash with the acquisition of AVL Digital Group, whose subsidiaries included CD Baby, AdRev, DashGo and Soundrop. AVL is the entity […]

Amazon has announced a big milestone for its music-streaming business: more than 55 million users. “The streaming service has reached more than 55 million customers globally, with subscriptions to Amazon Music Unlimited growing by more than 50% last year alone,” claimed Amazon in its announcement. In an accompanying interview with the Financial Times, music boss […]

Netflix published its latest quarterly financial results yesterday, including its full-year figures for 2019. In that year, the company’s revenues reached $20.16bn, with its Q4 total of $5.47bn representing 30.6% growth year-on-year. Netflix ended 2019 with 167.1 million global streaming paid memberships, up 20% year-on-year having added nearly 8.8 million net new subscribers in the […]

The streams of the two biggest current digital youth-trends are crossing this month, as the publisher of Fortnite launched a dance contest on TikTok. The #EmoteRoyaleContest will be catnip for Fortnite’s tween’n’teen superfans too, as it gives them a chance to get their own dance routines added to the game as one of its ‘emotes’. […]

The US Recording Academy may be in the thick of a full-blown crisis following the defenestration of its boss Deborah Dugan, but with the Grammy Awards imminent, it’s still business as usual on the latter front. That includes digital partnerships for the organisation’s flagship event. Buzzy social-music app Triller is on board for the 2020 Grammys, […]

British radio DJ Clara Amfo has launched a new podcast called ‘This City’, which will see her explore the streets of London “through the eyes of some of the city’s most recognisable names”. Available on all the usual podcast platforms, the interesting thing about it is that the podcast’s producer is Sony Music UK’s 4th […]

Global independent-labels trade body WIN has held elections for its board of directors, with five new executives joining the board. Francesca Trainini (PMI), Garry West (Compass Records), Jörg Heidemann (VUT), Lisa Levy (Robbins Entertainment), and Zena White (Partisan Records) are the five newbies, joining WIN’s 15-person board. “Francesca, Garry, Jörg, Lisa, Zena and Jason together […]

The artificial intelligence technology being developed by companies including Google needs to be regulated… thinks the CEO of Google (and now also its parent company Alphabet) Sundar Pichai. He published a guest column for the Financial Times yesterday that’s been widely shared since, outlining his views. “History is full of examples of how technology’s virtues aren’t guaranteed. […]

British creative, marketing and digital agency Blackstar London, whose founder Olivia Hobbs spoke at our Sandbox Summit conference last autumn, is expanding. The company is opening an office in Los Angeles, and has hired three new staff, one of whom will be based out in LA. “The expansion of the team and company is as vital […]

“Radiohead.com has always been a) infuriatingly uninformative and b) surprising. The most surprising thing to do next, therefore, is to suddenly become incredibly informative,” explained an announcement on Radiohead’s website yesterday. “So that is what we have done.” They certainly have. The band have launched a ‘Radiohead Public Library’, which they describe as “an online resource containing […]

Last year we wrote about UK-based startup Delic, and its plans to launch a “progressive asset and rights management platform for labels, management companies, and independent musicians” including blockchain technology. At the time, it was still working on that product. Now the company has raised £250k (around $325k) in a ‘pre-seed’ funding round led by Velocity EIS Technology […]

Is the controversy around Recording Academy boss Deborah Dugan being placed on administrative leave going to quieten down in the days leading up to the organisation’s flagship event, the Grammy Awards? No. No it is not. Chair of the board and interim president/CEO Harvey Mason, Jr has published a letter to the ‘Academy Family’ on its […]

The second morning at this year’s NY:LON Connect conference focused on ‘emerging international and influential markets’. Three territories in particular: South Korea, China, and Russia / Eastern Europe. The track began with a keynote from Sun Lee, YouTube’s head of music content partnerships and subscriptions for Korea and Greater China. Lee was interviewed by Billboard […]

One of the traditional highlights of the NY:LON Connect conference is the startup pitches session, and 2020’s event was no exception. New York startup Trash emerged as the winner in an audience vote for the best pitch, but fellow pitchers Super Hi-Fi, MyPart, Boomy and FeedForward won plenty of plaudits from attendees too. Music Ally […]

Thailand’s digital infrastructure has spearheaded growth in social media and internet usage that has had a positive effect on streaming revenues, with the market picking up in 2018 for the first time in five years The post Country Profile – Thailand 2020 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Fresh from test-launching its Resso music-streaming service, Bytedance is set to expand into another sector that will bring it into direct competition with fellow Chinese firm Tencent. That sector is mobile gaming, which drives huge revenues for Tencent already. Bloomberg reports that Bytedance has “rapidly built a full-fledged gaming division to spearhead its maiden foray into hardcore […]

Amazon’s Prime membership is a huge driver for its music-streaming services, so how is it growing in the US? Research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) has put out some new estimates. It claims that the number of American Prime members grew by 11% to 112 million at the end of 2019, with 52% of those […]

Keen followers of Björk’s career so far may have thought it was only a matter of time before she experimented with AI music, such has been her openness to new technologies. However, her new ‘Kórsafn’ project is less about using AI to generate the music itself. It’s an installation at the Sister City hotel in […]

“VR is shit! It’s shit but it doesn’t have to be. Certainly the hardware’s not all the way there yet, it’s quite bulky and if you put it on for an hour or so you’re going to get a pretty raging headache and neck ache. But the real problem is the content is shit. The […]

Troy Carter was the closing keynote at Music Ally and Music Biz’s NY:LON Connect conference in New York on Friday. The former Atom Factory boss (where he managed Lady Gaga during her rise to fame) and Spotify exec is now running Q&A, a company blending artist development, distribution and technology. I interviewed Troy on-stage at […]

Earlier this month, we reported on changes to the Midemlab startups contest at Midem in June: a new ‘Live Music Experiences’ category to replace the existing ‘Experiential Technologies’ one. Music Ally, as before, is one of the selection partners for the contest, which means we’ll be one of three companies (alongside Plus 8 Equity and The Lynk) […]

Music managers body EMMA (the European Music Managers Alliance) is launching a pan-European mentorship scheme for managers, with applications opening today. Called EMMMA (an extra ‘m’, because it’s the European Music Managers Mentorship Activation) it has support from the EU’s Creative Europe program, as well as from YouTube Music. Announced last year, it will offer […]

In August 2018, we published an article questioning what ‘social music’ is in the streaming age, which included a (slightly depressing, in hindsight) rundown of past failures at wedding social features and music. Among them was a catalogue of music-discovery gamification services – fantasy labels or league tables of friends’ track-spotting skills – which included Thesixtyone and the […]

“You can choose to grow one copyright at a time. That’s going to take a really, really long time. We went to look for solutions that would help us scale more quickly. And what drove that was really find likeminded people, find people with whom you have shared values… with whom you have a vision […]

“I think it’s good that we have a lot of players in the market, because it means we all get better… The streaming landscape, and particularly for us the audio landscape, will continue to grow. We are just on the tip of the iceberg of what this will become.” Cecilia Qvist is global head of […]

“Labels who call themselves labels? That’s like dinosaur shit to me! It’s what’s your value proposition? What’s my value proposition? Can one plus one equal 10? As long as I can say to somebody that you and I together will be better… 300 is not a label, we’re a platform. We’re an opportunity for people […]

British collecting society PRS for Music teamed up with Spotify for a three-day songwriting camp called Who We Be Songwriting Sessions, using the brand of the streaming service’s popular playlist. Now they’ve released an eight-minute mini-documentary about the event, which saw more than 30 grime, rap, R&B and afrobeat musicians collaborating in London’s RAK Studios. […]

Mexico will be the location for Latin America’s latest new music conference, Cancun Music Week. It will take place in Cancun from 3-9 August, and will focus on electronic music with a mixture of DJ sets, branded parties, conference keynotes, panels and workshops, and even early-morning wellness sessions. XKYY Entertainment is the company behind the event, […]

There’s joy to be found in the fact that on the day Spotify launches a playlist for pets, Apple Music is making Orville Peck the latest emerging artist to be chosen for its Up Next initiative? Orville being the famously non-flying duck-puppet British TV star of the 1980s. You won’t catch Orville Peck singing saccharine songs […]

Good news for cats, dogs, hamsters, birds and iguanas this morning, but less so for stick insects, micro pigs and goats. Spotify’s latest algorithmically-generated playlist is aimed at pets, but only those in the first list above. And while this may sound like an April Fool’s story, it’s not: Spotify says it surveyed 5,000 pet owners […]

App analytics firm Sensor Tower has published its year-end report on the apps market in 2019. Among its conclusions: TikTok was the second most-downloaded app across Apple and Google’s app stores in 2019, behind only WhatsApp, with nearly 750m downloads over the year. That put TikTok ahead of Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, with the caveat […]

Twitch has a new music partnerships manager: Athena Koumis, formerly of Spotify and Xcite Networks. She announced her new job in social posts yesterday, making it clear that Amazon’s live-video platform wants to get more musicians streaming. “One thing I’ve yearned for working in streaming over the years is a sense of community & meaningful interaction w/ […]

When it comes to touring, independent artists and their teams often face significant revenue risks. RoadNation aims to help mitigate this risk and drive more fan engagement through a direct artist-to-fan platform that sees artists funding their tours upfront through exclusive products while the fans get input into where their favourite artists will play.  Artists […]

US startup Lüm launched a music discovery app in July 2019: the latest attempt at a smartphone app to help music fans find new artists to listen to. The company has since closed a $1.4m seed funding round, and says that it has “grown to over 15,000 fans, 22,000 artists and has over 60,000 tracks […]

We last wrote about French startup Joué in June 2019, when the company was one of the finalists in the Midemlab startups contest. It’s a hardware company that makes instruments, with its first (also called Joué) being a board-shaped device made out of wood and metal, with “magic modules” made of silicon slotting in to turn it into a […]

Deezer’s ambitions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region continue. The streaming service has announced a partnership with mobile technology firm Mondia which will help people pay for Deezer in the region. The deal involves ‘direct carrier billing’ so that people can pay for a Deezer subscription through their mobile bills. “One of the main […]

Fancy starting the day with a sing-song? Come on then: “Ry’n ni yma o hyd / Ry’n ni yma o hyd / Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth…” Those are the words of ‘Yma O Hyd’, a track by Welsh folk artist Dafydd Iwan that was originally released in 1983. Why, you may wonder, is Music […]

Indian firm T-Series’ flagship channel has the most subscribers on YouTube: 124 million at the time of writing. It will come as no surprise to learn that it’s also the most popular in terms of weekly views, then. That’s according to a chart published by online-video industry site Tubefilter, using data from analytics firm GospelStats. It claims […]

Tencent’s messaging app WeChat is already a huge moneymaker in terms of the way people in China use it to pay for all manner of goods and services. One of the keys to this are the ‘Mini Programs’ launched by developers and brands for WeChat: essentially apps within the app. How much money is being […]

One of many mysteries of this algorithm-driven age is how TikTok’s ‘For You’ feed works, in terms of the videos it recommends to users of its app. However, a report in the Financial Times this morning suggests that TikTok may be considering adding something a bit more… curated to its offering. The newspaper describes it as “a […]

Many artists have posthumous careers, thanks to their archives of unreleased tracks and demos. Dolly Parton, however, appears to be taking a more strategic approach for remaining successful after she dies. “I am a lucky person, cos I’ve got hundreds, hundreds, even thousands of songs. And a big part of ‘em have never even been […]

In December, it was announced that Apple TV+ had bagged the rights to a documentary about sexual misconduct in the music industry, focusing on a then-unnamed executive (since confirmed as Russell Simmons) and presented by Oprah Winfrey. The documentary was being produced by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering. Now the deal has hit the rocks […]

“Create a playlist with Yummy on repeat and stream it. Don’t mute it! Play it at a low volume. Let it play while you sleep.” “Buy the song on iTunes. Buy the song multiple times on Justin’s website.” These quotes are from a slideshow, complete with artwork reminiscent of a MySpace page in 2007, posted […]

Live music-streaming firm LiveXLive has published some end-of-year figures showing its growth. The company, which also owns streaming service Slacker Radio, says it ended the year with 820,000 paid subscribers, having added 140,000 in the last year, while its total average monthly active users were 1.2 million at the end of 2019. The company livestreamed 28 music […]

Midem’s Artist Accelerator has been a popular addition to the music-industry conference over the last five years: choosing a group of emerging artists each year for a programme of mentorship and networking, as well as live performances during the June event. Now it’s being rebranded as Midem Talent Exporter, which organiser Reed Midem says will […]

If you want an insight into some of the challenges for composers in 2020, grab a large cup of tea and settle down to read this Twitter thread from Kerry Muzzey, whose music has been used by a number of high-profile TV shows. In it, he details his discovery that his music had been used, without […]

