Japan’s recorded music market lost 19% of value in the first half of 2020, despite an increase in digital revenue of 11% – but it was a drop that was expected, given the impact of COVID-19. The post Country Profile – Japan 2020 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Lead: Experiential brand activations in a non-live world – Creating effective brand activations has never been easy – but there was one basic starting point: find an event with lots of people, and connect with them. With concerts and festivals curtailed for the next six months at least, brands are partnering with musicians online to create […]

2020 has been a really interesting year for Universal Music Group’s various arms in China. From local signings like Linong Chen and Sunnee to a joint label with Tencent Music, via gaming songwriting camps and the small matter of $1.2m of Taylor Swift album sales in a few days on NetEase Cloud Music. Weaving these strands into the overall story of UMG’s China strategy […]

The knock-on effects from rightsholders’ pressure on Twitch over music licensing are starting. Games publisher Electronic Arts has added a new menu option to its FIFA 21 game: ‘Disable All Music For Streaming Purposes’. That means people streaming their gameplay on platforms like Twitch will now be able to do it without any background music that […]

The Keychange initiative pressing for gender equality in the music industry – including on its live stages – has a new frontier this week. Poland has become an official partner for the movement, and tomorrow will see an event co-hosted by Key Change and festival organiser Spring Break to introduce its first two ambassadors in Poland: Avtomat and Karolina […]

There was good news for fans of musician Zoe Keating in late August: one of her cancelled gigs was being replaced by a ticketed livestream. The only downside: Keating knew nothing about it. It had been created as an event on Facebook, with the people behind it taking fans money in the full knowledge that […]

Distributor Amuse launched its Fast Forward scheme in February 2019 as a way to pay artists up to six months of royalties in advance, based on its estimates of their future earnings. The company now says that hundreds of artists have benefited from the feature, with advances between $250 and $300k. Now Fast Forward is relaunching and […]

Electronic music is suffering considerably from the Covid-19 pandemic, given the difficulties of safely opening clubs and putting on live events at any scale. The Netherlands may be in the most precarious position of all according to a new report presented at the ADE conference last week, and authored by Music Ally. Figures from DJ […]

Dance festival Tomorrowland sold nearly 140k tickets to its virtual festival earlier this year. Now the organisers have been talking to Billboard about how those sales translated into profit. The answer: not quite, but not far off. Co-founder Michiel Beers said that the festival “about broke even” after Tomorrowland spent around $6m putting it together, with additional […]

Lead: Sandbox Summit Global – Over five days at the end of September, we held our Sandbox Summit Global conference. For this Sandbox report, we’re digging into what we learned from the event and how it relates to the wider industry: from streaming innovation (or a lack of it) and Covid-disrupted release schedules to analytics overload, knock-on […]

Our main feature focuses on TikTok’s eventful 2020 so far, from the deepening of its relationship with artists and the music industry to its tangles with the Trump administration, along with the rise of the short video apps category more generally. Our Second Look section analyses recent stories and data around Hipgnosis Songs Fund; Tencent […]

Capitol Music Group is bringing back its Capitol Royale tech event, although in a different form to last year’s two-day conference. The label has partnered with an online event called Infinity Festival Hollywood, which runs from this week (28 October) until early January 2021. “Capitol Royale will bring a unique slate of music-related programming to the table including […]

The word ‘deepfake’ already has negative connotations: of people manipulating photos, audio and/or video for nefarious purposes. That’s why you’re going to hear the word ‘synthetic’ a lot in the coming months: the same technology, but being put to more positive work than misinformation or the really worrying stuff. Deep Word is an interesting example of synthetic […]

If 10 episodes of YouTube documentary about Justin Bieber weren’t enough for you earlier this year, we have some good news. The video service is following up its ‘Justin Bieber: Seasons’ series with a one-off 30-minute doc called ‘Justin Bieber: Next Chapter’. Fans can expect “an exclusive look at his life today – everything from […]

It may seem strange that people try to use music streaming services like Spotify and Deezer through unofficial apps, when there’s not even a subscription barrier to entry for the official ones. Getting premium features without paying is one reason some people gravitate towards the unofficial (or ‘modded’) apps, and understandably the streaming services regularly […]

It’s open season for acquisitions of podcasting startups whose technology and/or shows seem appealing to a bigger fish. The latest example is Voxnest, a company that makes advertising tech for podcasting, and which is now being bought by iHeartMedia. Cue adspeak! “iHeartMedia, through Voxnest, will now be able to provide podcast advertisers with additional targetable inventory […]

We first wrote about Audius in August 2018, when it raised $5.5m for what one report described as “SoundCloud on the blockchain”. It launched just over a year later, with a “censorship-resistant, community-controlled” audio streaming service where “anyone who joins Audius can effectively become an artist, just by uploading tracks”. Its decentralised model – music hosted on local […]

November this year is New Consoles Month, with Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S plus Sony’s PlayStation 5 making their debuts. While games are the focus, music and video streaming will also be part of the packages. Sony revealed some of its plans yesterday: at launch the PS5 will have apps for Apple TV, Disney+, […]

Sam Smith’s new album ‘Love Goes’ is out later this month, and they’re pulling out plenty of promotional stops around its release, including new single ‘Diamonds’. The latter is getting a web-based augmented reality music video in partnership with Spotify. Dreamed up by agency Powster, it gets fans to scan an image to pop up […]

Quincy Jones is no stranger to the world of music/tech startups: he founded music video-on-demand service Qwest TV, which launched three years ago. Now he’s also investing in another startup, Musimap, which describes itself as an “emotional artificial intelligence” company, with a lead product called MusiMe which is a “psycho-emotional profiling engine”. Essentially it analyses people’s […]

Output is one of the music/tech companies making digital instruments, effects and even furniture for musicians to use in the studio. A valuable business? It certainly is according to investment firm Summit Partners, which has just funded Output to the tune of $45m in its Series A round. It’ll help the company to add “playable instruments and mobile […]

YouTube Music’s #SOSFest last weekend has so far raised more than $1.8m to support NIVA’s campaign to support independent music venues in the US. The company is already planning its next online festival though: it’s called #FoundryFest, and will be an “on-demand video series” rather than a full-on livestreamed event. It’s focusing on artists who […]

US satellite-radio firm SiriusXM published its latest financials yesterday, revealing that it now has nearly 30.5 million ‘self-pay’ subscribers to its service, having added 169,000 in the third quarter of this year. Its revenue grew by 1% year-on-year to $1.6bn. Its music streaming subsidiary Pandora is still battling to turn around its listener decline though. Pandora […]

Independent publishers body IMPF has published a new ‘Global Market View 2020′ report offering figures for its members’ share of the global publishing sector. The key stats: an estimate that the global publishing market was worth €5bn (around $5.9bn) in 2019 – up from €4.63bn in 2018 – and that independent publishers accounted for 27% of […]

Shock news! The latest big-money deal for a publishing catalogue doesn’t involve Hipgnosis Songs Fund. Dance star Calvin Harris has sold his catalogue of more than 150 songs to financial firm Vine Alternative Investments, although Sony/ATV will continue administering it. The price wasn’t officially announced, although Variety claimed it was “around $100m” while Billboard offered a wider “between $90m […]

Breakfast shows are a staple of the traditional radio landscape. Now Spotify has one too. ‘The Get Up’ is a weekday-mornings show, launching in the US only, delivered as a playlist. That means personalised music picks for each listener, sandwiched between talk segments from the show’s three hosts: Kat Lazo, Speedy Morman, and Xavier Jernigan. […]

It’s been a while since we’ve had some big-figure predictions for the smart speakers market, but here’s research firm Canalys hoving into view with its latest forecasts. It reckons that 163m smart speakers will be shipped in 2021, which would be year-on-year growth (from its estimates for 2020) of 21%.  Speakers using Amazon’s Alexa and Google […]

Removing hateful content from a social media or streaming service is a constantly moving target as new movements and forms of hate emerge, and new tricks to avoid moderation. TikTok is the latest platform to announce how its policies are adapting. “While our Trust & Safety teams already work to remove hate speech and hateful ideologies, […]

Barely six months after it launched, video streaming service Quibi is shutting down. “We are winding down the business and looking to sell its content and technology assets,” announced co-founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman in a blog post overnight. “Quibi was a big idea and there was no one who wanted to make a success of […]

Pretty much every major streaming service now has some kind of program to identify and promote emerging artists: Spotify’s Radar, Apple Music’s Up Next, Amazon Music’s Breakthrough, Deezer’s Next, YouTube Music’s Artist on the Rise… Two of them have announced their latest picks this week. Spotify has made teenage rapper The Kid Laroi its third Radar […]

Scooter Braun is a man with his finger in many pies, and now he’s added podcasts to his pastry portfolio. In fact, his Ithaca Holdings company has signed a podcast development deal with Spotify (described as a ‘first look’ agreement by Variety, which means Spotify will get first dibs on new shows from Ithaca Holdings). The […]

As the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic grows in many countries, now’s a very difficult time to be involved in live music. However, it may also be seen as an opportunity by companies looking to make acquisitions in live. BMG, for example, is getting into live music for the first time, with an agreement […]

In our latest Music Ally report, we examined how Snapchat had bounced back from a worrying-looking flattening of its user growth in 2018. That bounceback is continuing, judging by parent company Snap’s financial results for Q3 2020. Snap said that Snapchat ended the quarter with 249 million daily active users (DAUs), up by 18% year-on-year. It also […]

Netflix warned investors that its subscriber growth was going to slow in the second half of this year, and it has. The video streaming service added 2.2 million net new paid subscribers in the third quarter, taking it to just under 195.2 million overall. Netflix also said that it expects to pass 200 million subscribers (201.2 […]

The US Department of Justice has filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing it of “unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets”. It’s the latest (and biggest) move in the US antitrust debate over big tech companies, following the recent high-profile hearing involving Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. […]

It sounds like a supergroup for the ages, doesn’t it? But what George Michael, Prince and John Lennon have in common is that their estates and labels have been working with TikTok to bring their legacies into the world of short video clips. A licensing deal for Prince’s music plus an official TikTok profile came in […]

The timing may be awkward given the renewed DMCA takedown notices currently battering Twitch, but Amazon Music is stepping up its livestreaming activity, including with its sister platform. It’s launched a new weekly show called Breakthrough Live, which will air live performances from artists in a different genre every Tuesday. The show will be broadcast live […]

Reputable figures breaking down the global podcasts market are hard to come by, but there’s been a general consensus that Apple Podcasts (formerly iTunes) has been the biggest platform by far; that the rest of the market is very fragmented; and that Spotify’s aggressive move into podcasts meant it was growing fast to finally become […]

We don’t have space here to go into the full lunacy of the QAnon conspiracists movement, and the unwillingness of the actual US president to disavow it. Suffice to say that YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are among the big online platforms cracking down on QAnon content, but that crackdown has seen its adherents try to shift to other […]

As the number of artists exploring livestreams at scale grows, so there’s going to be a need for decent infrastructure around that. One example is being announced today, by live-tech firm Push. It’s a tool called Push Live Unlimited, which helps artists who want to broadcast on a number of platforms at once – for example, […]

More evidence for the growing ambition of online concerts for bigger artists comes with Kylie Minogue’s ‘Infinite Disco’ event on 7 November. It’s the latest event from Driift, the company launched earlier this year by ATC Management, with investment from Beggars Group. The 50-minute show will blend tracks from Kylie’s new album ‘Disco’ with older hits, […]

We reported earlier this month on plans for Billie Eilish’s first livestream, the $30 ‘Where Do We Go? The Livestream’ concert on 24 October. Startup Maestro is the technical partner, and it’s been talking about a new partnership with ecommerce firm Shopify that will see merch sold during the event. Open to all artists using the platform, it […]

Apple Music is pushing all the boats out for the release of Bruce Springsteen’s 20th studio album ‘Letter to You’. There’ll be a week of radio shows on its new Apple Music Hits station, plus an album listening party and live Q&A, and a documentary on the Apple TV+ service, which drops on Friday alongside […]

In April we reported on the shutdown of French startup Soundsgood. It had launched in 2015 as a way to curate playlists and manage them across multiple streaming services, before moving more towards B2B services for labels. “These B2B activities have eventually led to our recent acquisition,” announced Soundsgood as it closed down, but the company […]

Live radio is already one of Apple Music’s big differences to its streaming rivals. Now it’s trying out MTV-style music television, although for the most part without the VJs. Instead, Apple Music TV is a 24-hour channel broadcasting music videos via the Apple Music and Apple TV apps, as well as on the web. For now, it’s […]

It was a busy day for Warner Music Group yesterday, with several interrelated announcements. First, there was news of the company raising $250m of new funding through a ‘senior secured notes offering’ to be spend to “fund a portion of the aggregate cash consideration for certain acquisitions”. Later that day, a US regulatory filing offered more information on those […]

Is the biggest recorded-music market in the world nearing ‘peak streaming subscriptions’ for music? In an article for Billboard, former Spotify chief economist Will Page offers some reasons for optimism, even though there are now 110 million music subscribers in a country with 110m households. For example, he notes that there were worries that Sweden and […]

There’s a price on everything in the influencer world, and with a startup called PearPop, that includes collaborating with your favourite TikTok stars. The company has announced a marketplace for TikTokers to charge fans for collab posts, and according to TechCrunch it already has more than 25,000 fans signed up. The fees are public: a duet, stitch or […]

Since 2018, UK regulator the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been running an investigation into whether influencers on social media are disclosing their endorsements properly. In January 2019, that included eliciting ‘formal commitments’ from 16 British celebrities to be fully transparent, including musicians Rita Ora and Ellie Goulding. This week, the investigation has put Instagram in the […]

Dance label Defected Records did a great job earlier this year with its ‘Virtual Festival’ series of livestreams, raising $1.2m for the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 relief fund over 10 weeks. Now it’s coming back with a new event called ‘We Dance As One’ spread over three dates: 30 October, 27 November and a finale […]

UK charity Youth Music has published a new report, Reshape Music, which explores the challenges facing disabled musicians ‘in education and beyond’. It’s the result of interviews with hundreds of musicians, music educators and retailers. “Disabled people make up over a fifth of the population and yet they are hugely under-represented in the music industry […]

For several months, the #BrokenRecord campaign in the UK has been calling for the government to step in to the debate about musicians’ streaming royalties. Today, there’s been a significant announcement on that front. No, not legislation (yet). The British parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee has launched an inquiry into the economics […]

Podcasters regularly complain about the difficulty and/or cost of licensing commercial music for their shows. With hundreds of millions of people now listening to podcasts globally, there’s a big opportunity for the music industry, if good licensing models can be worked out to put music in podcasts, while ensuring that rightsholders and musicians get paid. […]

Scooter Braun, Troy Carter, Patreon CEO Jack Conte, actor Jared Leto and artist Kygo’s Palm Crew Investments are among the investors in the latest ticketed livestreams startup, Moment House, which announced its $1.5m seed funding round today. The round was led by Forerunner Ventures, with Sequoia Capital partner Jess Lee also among the angel investors, […]

Streaming being the primary focus for record labels is nothing new in our industry, but in Hollywood it’s still a major talking point. Witness Disney’s announcement yesterday that the company is having a strategic reorganisation of its media and entertainment businesses “designed to further accelerate the company’s direct-to-consumer strategy, in light of the rapid success of Disney+”. […]

Digital marketing agency Motive Unknown is spinning off a new company called Positive Subversion, which it describes as a “project and label management consultancy for independently-minded artists, managers and record labels”. It’s a partnership with former !K7 exec Siofra McComb, and has already signed up Run The Jewels (already a Motive Unknown client) and label Innovative […]

Electronic music label Monstercat has always been keen to get its music into games, with a series of inventive licensing deals and partnerships. Its latest is with Amanotes, the Vietnamese developer of ‘hyper-casual’ mobile games. The deal has already made some of Monstercat’s catalogue available within Amanotes’ biggest mobile game, Tiles Hop (350m downloads and counting) […]

Earlier this month, Music Ally teamed up with British industry body the BPI for an online event called ‘Feeling Good’ about the intersection of music, fitness/wellbeing and technology. Now we’ve published a tie-in report, which you can download for free here. In it, we’ve explored some of the companies who’ve been innovating in these areas, from […]

Remember those July reports that short-video app Triller was raising a funding round of up to $300m? Whatever happened to that? Reuters has an update, claiming that the company has “so far secured around $100 million in that round at a $1.25 billion valuation” according to unnamed sources “familiar with the matter”. However, the report claims that […]

B2B streaming service Soundtrack Your Brand has renewed its licensing deal with Warner Music Group, a couple of months after striking an agreement with Universal Music Group. In WMG’s case, it’s a renewal of the deal signed two years ago with Soundtrack Your Brand, which provides music to businesses including retailers, restaurants and hotels. The news […]

We’ve written about the #SaveOurStages campaign in the US to support independent music venues, launched by their representative body NIVA. Now there’s another campaign, #SaveLiveEventsNow, which expands the remit to larger venues and the people who work on concerts and festivals using them. It’s backed by a who’s who of the industry: the RIAA, Recording Academy, Live Nation, […]

The rumours were right: music publisher Round Hill Music is planning to take its songs fund public. The Round Hill Music Royalty Fund has announced plans to raise $375m through an IPO on the London Stock Exchange. You can read its announcement here. The company says it has already identified more than 40 catalogues containing more than 120k […]

Almost as long as there have been a number of popular music streaming services, there have been apps and websites designed to help people transfer their playlists between them (for example when leaving one service to join another) or to maintain playlists across several of them (aimed at curators more than regular users). Nobody’s found a […]

‘Can Music Make You Sick?’ is a new book by Sally Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave, with its roots in a study of the same name commissioned by charity Help Musicians UK in 2017, about mental health in the music industry. Gross and Musgrave have shared an excerpt from the book with Music Ally, […]

Investment bank Piper Sandler publishes a semi-annual study of US teenagers – 9,800 of them for its latest drop. It covers all kinds of topics, from social and political issues to favoured brands, but digital habits are also included. The big news from the latest study is the claim that TikTok has just overtaken Instagram to become the […]

Spotify’s now traditional end-of-year Wrapped promotion sees artists and listeners alike flooding social media with branded graphics on their stats. Now the streaming service is extending that idea for artists (and podcasters) with a feature called ‘Promo Cards’. It’s an online tool that they can use to create promotional graphics for songs, albums and artist […]

It’s been a while since we’ve seen public tensions in the west between music rightsholders and Apple over piracy apps – Apple’s involvement being as the owner of the store through which those apps are distributed. According to TorrentFreak, it’s all kicking off in Russia over this issue though, following a new law cracking down on piracy […]

Six months ago, livestreaming was in many quarters seen as a temporary sticking plaster for the shutdown of physical concerts, likely to return to a niche once the latter returned. A lot of people have changed their tune since then: physical concerts aren’t returning anywhere near as soon as we had hoped, and successful livestreaming […]

US trade body the RIAA has published its mid-year figures for Latin music in the US, and once again it has outperformed the overall market. The body recently reported that the US recorded music market grew by 5.6% year-on-year in the first half of 2020, but revenues from Latin music grew by 18.6%. At $296.1m, it accounted for […]

The ‘will streaming kill radio’ debate rumbles on, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet: radio airplay remains important for many artists, and tracking it globally remains a challenge. We’ve written about startups like World Airplay Radio Monitor (Warm) in the past, and now there’s a new contender: Maltese startup Radio Tools. It’s analysing the music played on more […]

British music industry body the BPI has launched an equality and justice advisory group, which it says will “advise and challenge the BPI on matters initially focused on race and gender in order to further support and promote equality and inclusion in music alongside other industry initiatives”. It’s an expansion of the existing Brits Diversity Advisory […]

The more music industry entities working hands-on with startups and developers the better, as far as we’re concerned. The latest example is US collecting society Ascap, whose innovation arm Ascap Lab has been running an 11-week ‘Seed Project’ challenge for graduate students in New York. Five teams were involved, exploring new ways to interact with […]

Oda is a startup making a pair of speakers (also called Oda) that look very nice indeed – “made of wood, glass, cotton, and steel: materials that are humble and human, not technological” as the blurb puts it – with as much attention to detail paid to their audio innards. However, what interests us about the $299 […]

Like its streaming rivals, Deezer is experimenting with commissioning original music that won’t put labels’ noses out of joint. The latest example is a compilation album called ‘InVersions’, which is a collection of cover versions by 10 independent artists. Fontaines DC, Arlo Parks, Dream Wife, Alfie Templeman and Chloe Moriondo are among the artists chosen […]

Camille Hearst was the head of product, creator and general manager, merch at crowdfunding platform Patreon, until now. As of today, she’s joining Spotify as its first head of Spotify for Artists. Hearst announced the news in a series of tweets this afternoon. “In this new role, I’ll lead a cross-functional team including product, tech, design, […]

Live video streaming service Twitch has been one of the (unwitting) beneficiaries of the global pandemic, as musicians scramble to find a way to compensate for the near-total shutdown of live music. In their recent “State of the Stream” report, StreamElements and Arsenal.gg claimed that Twitch’s Q2 2020 chart bars “look like skyscrapers compared to […]

According to Chartmetric, Spotify boasts over 270k+ curators, 1.1m+ playlists and 8.6k+ self-curated playlists, providing a fertile ground for playlist pitching. While editorial playlist placements on Spotify are notoriously competitive and dealt with exclusively via Spotify for Artists, figuring out how to get an artist’s independent playlist strategy right (e.g. by brands, labels, curators or […]

A lot of physical concerts have been cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s been heartening how many fans have held onto their tickets for the ones that have been postponed – even those delayed for a year or more. Now ticketing firm Lyte has developed a tool that capitalises on this loyalty in a different […]

Last month we wrote about the plans to hold an album launch party for artist Ava Max in gaming platform Roblox. So how did that go? Well, according to the public stats, the ‘Ava Max Heaven & Hell Launch Party’ has generated more than 2.4m visits from Roblox players, with nearly 49,000 people marking it as a favourite. […]