In July 2019, we reported on the latest new label with grand ambitions for the music industry. In the case of Saban Music Group, those ambitions were backed by $500m of capital, thanks to founder Haim Saban, whose TV firm Saban Entertainment (and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) made him a billionaire. The new label would focus […]

Welcome to the first Sandbox of 2020. Lead: It is now 10 years since we published the very first edition of Sandbox, so to start a new decade we speak to marketers from around the world about the tools and trends that shaped the past decade of music marketing as well as the ones they believe […]

In August 2018, Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and tech exec-turned-politician Meg Whitman made waves by raising $1bn of seed funding for their startup NewTV, with plans to stream high-quality TV shows and films broken up into bitesize 10-minute episodes. Since then, NewTV has been renamed Quibi, and at this week’s CES show in Las Vegas it was […]

Music Ally last wrote about Indian startup Flutin in October 2019, when the music-discovery app announced that it had been downloaded more than 9.7m times, and had built an audience of 370,000 daily active users streaming around 3m tracks a day. Now Flutin has announced that it’s teaming up with Indian artist Sukhbir Singh, who is investing […]

As part of the promotion for their The Later Years album and box-set, Pink Floyd have just launched a number of augmented reality filters for social media. Rhino UK commissioned WMG’s Firepit Technology to create Instagram and Facebook AR filters based on artwork for releases including ‘The Division Bell’, ‘Endless River’ and ‘P.U.L.S.E’. Fans can thus have […]

TikTok has been subject to intense scrutiny recently over its censorship and moderation policies, and specifically the extent to which its global approach is guided by views on what is or isn’t acceptable in China. Now the company has published a revised and expanded set of its community guidelines, promising “greater transparency” and a clearer structure of 10 […]

Spotify made a well-documented misstep with its attempt to introduce a policy on ‘hateful conduct’ of artists, but the streaming service has won more praise for its uncompromising approach to keeping hateful content – neo-Nazi music etc – off its platform. Now, however, Spotify is facing criticism after extremists found a way to promote their views on its […]

Hot Pod News is one of the most respected sites covering the podcasting industry, so its predictions for the market in 2020 are worth perusing. Among the trends it expects to make headlines this year: competition between Apple and Spotify. “At the end of the day, the competition is about getting users, audiences, and listeners into respective […]

Facebook messaging and fan engagement service Sendmate has been acquired by text-messaging firm Community. Sendmate’s co-founder Andreas Mahringer will become head of business operations at Community, with plans to contact Sendmate’s customers in the coming weeks to explain how the transition will work. Sendmate was a spinoff from Record Bird, a music discovery startup that closed in […]

Fans of brandspeak will find much to enjoy in financial firm Mastercard’s latest press release. In a nutshell, the company has commissioned and released its first music single, a track called ‘Merry Go Round’ by Swedish artist Nadine Randle. But as the company prefers to put it: “Mastercard is redefining how people interact and recall the […]

Based on a survey of 2,500 people in the US and China listening to a variety of musical genres, research scientists at Berkeley have identified at least 13 emotions triggered by music across cultures. They are: amusing; annoying; anxious/tense; beautiful; calm/relaxing/serene; dreamy; energising/pumped up; erotic/desirous; indignant/defiant; joyful/cheerful; sad/depressing; scary/fearful; and triumphant/heroic. “We have rigorously documented the largest […]

As a story it has been circulating in the industry for many months, but YouTube has now confirmed that Dan Chalmers has been appointed as director of YouTube Music for Europe, Middle East and Africa. He joins from Warner Music where he was president of ADA as well as heading up both East West and […]

Two of the most active music firms involved in buying up publishing catalogues have started 2020 with a bang. UK-based Hipgnosis has acquired a catalogue of 157 songs from Blink-182 co-founder Tom DeLonge, hopeful of a resurgence for his main band’s music. “The influence of Blink-182 on today’s artists is massive. If you’re under 27 years old […]

One of the challenges that YouTube presents for the music industry is the way music videos compete against other kinds of content and creators on the service. Many of whom are churning out videos much more regularly than artists are able to, with a firm sense of what will grab the attention of YouTube’s recommendation […]

Underfunding of the arts in general, and the arts in education in particular, have long been a concern for those in the UK who know there is a direct line between such schemes and the export power of the country’s music business. The Department For Education, however, has announced that it is earmarking £80m for music hubs […]

Audio-tech firm Sonarworks is hoping to make a splash at CES this week with a new product called SoundID. It’s an app for Android and iOS that promises “personalised audio perfected for each listener”, with its beta version available now. It’ll work by running users through a one-time ‘hearing test’ including their age, musical preferences and […]

YouTube already goes back a long way with the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival: it has been streaming sets live from the annual event for a decade. Now it’s going back even further. YouTube is launching a documentary about Coachella, which will explore the festival’s 20-year history. The feature-length original will go live on 31 March […]

Nettwerk Music Group has announced a recapitalisation of its business, which means a process of restructuring its debt and equity ownership. In this case, that process includes buying out the stake held in Nettwerk by HBC Investments: “part of a broader financing plan that recognizes the success of the Company’s strategy over the past seven years and […]

  About the Roundhouse: The iconic Roundhouse is one of London’s foremost cultural venues with a legendary track record in presenting music. Our core purpose is to enable young people to realise their creative potential and to offer audiences, of all ages, new and extraordinary experiences in live music, theatre, dance, circus, spoken word and […]

Join the best team in the independent music world! CD Baby (part of AVL Digital, a Downtown Music Holdings company) is now searching for an Account Manager in the Creator Services department based in London, UK. This role help manage music release campaigns and add value to CD Baby’s most important artists, managers and labels. […]

Job title: Junior Programme Manager Responsible to: Innovation Manager Department: Abbey Road Red Location of work: Abbey Road Studios   Music is Universal   Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, […]

This year we’ve picked 42 (also the answer to life, the universe and everything as fans of Douglas Adams will know) of the trends and moments we found most significant in 2019. What are they? *takes deep breath* industry growth; the European Copyright Directive and Music Modernization Act; Spotify’s two-sided marketplace; Apple Music’s bundled future; […]

You don’t have to be a boomer to think that the idea of sharing a house with 19 TikTok stars has the makings of a living hell. But in the case of the Hype House in Los Angeles, it’s part of a burgeoning social-media trend. The New York Times has explained what’s going on: actually, only a […]

To use the standard industry language, there’s been an almighty hoo-ha around the reappearance of a track by artist French Montana on Spotify’s US chart. ‘Writing on the Wall’ features Post Malone, Cardi B and Rvssian, but wasn’t a smash hit when it was originally released last September. Now a dramatic rise up Spotify’s chart, […]

Taiwanese streaming service KKBox announced a partnership with Microsoft at the end of 2019, and while on the surface it was a fairly dry B2B story about cloud infrastructure, there’s more to it. So yes, KKBox will be migrating its service to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, but the press release for the deal outlined another […]

Rolling Stones fans – at least, those camping out on YouTube in the final hours of 2019 – got an unexpected treat on 31 December. More than 75 rare tracks popped up on Google’s video service on the Stones’ and catalogue administrator Abkco, before disappearing again a few hours later. The live recordings and studio out-takes […]

Bytedance’s latest music hire will be focusing on its Douyin short-video app in China – the Chinese version of TikTok. The company has recruited Deng Linhai to lead Douyin’s music business, according to news site Technode. The former operations director at Tencent Music Entertainment is taking over from Douyin’s former music boss Zhu Jie, who left the […]

Ripple Labs is one of the bigger companies in the crypto / blockchain space, with its payment protocol and XRP cryptocurrency. Now its director of product Craig DeWitt has revealed plans for a personal project focusing on music, called xSongs. It’s a familiar (and thus far, unsuccessful) idea in blockchain music: a platform for artists to […]

Barring a major surprise, 2019 will have been the fifth straight year of growth for the global recorded music industry. Over those five years, its annual revenues have grown from $14.2bn to $19.1bn, taking it almost back to its 2004 level. If 2019 matched 2018’s 9.7% growth, we could be talking about $21bn last year. […]

Consumer spending on music streaming in the UK passed the symbolic £1bn mark for the first time last year, according to figures published by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) today. Brits spent just over £1bn on streaming subscriptions in 2019, up by 23.5% from the £812m spent in 2018 – and 31 times the spend […]

Music firm Concord’s COO Glen Barros left the company at the end of 2019, in order to launch what Billboard is describing as “a new music rights business venture”. He’d spent the last 25 years working at Concord, ever since buying the original Concord Jazz label. The new business is called Exceleration Music, and it has already […]

Research firm Canalys expects wireless earphones and wireless headphones – ‘the smart personal audio device market’ – to have a very big 2020. “In Q3 2019, the worldwide smart personal audio device market grew 53% to reach 96.7 million units. And the segment is expected to break the 100 million unit mark in the final quarter, with potential to […]

Napster is the latest music-streaming service putting out some end-of-year statistics. However, it has chosen a different topic to the usual ‘most popular artists / tracks’ DSP data dumps. Napster has been looking at its data for independent artists, and says that in 2019, 33% of its top 100 most-streamed artists were independent. That’s up […]

The latest artist experimenting with releasing music through meditation apps is Keaton Henson, the British folk-rock musician and composer. His new album ‘Louise’ Piano’ is coming out through Music Zen, the mindfulness app developed by music-apps firm Gismart. It’s the first time an artist has written exclusive music for the app, although the model has been […]

Bad news if you want to hear the all-new remixed version of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the flesh: tickets to the “immersive experience” in the band’s native Liverpool are already sold out. The good news, however, is that the remix – in the Dolby Atmos format – is also being made available […]

Gaana is the latest music-streaming service exploring the potential of interactive voice ads, following announcements earlier this year from Spotify and Pandora. The Indian service is working with the same partner as the latter: Instreamatic, which has tech for ads that people can talk back to. “With this partnership, Gaana listeners will engage with voice ads that […]

Live-music firm Sofar Sounds has been facing some criticism in recent months around how it pays artists and its volunteers alike. Now the company is responding in some depth, with a blog post explaining “how money works at a Sofar show”. Its publication comes ahead of some changes to the company’s model set for February, including to artist compensation […]

Up to this point, Facebook’s music-licensing deals have focused squarely on user-generated content. But for several years now – for example in the days when Vevo’s relationship with YouTube was thought to be on the rocks – there has been speculation about whether Facebook might fancy licensing music videos for its service. Now, according to Bloomberg, it may […]

Up to this point, Facebook’s music-licensing deals have focused squarely on user-generated content. But for several years now – for example in the days when Vevo’s relationship with YouTube was thought to be on the rocks – there has been speculation about whether Facebook might fancy licensing music videos for its service. Now, according to Bloomberg, it may […]

Earlier this month, we reported on Resso, the new music-streaming app that TikTok’s parent company Bytedance is testing in India and Indonesia. We asked journalist Amit Gurbaxani, who has written regularly for Music Ally about the music industry in India, to try the app and offer his first impressions. “The most distinct thing about Resso, […]

Valence Media, the owner of Billboard, is buying the Nielsen Music “insights and product suite’ that it uses for its charts in the US.  The two companies were previously under the same roof between 1999 and 2009 when they were part of Dutch media group Verenigde Nederlandse Uitgeverijen (VNU). That was until VNU sold Billboard […]

Your Mission. We have an exciting opportunity for a Marketing Co-ordinator to join BMG Production Music in the sales and marketing team based in our new office in Hoxton! The role will be working with the international territories to co-ordinate the global marketing strategy for BMG Production Music.  Your Responsibilities. Create and coordinate the distribution […]

Music Ally has written about ‘in-skill purchases’ before: they’re the equivalent of in-app purchases for the third-party skills created for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. A way for developers to make money from their Alexa skills, in other words, by charging users for extra content or features. Tech-news site The Information claims that the feature is off to […]

As Drake never sang: you used to call me on my cell phone, late night when you need my… cell phone too, to watch the new video from Post Malone. Yes, fans will need two phones to watch the latter artist’s new video, which is exclusive to Spotify. Essentially it’s the story of a couple breaking […]

Will the number 13 be lucky for some music/tech startups? The annual Midemlab competition will be in its 13th year in 2020, and has just opened its call for entries. SoundCloud, Kickstarter, Songkick, The Echo Nest, Next Big Sound and Soundcharts are among the past participants in the contest, which is part of the Midem conference. […]

Sample-licensing service Tracklib has published its latest ‘State of Sampling’ report, offering some stats and insight into how samples are being used in 2019’s music industry. “This year, 15% of the songs on Billboard Hot 100 contained samples. A total of 17 samples in 15 of the songs, with some containing more than one,” being […]

The UK’s Brit Awards have a new partner from the world of streaming services. Amazon Music will be the ‘digital music partner’ for the event in February. That means Amazon’s music services will get to stream the performances from the awards after the event; host the official Brit Awards 2020 playlist as well as other […]