Music apps firm Smule is the latest company to use the Snap Camera Kit launched by Snapchat’s parent company. Smule has integrated it into its AutoRap app, which lets people choose beats, rap over the top and share the results. Now they can add Snapchat’s augmented-reality lenses (filters) to their videos in AutoRap’s iOS app, with Android […]

Mdundo is one of the established music streaming services in Africa, and its CEO Martin Nielsen has been talking to Nigerian news site Pulse·ng about its latest figures, and the wider African music market. According to the piece, Mdundo currently has more than five million monthly active users across Africa, including 3.5 million in its key markets […]

Spotify has taken plenty of flak from songwriters over its history, and with its appeal against new royalty rates in the US still not settled, there’ll be more to come we’re sure. However, the streaming service will at least have enjoyed the latest letter to members of US collecting society Ascap from its president and chairman Paul […]

Audio streaming service Mixcloud launched a livestreaming feature in April this year, enabling people to stream live audio or video on its platform. Today, it’s announcing an expansion of ‘Mixcloud Live’ to add ticketing. Several artists will be testing the new feature out, including Flying Lotus, Róisín Murphy and Nas (who recently invested in Mixcloud, which […]

The charts of digital music services having clout with consumers and the industry alike isn’t a new trend for anyone who remembers the heyday of Apple’s iTunes rankings around the world. We’re interested in the current burst of activity around streaming services’ charts though. Both Spotify and YouTube Music had announcements this week shedding more […]

Manager and investor Scooter Braun appeared at the Fast Company Innovation Festival this week, and had plenty to say on the music industry’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. “With all this time, we are creating new lanes that didn’t exist before. When you talk about your work life, I always tell people . . . build time […]

The Observer Effect has published a long interview with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, focusing on his management style and processes. So, there aren’t many news lines for the likes of us to pick out on Spotify’s business, but lots of food for thought for anyone wondering what they can learn from the way its CEO runs […]

In August, Dua Lipa launched her #DuaVideo challenge on TikTok, inviting fans to submit videos based on makeup, animation or dance using her ‘Levitating’ single. The promise was that the best creators would make it into a music video for the track. TikTok says that the contest generated more than 150k videos which were watched more […]

This might just be a record for the shortest gap between a startup being first covered by Music Ally, and being acquired. We wrote about Trick 3D and its ‘AiR Show’ app a couple of weeks ago: it promised to beam artists into fans’ living rooms using augmented reality technology, for performances. It had a partnership with […]

We knew that Tidal and Facebook’s Oculus were working together on plans for some virtual reality concerts. Now we know who’s playing the first one: Charli XCX, who’ll be performing within the Oculus Venues app this Friday (9 October). It’s the first of a series of six concerts organised by the companies, each of which will see […]

Instrument maker Fender is extending a promotion offering three months of free access to its Fender Play digital guitar-lessons service. The promo launched in April, shortly after Covid-19 lockdowns began in many countries. Fender says that the Fender Play user base has grown from 150,000 to 930,000 subscribers since then. With the promo extended until the end […]

Germany collecting society Gema held its annual general meeting last week – online, of course, with around 1,000 of its songwriter, composer and publisher members taking part. The event included some blunt words from CEO Dr Harald Heker on why Covid-19 relief measures taken by the society this year can only go so far. “We are […]

Short video app Triller has found itself at the centre of another controversy around its public user numbers. A report by Business Insider citing ‘six former Triller employees’ claimed that when Triller said in October 2019 that it had 13 million monthly active users, the true figure was “closer to two million”. The details are important here: […]

Music Ally first came across Roli in 2013, when it was named as a finalist in the SXSW Music Accelerator startups contest, before we reported on its $12.8m funding round the following year from investors including Universal Music Group. The company was focused on music instruments, with its first being the Seaboard Grand, a keyboard […]

We should clarify this headline quickly: Amazon Music HD already has many more tracks from Universal Music and Warner Music. The news is that Amazon is working with the two labels to remaster thousands of tracks in ‘Ultra High Definition’ for its hi-res streaming service. Amazon’s definition of Ultra HD is tracks with a bit […]

TikTok’s Creator Fund started as a $200m commitment in July to be distributed among US-based TikTokers trying to build careers on the platform. It quickly expanded to a promised $1bn over three years, with a European fund following in September aiming for $300m over three years. Beyond those big headline numbers, though, details of how […]

Moj is one of the short-video apps making hay in India in the wake of TikTok’s ban there. Launched in July, it grew to 50 million users within a month, then 80 million by late September, when its parent company ShareChat raised $40m of funding to continue the momentum. ShareChat said then that partnerships with music labels would […]

Triller has been making the most of TikTok’s recent troubles, poaching creators, trumpeting its user growth and even pitching itself in the US as “a form of patriotic capitalism”. But with that higher profile has come scrutiny of Triller’s licensing status, not least from US publishing body the NMPA. On the other side of the Atlantic, […]

Post-IPO, there’s a flurry of dealmaking and senior appointments happening at Warner Music Group, as the company gears up for its next stage of growth. Today alone it has announced new partnerships with Indian company Tips Music and investment firm SOSV. The former deal will see Warner Music India distributing the film-music label’s music in […]

When we reported on the launch of Soundtrack by Twitch earlier this week, we had a sneaking suspicion that we’d be hearing from the publishing sector – and US representative body the NMPA’s boss David Israelite – sooner rather than later with some opinions. And lo, he’s one of the interviewees in a Rolling Stone follow-up about the wider […]

Deviate Digital are seeking a PPC & Social Media Advertising Specialist to join their growing team based at Tileyard Studios in Kings Cross, London.  Deviate Digital was founded by Sammy Andrews in 2017 and has been named a leading digital advisory agency to the entertainment industry by the Sunday Times. Their client list includes internationally […]

Teenage Engineering’s pocket-sized synthesizers are marvellous, but now the Swedish company is applying its innovation skills to radio. Its latest device, the OB-4, is pitched as a “magic radio” – a portable Bluetooth speaker that can also receive FM radio broadcasts. The twists being that, well, owners will be able to twist the audio itself. “OB–4 continuously […]

Smart speakers and voice assistants are increasingly popular, but what’s their value in corporate terms? It’s hard to tell given that many of the companies making them – Apple, Google and Amazon included – don’t split out their revenues from this technology, and the companies’ market caps are based on their entire businesses. But here’s […]

In February this year, Spotify launched a beta ‘Songwriter Pages’ feature offering more visibility for songwriters on its service, including their own profile pages and playlists of recordings of their works. Today, it’s expanding that with video on some of those pages. Songwriters Mike Dean, Raye and Cautious Clay are the first to get the treatment, with videos in their ‘Written By’ […]

Scottish startup Rockifi isn’t brand new: back in 2018 it was being hailed as ‘Tinder for rock fans’ with an app that helped rock and metal fans find likeminded fans to go to concerts with. However, it’s relaunching this month with a bigger ambition: to be a fully fledged streaming service for hard rock and heavy metal. […]

Boomy is the startup that lets anyone sign up and create music using its AI tool – and then release it to streaming services. We’ve covered the company regularly (this profile for example), and now the company has launched a major update to its platform. That includes an expansion of its free tier: “Starting today, […]

Just over a year ago, music streaming service Deezer announced its desire to launch a pilot of a ‘user-centric payment system’ (UCPS) by early 2020. You can read our primer on the user-centric model here, but in a nutshell, it ensures that the money from your streaming subscription only goes to the music you listen […]

Livestreaming platform Twitch is launching a new feature, Soundtrack by Twitch, with a catalogue of licensed music for its community of creators to use in their streams. The Amazon-owned company has licensed more than 1m tracks from more than 30 independent labels and distributors for the beta launch, in what’s its second attempt at an […]

Lead: Crowdfunding in 2020 – Crowdfunding is not a new idea – but following the nosedive of recorded music sales in the early noughts, crowdfunding became a tantalising concept: fanbases could be leveraged into recording costs. Despite some successes, it has remained a relatively niche concern. That is, until now. Covid-19 has led to a rise […]

Distributor Amuse and consultancy Midia Research have teamed up for their second report on the independent music community. One of the headline figures from Independent Artists: Pathfinding Through a Pandemic – that the ‘artists direct’ sector grew by 32% to $873m in 2019 – isn’t a new stat, having originally been published by Midia in March this […]

Channels like ChilledCow and Chillhop Music can do it. Hollywood star Will Smith can do it. Even Pepsi can do it. So why can’t Four Tet? He can! The ‘it’ in question being ‘looping lo-fi chillout music streams on YouTube’ of course. Electronic artist Four Tet has what appears to be a 12-hour loop that began streaming on his YouTube channel […]

Spotify launched its Daily Mix playlists in 2016 as a collection of personalised playlists based on different ‘clusters’ of a listener’s musical tastes. Now it looks like YouTube Music is launching a similar feature. Tech blog Android Police reported on some users seeing up to seven new ‘My Mix’ playlists, each seemingly based on a different genre or […]

‘The Michelle Obama Podcast’ is perhaps the most high-profile show that’s exclusive to Spotify. Well, it was until today. Spotify has announced that the show, co-produced with the Obamas’ production company Higher Ground, will now be available on “a number of additional platforms”. It didn’t say which platforms, but there’s already a listing for the show on Apple […]

We’re still waiting to find out what the Trump administration will do in response to a judge blocking its ban of TikTok in the US. We suspect the president won’t be too keen on its latest feature though: an in-app guide to the 2020 elections. It will provide TikTok users with information about candidates; explain how […]

It’s about to turn 25 years since the release of Oasis’s second album ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’, which several members of our editorial team are in firm age-related denial about. The band remains on hiatus thanks to ongoing tensions between its founding brothers, but celebrations are afoot on YouTube. This Friday (2 October) there’s […]

With recent app store controversies involving Spotify and Epic Games, the focus has been squarely on Apple and its App Store, even though the Fortnite publisher also has issues with Google and its Google Play store. Spotify’s relationship with Google has been much friendlier: the companies have teamed up on smart-speaker giveaways, and Spotify has […]

The coronavirus pandemic has forced artists and their teams to focus even more on the digital space, where fans are spending the majority of their time. Fanaply – a company that creates digital collectibles and fan engagement tools for artists – suggests that it’s now crucial to think about products that allow fans to express […]

Zebr originally started out as a new music discovery channel on Instagram and TikTok – and is now making an interesting move into influencer marketing. Zebr’s new app allows artists and their representatives to submit music to influencers and content creators, using a streamlined and affordable pricing structure, and ensuring each song is credited in […]

Korean music company SM Entertainment has announced a partnership with Marvel Entertainment, with K-Pop group SuperM first to benefit – just in time for the release last Friday of their debut album ‘Super One’. There’s a range of dual-branded merchandise available from the SuperM online store: t-shirts, hats, luggage stickers, and special packages with the album and various […]

Well, it sort of has, and sort of hasn’t. We’ll explain. Last week we reported on the marketing campaign around Jennifer Lopez and Maluma’s new singles ‘Pa Ti’ and ‘Lonely’, including a #PatiChallenge on TikTok launched with influencer Charli D’Amelio. Her video has been watched 24.4m times so far, but videos using the challenge’s hashtag have racked […]