Another day, another new music-podcast announcement. Spotify in particular has been throwing a lot of money, time and marketing effort at original podcasts this year. The latest example is a show focusing on the rise (and recent fall) of rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine. It has been created in partnership with Complex. Infamous: The Tekashi 6ix9ine Story […]

Fugees and solo star Wyclef Jean has founded a music publisher and distributor that will focus initially on working with songwriters and artists in Africa. It’s called Carnival World Music Group, and now it has some financial backing from music-investment firm Sound Royalties. That company is better known for its business offering royalty advances to […]

Deezer is adding a selection of DJ mixes to its streaming service, with Michael Mayer, Modeselektor, Mark Knight, Wil Saul, Sultan + Shepard and Makoto among the DJs taking part, with the first mixes launching on 30 December. Mix sets have long been a tricky area for music-streaming services, in terms of rights clearances and […]

A decent suite of personalised playlists is now table stakes for anyone who wants to be a competitive music-streaming service. YouTube Music’s latest move to ensure it’s up to speed is the launch of three new ‘playlists mixed for you’ which follow the template laid down by other services. Discover Mix is a playlist of […]

2019 has been a good year for creative music-marketing campaigns, as you’ll know if you read our end-of-year Sandbox report earlier this month. If you haven’t, you can find it here: it’s our pick of the best campaigns of the year. Anyone looking for more inspiration for their music marketing in 2020 would do well […]

AI-music analysis startup Musiio has had a good 2019: it recently raised $1M in seed funding, is already working with a slew of clients, and is looking to raise money again in 2020. Musiio’s technology is a mixture of the advanced (AI that can listen to music) and the pragmatic (efficiently labelling catalogue). Right now, […]

Podcasts are already one of the uses for smart speakers, but that activity could be boosted in the US by the latest announcements from Amazon. From last Friday (13 December) it became possible for American Alexa customers to ask for podcasts as well as music. Interestingly, Amazon’s announcement only included Apple, with more than 800k podcasts […]

The latest brand working with TikTok is sports-entertainment organisation WWE, which has created an official account on the social app. However, music is also a key part of the deal, with WWE licensing the entrance themes for more than 30 of its past and present wrestlers for use on TikTok. That means users of the app will […]

The latest act to get into the Spotify Wrapped co-promotion mood are BTS, with the headline stat being that their music has been streamed over 3bn times on Spotify in 2019. Those streams come from 60 million people across 79 countries – resulting in 178.4m listening hours. Reminder: Spotify’s ‘Wrapped’ data covers the period of January […]

A variety of tools and platforms have allowed artists and industry professionals to collaborate remotely, but real-world meetings are also important, especially the serendipity that can arise from them. That’s part of the logic behind Qube, a new co-create space that will open in West London in January. The membership-based complex has been set up by […]

YouTube has contributed to the US ‘Hot 100’ singles chart since early 2013, but now Billboard has announced that the video service’s data will also count towards its ‘Billboard 200’ albums chart. Importantly, this data will only come from “official licensed video content uploaded by or on behalf of a rights holder” – no user-generated […]

It’s not there yet, but YouTube could soon be the biggest paid music-subscription service in India. That’s the hook for a report by Bloomberg claiming that YouTube has more than 800,000 paying subscribers in India across its YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium tiers – the latter of which includes the former. The report claims that YouTube’s subscriptions […]

Sony Music really is serious about this podcasts business. The label has already launched two joint-ventures with podcast producers this year, as well as building internal teams to develop (and commercialise) spoken-word shows. Now it has announced a strategic investment in an existing podcast production firm, Los Angeles-based Neon Hum. Its hits include ‘Bag Man’, ‘The […]

With the decline of high-street record stores, not to mention the rise of smartphones, are artist-signing events dying out? Scribbled signatures may pale compared to selfies, but a startup called Qjam is aiming to give signings a new, digital spin. It’s launched an Android and iOS app that fans can use to stream live video of an […]

The latest two artists to get their own augmented-reality camera ‘effects’ on Instagram are Stormzy and Wham. The Stormzy effect has been created by the Firepit Technology team at Warner Music in the UK, and puts a rotating crown of ‘H.I.T.H’ (the initials from Stormzy’s new album Heavy Is The Head) on the user’s head […]

Earlier this year, Pandora announced a deal to test ‘interactive voice advertising’ through a partnership with a company called Instreamatic. At the time, the tests were slated to begin later in 2019. Well, now they’ve begun. TechCrunch has the details of the ads, which will ask listeners if they want more information about whatever product or service is […]

If you’ve read any of the long-form articles (or the book) about Twitter’s history, you might have formed the opinion that CEO Jack Dorsey is good at Big Ideas, but not always quite as good at the details. With that in mind, here’s a new Big Idea from Jack Dorsey! “Twitter is funding a small independent […]

Streaming services are going in all guns blazing with podcasts and the major labels are following suit. In April, Universal Music Group announced a partnership with podcast publisher Wondery to develop original podcasts based on the label’s catalogue, artists and labels. Sony Music has launched two podcast-focused joint ventures, and recently unveiled its US leadership team for podcasts. […]

British label Dirty Hit has made its name with The 1975 and Wolf Alice (not to mention Beabadoobee, one of the hot tips for 2020 in numerous year-end lists). Now the independent company has signed an exclusive, global distribution deal with UMG subsidiary Ingrooves – a “deepening” of an existing relationship, rather than a brand […]

Touting (scalping) is an ongoing problem for mega-acts, where demand far outstrips supply. The inverse, of course, is the case for smaller acts – where tours can lose them money and small venues are often sparsely attended. RoadNation is the latest platform aiming to help, by developing what it is terming a “direct to fan” touring […]

Earlier this year, we reported on the publication of a book, ‘Spotify Inifrån’ (‘Spotify Untold‘), which claimed to tell the inside story of Spotify’s rise. Then, in August we reported on the news that TV production company Yellow Bird UK, part of the much-bigger Banijay Group, had optioned the screen rights to the book and was developing […]

We profiled startup Super Hi-Fi earlier this year. The US firm has developed technology that uses AI to make streaming services sound much more radio-like, with branded stings, artist name and track title announcements, interview clips and ads – all personalised to each individual listener. Now the company has a new partnership with a streaming-music firm: Napster. […]

Here’s an interesting job title for a major label: senior privacy counsel. Warner Music Group has just created the role, and appointed Clare McConnell to it, reporting in to WMG’s general counsel, international, Kate Logan. “Clare is an online privacy expert and specialist in compliance with data privacy legislation in the US, Europe and beyond,” […]

Streaming music doesn’t mean you don’t also want to buy it sometimes. Music Ally has always argued that there could be more links between streaming services like Spotify and D2C platforms like Bandcamp, beyond a few items of merch on artist profiles. Now music website Hype Machine has stepped in to create a new link […]

Taylor Swift’s latest interview (with Billboard) sees her talking about the music industry’s approach to rights ownership. It won’t surprise you, given recent events, to find out she thinks change is needed. “We have a long way to go. I think that we’re working off of an antiquated contractual system. We’re galloping toward a new industry […]

Spend any amount of time digging in to the comments on any public figure’s social-media accounts, and you’ll quickly realise it’s not all wonderful #engagement with fans. In fact, it can often be a cesspit. This is a challenge all the social networks (and streaming services with comments enabled) are trying to tackle. Yesterday, YouTube announced […]

It is that time again when we highlight the best music marketing campaigns of the year. We genuinely were flooded with entries this year and therefore had to increase the number that made the final cut to 50 simply because there were so many incredible campaigns to choose from. We list everything in alphabetical order (by […]

Our recent interview with Stephen Phillips, CEO of AI-music startup Popgun, outlined his belief that an app for teenagers to make AI-powered music might be the ultimate ‘end-game’ for this technology. Now his company has launched… a music-making app for teenagers! Well, any-age people really: the key is that they don’t need prior musical knowledge to […]

Amid all the interest in the audio music-streaming market in India, where Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn and others are all scrapping it out, the biggest hitter is undeniably a video-streaming service: YouTube. We already knew that it has 265 million monthly users in India; that it may account for as much as 40% of Indian labels’ digital revenue; […]

The game Grand Theft Auto V was released in September 2013, but six years on it’s still going strong, having sold more than 115m copies across various consoles, and with a popular online mode extending its lifespan. It’s also still making musical waves, with the latest example being a new station for the game’s in-car […]

As part of a collaboration between UMG, the EMI Trust and youth-community charity The eXceL Project, the three-day education programme Secret Studio has resulted in the release of two new original tracks. The eXceL Project’s (XLP) community leaders picked six individuals, aged between 16 and 20, from different backgrounds across London to harness their creativity […]

Music Ally wrote about the beta launch of Swedish fan-funding startup Corite in October, with five artists raising money from fans in exchange for a share of their royalties. Now the company has provided an update on how it all went. “One month after the official launch, Corite has gathered thousands of registered users and closed ten […]

Bytedance has begun testing its new music-streaming service Resso in India and Indonesia. Music Ally received a tip-off yesterday about the app’s availability, and began researching it, but since then Bloomberg has published a report claiming that the new app has been downloaded 27k times since its stealthy launch, but also suggesting that Resso has […]

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is one of the regions – like Latin America – where Deezer sees an opportunity to compete strongly against its larger global rivals. A $185m funding round in August 2018 included Saudi Arabian investment fund Kingdom Holding Company and media firm Rotana Group, and was quickly followed by Deezer’s launch across the MENA […]

In September, InChorus Group and Shesaid·so teamed up to launch a global survey of bias and harassment within the music industry. Now they’ve published some of the first results, based on the first 172 respondents. The survey focused on incidents of bias, harassment and microaggressions experienced at work in the music industry. According to InChorus and Shesaid·so, […]

Yesterday, Twitter announced that the most-retweeted tweet of 2019 was January’s ‘World Record Egg’ – an attempt to break the previous retweets record with a photo of an egg. According to Twitter, the egg beat a tweet by K-Pop stars BTS featuring band-member Jungkook dancing to Billie Eilish’s ‘Bad Guy’ into second place. We’ll let you guess what happened once […]

British music-apps developer Gismart has quietly become one of the bigger firms in the apps world, with more than 500m downloads of its products – which include Beat Maker Go, Piano Crush and DJ It. Now the company is starting to invest in external firms, starting with one of the winning music/tech startups from this summer’s Midemlab contest: Jambl. […]

The treasure hunt, scattering of Easter eggs and a good dash of the cryptic is a failsafe in music marketing. It is all a nice way to get the fanbase excited about a new album, an opportunity to test out a new platform and hopefully get some virality and/or wider media coverage in the process. […]

Regular readers of our Sandbox report will be very familiar with music brand Colors and the minimalist videos it records for artists which are often a key part of their marketing campaigns. The visual aesthetic is based around getting acts to perform in a room that is in a single block colour, the intention being […]

Ole Obermann was Warner Music Group’s chief digital officer until June 2019, when he left the company after reportedly declining to renew his contract. Recent gossip had suggested that Obermann was joining TikTok and/or its parent company Bytedance in a key music role. And lo: Obermann has now confirmed that he has joined the companies as global […]

Amazon is the latest streaming service to publish some year-end charts, including a new name as its most popular artist of 2019. Taylor Swift takes that honour for Amazon Music, joining Post Malone (Spotify) and J Balvin (Deezer), while Billie Eilish was Apple’s editor-chosen ‘Global Artist of the Year’, and Daddy Yankee / Snow had […]

Gamer music fans want music that fits the exact gaming moment they’re experiencing, and they want to show off their fandom. Five Vectors’ tech scans and funnels music programmatically to those audiences, and helps fans pay for it in ways that make interaction meaningful and status-based, like being skins in Fortnite. The post Music Ally’s […]

Take two trends: swipe-voting and short-videos. Mash them up, and what do you get? US startup Famous Media hopes you get a recipe for success. It’s working on an app called Famous for which its high-concept pitch is “TikTok with Tinder-style voting”. Its profile on investment site AngelList explains more. “Famous merges the youthful appeal of Instagram and TikTok […]

“What’s the end-game for this? There isn’t this place in the world where teenagers come together to make music for each other. That place does not exist, and that’s nuts! That thing needs to exist, and it will exist. And getting the AI working is the price of admission to build that thing…” Stephen Phillips, […]

Yesterday, we reported on a lawsuit filed against TikTok in the US over its predecessor app Musical·ly’s handling of children’s data. There’s a speedy update on the case: it’s been settled. “TikTok is firmly committed to safeguarding the data of its users, especially our younger users,” a spokesperson told The Verge. “Although we disagree with much […]

In mid-November, Music Ally wrote about a new feature on Google Earth where people could create their own stories by attaching text, images and videos to locations on the planet. “We think there is some interesting scope here for artists to tell stories using the new features: who’ll be the first to give it a try?” we […]