The latest external playlist curator getting some love from Apple Music is independent dance label Defected Records, including its Glitterbox brand. It’s providing Apple Music with some exclusive DJ mixes and live sets, kicking off with a selection including sets from Ibiza in 2019 (Roger Sanchez, Gorgon City, Sam Divine) and from the recent Glitterbox Virtual […]

In China, Tencent Music has plenty of history as a direct distribution channel for independent musicians, which is now concentrated in its Tencent Musician arm. Its latest project is interesting. ‘Root Music’ is a collection of Chinese folk tracks in local dialects, with its lineup chosen by listeners rather than by Tencent Music’s own curators. […]

Wake up, take a look at the US app stores (if you can) and see that… TikTok remains available to download. That’s because a US District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction last night to prevent the Trump administration’s proposed ban on new downloads of the app from taking effect. The judge’s written explanation of the ruling […]

“I remember looking for podcasts hosted by Black people. I think I found four in the UK!” Renay Richardson is the CEO of podcast production company Broccoli Content, and also a prime mover behind the ‘Equality in Audio Pact’, an initiative encouraging the industry to tackle “the lack of opportunities for minority talent both in […]

The final day of Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference had a practical focus on music marketing, with two panels of experts offering their advice. First was a ‘tips from the top’ session picking the brains of Sarah Ismail (regional marketing director, Greater China and South East Asia, Warner Music Group), Negla Abdela (head […]

Amazon’s livestreaming video platform Twitch was already looking to do more with music before Covid-19 struck, but the pandemic has fuelled a moment where lots of musicians are also suddenly keen to do more with Twitch – and livestreaming more generally. At Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference this week, Twitch’s VP of music […]

“If you don’t know me I’m M to the B / Coming in hard, you better watch it Sophie…” If those lyrics mean nothing to you, then you clearly aren’t an aficionado of the mid-2010s Blackpool grime scene, nor do you have a tweenage TikTok fan in your household. The lyrics are from a 2016 […]

Can you make money from livestreamed music performances on YouTube? Japanese artist Reol certainly did: to the tune of $130k. YouTube’s director of Black music and culture Tuma Basa revealed the figure in his appearance at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference yesterday alongside colleague T. Jay Fowler, director of product management. Reol’s livestream […]

Back in June 2018, Music Ally wrote about a startup called Scout·fm, which was launching a ‘voice-first podcast curation service’. It had an Alexa skill that would ask people questions to understand their interests, then provide a radio-style stream of podcast episodes. The next we heard of it was early this year, when Scout·fm joined a […]

One of the K-Pop groups that have been smashing down global barriers recently is Blackpink, who you can expect to see splashed over many digital platforms in the coming week ahead of their new album’s release on 2 October. Two examples today: Blackpink have launched an ‘enhanced album’ playlist on Spotify, complete with some videos of Jisoo, […]

The new mobile game for K-Pop stars BTS has gone live. Netmarble’s BTS Universe Story was made available for Android and for iOS overnight, and is the band’s second foray into mobile gaming following last year’s BTS World. As we recently reported, BTS Universe Story is about tapping the BTS Army’s creativity: creating their own animated stories set in […]

Jennifer Lopez and Maluma have just released a pair of singles together: ‘Pa Ti’ and ‘Lonely’, and like a growing number of artists, they unveiled the music videos in a YouTube premiere, yesterday. However, they also held an afterparty (a #PaTiAfterParty in hashtag form) which saw J-Lo and Maluma chatting about the collaborations, promoting their upcoming movie […]

Gaming platform Roblox has more than 150 million monthly active users, and its head of music recently told Music Ally how keen the company is to work with artists and labels. Now we’ve got one of the first examples: pop artist Ava Max is holding an album launch party in Roblox later today (25 September). Atlantic Records […]

This is the first in a new series of guest columns for Music Ally from Big Bang Music in India, on the latest trends there. On July 15, singer Armaan Malik became part of a new initiative by chart-maker Billboard and social video platform Triller called the Top Triller US and Top Triller Global charts. […]

Is everyone an influencer in 2020? Well, not everyone, but according to investment firm SignalFire “more than 50 million people around the world consider themselves creators, despite the creator economy only being born a decade ago”. That’s the introduction for its new report, ‘Creator Economy Market Map‘, which catalogues more than 100 of the startups […]

There are a lot of exciting things happening around music, wellbeing and fitness in 2020: from artists working with meditation services like Calm and Headspace, to the growth of Peloton and other fitness startups who make licensed music a key part of their offerings. The BPI and Music Ally are holding an online event on […]

Endel has been one of the higher-profile startups exploring AI-generated music: in its case, focusing on its application as music to help people concentrate, relax and sleep. Now it has raised a Series A funding round of $5m to further its ambitions. The round was led by True Ventures and its partner Kevin Rose – […]

Production library Epidemic Sound is taking flak from musician bodies again, in what’s becoming a regular, one-sided war of words. European bodies Aepo-Artis, Ecsa and FIM, who represent composers, songwriters and performers, are lambasting the company over issues including 100% buyout contracts; replacing composers’ names with the company name in TV credits; and its recent […]

Swedish distribution startup Amuse is one of the more disruptive music/tech companies to have emerged in recent years, but is it a profitable one? Not yet. The company’s financial results for 2019 show that it generated revenues of SEK 85.1m (around $9.5m), which was impressive 209% growth year-on-year. However, the company’s net losses nearly doubled […]

The music industry may still be picking its way through Kanye West’s self-leaked Universal Music Group deals, but West is making it clear that his campaign around artist contracts is more than just a moment on Twitter. “The desired effect will only be achieved when every artist owns their masters. I’m Team ‘Free Artists.’ I’m […]

Are the big music streaming services too similar to one another? And if so, how can they break out of that box to innovate and differentiate themselves? A panel at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference yesterday, had some ideas. Angel Gambino, partner at venture development firm Prehype and until recently chief commercial officer […]

Playlists have become a hugely important part of the music streaming world, and many of them have a tightly-curated theme, be it a musical genre or a specific mood or activity. Not all, though. Some of Spotify’s most interesting emerging playlists – Lorem, Pollen and Oyster for example – are designed to be ‘genreless’. Today at […]

We’ve been writing about popular children’s gaming platform Roblox for some time, including its desire to work with the music industry. It’s not the only platform of its type. Manticore Games is the company behind Core, which is a similar “digital playground and community designed to unleash imagination and explore new play experiences”. It came onto […]

YouTube is keen to ensure that underage viewers aren’t watching videos that are inappropriate. It’s announced plans to “build on our approach of using machine learning to detect content for review, by developing and adapting our technology to help us automatically apply age-restrictions”. In other words, YouTube’s AI will be rating videos, although uploaders will be able […]

The latest distributor to announce a partnership with TikTok is TuneCore, which hopes its latest promotion will tempt more artists into putting their music on the social app. Between 22 and 29 September, TuneCore artists can upload a track to TikTok for free. This follows the deal signed with TikTok by TuneCore’s parent company Believe in July, […]

UK artist trade body the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) has announced its latest crop of artist ambassadors. There are 19 of them, including some famous names: Bob Geldof, Aluna, Ghostpoet, Roni Size, Shaun Ryder, Roger Sanchez and Maxi Jazz out of Faithless. However, there are also some newer artists in the group: Dream Wife, Bishi, Porridge Radio […]

Some headlines overnight suggested that Amazon was launching its own exercise bike to take on Peloton, in partnership with a company called Echelon. You can see the press release that sparked those reports here: claiming that “Echelon’s new EX-Prime Smart Connect Bike – also known as the Prime Bike –officially hit the online market as Amazon’s […]

We’ve written regularly about the activities of Shesaid·so, the community for women and gender minorities in the music industry, which was founded nearly six years ago. Now it has announced plans to launch a new community ‘hub’ for its members, and also a Patreon campaign to raise ongoing funding to support that – including from non-members. “With your […]

After a few weeks of badgering people to go back to work in company offices, the British government yesterday executed its latest u-turn of the Covid-19 crisis, telling them to work from home if they could again. The timing was certainly unfortunate for Spotify, which had chosen yesterday as the day to launch its ‘Your […]

President Trump may have tentatively approved TikTok’s deal to avoid a ban in the US, but what will the Chinese government make of it? Judging by state-media outlet China Daily’s blistering editorial column this morning – title: ‘No disguising proposed TikTok deal is a dirty and underhanded trick’ – the omens aren’t good. “What the United States has done […]

There’s a thriving trade in ‘Bandcamp as the anti-Spotify’ articles this year: the latest, from the Los Angeles Times, puts the ‘anti-Spotify’ phrase right in the headline. However, lower down there are some interesting figures showing Bandcamp’s current momentum. In the past year, fans have bought 5m digital albums, 2m tracks, 1m vinyl albums, 600k CDs, […]

Q&A and Platoon are two of the most interesting new artist-focused music companies to emerge in recent years, and we had their founders Troy Carter and Denzyl Feigelson in conversation at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global conference today, interviewed by Music Ally CEO Paul Brindley. From working with top artists at early stages of their […]

If you don’t know Atlanta artist K Camp, it’s highly likely you know his track ‘Lottery (Renegade)’, or at least the 15-second clip of it that blew up on TikTok early in 2020, in turn sending the track zooming back up the charts. There’s far more to K Camp than one viral track, however. With […]

American TikTokers have been grappling with the existential (in app terms) question of what they’d do if the app was banned. Now imagine the rumpus if Facebook and Instagram were suddenly unavailable across the whole of Europe. It could happen. Well, Facebook is claiming that it could happen, as part of its fightback against a […]

Artist Amanda Palmer has always been eager to explore new ways of connecting with her fans. The latest example is a weekly podcast, The Art of Asking Everything. It launches on 29 September with 10 episodes already lined up, and like some of the most popular artist podcasts (Jessie Ware, George Ezra etc) it will […]

BTS are no strangers to the gaming world, having starred in their first mobile game BTS World last year, with a follow-up (BTS Universe Story) about to launch. Now the K-Pop stars are heading to one of the biggest, buzziest games of all: Fortnite. This Friday (25 September) they’ll be premiering a new “choreography version” music […]

Artists turning up in your living room to play a concert is awkward at the best of times – what if you run out of teabags or biscuits? – but impossible under current social distancing rules in many parts of the world. Cue a startup that wants to do it virtually. A company called Trick 3D has launched an […]

With the UK bracing itself for a ‘second spike’ of Covid-19 cases in the autumn and winter, things aren’t looking good for the return of physical live concerts. Now the Musicians’ Union has published the results of its latest survey, warning about the potential consequences. “A third (34%) of musicians are considering abandoning the industry completely, […]

Qobuz is the hi-res music streaming service founded in France, which has expanded to 12 countries so far. Now it has a new funding round to fuel further growth. The company has raised €10m ($11.7m) from existing investors Nabuboto (the holding company of CEO Denis Thébaud’s company The Thébaud Group) and Canadian telco and media […]

After an introductory session offering views on Covid-19’s music impact around the world, Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global conference turned its attention to what happens next. The online event’s ‘Future of Streaming Post-Covid’ strand began with some views from Chaz Jenkins, chief commercial officer at Chartmetric. “If we’re to use one word to describe what […]