As Spotify launched the artist-focused element of its Wrapped 2019 promotion yesterday, the streaming service also offered some new statistics. More than 1.2 million artists were listened to for more than 100 hours on Spotify this year during the period covered by Wrapped (January to the end of October, which isn’t a widely-known fact – Mariah Carey must […]

Anyone who has been to an improv comedy show will know that making up songs on the spot based on audience suggestions is often more admirable than enjoyable. But that’s, in a way, what Jamie Cullum is doing with the release of 19 songs, as part of a partnership with lifestyle retail brand Clos19. Each of […]

Every so often, we end up in a conversation about how to make conference panel-sessions more interesting. British indie body AIM has an idea: get rid of them entirely. Its AIM Connected conference will take place on 4 February in London, and it will be panel-less. Instead, the event will focus on “a series of […]

U2 are the latest artist to ink a partnership with both SiriusXM and its Pandora subsidiary. The band are launching something called U2X Radio, which will include their own station on SiriusXM’s satellite-radio service playing recorded and live music, interviews and other content. There’ll also be exclusive stuff available for Pandora listeners. The news follows SiriusXM’s creative […]

Artists connecting with fans and rewarding superfans has been a trend in our industry for years. Doing that while respecting their digital privacy is… a somewhat-newer trend. Something that’s trying to walk this line is Portes, a new platform and app launched by startup OCL. The app is available on iOS, with Android to come. “Use […]

Running a music website as a profitable business in 2019 is hard. Running it as an extension of other kinds of music brands, however, is an increasingly-common strategy. The latest example is a site called Beatportal, launched by dance brand Beatport for its community of DJs. “A monthly cover story featuring a diverse range of artists […]

Recorded music revenue in Italy increased 6.7% in the first nine months of the year, according to recorded music body FIMI, with streaming up 28%, a result that suggests the streaming-led revival is having a lasting impact in one of Europe’s most stubbornly analogue markets. Italy, the subject of our latest Country Profile, ranks 24th out […]

Expect to see a LOT of Spotify-branded social posts from artists and fans alike today, due to the launch of the streaming service’s annual ‘Wrapped’ promotion. Fans can log in to see data on their listening not just from 2019, but also from the last decade. It’s the first time Wrapped has been available within Spotify’s […]

Italy’s digital music take-up lags behind most of its EU neighbours with only 1.5 million premium streaming subscribers. Nonetheless, that’s still a jump of 0.5m in less than a year and streaming is enjoying growth The post Country Profile – Italy 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The dispute between music-lyrics site Genius and Google may yet end up in court: the former is suing the latter plus its partner LyricFind for $50m. This all relates to Genius’ accusation in June that Google was serving up some lyrics in its ‘OneBox’ search results that had been lifted from Genius – detected by the latter using alternating straight […]

TikTok currently finds itself in a position that YouTube knows only too well, being simultaneously hailed as a kingmaker for breaking new artists, and a hot potato when it comes to the question of licensing and royalties for music on its platform. Part of TikTok’s charm offensive is partnerships with artists, and the latest example […]

Who said major labels were the only established music entities buying into the digital distribution market? German collecting society GEMA is joining the fun. It has taken a majority stake in Berlin-based distributor Zebralution, which it says makes it one of the first collecting societies in the world to ‘secure commercial participation’ in that market. Zebralution […]

We reported yesterday on Amazon’s announcement of DeepComposer, a musical keyboard designed to help developers explore generative AI. Now Ed Newton-Rex, founder of one of the first AI-music startups, Jukedeck, has been giving his views on what Amazon’s announcement means. That includes the fact that it’s the fourth of the ‘big five’ tech companies to publicly […]

The catalogue of late R&B star Aaliyah has long been held back from streaming services – with the exception of her 1994 debut album Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number and a handful of early singles and EPs. Now it is rumoured her full catalogue, including 1996’s One In A Million and her self-titled third […]

Details have emerged about the team Sony Music is putting together in its New York office to produce and make money from podcasts. An internal memo from execs Dennis Kooker and Tom Mackay outlined the four key executives working on what they describe as a “key area of creative and business development”. They are: SVP […]

After all the recent controversies around data privacy and censorship, TikTok’s leadership won’t have enjoyed seeing this intro to a story on news site Netzpolitik. “Leaked documents reveal how TikTok hid videos of people with disabilities. Queer and fat users were also pushed out of view.” The story concerns a list of ‘special users’ whose posts’ […]

The Paris Agreement is the 2016 deal on measures to tackle the climate emergency signed by 195 nations and states. However, US president Donald Trump has made it clear that he intends to withdraw from the agreement, and the earliest date at which he could do that would be November 2020. Now a group of […]

Cast your minds back to October 2018, and a story we wrote about a playlists partnership between Apple Music and Ministry of Sound. The gist being, as Ministry’s profile on that streaming service explained it: “All Ministry of Sound playlists and the monthly Ministry Mix – only on Apple Music.” At the time, we noted that Ministry […]

In October, Spotify announced that it would be testing sponsorship of its full-screen ‘marquee’ album recommendations, allowing artist teams in the US to buy these spots – but only for people who’d already listened to their artist. What Spotify didn’t say at the time was how much this would cost. Enter Rolling Stone, which has got its hands […]

Dutch secondary-ticketing firm TicketSwap has hired former EMI/Universal Music insight director Chris Carey as its new head of international marketing. The company aims to make secondary ticketing “fairer, safer and more transparent” at a time when the biggest firm in the secondary world, Viagogo, is under sustained attack from the music industry and regulators alike. […]

What we need, said almost nobody in the music industry, are a few more awards ceremonies. But now we have two, from the world’s biggest subscription music-streaming services. Spotify’s first awards will take place in Mexico City next March, driven entirely by its data, but Apple Music’s first event took place overnight, chosen purely by the company’s […]

“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” sang Janis Joplin in 1970. “My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.” Half a century on, instead of wishing for luxury automative brands to fall out of the sky, pop stars now become creative directors for them. Which is the long way round to […]

Travellers to Dubai’s international airport (DXB) will now be getting some free music playlists, courtesy of the facility’s partnership with streaming service Anghami. “Customers of DXB will now have uninterrupted free access to specially curated, travel-themed playlists featuring a variety of different global artists and some exciting new local talent from Anghami’s vast music catalogue, […]

Deezer has pulled together its 18-track Big Christmas album where acts including Ella Henderson, Aurora, Circa Waves, Thalía and Gabrielle Aplin record covers of Christmas classics that are exclusive to the streaming service. The album pulls in artists from a range of countries including Australia, France, Norway, Mexico the UK and the Philippines, and working across a […]

Spotify’s annual subscription promotions are of and running in the western world, but the streaming service also has a discount for one of its newest markets: India. The company has halved the price of its annual subscription there from 1,189 rupees (around $16.57) to 699 rupees. The Hindustan Times reported that the offer lasts until 31 December, […]

In 2019, every digital service with a significant profile is a target for hackers. The latest music service dealing with the after-effects of a security breach is Mixcloud. According to both Motherboard and TechCrunch, a data reseller is asking for around $4k (paid in bitcoin) for details of 21m user accounts from the audio-streaming service. Mixcloud has issued […]

Too often, still, the climate emergency is seen by even-senior politicians as an opportunity for puerile stunts of political point-scoring – and this at a time when researchers are warning that the planet may already have crossed a series of climate ‘tipping points’, where certain impacts of global heating take on a momentum of their own. In Music […]

With a multitude of music marketing tools available to artist teams, it can sometimes be difficult to decide which ones to prioritise, especially when most of them are eating into your monthly budget.  It’s therefore great to see how ToneDen has been further developing its offering since we last covered the platform in 2017, adding […]

A T-shirt or a flimsy tour programme was the bulk of merchandise in the “old days” – mass-produced items to shift quickly when an act was on tour. Fortunately, things have changed dramatically in recent years – with a clear drive to be as environmentally aware as possible. Print-on-demand technology is also allowing acts to […]

Founded in 2017, Monokrome Music offers artists digital marketing and social media support. It expanded its offering in September with the launch of rightsHUB as a centralised point to store contractual information as well as release metadata, publishing and neighbouring rights data. It has now launched rightsAUDIT, a service aimed at rightholders (artists, labels, managers, songwriters) […]

In Music Ally’s recent report on AI music (which you can read here if you missed it earlier this week) we cited Holly Herndon as one of the best examples of an artist leaning in to this technology for creative purposes. Now she’s published some thoughts on what AI means for musicians, in a tweet responding to […]

Music-publishing body ICMP has just held its latest board meeting, in Mumbai, as part of a week-long delegation to India to hold talks with the government, music-industry entities and media in the country. “We came to India because it’s a promising market – currently the 15th largest in the world. However, we also need to […]

It’s year-end lists season and no mistake. Deezer is the latest music-streaming service to put out its annual figures, and for the second year running, Colombian reggaeton artist J Balvin is the most-streamed act on the service – indicating not just the foothold of Deezer in Latin American countries but also the growing global crossover […]

Indian telco Airtel says its Wynk Music service is now India’s top music-streaming app when measured by daily active users (DAUs). What it hasn’t said, however, is a specific figure for that. Instead, Wynk’s press release cited October 2019 data from research firm App Annie, without quantifying how many DAUs that is, or how they’ve grown over […]

Christmas is coming, and Music Ally’s list of cheap music-streaming subscription promotions is getting fat. YouTube is the latest in to the festive fray, with a ‘Cyber Week’ offer in the US of an extended three-month free trial of its YouTube Premium tier, rather than the usual one month of free access. That includes YouTube […]

TikTok has been under fire recently over accusations that its global moderation policies are too in thrall to the government of its parent company’s homeland, China. The line coming out of TikTok executives in the US this month has been that censorship decisions on the platform in the west are NOT driven by Beijing. That’s […]

As part of a chart battle last year in the US between Travis Scott and Nicki Minaj, all hell broke loose. The latter used her Queen Radio show on Beats 1 to attack the former for using merchandise bundles to drive his album to number one ahead of hers. “Travis Scott is out here selling f***ing […]

Across the world, there are lots of different initiatives afoot to tackle the music industry’s metadata problems – including accurately filling out the credits for songs and recordings. The latest example comes from the UK, where collecting society PPL has announced a new partnership with startup Sound Credit. The latter company’s product is a plug-in and […]

Tidal has launched a new feature called ‘My Video Mix’ which, as you will have guessed from the name, offers a series of video playlists to users. Blending human editors’ recommendations with machine-driven picks based on users’ listening habits, My Video Mix will serve up to eight different playlists grouped by artist and ‘music clusters’. […]

In September, Music Ally spoke to three of Warner Music Group’s senior innovation and business-development execs, about how they work with startups and innovative technologies. That month, we also interviewed some music/tech startups, who gave some blunt, honest feedback on the challenges they have faced working with major labels in general. It’s a conversation that’s […]

When most people think about the potential legal issues around AI-created music, they tend to think about the output – the music itself, and questions like whether an AI-generated track can attract copyright protection. Sophie Goossens, counsel at law firm Reed Smith, thinks that just as much attention should be paid to the input. “AI is […]

Independent-music body Impala has come out against plans for Chinese technology company Tencent to buy a 10% stake in Universal Music Group, with an option to buy a further 10%. “Even at a low level of shareholding, we believe the risk of harm for consumers and competitors from such a transaction would be a concern […]

“If we leave the web as it is, there’s a very large number of things that will go wrong. We could end up with a digital dystopia if we don’t turn things around. It’s not that we need a 10-year plan for the web, we need to turn the web around now.” Some sobering comments […]

Will Spotify’s lawyers ever be able to enjoy their Christmas dinners without a looming royalties lawsuit? The latest comes from independent music company Sosa Entertainment and its sister firm Pro Music Rights. MBW reports that Sosa claims that it has not been paid the full royalties for more than 550m streams of its catalogue on Spotify. There […]

There’s a new row involving collapsed crowdfunding service PledgeMusic, and specifically its former CEO Dominic Pandiscia. After a musician – Ken Andrews of the band Failure – made a series of allegations about Pandiscia in a Facebook post, they were picked up by music blog Brooklyn Vegan, in an article that has since been removed from […]

This report focuses on AI music – both in terms of artificial-intelligence systems that are creating original music, and AI-driven tools that human musicians are using for their own creative purposes. There’s lots to talk about. We’ve started by digging through the Music Ally archives to offer a timeline of modern AI music – starting with UK […]

Journalists, analysts and research companies have been warning about a ‘Facebook flight’ – people migrating away from the social network – for years now, yet overall, the company’s user base has continued to grow. eMarketer has some new predictions out this morning though, focused on two markets – France and Germany – where it says the migration is real, and “even […]

There are many studies on adoption of smart speakers and which companies are dominating the market – with research firm Canalys forecasting that more than 200m devices will be sold this year globally. However, other studies have picked up on potential privacy issues around speakers ‘listening’ (and recording) within people’s homes. Now the Pew Research Center has published a […]

It’s that time of year again, when artists eye Mariah Carey’s annual Christmas royalties-boom with envy, and hope to follow suit with their own original festive songs – and cover versions of classics. But music-streaming services are also on the Christmas bandwagon: Amazon’s program for commissioning new Christmas songs is well known, but Spotify has also […]

Neil Young’s debut solo single in 1968 wasn’t called ‘The Loner’ by accident. He has defiantly ploughed his own furrow for over half a century – and that relates as much to his attitude to the industry around him as it does to the music he creates. He has now announced, in a brief posting on […]

For most Taylor Swift fans letting Scooter Braun know their thoughts on the dispute over Taylor Swift’s AMAs medley and Netflix documentary, a few rat emojis sufficed. Some, however, went a lot further, leading Braun to speak out on Friday in a social post addressed directly at Swift. “Since your public statement last week there have […]

Thanks to its music-driven adverts, Apple’s original iPod earphones became one of the most recognisable tech products back in the day. Its modern equivalents, the wireless AirPods, are increasingly common on the streets today. Bloomberg has put some numbers to that, quoting “people familiar with the Cupertino-based company’s production plans” as claiming that Apple is doubling […]

We have several favourite sentences from the announcement of Spotify’s latest brand partnership, with Tic Tac. “The unique event series employs Spotify’s streaming intelligence to target consumers who exemplify the fun and refreshing Tic Tac brand personality,” is one of them. “The interactive concert will intertwine music with the spirit of the Tic Tac brand […]

Indian streaming service JioSaavn has been commissioning original tracks and remixes for a while now, but its latest example takes things up several notches in terms of the participating artists. U2 have teamed up with Indian legend A.R. Rahman for a new track called ‘Ahimsa’, which launches today ahead of U2’s first ever concert in India, […]

At the time of writing, Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ is the 41st most-streamed Spotify track in the UK, which tells you something about we Brits’ eagerness to embrace Christmas rather than think about Brexit and/or our upcoming general election. The rest of the world will be catching up (on Mariah, […]

Universal Music Artists (UMA) is a new Android and iOS app for artists signed to Universal Music Group (and their managers) where they can access data and insights on their music plays on the major international DSPs – Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube are named in the announcement. However, it will also pull in data […]

Mute seeks an experienced Production Manager to join its US team, based in the NY office in Midtown, Manhattan.  KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:  Liaise with artist managers, UK and US label managers to create global production schedule and ensure timely and accurate production of all releases and formats (digital and physical) Managing digital Metadata, including claiming videos […]

OUR COMPANY Spinnin ’Records is one the world’s best-known dance music labels, with artists such as Oliver Heldens, KSHMR, Sam Feldt, Alok, Mike Williams, Lucas & Steve, Kris Kross Amsterdam and many more in its roster. The label specializes in electronic music and manages the largest online dance community in the world with more than […]

Research firm Edison Research has won plenty of friends with the reports that it publishes with NPR: ‘Smart Audio Report’ tracking US usage of smart speakers, and more recently the ‘Spoken Word Audio Report’ exploring consumption of podcasts and other non-music content. Now it’s launching something new: a ‘Podcast Consumer Quarterly Tracker’ that will survey […]

The reason we can’t mention the website where the latest video from UK-based artist Miink has nothing to do with prudishness, and everything to do with not wanting to get this bulletin blocked by music-company email filters across the world. Let’s just say the website’s name starts with ‘You’ joined to a four-letter word that […]

YouTube Music boss Lyor Cohen sat down with colleague Tuma Basa, director of urban music, for a hip-hop focused event earlier this week – and delivered a warning to labels about their A&R strategies. “I think the industry is so focused on the data that it’s a problem. You guys are very lucky that you […]

TikTok is testing a new music-related feature in Thailand: selling tickets. The company is partnering with several local companies, including BEC Tero (which promotes concerts, owns a record label and produces films and TV shows); Neon Festivals; ticketing firm Ticketmelon; and cinema chain Major Cineplex. For now, TikTok will be selling tickets for 500 films […]

The Grammy nominations and Taylor Swift’s AMAs row aren’t the only awards stories making headlines this week. This morning, Spotify announced plans for its first ever ‘Spotify Awards’, which will be held in Mexico City on 5 March 2020. Turner Latin America is on board as the broadcast partner, and Spotify says that the awards will […]

Some of the most creative music-marketing campaigns we’ve reported on over the last decade or so have involved maps and location. So an announcement of a new feature in the Google Earth service piqued our attention this morning. “With new creation tools now in Google Earth, you can turn our digital globe into your own […]

Spotify India has announced its first batch of platform-exclusive podcasts: cricket-themed 22 Yards hosted by popular television anchor Gaurav Kapur, dating and relationship advice-focused Love Aaj Kal (Love Today and Tomorrow) from journalists Aastha and Ankit and fictional detective series Bhaskar Bose narrated by radio host and actor Mantra. Each of the podcasts, which are […]

“Play gigs! Buy records! Fill the dance floor & become a Superstar DJ.” But enough about Music Ally’s ambitions for December. No, this is the introductory blurb for a new mobile game called Mixmstr, launched by developer Youth Control Games. It’s the latest music-rhythm game for smartphones (“tap to beat to mix records like a mixmaster”) […]

Bobby Vee’s ‘Rubber Ball’ has been on our internal jukebox all morning so far – and now on yours, no need to thank us, it’s all part of the service – since spotting a new music/tech startup called ODD Studios. The London-based company is working on “products that allow everybody to experience the thrill and […]

African music-streaming service Boomplay now has a full set of deals with the global major labels, with Sony Music the third and final major to strike an agreement. Sony’s catalogue of both African and international artists will now be available to stream on Boomplay, alongside material from Universal Music (which signed its deal with the […]

Back in July 2014, we reported on photo and video library Shutterstock’s move into music, with a catalogue of 60k licensed clips from partner Rumblefish, which it was selling to online video and advertisement creators starting at $49 per track. Five and a half years on, the company is trying something new: an all-you-can-eat subscription. It’s still aimed […]

There’s a new independent music distributor set to make waves in the Nordic region, and it includes some familiar faces for that part of the world. Secretly Noord is the result of a partnership between existing distributor Secretly Distribution and local group NoordRights. The new venture plans to offer distribution, marketing and technology tools to labels […]

It’s been known for some time that Chinese tech firm Tencent is in talks to buy a 10% stake in Universal Music Group, with an option to acquire another 10% for up to a year afterwards. The deal is thought to value UMG at around €30bn, but now there’s been a development: Tencent may not […]

The enmity between Taylor Swift and her former label Big Machine Label Group (not to mention its new co-owner Scooter Braun) isn’t going away any time soon, we sense. But one element of their latest dispute appears to have been settled: Swift’s ability to perform a medley drawn from her back catalogue at this weekend’s […]

When Amazon launched a free, ad-supported music-streaming service in April, it was only available in the US, for Echo smart speakers. That careful rollout is now expanding considerably: Amazon’s ad-supported music tier is now available in the UK and Germany too, through the Amazon Music smartphone app and FireTV devices as well as Echos. Limitations remain: this is […]

The notion of ‘exclusive Christmas playlists’ may seem a bit strange: with a relatively-small pool of tracks to choose from in the grand scheme of things, unless you’re commissioning original tracks Amazon-style, differentiation is hard. But Spotify has a new spin on the idea: it has partnered with Netflix to launch eight playlists from the cast members […]

On Saturday and Sunday (November 16-17), Capitol Music Group held its 2nd annual music and tech festival, Capitol Royale, at its Los Angeles headquarters. The theme for this year was ‘Music on the Move’, with workshops, hackathons, panels, and social events revolving around the ever-changing landscape of music and innovation. Kicking off on Friday was […]

After a string of revelations and controversies around digital privacy in recent years, how are Americans feeling about this issue? Not so good, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. Roughly six in ten US adults don’t think it’s possible to go through daily life without having data collected about them by companies […]

Could the music industry be in for an early Christmas present of a new streaming service this year? The Financial Times has reported that Bytedance’s long-rumoured music-streaming service “aims to launch as soon as next month, initially in emerging markets such as India, Indonesia and Brazil, before a future opening in the US”. There have been regular […]

As parent company Bytedance prepares to launch its dedicated music-streaming service, TikTok has reached a new milestone. Well, it has according to research firm SensorTower, anyway. It claims that TikTok has now been downloaded more than 1.5bn times from Apple’s App Store and Android’s Google Play, including 614m downloads in 2019 alone. “It’s currently the third most […]

Taylor Swift’s latest dispute with Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun continues to blow up: a woman who millions of people think would make an excellent president of the United States weighed in with her views this weekend. In fact, two did: besides Cher, senator Elizabeth Warren also had her say, following the latest salvos from […]

Last week, we reported on Linkfire’s data-attribution deal with Apple Music, as well as the strings attached which included the stipulation that to get the data, people had to put Apple Music in top spot on their smart-link landing pages. When we wrote our story, criticism of these requirements had been led by Darren Hemmings, founder of […]

Artist and musician-rights advocate David Lowery has criticised last week’s announcement of an agreed budget for the new US Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC). Agreed with the body that represents the digital music services, the Digital Licensee Coordinator (DLC), the agreement secured $33.5m for the MLC’s startup costs, and $28.5m for its 2021 ‘initial annual assessment’. […]

Music-marketing firm Linkfire had a big announcement yesterday: it has a deal with Apple Music to provide more attribution data on what fans are doing on the streaming service after clicking or tapping through from artists’ smart-links. “No more guessing about streaming performance and fan engagement,” as Linkfire explained it in an email to its […]

Ever since co-founding distributor The Orchard in 1997, Scott Cohen has been known as one of the music-industry executives with an intense curiosity about new technologies and their potential applications for musicians and rightsholders – even when (or perhaps, especially when) they are disruptive to current business models and ways of thinking.

 The post WMG’s Scott […]

We reported before on the (sadly inevitable) squabbling over the budget for the new Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) in the US, with the bill to be footed by digital music services. However, the latter’s representative in the negotiations, the Digital Licensee Coordinator (DLC) has reached an agreement with the MLC to bring the argument to […]

After a period of calm, the dispute between Taylor Swift, Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun has exploded into life again. This time, the cause is Swift’s planned performance at the American Music Awards, where she was planning to celebrate her ‘artist of the decade’ award by performing a medley of her past and current hits. […]

It would be wrong to generalise that ‘labels’ are unhappy with Spotify’s push into podcasts. It’s true that some executives do view the strategy with suspicion, as a development that will cannibalise both music-listening and royalties paid to rightsholders. But others accept Spotify’s argument that expanding the range of audio on its service will boost […]

Building engaged audiences on a social platform is one thing; but keeping them there when you are at the mercy of each platform’s algorithms is another thing entirely. What can you do with thousands of fans on, for example, Facebook or Instagram if a simple change in the algorithm pulls the brakes on you effectively […]

What qualifies as a successful launch for a new video-streaming service? How about 10m signups by your second day? That’s the number being touted by Disney yesterday for its Disney+ service, which launched on Tuesday. The announcement helped Disney’s stock shoot up by nearly 7.4%, adding more than $13bn to its market cap, according to CNBC. […]

It takes a brave person to get involved in arguments between the world’s keenest superfans over whether one artist is better or bigger than another. So doff your caps but retreat a safe distance from music-database Viberate, which has sent out some figures claiming that Blackpink are ‘the biggest K-Pop group’ ahead of BTS. Blackpink […]

Mince pies are in the shops, Mariah Carey is lurking in the lower reaches of the charts, and Amazon is joining the early-Christmas fun with its latest crop of brand-new festive tracks. They’re part of its Amazon Originals program, and this year the company is promising to release ‘many’ Christmas songs over the coming weeks, exclusively […]

Vibrating Trainers may sound like a hot new artist rocketing up Spotify’s Viral 50 chart, but no. At least not yet. We’re talking about the trainers/sneakers (delete according to geographic preference) that you wear on your feet. A startup called DropLabs, led by former Beats by Dre boss Susan Paley, has revealed a product called the EP […]

Independent music company Marathon Music Group is launching a third cohort of its Marathon Artists Labs startup accelerator. Due to kick off in the first quarter of 2020, its theme will be ‘music discovery’, following previous programs focused on ‘tools for artist managers’ and ‘music-related content monetisation’. Marathon says that it’s looking for six startups for the […]

Magic Leap has linked up with Spotify to make the latter the first music service available for its One Creator Edition augmented-reality headset. And it certainly has some AR bells and whistles. “The app is spatially aware, so you can pin recently played artists, albums or tracks to specific locations in your home. And because content builds […]