The whole music industry should be throwing its weight behind independent venues’ struggle to survive, according to Ana Rodriguez, co-chair of international managers body the IMMF. Speaking at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference today, she called on fans and industry entities alike to support local venues. “The most important thing about them is […]

The Covid-19 pandemic may be encouraging the Japanese music industry to look outwards more, according to Tatsuya Nomura, president of the Federation of Music Producers Japan (FMPJ). Speaking at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference today, he described how the pandemic came at a sensitive moment in Japan’s transition from a recorded music market […]

Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference began today with some quickfire talks on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the music industry in Latin America, China and Nigeria. Noemí Planas, network development director at global independent body WIN began with a blunt assessment of the challenges in Latin America. “In recent months we have […]

Having officially retired from music earlier this year, before signing what was reportedly a seven-figure exclusive deal to stream on Twitch, artist Logic is a prominent figure at the intersection of music and livestreaming. A tweet on Friday is thus making a few waves. “Too many of my gaming homies @Ninja included have wanted to play my […]

Warner Music Group’s Arts Music division has been steadily growing its catalogue of kids and family music, with partners including Sesame Workshop, Mattel and Build-a-Bear Workshop. Its latest deal is with a popular YouTube children’s music brand, Super Simple Songs. Well, with its parent company Skyship Entertainment anyway, which will be making the Super Simple Songs […]

Fresh (well, maybe that’s not the best word) from expressing his views on the music industry by tweeting a video of a Grammy award being urinated on, Kanye West offered some more constructive suggestions for how he’d like to see the industry change. In a series of tweets yesterday, West outlined some “new recording and […]

Amazon Music is the latest streaming service to make a concerted push around music from Latin America, with its new ‘Amazon Music Lat!n’ hub. It will offer a mix of Latin playlists, original/exclusive tracks, interview and mini-documentary videos with artists, and podcasts. There’s also a program called ‘Rompe’ to promote emerging artists in the US, […]

It’s been another topsy-turvy weekend in the US for TikTok. On Friday, the Department of Commerce announced that as of 20 September (Sunday) US app stores would be banned from making the app available to download, or for it to be updated for existing users. Yet on Saturday, the department announced that “in the light of recent positive developments” […]

From watching Peloton we know how interesting the connected fitness world is, with exercise devices for the home accompanied by live and on-demand workout videos and other digital features. And we also know that music is often an important part of these services, often with licensing opportunities (and the odd argument) for rightsholders. Anyway, it’s […]

British music industry body the BPI has a new partner: hi-fi maker Bowers & Wilkins, with a three-year deal for the latter to be involved in events and other campaigns. B&W will be a key backer for the Hyundai Mercury Prize award, as well as the UK’s annual National Album Day, and also fortnightly online […]

U2 are the latest heritage artist to be getting their archive of music videos spiffed up for modern-day viewers online. The band’s YouTube channel is relaunching as part of a collaboration between UMG’s Island Records, Interscope, UMe and UMC divisions and YouTube, with plans to spend the next year releasing remastered HD versions of U2’s music […]

We spotted Synaesthetic in October last year, as a startup promising to develop “a new musical medium, that is more engaging and practical; through classical music theory, cutting-edge AI, and neuroscience”. Nearly a year later, the company is showing off more of its plans for a product called ‘Lava’, and an artist-testing scheme called ‘Leap’ that goes […]

Sure, you may like round-the-clock streams of lo-fi hip-hop on YouTube from channels like ChilledCow and Chillhop Music, but wouldn’t it be nice if their animated backgrounds were more branded? And in fact, wouldn’t the music be nicer if it had a few more lyrics about fizzy drinks? Fear not: Pepsi has you covered. It […]

Twitch has been doing more with music and musicians, and analytics firm Chartmetric has been tracking that. The result is four new charts for music on Amazon’s live-video platform, presenting the top users by viewer hours both weekly and monthly, as well as the top users by followers both weekly and all-time. Chartmetric says it’s […]

Spotify is putting some oomph behind its ‘Radar’ initiative to promote emerging artists. Originally launched in March, it now has a dedicated hub on Spotify, highlighting new releases from the artists as well as country-specific ‘Radar: First Listen’ playlists gathering some of their tracks. The idea is that listeners don’t just discover the artists from their […]

As the physical live-music lockdown stretches on, artists are finding new spins on livestreaming. The latest example is Rufus Wainwright, who’s kicking off his ‘Rufus-Retro-Wainwright-Spective!’ series of streams in October. He’s going to perform each of his nine studio albums in chronological order, splitting each into two broadcasts (corresponding to ‘sides’ in a vinyl stylee). […]

Facebook’s Oculus Quest has been the most successful virtual reality headset yet, finally delivering on some of the early hype around what VR was capable of. Now it’s getting a sequel. The Oculus Quest 2 costs $299 – $100 less than its predecessor – and is lighter and more powerful. It comes out in October, and gaming […]

Signing podcaster Joe Rogan to an exclusive deal certainly gave Spotify’s share price a boost, but it’s also created some internal headaches for the company. Vice has a story about some recent internal meetings with staff at Spotify to discuss concerns about the back catalogue of The Joe Rogan Experience. And no, this time it’s not […]

Classical musician Wojtek released his album ‘Atmosphere’ in July, with fans made aware that it was produced and written ‘carbon neutrally’. Now he’s launched a website explaining how, with infographics showing how carbon emissions were neutralised during the making of the album, as well as some of the other ways Wojtek is trying to balance his environmental […]

Apple has a history of music-related livestreams: for example the broadcasts of its London iTunes-branded concerts back in the day. There’s something interesting happening this year around livestreams and artists though. We wrote about Apple Music’s virtual listening party for Victoria Monét in August, and now it’s repeating the trick for country star Keith Urban. 1,000 of […]

Lightricks is the developer behind popular photo and video editing apps like Facetune and Videoleap, with more than 350m downloads so far. Now it’s launching a new creativity app with a music twist. It’s called Beatleap, and it’s a partnership with production music firm Epidemic Sound. The app helps people to edit their videos to fit […]

XL Recordings are recruiting for a new Global Project Manager to join the team.  You’ll work very closely with the artist, their management and their A&R, to build a picture of the artist’s overall vision for the project, to contextualise and communicate to the wider team.  Gleaning information from the relevant promo, sales, marketing and […]

Lead: Twitch for artists – Artists were drifting towards livestreaming platform Twitch before COVID-19 hit, and Twitch has been making overtures to musicians for a while. But since live performance was halted, interest in the platform has never been higher, and Twitch is welcoming artists – and their fans – with open arms. But Twitch demands […]

Apple’s ‘Time Flies’ press launch last night focused on Apple Watch and iPad but not iPhones, as predicted. However, there were also some big services announcements, including the long-anticipated Apple One bundle. Well, bundles: there are three of them, which will launch this autumn. The ‘Individual’ tier includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and […]

Concerts with disputed social-distancing safety measures didn’t work out so well for EDM duo The Chainsmokers. Perhaps venture capital will go better. Alex Pall and Drew Taggart are launching an early-stage VC firm called Mantis, with backing from some Silicon Valley luminaries including Mark Cuban, Keith Rabois and Ron Conway. TechCrunch reported that Mantis’s debut […]

Lots of musicians have artistic interests well beyond music. Now Google is capitalising on that through its Google Arts & Culture initiative, enlisting some popular musicians to act as virtual tour guides for works of art. It’s part of a series called ‘Art Zoom’, which is in its second season. J Balvin, Ellie Goulding, fka […]

K-Pop stars BTS are already one of the big success stories of lockdown livestreams: their ‘Bang Bang Con’ concert in June pulled in 756,000 paying customers. Now they’re following it up with an even more ambitious event. ‘Map of the Soul ON:E’ will take place on the weekend of 10-11 October, with two broadcasts. However, […]

Rap battles are a perfect match for livestreaming services: not only are they fun to watch and chat about, but musically speaking, they’re original content with far fewer copyright headaches for the platform. Twitch knows all about those headaches, so its latest deal is interesting: with rap league King of the Dot. The exclusive agreement […]

One of the music distribution trends of recent years has been aggressive geographic expansion, as distributors look to gain footholds in burgeoning new markets for music streaming – or those anticipated to grow rapidly in the years ahead. TuneCore is one of those firms: it signed a deal with Tencent in China in October 2019, […]

Spotify has been showing artists’ upcoming tour dates on their profiles for years, although data on how effective those listings are at selling tickets is scarce. With the live industry still shut down in many parts of the world due to Covid-19, the streaming service is taking the logical step of adding listings for livestream […]

The deadline is approaching for TikTok to be sold, shut down, or find an alternative solution that satisfies President Trump’s administration. After tech firm Oracle said it was part of a proposal submitted to the administration as a “trusted technology provider”, more details have emerged of the plan. “ByteDance will place TikTok’s global business in […]

In the Covid-19-era music industry, the old income dichotomy of recorded music and live performances is not dead so much as it is becoming fleshed out. A variety of different fan experiences, earning money for artists on different platforms, is emerging as a common approach. Livestreaming is at the heart of many of them. It […]

“It’s so hard to stay positive in a time like this, but it’s about finding the little things. Once this is all over, there’s going to be the Summer of Love, and festivals, and touch. I can’t wait!” Beatrice Kristi Laus – aka Beabadoobee – is looking for the silver linings in the Covid-19 pandemic, […]

There have been growing complaints about copycat podcasts uploaded through Spotify’s Anchor app. That means taking other people’s podcasts and re-uploading them – often with the same artwork – as your own, in the hope of snagging some advertising revenues before you get caught. Now Anchor is cracking down on it. “This is definitely a new type […]

Indian streaming service JioSaavn is launching a new scheme offering direct distribution to emerging, unsigned artists. It’s part of its existing ‘Artist Originals’ initiative, and is called ‘Amplify’. It’ll encourage musicians to submit their demos to JioSaavn’s A&R team, based in Mumbai and New York. Artists chosen by the team will get upfront payments, marketing support […]

The Music Managers Forum (MMF) is teaming up with YouTube Music once again for its Accelerator Programme for Music Managers in the UK. Applications open today for the scheme’s 2021 cohort, which will be its third year. It’ll offer 12-month grants of up to £15k as well as training and other support. The MMF has […]

When we profiled social music app Voisey early this year, its co-founder Olly Barnes talked about its ambitions to discover new talent. “We have users in remote parts of the world, who have never made a song before, and have low self-confidence, but Voisey allows them to make the step to songwriting,” as he put it, […]

Warner Music Group’s distribution arm ADA Worldwide is on an expansion drive. In July, it launched ADA Latin to oversee Latin America and Latin music in the US as well as Spain and Portugal. Now it’s turning its attention to Asia. ADA Asia will be headquartered in Singapore, with a remit to sign up artists and independent […]

Based in our London office, Domino seeks a Head of Digital Partnerships & Analytics to lead digital commercial strategy across the Label Group. The role will monitor, explore and execute opportunities for Domino’s global digital business and operations. We are open to considering applications on a full-time or part-time basis, dependent on the candidates’ existing […]

Twitch may be doing more with music, but gaming remains its bread-and-butter content. Now one of the platform’s first and biggest stars is returning to it. Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins is well known to Music Ally readers: he broke livestreaming records when playing Fortnite with Drake; competed in pro-amateur tournaments of the same game with Marshmello; […]