People are increasingly attuned to the need to look after their mental and their physical health – and music can and does play a big role here. The gym playlist is one thing, but acts crafting albums for meditation apps and artists working with a new generation of fitness brands is something else entirely. We […]

SoundCloud has launched Promote for users of the platform to help them better push tracks to listeners. The self-service tool is part of SoundCloud’s Premier tier for users to assist them in getting their music in front of more people on not only SoundCloud but also other digital platforms. “With Promote on SoundCloud, creators can […]

Chinese technology firm Bytedance bought social-video app Musical·ly for reportedly north-of-$800m in November 2017. Then, in August 2018, it folded Musical·ly into TikTok (obligatory reminder: Musical·ly had nothing to do with us, Music Ally, and thus we’re still open to nine-digit acquisition offers…) But in a parallel reality, Musical·ly is now owned by… Facebook! Well, Buzzfeed News […]

Apple Music has anointed its latest ‘Up Next’ artist, who’ll be getting a boost across the company’s music platforms. It’s Canadian artist Jessie Reyez, who’s actually been doing pretty well on Apple Music for some time now – the company says it’s been playlisting her since 2016, and that she has more than 325m streams […]

From data-harvesting and ideological echo-chambers to hate speech and trolling, the big social-media platforms are facing more criticism than ever before. Less tech utopias, and more saloon brawls in 1940s western movies where everyone gets beaten up (except the owners, who get rich from the ruckus). Which makes the latest pronouncements from entrepreneur and web-activist […]

Classical-music streaming service Idagio is launching a free tier, which will make a catalogue of 2m tracks available to listeners without the need for a subscription. The company clearly hopes that the new tier will provide an accessible entry-point to classical music for people who may be less knowledgeable about classical – with a canny […]

British independent-music body AIM is launching its latest report today: ‘Distribution Revolution’. It promises a “comprehensive analysis of the modern distribution landscape”, including the trend for distributors to add more artist and label services to their offerings. AIM worked with CMU Insights on the report, which is being published for free (people can sign up […]

Fresh from adding an ‘HD’ tier to its Music Unlimited streaming service, Amazon appears to be preparing to add another element in to the mix: music videos. At least, that’s the gist of a ‘direct license amendment’ sent to licensors on behalf of Amazon by rights-management firm Music Reports. The email, which Music Ally has […]

‘Killer’ is one of the most overused words in the field of tech journalism, when it’s appended to the name of digital services thought to be under threat from a rival or copycat launched by a much-bigger technology company. Was Apple Music a ‘Spotify-killer’? Nope. Was Google+ a ‘Facebook-killer’? Absolutely not. Vine’s killer turned out […]

Amazon’s live-video platform Twitch is best known for its gaming communities, from creators streaming their play-sessions live to professional esports tournaments. But musicians have also used Twitch. One of them is British artist and producer Dan Le Sac, who joined Music Ally at our recent Sandbox Summit conference to share some of the lessons he […]

As the business hub of the Middle East and North Africa, the UAE belies its geographical size. In the case of the music industry, global streaming services have joined record companies in mining its significant potential The post Country Profile – UAE 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Hi-res music-streaming service Qobuz is (in the US, at least) getting rid of its cheapest MP3-quality tier, and lowering the cost of its higher-resolution offering. “MP3 is really bad for music, artists, and listeners – so Qobuz is saying ‘no’ to MP3 and now offers only real studio quality in one accessible plan,” said its US managing […]

17 teams of developers are getting well-earned rests today after taking part in the Abbey Road Red hackathon at London’s famous Abbey Road Studios over the weekend. The focus was ‘The Power of Immersion’ with augmented-reality technology to the fore, courtesy of strategic partner Facebook – with its Spark AR tools. Top prize in the […]

Facebook has launched a dedicated music app! But hold your horses: Aux is the work of the social network’s ‘NPE Team’ division, which was created in July this year to work on experimental new apps. “A way for Facebook to develop new types of experiences for people and to try different ideas by creating small, focused apps in order […]

Last week we noted the announcement of a March 2020 launch date for Disney’s new video-streaming service Disney+ in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, but there’s more to say about this. Particularly relating to the service’s launch date in the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand this month. That means a four-and-a-half months […]

We’ve seen lots of big numbers this year for the amount of people streaming music in India, but what is that growth in listeners meaning for the underlying financials of the platforms providing those streams? One of the biggest ones, Gaana, has just published some figures that offer an insight into its business, at least. […]

Last week, Music Ally published a feature about the challenge that ‘non-film’ music is providing for Bollywood music in India – you can read it here if you missed it at the time. One of the projects exploring the potential for non-film music in India is Universal Music’s VYRL, which includes YouTube videos, streaming playlists and radio […]

World renowned DJ/Producer seeks experienced Digital Marketing Manager. Responsibilities: – Develop and maintain close relationships with all relevant social and media platforms. – Prepare social marketing plans and strategy for music releases, tour dates, and other activations. – Plan and execute advertising strategies including budgeting, approvals, concept/copy, media buys, analysis, and reporting. – Identify and liaison with influencer […]

This article is an excerpt from Ari Herstand’s second edition of How to Make It in the New Music Business: In 2009, I was co-managing one of my favorite Minneapolis bands with my girlfriend. I was actively touring, playing 100+ dates a year myself, so the day-to-day duties were mostly handled by her. The band […]

AI firm OpenAI made headlines earlier this year for its GPT-2 text-generating AI system, capable of being given a few sentences and then generating more text based on it. OpenAI declined to release the full system, for fear that it might be used for nefarious purposes (fake news, for example). However, after months of tests, […]

Can an AI (or a non-human) be the ‘author’ of a piece of music –or other art / content – that it has created? It’s a question that has been bubbling for a while now, from selfie-snapping monkeys to the output from the growing number of AI-generated music startups. And often, certainly from the entities […]

Startup Musiio has revealed its latest partnership for its AI-powered catalogue-tagging technology. It’s working with production-music firm Overcoast – its eleventh music-industry customer – to help the company analyse its catalogue of music and tag it correctly. “Catalogue management becomes increasingly hard as companies grow their libraries, and we are no exception. Manually tagging tracks becomes tedious […]

In Berlin, talk around music usually takes two paths: techno or the blockchain, and both involve a lot of earnest nodding. At the Most Wanted: Music 2019 conference, conversation was nudged towards the creation of new value streams, pushing for meaningful diversity, and embracing change in an age that demands it. The post Most Wanted: […]

Musician Jean-Michel Jarre is launching an “infinite music app” called EōN, which uses an algorithm to turn beats, melodies and chords he recorded into an endless stream of music. The app is being released for Apple’s iOS devices as a paid download: it costs $8.99 and is available now on the App Store, having been unveiled […]

British virtual reality startup MelodyVR latest move is using music to push itself deeper into the world of mainstream TV. It has extended its deal with the ABC network in the US and its ‘Good Morning America’ show to offer TV performances from a number of country acts – including Trisha Yearwood, Trace Adkins, Luke Combs and […]

Lyrics-licensing company LyricFind announced its LyricMerch product back in November 2017: a site where people could order physical merchandise emblazoned with lyrics from its catalogue – with publishers (and thus songwriters) earning royalties. Now LyricMerch is getting an interesting distribution partner: eBay, which will be a new shop-window for LyricMerch, as well as a place for “targeted […]

App-analytics firm SensorTower has been releasing some of its data tracking Android and iOS apps globally in the third quarter of 2019. That includes quantifying the top 20 apps by overall downloads, with TikTok in second place – behind only WhatsApp – with 176m new installs in Q3. SensorTower noted that this was 13% growth quarter-on-quarter, although […]

Hot Pod News is an excellent news site for anyone trying to get under the skin of the fast-evolving podcasting industry, and its latest feature shows why. The site has been surveying its readers on their current frustrations with the way the podcasts world works, all anonymously. It’s a collecting steam-venting that will make useful reading […]

Early next week, there’ll be a new way for Twitter users to keep up with the subjects they’re interested in. It’s a new feature called ‘topics’ which launches on 13 July, and it involves following topics – more than 300 at launch covering entertainment, sports and gaming – rather than just following people/profiles. Following a […]

The latest startup hoping to apply the idea of loyalty schemes to music artists is Boston-based Venu. Its Android and iOS apps are billed as ‘coming soon’ on the company’s website, which sets out how it’ll work for artists and for fans. In the former case, artists will be able to post their news to […]

‘All I Want For Christmas is You’ is Mariah Carey’s biggest streaming hit by a distance: it has 511.9m Spotify streams and 555m YouTube views, for example. The ‘Merry Christmas’ album the track originally featured on is getting the ‘deluxe anniversary edition’ treatment for its 25th anniversary this year, too, while in the UK Carey […]

CISAC, the global collecting-societies body, has published its annual ‘Global Collections Report’ setting out the collections of its 239 members in more than 120 countries. As ever, it’s a useful counterpart to the IFPI’s annual Global Music Report: while that publication focuses on recorded-music royalties, the music section of CISAC’s report quantifies collections for songwriters […]

TikTok’s difficult end-of-2019 in the US continues: now the Washington Post has been digging around in the company’s internal policies. ‘Inside TikTok: A culture clash where US views about censorship often were overridden by the Chinese bosses‘ is the Post’s headline, which is exactly the issue that’s been sparking calls by US politicians for a […]

Sony Music Entertainment is partnering with satirical website The Onion to launch a new daily podcast in 2020. ‘The Topical’ will go live in January and will deliver daily sideswipes at the news and current affairs. It’s part of a wider trend towards shorter, daily podcasts that fit neatly into people’s work and home routines. […]

A number of social-media influencers have been reprimanded by regulators about not offering clear-enough disclosures about their commercial relationships. Now the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has published a guide – ‘Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers‘ – which aims to keep them on the right side of advertising regulations there. It’s a plain-language summary […]

Teams of researchers and students at Ithaca College and Cornell University have been working on a tool to inject more local music into people’s Spotify playlists. It’s called Localify, and works by getting people to choose their location and a selection of their favourite artists. “We’ll create playlists that mix your favorites with local artists while […]

We’ve linked to the work of journalist Liz Pelly before: she’s been one of the most eloquent critics of Spotify specifically and streaming generally, with articles like ‘Discover Weakly‘, ‘Streambait Pop‘ and ‘Big Mood Machine‘. Now she’s turned her attention to live-music startup Sofar Sounds, and is just as unimpressed with the company’s impact on […]

Fitness firm Peloton published its latest quarterly financials this week, and it includes some information on the company’s music plans. “In order to amplify our commitment to music, we plan to increase the number of ‘Artist Series’ offerings,” announced the company. That means classes based on specific artists’ music for its exercise bike-owning subscribers. “We recently produced […]

Research firm eMarketer has published some new estimates and predictions for the size of the US digital-audio market – music-streaming, podcasts, online and satellite radio. The big claim is that by 2020, American adults will be spending more time listening to that than to traditional radio for the first time – averages of 83.9 daily minutes and […]

Technology firm RealNetworks has published its latest quarterly financial results, and as usual, they include figures for Napster, its music-streaming subsidiary. The key figure: $27.3m. That’s Napster’s revenues for the third quarter of 2019, which represents a 21.6% drop year-on-year from its $34.8m revenues in Q3 2018 (which in turn were down 18.7% on the $42.8m of revenues […]

Artists have been making ‘stems’ from their tracks available since the early 2000s for fans to remix, often as part of contests. The recent deal between Tracklib and the estate of Isaac Hayes shows that trend continues. Now Deezer has released an open-source tool that could have an interesting impact. Spleeter focuses on ‘source separation’, using machine-learning […]

Job Description:   Implementing world class social media campaigns for our management, publishing and record label clients. Supporting the marketing team in London on all social media activities across the business.  Liaising with clients and third-parties to create approved posting schedules, preparing both copy and assets to the highest possible standard.  Ensuring all social media […]

The UK-based MOBO Help Musicians fund is now in its third year and has seen the available funding behind it grow from £40k to £60k. It is a partnership between the MOBO Trust and Help Musicians UK and is designed to support musicians from diverse backgrounds – underwriting all areas of creativity – from vocal […]

Greek startup Accusonus has raised a Series A funding round of $3.3m, which the five year-old company will use to continue developing its “human-friendly audio software”. That means tools that use machine-learning technology to process audio, within software used by musicians, podcasters and video creators alike. For example, its most-recent product is Rhythmiq, “an instantly playable virtual instrument” […]

There are more people now talking about music-generating AIs as tools for musicians to use, rather than existential threats to their livelihoods. But if there’s one obvious area where AI could replace humans (sometimes, at least) it’s production music. Now startup Amadeus Code, which came to our attention with its AI-powered app for songwriters, is […]