A year ago we reported on a new ‘Voice Interoperability Initiative’ from Amazon, which was created to ensure that different voice assistants could work on the same devices. Spotify, Sonos, Microsoft, Baidu and Tencent were among the first companies to join Amazon in the initiative. Now it has announced some more: Dolby, Facebook, Garmin and Xiaomi, taking […]

It seems to be the time of year for startups to be beefing up their wise-old-heads quota with advisors and board members. The two latest examples are Super Hi-Fi and Rotor Videos. US startup Super Hi-Fi (which we profiled last year: its tech helps streaming services with the gaps between songs, whether that’s making transitions smoother, or automatically […]

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been writing about campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic to save independent music venues. These spaces may seem a world away from the big concert halls, arenas and stadiums of the live music industry, but Midia Research has published one of the better explanations of why they matter. “Without this […]

Twitch recently announced that it was shutting down its karaoke game Twitch Sings, including removing all the archived broadcasts and clips using it. But where one karaoke game closes, another one pops up backed by a different digital platform. That game is called SingHeads, and the platform is Snapchat, which is an official partner. Released initially for […]

Primephonic is one of the streaming services focusing on classical music, with a comprehensive collection of albums and playlists. However, neither of those are its most popular format with listeners. It’s podcasts. The company has been producing its own shows blending interviews with classical music artists, composers and conductors with their music. “These podcasts are […]

US music industry body the RIAA has published its annual mid-year stats for the recorded music market there. They show that revenues grew by 5.6% year-on-year to $5.7bn in the first half of 2020. The story here, as in other countries, is that Covid-19 had a significant impact in the second quarter of this year, […]

Veteran radio host Charlamagne Tha God is launching a new podcast network, in partnership with radio/streaming firm iHeartMedia in the US. It’s called The Black Effect Podcast Network, and is promising to create shows in genres including social justice, pop culture, sports, mental health, news, comedy, focusing on Black listeners. It’ll launch its roster of 18 […]

A new tool to help managers and artists research Spotify playlists appears to be picking up some steam. PlaylistSupply was launched by a manager, Noah Motion, as a way for his peers to search for Spotify playlists relevant to their artist’s genre (or other search keywords), see their public data, and find contacts – email addresses included – for […]

The explosion in Beirut on 4 August was devastating, killing nearly 200 people and injuring thousands more, while destroying buildings across a large swathe of the city. One of the latest relief efforts comes from the music industry: a livestreaming event called ‘For Beirut’ that has been organised by the Electronic Labor Day initiative and Beatport. It […]

As it prepares for a migration of users from Google Play Music, YouTube Music’s team have been talking about some of their recent improvements to playlists on the service. That includes assistive playlists, with YouTube suggesting songs to add to a playlist based on its title, the songs already in the playlist, and the user’s listening history. […]

We know that Hipgnosis Songs Fund likes buying publishing catalogues, and sometimes recordings rights too. But now it’s also buying publishing companies. Well, one publishing company this morning: Big Deal Music, which owns rights in songs that have been recorded by Shawn Mendes, One Direction and Panic at the Disco among other artists. This isn’t […]

With less than two months to go to the US presidential election, efforts to encourage people to vote are heating up. Musicians – and now even music streaming services – are playing a prominent role. Global Citizen, which was at the forefront of music-related Covid-19 relief efforts earlier this year, has turned its attention to the US […]

We’re in a peculiar time right now, where despite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on individual musicians’ incomes, we’re also seeing announcements by industry bodies, major music companies and collecting societies of positive (and even still record-breaking) figures for their businesses. The latest is US society BMI for its last financial year, which ended […]

Sony Music has been signalling its podcasting ambitions with a series of partnerships over the past year. Now it has revealed nearly 40 new shows resulting from those deals – and they’re all launching this year. The unveiling happened at the major label’s first IAB Podcast Upfront presentation, with shows in categories including true crime, politics, […]

The question of how long the ‘long tail’ of streaming is – and also how miserable it might be – has long been a subject for debate in the music industry. US analytics firm Alpha Data has some new figures to contribute, but they may not make reassuring reading for musicians lower down that tail. Rolling […]

Music and podcasts are increasingly intertwined on various streaming services, but books – and specifically audiobooks – may also be joining the party. We recently reported on Spotify’s ambitions on that front, but Apple already has an ebooks store with audiobooks options. Now it’s announced its latest related partnership, with Oprah Winfrey and her famous ‘Book Club’. Her latest […]

We’ve been writing about the jockeying for position in the Indian short-video apps market in the wake of TikTok’s ban there. Now another of the contenders has been talking (to the Economic Times) about its growth. MX TakaTak says it has more than 10 million daily active users and 45 million monthly active users, with […]

A music industry trend isn’t a proper trend until it gets its own awards ceremony, right? If so, livestreams are graduating to the Big Trends league, because LiveXLive has announced plans for ‘The Lockdown Awards’ this October to “honour artists and entertainers who create content for fans amidst the pandemic”. Categories include Best Virtual Festival; Best Show […]

The last time we wrote about Spotify’s album-deep-dives podcast Dissect was in April, when its sixth season launched with a focus on Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ album. Now it’s season seven time, and Childish Gambino is the artist under the spotlight. Specifically his 2013 concept album ‘Because the Internet’ – “a nobly expansive attempt at plumbing the catacombs of […]

Where there’s a startup that’s gone public in a big IPO, there’ll be fledgling rivals hoping to follow the same path and compete with it. Such is the case with fitness firm Peloton. One of its latest rivals is called Apex Rides, with its own combination of a physical exercise bike, and digital workout classes available […]

In China, the music industry works differently. Music fans quickly – and in the tens of millions – adopt new technologies, new methods of supporting artists or ways of consuming music. The audience seeks a different experience from artists, who are often hybrid stars – equally at home as actors, TV personalities or models. What […]

The latest TikTok controversy doesn’t involve music, or even Donald Trump. Instead, it’s about a video of a man shooting himself, which has been shared by a number of popular meme accounts on the app (that’s a link to a news article about this: we’re not going to link to any of the clips) even as TikTok’s […]

Kidd Keo is a Spanish hip-hop artist signed to Warner Music Latina, and now the label has launched an official mobile game for his new album ‘Back To Rockport’. Released for iOS and Android, Back To Rockport – The Game is an endless-runner game in the same vein as app hits Temple Run and Subway Surfers. […]

For any aspiring filmmaker, the chance to have their work soundtracked by composer Hans Zimmer would be a dream come true. Now it will come true for five people. Zimmer has teamed up with Sony Music and YouTube for a contest challenging people to create original music videos for five of his compositions. A winner will be […]

8tracks was one of the early music streaming services, launching just before Spotify in August 2008. However, it shut down at the end of 2019 after struggling with its profitability. Earlier this year, we reported on a comeback for 8tracks, after its assets were acquired by a company called BackBeat, Inc. Now its new CEO Jeffrey Treichel has […]

Roxi is the UK-based music streaming and karaoke service formerly known as Electric Jukebox, which until now has found its way into people’s living rooms via its own set-top box hardware. That’s changing: the company has just announced a deal with UK satellite broadcaster Sky to make its service available through the latter’s Sky Q set-top […]

Even before Covid-19 and its lockdowns around the world, there was a growing amount of talk about wellbeing in and around the music industry. The pandemic has only sharpened the sense that as an industry, we could be doing more to protect our mental health. One example of action being taken comes from distributor Record […]

Facebook Watch is the dedicated video hub on Facebook, and it’s one of the main places that official music videos live on the social network, since that content was added in late July in the US. Now Facebook has provided an update on how popular Facebook Watch is. “Today, more than 1.25 billion people visit […]

Last month we reported on Riot Games, the publisher of esports game League of Legends, launching a new track for its virtual pop group K/DA. What we hadn’t spotted, then, was a cover of the group’s past hit ‘Pop/Stars’ by an influencer called Seraphine, which was released a couple of weeks ago. The post Riot […]

Magenta is a research project within Google exploring the intersection of AI and creativity, including a range of music demos. The latest of those is called Lo-Fi Player, and it launched this month. It’s riffing off the increasingly popular trend for listening to lo-fi hip-hop as a study aid or relaxation tool. In this case, […]

It’s not that long since B2B digital music company 7digital was having serious financial troubles, but it’s been working hard to survive. By January 2020 the company said it had “stabilised itself”, before borrowing £500k in March to use as working capital over the following year. It’s also been announcing new business, including deals with […]

Investment firm Loup Ventures keeps a close eye on Apple’s business, including its music activity. Now it has put out some estimates for Apple Music’s progress. “Apple Music has room to grow with 82m subs out of 980m active iPhone users (8%) paying for the service,” wrote managing partner Gene Munster in a blog post. […]

Amazon’s Twitch live-video service may be doing more with music artists, but it’s also shutting down one of its existing music projects: karaoke game Twitch Sings. “As we look to the future, we have decided to invest in broader tools and services that will help support and grow the entire music community on Twitch. Because […]

A moment of relief for TikTok executives: a music story making headlines, rather than the latest revelation about the company’s potential sale or ban in the US. TikTok is getting a “five-day premiere” of the new single from David Guetta and Sia, and it’s a useful pointer to how the app is developing as a […]

The latest artist to get their own Alexa skill for Amazon’s smart speakers is Tom Walker, for whom Sony Music UK has launched ‘No. 1 Fan Music Quiz’. It’s a daily quiz where Walker sets the questions (about his own “songs, musical training and celebrity friends”) and fans test their knowledge by answering them. The […]

Another day, another artist reaching a carefully-targeted audience via an app that isn’t a social network or DSP. Gen Z favourite Declan McKenna collaborated with music teaching app Yousician to connect with his fans via a private livestream and, perhaps more interestingly, via some lessons from the man himself. The thinking is simple: if you use Yousician to […]

African telco MTN Nigeria and Tidal have announced a partnership which allows MTN users to access Tidal’s streaming service via their phones in a wide variety of short and long-term subscriptions. In December 2018, MTN launched its own streaming service, MusicTime, in South Africa, which is sold on a per-minute basis: customers buy as many minutes of mobile music streaming as […]

Music distribution company FUGA has announced the appointment of new senior hires, six months after being acquired by Downtown Music Holdings. The Netherlands-based company has now signalled their ambition by bringing in a trio of new faces, all with strong digital music experience. Former Ditto Head of Artist & Labels Services Craig May is joining FUGA as Global […]

The Artist Rights Alliance (ARA), an industry body representing songwriters and musicians, has been vocal in its criticism of Amazon, sending Jeff Bezos a letter demanding a better answer than, “I don’t know” when he was asked by the US Congress about music licensing on the Amazon-owned Twitch platform. After yesterday’s announcement of Twitch’s music livestreams being […]

Spotify has filed a patent for a feature that would allow users to create “video moments” with accompanying music within the Spotify app, Digital Music News reports. The short videos, with high-quality embedded music, would be sharable outside of the app and would be discoverable alongside the song itself: so searching for a song could also […]

Lead: The effect of COVID-19, six months on. This Sandbox issue hosts the launch of a new Music Ally monthly feature: our Global Experts Panel. We’ve assembled a panel of industry leaders from around the world, from many sectors of the music business, and each month we’ll put a single question to them on a pressing issue. […]

Facebook has warned that it will stop users of Instagram and Facebook from sharing local and international news if a draft law drawn up by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is passed. The ACCC’s planned code is designed to protect media companies, and would require Facebook (and Google) to negotiate with them for use of […]

Spotify paid over $100 million to exclusively license the Joe Rogan Experience, a move that caused the platform’s market cap to almost instantly spike by $1bn. Rogan’s podcast has now appeared on the platform – with “dozens” of the more controversial shows absent. At the time of the deal, Rogan was pleased by Spotify’s hands-off approach, […]

Apps are fond of keeping users within the app, and creators like to ping fans all over the internet to where they can get them to pay for things. To strike a balance, TikTok has followed Youtube and Twitch in partnering with Teespring to allow TikTok’s creators to sell merch they’ve created on Teespring within TikTok, […]

The largest Indian streaming platform, Gaana, has raised the equivalent of just over $50 million in debt from Tencent Cloud Europe and Time Internet, reports Indian startup news site Inc42. Tencent’s involvement accounts for nearly $41 million of the deal in a new allocation of shares, with Times Internet, the majority owner, making up the rest. Gaana […]

Music radio persists in an era of hyper-personalised playlists, possibly because it offers a contrasting linear, set-and-forget experience. One of Germany’s most popular radio stations, Südwestrundfunk (SWR), has launched a new radio app with the usual live-rewind and listen again functions, but is also trying something slightly different: AI-powered, in-show song personalisation. (Article in German) If the user doesn’t […]

It’s almost a surprise that this hasn’t happened sooner, but Amazon Music has now integrated Twitch, the live streaming service owned by Amazon, into its Amazon Music mobile apps. Artists can now livestream via Twitch, with the streams appearing on their profile page in the Amazon Music mobile app, and followers will be alerted when they […]

Collective artist ownership is the only way to fix Spotify. If artists can collectively own platforms like Spotify, we can address the underlying problem that drives their incentives and decision making. As a for-profit, publicly traded corporation, Spotify has no responsibility to artists. Their only binding fiduciary responsibility is to seek profit and to increase […]

Made In Memphis Entertainment (Mime), launched in 2015, has a quietly radical idea at its core: ‘disruptive decentralisation’. It’s about creating a root-and-branch alternative to the traditional music business structure. And the company is starting local, in Memphis, Tennessee. At present, Mime’s family of companies includes Beatroot Music, the only Black-owned music distributor in the […]

The US-based Digital Media Association (DiMA) is the lobbying body for music streaming services from companies including Amazon, Apple, Pandora, Spotify and YouTube. Its new ‘Streaming Forward’ report – produced with consultancy firm Midia Research – thus focuses on the positive aspects of streaming’s impact on the US music industry. Its data from 2019 notes that […]

Hot on the heels of announcing a big partnership with Spotify, the publisher of esports hit League of Legends is bringing its virtual K-Pop group K/DA back with new music. Riot Games launched K/DA two years ago as a group of avatar characters – each voiced by a real singer. Their debut live performance at the […]

Sure, music podcasts with artists talking about their music can be interesting, but wouldn’t it be more fun to make, say, a four-part Halloween-themed musical podcast instead? Hey presto! Machine Gun Kelly has done just that. He’s working with production company Audio Up Media on ‘Halloween in Hell’, a four-part series which kicks off on […]

A report published by the UK’s Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre yesterday suggests that more needs to be done to open up these industries – music included – to people from working-class backgrounds. “Echoing wider research, we find widespread and persistent class imbalances. Those from privileged backgrounds are more than twice as likely to […]

Sessions is the startup launched earlier this year by former Pandora boss Tim Westergren: a livestreaming platform for musicians to broadcast “with just a laptop and a microphone”. Now Westergren has been talking to Pollstar about how things are going. “In the first 6-9 months when we were in beta, we recruited about 150 artists […]

Strap in: the TikTok sale process may be even speedier than President Trump expected. CNBC reported today that TikTok is “nearing an agreement” to sell its operations in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – as soon as next week. Its sources claimed that the deal could be worth between $20bn and $30bn, but […]

Apple has quietly been becoming a digital health and fitness company for a while now, with wellbeing becoming a key selling point for its Apple Watch smartwatch. Now Amazon wants in on the fitness-wearables game. It has unveiled a device called Halo, which is a fitness band (sadly not one that hovers above your head) […]

Do you want to stream to YouTube, Twitch or Facebook? How about these and a couple of dozen more platforms simultaneously? That’s what the technology of a startup called Restream does, and investors are excited to the tune of a $50m Series A funding round for the company. Sapphire Ventures and Insight Partners led the […]

In early 2019 Spotify opened up its flagship algo-personalised playlist, Discover Weekly, to brand sponsorships. However, so far the option for advertisers to sponsor the playlist has only been tested in North America and Latin America, as well as the UK. Now it’s crossing the seas to Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Nine countries, […]

In June, we wrote about a pair of DJ apps getting ‘real-time stem separation’ features, so that DJs could mix with the individual elements of tracks (like vocals or basslines). One of those apps was djay from Algoriddim, where the feature was called ‘Neural Mix’. Now it’s being spun off into its own software for […]

The new season of Fortnite goes live today: Chapter 2 – Season 4 is a big tie-up with Marvel, with a bunch of its superheroes and supervillains added to the game, complete with their most famous locations – and an in-game comic explaining how they got there. But one section of Fortnite’s player community won’t be […]

For Spotify, as one ‘Joe’ podcasting era begins, another appears to be drawing to an ill-tempered close. The streaming service will soon be the exclusive platform for The Joe Rogan Experience, but what about the deal it signed back in August 2018 for hip-hop show The Joe Budden Podcast? It’s not ending well. “September 23rd, […]

The new Katy Perry album comes out tomorrow (28 August) and ‘Smile’ will be accompanied by its own promotional game. It’s a partnership with computing brand Dell – or rather, with its high-end gaming sub-brand Alienware. The game is called Katy Quest, and from the clip shared by Perry on her socials, it appears to be […]

The last time we checked in on eMusic, it had just launched its eMU token as part of a blockchain drive, while its boss had joined the board of B2B firm 7digital. A few months on, the two companies are hopping aboard the livestreaming bandwagon. eMusic is launching a platform called eMusicLive, which it says […]

What kind of trade deal will the UK have with the European Union after the end of its Brexit transition period this year? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ is the best description, in the absence of an emoticon denoting ‘throwing hands in the air and running around screaming’. There is some positive news though: the British government has created […]

It seems to be the week for music streaming to meet virtual reality startups. VR firm MelodyVR announced plans to acquire Napster, and now Tidal is making an investment in VR company Sensorium Corporation. It’s not a traditional deal though: Tidal has bought $7m in tokens issued by Sensorium – yes, that’s Music Ally’s blockchain […]

Stem is the US-based company that combines tools helping musicians to track their royalties with distribution to digital music services. It has just raised a funding round of $10m from investors including Coach K, the COO of label Quality Control Music; Mark Gillespie, founder of management company Three Six Zero; a number of managers working […]

We promised you twists in this tale. TikTok is taking to the courts to battle the Trump administration’s executive order forcing its sale or shutdown in the US, but it will be doing so without its recently appointed CEO. Former Disney executive Kevin Mayer has resigned barely three months after taking the reins at TikTok […]

In 2020 you’re nothing in the music industry without your own custom AR filter, layering brightly covered digital swirls over camera displays. Legendary artists such as Prince, Pink Floyd and The Beatles have all launched their own filters on social networks – the Prince estate offering a Purple Rain filter on TikTok and WMG’s Firepit […]

News of a livestreaming app for DJs can’t help but spark questions about royalties for the musicians whose work those DJs are using in their sets. Skrachy is a US startup which claims to have an answer for that: it will charge DJs membership fees, and pay royalties out from that. “A Skrachy membership equips DJs […]

A new site called Good Splits is promising to help musicians “quickly and easily calculate royalties from aggregator services”. The idea being that they can not just see how much they’re earning, but also split the revenues between their collaborators with the minimum of spreadsheet-wrangling. “This app hides complicated accounting math inside a simple UI that lets […]

Music videos firm Vevo has published a report called ‘The Anatomy of a Video Experience: a Multicultural Story’. It analyses how people are watching video on various devices – TV, mobile and PC – as well as exploring whether there are differences in behaviour between demographics including Asian, Black / African-American, Hispanic / Latino and White […]

Dua Lipa is the latest major artist to launch a TikTok challenge, but in her case, she’s looking for fans to appear in her next proper music video. The challenge is #DuaVideo and runs for a week, having been launched yesterday with a video by Dua herself. Fans are being challenged to submit clips showing their creative skills […]

In March, BTS launched a new video series online called ‘Learn Korean with BTS’ – 30 three-minute lessons teaching their global fanbase how to speak the band’s native language. Now this has evolved into a physical package developed by the educational arm of Big Hit Entertainment, the band’s management company. The new product includes four textbooks and a […]

The Techstars Music accelerator has announced its plans for 2021, including the addition of Amazon Music as a new ‘member’ partner. The program will also run entirely virtually for the first time when it kicks off on 16 February 2021, including its selection process, which is underway now. Its managing director Bob Moczydlowsky is also […]

Yesterday we reported on MelodyVR’s planned acquisition of streaming service Napster for $26.3m in cash and stock, and wondered why the company was describing it as a $70m deal. A separate announcement from Napster’s majority owner RealNetworks cleared that up: the deal also saw MelodyVR assuming “approximately $44m in payment obligations, primarily to various music industry entities”. The cash […]

SoundStorming could be a lot of things, and at a glance the platform appears to begin a trek up that unassailable summit of music-tech: A Social Network For Music. But co-founders Alícia Rius and Arnau Bosch are keen to explain that their aim is simple. “We want to get the fans on board earlier than […]

Bandsintown has been one of the companies around live music that has pivoted during Covid-19 – in its case, turning its site and app into places for fans to discover livestreams by artists, as well as launching its own live channel on Twitch. Now the company has published a report based on a survey of […]

Global music body the IFPI is continuing its battle against ‘streaming manipulation’ services. Together with German body BVMI, it has secured court injunctions against the operators of five websites promising to inflate artists’ streaming counts artificially. The sites are Socialnow·de, Socialgeiz·de, Likergeiz·de, Netlikes and Likesandmore, with a sixth site (Fanexplosion·de) having already removed the relevant service in […]

Pitchfork’s article about ‘how musicians are fighting for streaming pay during the pandemic’ isn’t new: it was originally published in June. However, after the site re-shared it on Twitter yesterday with some stats on classical violinist Tasmin Little’s earnings, it’s sparking debate. There’s definitely something puzzling afoot. The article references a tweet from Little in May revealing […]

TikTok has followed through on its promise to sue President Trump’s administration over its recent executive order setting a deadline for the app’s US operations to be sold or shut down. The lawsuit includes some important new figures on TikTok’s business globally, as well as in the US.  Globally, TikTok grew from 54.8 million monthly active […]