It’s a debatable opinion but one that warrants consideration in the Indian music industry in 2019: is Bollywood slowly but surely losing its dominance? Major Indian labels such as international heavyweights Sony and Universal and local biggie T-Series are increasingly releasing what they term “non-film music”, a loose if somewhat nebulous term used to classify […]

Lead: The old rules of advertising are long gone – as is a lot of the inherent guesswork around advertising’s effectiveness. In its place has come greater tracking of ad spend and ad impact, but the entire process itself has become much more convoluted. We speak to those working in this rapidly changing world to […]

The BPI is looking to recruit a passionate, creative and strategically driven Digital Content & Communications Manager to work across its digital, social media and press & PR channels. Reporting to the Communications Director, the role will focus on generating content for and managing the BPI’s social media and digital output, while also contributing to […]

Ed Walker, VP of original content & production at Vevo, used his presentation at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit to explain how to ensure videos on YouTube benefit from – rather than rub against – the platform’s recommendation algorithms. Walker used Vevo’s catalogue of music videos and original content – more than 400k videos in total […]

Whether you’re still excited about virtual reality’s potential for music, or think it’s a busted flush as a mainstream consumer technology, the latest predictions from research firm SuperData are worth a read. It reckons that globally, people will spend $3.2bn on VR hardware in 2019 – plus another $1bn on mixed-reality headsets which combine virtual and augmented […]

The latest element in Apple’s multi-media subscription strategy is here: video-streaming service Apple TV+ went live on Friday in more than 100 countries and regions. As announced earlier this year, the service costs $4.99 a month, and is accessed through Apple’s TV app – with a one-year free sub bundled in with new iPhones, iPads, […]

The UK’s High Court has delivered its ruling on Warner Music and Sony Music’s copyright-infringement case against online-radio firm TuneIn. As is often the way of these things, both sides have claimed victory. A press release from Sony Music was headlined ‘UK High Court rules in favour of music copyright holders in TuneIn Radio decision’, […]

Indian digital-media firm Hungama has launched a new loyalty program that spans its music and video-streaming services. It’s called Hungama Rewards, and involves people earning virtual ‘coins’ (no, not in a cryptocurrency way) for the actions they take on both services. Those coins can then be exchanged for various rewards, including digital subscriptions and offers, but also […]

Managers are more at the heart of things in the music industry than they’ve ever been, including the digital aspects of their artists’ businesses. But what does that mean on a practical level, and how are management companies evolving and investing as a result? That’s the question a new report from the Music Managers Forum […]

Lars Ettrup, CEO of smart-links firm Linkfire, delivered a talk at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in London this week on “the joys of attribution”, and how music marketers can better track the journey music fans take from discovery through to consumption and purchase. “With all the channels and influencers who can drive streams, how […]

The debate around digital privacy tends to focus on the biggest technology companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Yet as internet users become more aware of the privacy debates around those companies’ services and devices, they’ll also be thinking more about how their personal information is being used in other ways. Including music marketing: from […]

As a platform, TikTok continues to generate strong opinions within the music industry regarding what kind of licensing deals it needs, and how much it could or should be paying rightsholders. But it’s also generating a lot of interest and activity from the marketing teams working with artists. It’s certainly not the first platform to […]

Music Ally has covered analytics firm Chartmetric’s concept of Trigger Cities before but at Sandbox Summit in London this week, we assembled a panel of marketing experts to talk about the idea in practice and how – or if – it is changing the architecture of their global campaigns. Chaired by Isabelle Ljungqvist, digital marketing […]

Domino’s campaign for A Bath Full Of Ecstasy – the seventh studio album from Hot Chip – was named Campaign Of The Year at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit in London yesterday (30th October). It was one of five shortlisted campaigns that were put to an audience vote and it emerged as the clear winner. It […]

Jamie Oborne is the owner and CEO of Dirty Hit Records and All on Red Management, working with The 1975, Wolf Alice and Benjamin Francis Leftwich among other artists. He was also the opening speaker at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in London this morning, interviewed by our very own Eamonn Forde. “Marketing is about […]

Spotify now has 248 million monthly active users, but how many of them are children? We don’t know, and neither does Spotify: its minimum age varies across the world, but the lowest is 13 years old with parent or guardian consent. Anecdotally, though, plenty of parents have ignored this stipulation and added under-13s to their […]

Deezer is one of the streaming services supporting Sony’s new 360 Reality Audio format. As it turns out, that support won’t just be playing out within Deezer’s existing mobile app. The company has launched a standalone app called 360 by Deezer for Android and iOS devices. It requires a paid subscription to work, and will play what […]

Spotify has announced its latest financial results, for the third quarter of 2019. The streaming service now has 248 million monthly active users (MAUs), up 30% year-on-year, having added 16 million in Q3. 113 million of those users are premium subscribers: 31% growth in the last year, with five million having been added during last quarter. […]

Artist, investor, tech entrepreneur and TV-talent-show judge at large: Will·I·Am wears a lot of hats, but one of them may be slipping: his i·am+ technology company appears to have run into financial trouble. The Verge has the details for a company that raised more than $117m in funding by 2017. The report claims that a partnership […]

Amazon recently announced plans to host its own festival in Las Vegas this December, called Intersect. It’s billed as “the place where music, technology, and art converge”, but the event is rousing some strong protests from musicians due to the involvement of Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud-technology division. Why? This article will fill you in on […]

We referred to it in our story about Pandora adding full credits for songs last week, but now US music body the Recording Academy has officially launched its ‘Behind the Record’ campaign. It’s an initiative encouraging artists to credit all of the collaborators on their music. “Credits have been a casualty of the digital age, […]

We’ve written a lot about the big music-streaming services in India like Gaana and JioSaavn, but this week brought news of an interesting-sounding music-discovery startup there. It’s called Flutin, and its schtick is building algorithmic playlists for users based on their musical preferences, activities, location and other data. The company says its app has been downloaded […]

Pex isn’t a startup we’ve written much about for Music Ally thus far, but it’s one of the more interesting companies in the current music ecosystem – not just because of what it’s doing now, but for how its technology might be used in the future. The company’s business is “independent video and music analytics and […]

For some time now, Spotify has been showing its mobile listeners full-screen recommendations of new albums from the artists that they like – ‘Brand new music for you!’ pop-ups with a ‘Go to Album’ button to tap. Thus far, this has been a purely-editorial feature, but today Spotify is launching a test in the US to […]

Spotify’s former chief economist Will Page is now reportedly writing a book – but he’s certainly writing for The Bookseller, the publishing-industry trade mag. He’s just penned a column exploring whether the user-centric payouts debate that’s currently happening in the music industry might have relevance for authors and book publishing too. “Just as the music […]

There’s a new Coldplay double-album on the way next month, and it sounds like the band and their team are having fun with the announcement process. So far, the teaser campaign has included a typewritten letter sent to fans (“For the last 100 years or thereabouts, we have been working on a thing called Everyday […]

Music-analytics platform Soundcharts has a new feature: ‘Mentions’. It promises ‘global media and web monitoring’ for artists, tracking where they’re mentioned in three categories of media: ‘music media’, ‘verified media’ and ‘unverified sources’. Artists will be able to dig in to the data by country; traffic rankings; and sources like news sites, blogs and discussions. […]

It’s five years since Pandora launched its Artist Marketing Platform (AMP) tools for artists to market to listeners on the streaming service. The company is celebrating the anniversary with some new stats. “In the last 12 months alone, we’ve seen a 688% increase of monthly active creators on AMP,” announced Pandora in a blog post. There’s […]

Sony Music Entertainment Japan has launched its Mora Qualitas hi-res streaming service, working with Rhapsody International (through its ‘Powered by Napster’ B2B business). Plans for the service were actually announced in December 2018, but it’s taken 10 months for the ‘formal’ launch of the service to happen. Mora Qualitas is offering FLAC-quality streaming, with Sony Music’s hi-res […]

UK radio-measurement body Rajar has just published its data for the third quarter of 2019, and also its ‘Midas’ audio survey of British consumers. There are some useful stats on the music-streaming world. According to the latest Midas research, 17 million Brits now use ‘a premium on-demand music service’. However, according to Rajar, on-demand music still only […]

A significant 8m jump in users of streaming services in Russia in a single year illustrates how those platforms are engaging music consumers, while on social media, vKontakte’s vast popularity is helping to fuel the growth The post Country Profile – Russia 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

There have been several interviews with artist Neil Young recently, to promote his new book ‘To Feel the Music: A Songwriter’s Mission to Save High-Quality Audio’. The latest piece, from Wired, has some stats on how Young’s own subscription service is doing. Young is charging $1.99 a month for access to his Neil Young Archives website, […]

Dance star Marshmello has hit a new milestone on YouTube: his channel now has more than 40 million subscribers. YouTube says that makes him the third most-subscribed-to musician on YouTube, behind Justin Bieber (47 million) and Ed Sheeran (42.5 million). At the time of writing, Marshmello is also 34th in YouTube’s global artists chart, with 73.2m weekly views […]

When crowdfunding platform Kickstarter first started making waves in the music industry in the early 2010s, the pitch from artists was often ‘help me to make my new album independently’. In 2019, in the case of artist Liz Longley, the pitch is ‘help me to buy my new album back from my label so I […]

Tegan and Sara are excellent, so news of them playing to a half-empty venue is disheartening. But doubly so because it wasn’t the result of poor ticket sales: according to Billboard, the sparsely-attended gig on 30 September in San Diego was because touts had snaffled most of the tickets. The duo have fought back, however, by […]

Last year, Spotify debuted its Google Home Mini smart-speaker giveaway, offering the device to its Spotify Premium for Family subscribers. Now the deal has returned in the US, but considerably expanded: now it’s any Spotify Premium Individual subscriber who can bag a free speaker. It’s the latest salvo in the now-traditional scramble for end-of-year signups among […]

On 17 October, a Chinese tech-startup owner posted an article on his WeChat account about a controversial aspect of China’s KOL (Key Opinion Leaders – known as influencers in the west) advertising scene. The article now has more than 100k views, as well as countless reposts by other notable accounts and individuals. It concerned a […]

We’ve written about this before: the music industry may be excited about the growth in sales of smart speakers, but privacy campaigners have their concerns about this device category. Those concerns are relevant to our industry too: so here’s news of a new experiment conducted by Security Research Labs that’s making headlines. It developed skills for Amazon’s […]

Fans of music/tech startups that sound a little… out-there will enjoy Synaesthetic’s ambitions. “While listening to music is great, we have evolved to look for things we hear and want visually-enhanced musical experiences, like concerts and music videos,” is how the Boston-based company’s website explains its plans. “We are developing a new musical medium, that is […]

Startup pitch contests at conferences around the world have become a useful window into new music/tech firms. The latest contest will take place at the Web Summit in Lisbon on 7 November. In a session dubbed the ‘Music Innovation Prize 2019’, five startups will be pitching to a jury of “industry heavyweights, influential investors, and big-name artists”. […]

Advertising-industry body the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has published its mid-year report on digital ad revenues in the US. The big figure is $57.9bn: that’s how much money was spent on digital advertising in the US in the first half of 2019. That’s 17% growth year-on-year, and the highest ever first-half total for this category. Trebles all […]

Manchester International Festival (MIF) is the world’s first festival of original, new work and special events, staged every two years in Manchester, UK. MIF launched in 2007 as an artist-led festival presenting new works from across the spectrum of performing arts, visual arts and popular culture. We aim to embody the values implicit in our name: […]

There is no suggestion that Pandora or TikTok are knowingly funding a TV-piracy service called TeaTV. But ads for these and other legitimate digital services have been found within that website, in an investigation published by CNBC. “The online service offers a wide swath of pirated movies from major networks such as HBO and streaming services […]

Algorithmic A&R continues to be a touchy subject in some quarters of the music industry, where there is distrust (and/or existential fears) of the prospect of big data encroaching onto the traditional territory of humans’ ears and guts. That’s even more the case when the algorithms are tracking not the momentum of an artist in […]

If you ever want to feel sympathy for the challenges that music/tech journalists face, read our 2018 report that included an ‘A to Z of Blockchain Music Startups’ and see our valiant efforts to find different ways of writing ‘X is a blockchain ticketing startup promising to beat touting and enable tickets to be transferred legally’. There […]

Cloudflare is one of the biggest content delivery networks (CDNs) in the world: CDNs being companies providing services to websites and digital services to help their content be delivered faster and more reliably, while reducing bandwidth costs. It’s also a controversial company in the eyes of music and film rightsholders, because some of the websites […]

Earlier this month, we reported on suggestions from Apple that there will be more Beats 1 radio shows based on Apple Music’s flagship playlists. Lo and behold, one launched on Friday. ‘Rap Life With Ebro Darden’ is based on the recently-rebranded ‘Rap Life’ hip-hop playlist, and is hosted by Apple Music’s global editorial head of hip-hop and […]

He may not have mentioned music, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown University yesterday is essential reading for anyone who’s interested in how the social network’s upper echelons view the world. Titled ‘Standing For Voice and Free Expression’, it focuses on some of the many controversies around what kind of free speech Facebook […]

Universal Music Group is shaking up its ‘college lifestyle marketing program’ in the US, with a new team, and brand, called °1824. The label describes it as “a new marketing, content and experiences team powered by university students and young creatives from around the world”. It’s partly about finding new creative talent to place in […]

You’ve likely read the news earlier this week that Atlantic Records UK president Ben Cook was stepping down, as the result of an incident seven years ago when he went to a party dressed as a member of Run DMC. Cook was disciplined for the incident last year, but has only now stepped down, which […]

The headline for newspaper The Times’ interview with YouTube Music boss Lyor Cohen may be over-egging the pudding a bit. ‘Whip Spotify’s ass? The answer is emphatically yes’, it turns out, refers to a section of the interview where the startling wording appears to come from the journalist in a question: Cohen agrees (“The answer is emphatically […]

The Economist has published an article criticising the proliferation of music charts in the streaming era, and questioning whether when considered together, they are confusing. “It used to be easy to know who the champions of pop were: it was whoever was number one in the singles chart and number one in the albums chart. But pop […]

In a keynote interview at the Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) conference in Amsterdam, Tencent Music’s Andy Ng outlined his role in combatting piracy in China, building a legal streaming market there and why he and his employers are betting heavy on the EDM boom. Ng stepped back from his role as group VP at Tencent […]

Lead: Lil Nas X might have broken on TikTok but it was his deft use of multiple remixes (and collaborations) that kept ‘Old Town Road’ in the air throughout most of 2019. He claims he has 25 remixes of follow-up track ‘Panini’ ready to go, although this might prove to be the most high-profile case […]

We’re delighted to announce the launch of our brand new Learning Hub for the global music industry! What is this special place? The Music Ally Learning Hub is a new dedicated e-learning platform for the modern music business. Our team has been hard at work behind the scenes to build a resource that will become the new […]

Shares in video-streaming service Netflix rose last night, after the company announced its latest financial results. This, despite actually missing one of its key targets for the third quarter of 2019. “In Q3, we grew to $5.2 billion in revenue, up 31% over the prior year, and operating income doubled to $1.0 billion. Paid net […]

In February, Music Ally spotted plans by former Spotify global head of artist and industry partnerships Mark Williamson to launch a new startup called Rostr. It was tagged as “AngelList for the music industry” – a reference to the popular website cataloguing startups for investors. This week, Rostr has launched in beta. “The industry is really exciting […]

Spanish live firm Primavera Sound is going to take its events ticketless, including its flagship festival in Barcelona. The company is doing it via an exclusive multi-year partnership with ticketing startup Dice, which will be powering mobile tickets for the company’s events. Dice reckons this will make Primavera Sound in Barcelona the world’s ‘biggest mobile-only […]

Virtual-reality music startup MelodyVR has announced its latest partnership: telco Telefonica UK, and its O2 operator. It’s all relating to the launch of its faster 5G network. MelodyVR has been signed on as “the exclusive music partner of O2’s 5G UK launch”, with customers getting a 12-month subscription to MelodyVR bundled into their contracts. Note: […]

Snap and Spotify have teamed up in an interesting way for a promotion in India around the Diwali festive season. The Snapchat app has a new augmented-reality lens designed to be used in a specific location: the Gateway of India monument in Mumbai. “The Spotify lens adds some unique AR experiences with special 3D effects, […]

YouTube is rolling out another feature for musicians with ‘Official Artist Channels’ on its platform. The company has signed a deal with Merchbar which will see artists able to “surface their official merchandise and vinyl alongside their videos… Fans watching videos from their favorite artists on their YouTube Official Artist Channels can now see a shelf with […]

Australian artist Toni Watson – aka Tones and I – is riding high with her track ‘Dance Monkey’, which started as a viral buzz track but has flowered into a bona-fide global hit. In fact, at the time of writing it’s top of Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart, with 5.6m daily plays. Spotify is keen […]

Music Ally wrote about Australian startup Replica earlier this year, following its participation in the Techstars Music accelerator. The company is using AI to create ‘Replica voice actors on demand” – taking recordings of someone talking, and creating a ‘replica’ voice capable of reading any text fed to it. For musicians, the company pitched the tech as providing “the […]

Stem has been helping artists to release their music as a distributor for some time. Now it’s launching a new feature, ‘Stem Check’, which it clearly hopes will win some artists over to its platform. “Think you’ve just been offered an ‘artist-friendly’ deal? Let us run the numbers for you,” is how the company introduced it yesterday. […]

Technology firm Sony has revealed more of the plans for its 360 Reality Audio format, which was announced earlier this year. From late autumn, there will be around 1,000 songs available in the format through four streaming partners: Amazon Music HD, Deezer, Tidal and Nugs·net. All three major labels are working with Sony to provide content, although […]

Audio-streaming service Mixcloud has published its financial results for 2018 through Companies House in the UK: and unlike in previous years, the accounts have been published without a small-company exemption, thus giving us an insight into the firm’s growth and profitability. The key figures: Mixcloud’s revenues in 2018 were £2.44m (around $3.1m), which was growth […]

The State Of The Stream report from Stream Elements covering Q3 2019 has been published and offers plenty of insights into the game-streaming world. Unsurprisingly, Twitch is the dominant platform here, accounting for 75.6% of hours watched in the period. What is perhaps most interesting is the fact that gaming giant Ninja recently defected from Twitch […]

Sony Music/RCA Records UK act Bring Me The Horizon are using their fans’ Spotify listening data to shape the T-shirt design that they can then buy – all as part of the promotion for their amo album from January. By going to a dedicated web page, they log in with their Spotify details and then […]

If you are parents to children of a certain age, the pain of the last few days will have been immense. “Is it back yet? Is it working again? WHY?” Fortnite’s servers have been down since Sunday as it wrapped up its 10th season. Instead of the normal game play, users were presented with a swirling black […]

Our latest country profile (available to Music Ally subscribers) is now online and looks at the Netherlands. The country was ranked number 11 globally in 2018 by IFPI and streaming now makes up 51% of the recorded music market there. Its biggest album of last year was Hella Cash by Josylvio, a local rapper, which outsold […]

Homegrown acts and local hip-hop artists have driven a surge in streaming in the Netherlands over the past four years. There are signs this trend is slowing but industry figures are positive there’s room for more growth The post Country Profile – Netherlands 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Back in June, Facebook announced that it was going to launch its own cryptocurrency – Libra. The news resulted in the classic mixed results. Some focused on the fact that it would change the financial shape of markets where bank accounts and traditional payments systems are not the norm. Some, notably the FT, picked apart its […]

On Friday, we covered Spotify starting to slowly open up its Canvas feature to more acts and posting a related blog that gives tips on how those using it can get the most out of its assorted features. One of the tips was “try creating a theme or narrative that crosses an entire album” such as […]

South Park has long been a critic of, well, just about everything. But the show has often aimed its satirical powers at China and now DJ Zedd claims he has been banned from China for liking a tweet on South Park’s Twitter account marking its 300th episode. “I just got permanently banned from China because […]

Music Ally first wrote about Zya in November 2011: it was a “cloud-based music platform that empowers everyone – regardless of ability or musical preference – to make music in a revolutionary 3D environment”. It went on to make a splash at SXSW 2012 with the added spin of incorporating licensed tracks. In April 2013, the company behind Zya […]

Entertainment One (eOne), which owns Peppa Pig among other media properties, has reported that its pre-tax losses for the first fiscal quarter grew to £43.9m – significantly up from £6.8m a year earlier. Revenues dropped 7% to £173.1m and the company stated that this slip was due in part to “lower Film, Television and Music [unit […]

The idea of the pop-up tied into an album release is hardly new and often involves taking over a small and recently vacated shop (or the site of a different pop-up from the previous week) and selling a few T-shirts and posters from it, hoping the pop stars themselves show up to gain a bit […]

Who ordered a new chart? Anyone? Bueller? Hold up – this one is slightly different. After Rolling Stone put the Billboard charts in its crosshairs with the launch of a daily chart in July, some began to wonder if we’d hit Peak Charts for singles and albums. Thankfully the latest chart from Billboard is based around Bandsintown […]

MBW has an interview with Timothy Armoo, founder and CEO of Fanbytes, where he talks about the TikTok campaign for Decca-signed act Aurora based around her track ‘The River’ which was about sending out “a positive message promoting mental health awareness”. For the #youcancrychallenge, they focused on 13 well-known TikTok users to get things rolling by […]

Acts distributed by TuneCore and CD Baby will now be available to listeners in China – or, to be more precise, listeners who use Tencent’s music offerings. The deals cover QQ Music, KuGou and Kuwo, who collectively reach 652m people in China according to Billboard. “We create partnerships, tools and services that bring the greatest possible […]

The Canvas feature on Spotify (where a short video loops on the mobile app instead of just having the single or album artwork) is opening up to more users via the Spotify for Artists tool. Music Ally first spotted the feature at the start of last year – back when it didn’t even have an official […]

Here’s a new buzzphrase for the live-music industry: ‘post-primary ticketing’. What’s that? According to ticketing firm Lyte, it’s “private label ticketing services offered to fans by the most iconic sports and entertainment brands… a platform that addresses the customer needs ignored by the traditional secondary market, and it does so in a way that is […]

A startup hoping to forge more links between the music and esports industries has raised a $1m seed funding round. The company is Five Vectors, and its business is focused around working with artists to create original music tracks, which can then be licensed to esports teams and organisations. The company was co-founded by former Universal Music Central […]

Music Ally reported on the launch of decentralised streaming service Audius in September, and wondered whether its “censorship-resistant” features (or as one report put it, ‘anti-takedown) might cause problems if people started uploading copyrighted music. A few weeks on, and other journalists are asking the same question. The Verge goes in strong, describing Audius as “a […]

Financial-services firm Legal & General isn’t a company we write about much for Music Ally, so why today? No, it’s not diversifying into AR-music livestreamed holograms on the blockchain. Not yet, anyway. Instead, Legal & General is the commissioner of the latest report from music consultancy Sound Diplomacy, which is arguing the case once again […]

Games firm Blizzard is attracting criticism for its decision to fine and ban an esports player who expressed support for the current pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong during a post-match interview. Chung Ng Wai was a competitor in an esports tournament for Blizzard’s game Hearthstone, and the publisher (which also runs the event) quickly stripped him of […]

The final keynote for NY:LON Connect, the conference that Music Ally co-runs with the Music Business Association (Music Biz), has been announced. Troy Carter, founder and CEO of Q&A, will be delivering the closing keynote at the event in New York next January. He joins Spotify’s Cecilia Qvist, YouTube Music’s Sun Lee and Warner Music […]

2019 is a busy year for British band Foals: they’re releasing two albums: ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1’ came out in March, with ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 2’ set to follow later this month. The new album has its own microsite now, with an interesting twist: new content will […]

Social brand Flighthouse has reached a new milestone with its TikTok channel: it now has more than 20 million followers. The company says that its recent growth has been fuelled by its decision to start producing its own original videos (rather than just reposting other people’s content), with the channel having added more than two million […]

This week, Spotify launched an Apple TV app as well as integrating with Apple’s Siri voice assistant on iPhone, which you might think represented a rapprochement of sorts between the two companies, following their longstanding anti-competition disputes. You’d be wrong. Spotify has updated its ‘Time to Play Fair’ lobbying website’s timeline of “Apple’s behaviour” down the years, […]

Spotify launched its ‘Daily Drive’ playlist in the US in June. Aimed at commuters, it was the company’s first algo-personalised playlist to combine music and ‘short-form podcast news updates’, with the aim of offering a more radio-like experience. Now Spotify has launched ‘Daily Drive’ in Germany too. As in the US, it offers a combination of “your favourite […]

UK-based artist Ashnikko is having a moment in the spotlight with a track called ‘Stupid’. Featuring ‘Yung Baby Tate’, the song is currently perched in second spot in Spotify’s Global Viral 50 chart, with 4.6m streams so far on that service. Its ‘official audio’ version on YouTube is about to cross 1m views, although an unofficial lyric-video uploaded […]

“It’s Britney Bitch!” is all the blurb you get in the ‘About’ section of a new podcast that launched on Spotify on 7 October – all 89 episodes of it. And each episode lasts for less than five minutes… because they’re songs: demos, remixes and other rarities from Spears’ career. Oh, and there’s been no official announcement, […]

Shazam reached 478 million annual active users in 2018, which is 78 million more than in the previous year. The company’s revenues fell by 23% to £31.4m last year, but it swung from a loss of £17.7m in 2017 to a profit of just under £124m in 2018.  That’s the benefit of being bought by […]