Music-focused virtual reality startup MelodyVR has announced plans to merge with streaming service Napster. To be clear: MelodyVR is the buyer, although the Napster brand will live on. “Under the terms of the Merger Agreement, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Company will be merged with and into Napster (with Napster being the surviving entity),” explained […]

The row between Apple and Epic Games rumbles on, with plenty of commentary from external observers – some of it useful, much of it not. File in the ‘useful’ category this blog post by tech analyst Benedict Evans, which suggests that some of the criticisms of Apple carry weight. “When Apple launched the app store it had […]

We do try to choose our words carefully when writing about the world of politics, but it seems increasingly uncontroversial to suggest that the process around the potential sale of TikTok’s US operations… well, it stinks. First President Trump suggested that the US Treasury should get a piece of the transaction that’s been enforced by […]

YouTube has revealed its latest slate of ‘originals’ – documentaries commissioned by the video service – for the UK this autumn. They include a four-part series about GRM Daily, the Black British music channel. ‘Together We Rise: The Uncompromised Story of GRM Daily’ will debut on 28 September, with interviewees including Skepta, Giggs, Stormzy, Julie […]

Soho’s swinging Carnaby Street (copyright: the 1960s) is getting a new boutique retailer from 9 September: RS No. 9 Carnaby. Otherwise known as a ‘world-first flagship store’ for The Rolling Stones. As part of their wide-ranging new deal signed with Universal Music Group in 2018, the band have worked with UMG’s Bravado subsidiary on the new […]

Generally, if we see a celebrity giving away money on Twitter, we assume they’ve been hacked and it’s a scam (and pro tip: if Elon Musk is giving away bitcoin, it’s NEVER the real Elon Musk…) But here’s the exception that proves the rule: Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion really have been giving away $1m […]

Spotify’s ‘audio first’ strategy involves an aggressive move into spoken-word content with podcasts (and soon audiobooks?) to compete with live radio. Apple Music has followed a different path, with the Beats 1 live radio station part of its service since launch. Yesterday it got a rebrand – to Apple Music 1 – and two new sister stations: Apple […]

The print edition of NME shut down in 2018, 66 years after its launch as New Musical Express. However, the NME brand has continued online, and in 2019 it was acquired by Singapore-based music/tech company BandLab Technologies. Now BandLab is launching a dedicated NME Asia site, promising daily music and pop culture news with an initial focus on Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. […]

The Covid-19 lockdown has been very tough for classical musicians in the live sense, but if there’s a silver lining, it may be classical’s performance on streaming services. A new report co-published by Deezer, British industry body the BPI and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) aims to show the growth, using data from Deezer. Globally, […]

Even as Covid-19 lockdowns ease and physical concerts tentatively start to return, independent music venues are still facing a battle to survive. The level of support they’ve been getting from governments varies widely around the world, but in the US there are new moves afoot to help those venues (plus promoters and festivals) to stay […]

“Hey there, it’s Abel. How are you? So glad you could join me. I’ve been waiting for you. There’s a lot I want you to know,” The Weeknd told us this morning. Sadly it’s not an exclusive interview, but rather a new “personalised generative experience” launched for the artist by Spotify. Its ‘Alone With Me‘ […]

Facebook bought virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2014, and since then users of its headsets have been able to log in with their Oculus accounts, or their Facebook accounts. Now Facebook is making some changes, from October this year. “Everyone using an Oculus device for the first time will need to log in with […]

TikTok’s ban in India has created a feeding frenzy among other short-video apps, from Roposo, Zili and Dubsmash to streaming service Gaana’s new HotShots. One app we hadn’t written about yet was Moj, which was launched in early July by social networking firm ShareChat. It was downloaded more than 1m times in its first week, but judging by figures shared […]

Music distributor AWAL says that “hundreds” of its artists now earn more than $100k a year from streaming, and that this number (of artists) has grown by more than 40% in the last year. The company also said that “dozens” of its artists earn more than $1m from streaming every year. This is all a […]

Netmarble is the South Korean company that launched the BTS World mobile game in June 2019, offering the BTS Army the chance to play manager to the K-Pop stars – complete with an original soundtrack album. The game topped app store charts in 25 countries immediately after its release, and by the first quarter of this year Netmarble’s financials revealed […]

In India, Spotify is in the atypical position of being the non-dominant player in a fairly over-crowded audio-streaming market. The service has yet to update its figure of over two million MAUs for the country, announced shortly after its launch in February 2019. Since then, local leaders Gaana and JioSaavn have both claimed listenership of […]

We’re fascinated by the potential of ‘synthetic reality’, an area that brings together virtual reality, AI, ‘deepfakes’ and other technologies. Two more startups in the news this week offer some more sparks for thought on this score. Hour One is the first: a company that takes real people and turns them into virtual characters, with uses […]

Things are getting even spicier in the battle between Fortnite’s publisher Epic Games and Apple over the latter’s App Store rules. Apple booted Fortnite out of the store last week after Epic added a new non-Apple payment option, but now Epic is claiming that Apple has threatened to “terminate all our developer accounts and cut Epic off […]

When Spotify bagged an exclusive on a new J.K. Rowling audiobook – a celebrity re-reading of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – we wondered if it hinted at ambitions to do more with audiobooks. Now look: Spotify is recruiting a head of audio books for its Spotify Studios division, based in either New York or LA. “In this role, you […]

If you thought getting concerts up and running again with four-piece bands was tricky, imagine doing it with an orchestra. The classical music industry has been hit for six by Covid-19 lockdowns just like the rest of the music business, but there are also orchestras figuring out alternative, digital models to start their recovery. The San […]

Warner Music Group’s latest acquisition is an intriguing one: of Israeli company Imgn Media, which creates videos and memes designed to go viral on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. TechCrunch reported that WMG paid “just under $100m” for the company, which claims that its content generates more than 3bn views a month, with more than 40 million subscribers […]

Karaoke is enormously popular with people of all ages in China, with millions flocking to ‘KTV venues’ [karaoke bars] to partake in singalongs. The Chinese government’s 2019 China Music Industry Development Report valued the karaoke sector at RMB 101.07bn (nearly $14.6bn) in 2019, up 12.3% year-on-year with that rise driven in part by online karaoke […]

Chinese technology firm NetEase published its latest financial results last week, with no new figures for its NetEase Cloud Music streaming service. However, the service was mentioned in the subsequent earnings call with analysts. “For NetEase Cloud Music, we continued to see triple-digit revenue growth in the second quarter year over year, with both membership and […]

Earlier this month, President Trump set a 45-day deadline after which transactions by US companies with ByteDance or Tencent’s WeChat would be banned. That was seen as a deadline for a sale of TikTok’s US operations, but now a new executive order from the president has set a longer deadline for that. ByteDance has been ordered do divest all […]

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, musicians offering livestreams have been exploring the different ways to make money from them. Paid ticketing has tended to be restricted to the smaller livestreaming companies, while on the bigger social/video platforms (Facebook/Instagram, YouTube and Twitch) it’s been more about free streams and revenue from virtual item sales and/or merchandise. So, […]

TikTok isn’t the only short-videos app from China to be making a big splash. Tech firm Joyy’s latest financial results reveal the growth of its app Likee, which has a similar community of people creating videos with special effects and music. The app, formerly known as ‘Like’, saw its average mobile monthly active users grow by 86.2% year-on-year […]

Back in May, we wrote about an inventive digital marketing campaign for the band Glass Animals, letting fans poke around a virtual computer desktop and create stuff with their assets. Now label Polydor’s ongoing campaign for their album ‘Dreamland’ has taken some new twists. Fans were asked to download an app called Trnio, which scans real-world objects and […]

Billie Eilish’s latest single ‘My Future’ has been streamed nearly 42m times on Spotify at the time of writing. That figure may be boosted by the latest marketing partnership between the artist and streaming service: a website called ‘A Letter to Your Future Self’. It encourages fans to “write a letter and send it to […]

Independent label Beggars Group has filed its latest annual financial results with Companies House in the UK. The company’s revenues fell from £74.2m in 2018 to £63.1m in 2019. The report notes that the 2018 figure was skewed by Beggars’ revenues from the sale of Spotify shares after the streaming service went public. “Like for like we […]

We’re big fans of famous artists being given spurious job titles as part of partnerships with tech companies, dating back to the glory days of Lady Gaga as Polaroid creative director and Will·I·Am as director of creative innovation at Intel. But perhaps meditation app Headspace really did need a ‘chief music officer’ and John Legend […]

‘How Britain entertained itself during lockdown’ is the title of the latest press release from UK body the Entertainment Retailers Association (Era). Surprisingly, the answer isn’t ‘doomscrolling Twitter in tears and making forts from panic-bought toilet rolls and flour’. Era is understandably more focused on music, TV and gaming habits, and a “boom in sales […]

Music Ally has just published our latest country profile, of China, and it includes some new figures on the growth of the recorded music industry there. We already knew from the IFPI that in 2019 China’s market grew by 16% to $590.9m, becoming the seventh biggest recorded music market in the world. For the profile, […]

Apple may be preparing to launch its long-awaited bundles of entertainment services, with music included. Bloomberg reported that the bundles – working title: Apple One – are “planned to launch as early as October alongside the next iPhone line”. It went on to suggest that the basic bundle will include Apple Music and Apple TV+, with more expensive […]

Spotify seemed well prepared when its EC antitrust complaint against Apple last March came with its own spin-off website detailing its issues. Now Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, has taken that up several levels. Yesterday it sued Apple alleging “use of a series of anti-competitive restraints and monopolistic practices”, and that lawsuit came with its own launch trailer: ‘Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite’, […]

  *Learn more about Music and Livestreaming: reaching fans AND making money   Another day, another livestream. Well, probably another thousand of them. A year ago, livestreams were defined by their rarity, now they are defined by their ubiquity. So how to stand out in a market that has suddenly become very busy? We speak […]

With the huge number of platforms out there driving the success of modern marketing campaigns, it is increasingly challenging to get the full picture of how a campaign is performing and to then decide where to invest or what to amend. Wavo aims to solve this problem for those investing in artist development and marketing, […]

We haven’t written about DouYu before, because the Chinese livestreaming video platform is focused on games rather than music. The numbers are startling though: according to its latest financial results, DouYu averaged 165.3 million monthly active users in the second quarter of this year, including 58.4 million people on mobile devices. Meanwhile, DouYu generated RMB 2.51bn […]

Beck released his ‘Hyperspace’ album in November 2019, but now it’s getting reimagined in an interesting way: as a visual album called ‘Hyperspace: A.I. Exploration’. It’s a partnership with space agency Nasa, pulling in mission images, visualisations, animations and data, using several AI technologies (computer vision, machine learning and generative adversarial neural networks to be […]

“Have you been listening to your favorite rappers since Day 1?” asks Spotify’s latest spin-off website, complete with a big red button tagged ‘Prove It’. Proving it involves signing in to Spotify to be told which hip-hop stars you were listening to early. “An exclusive group of fans that have been riding with an artist the […]

A lack of reliable figures makes China a difficult music market to understand. Even so, its digital potential is vast. The post Country Profile – China 2020 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The amount of money sloshing around in the mobile games industry continues to startle. According to analytics firm Sensor Tower, the top mobile game in July 2020 was PubG Mobile, published by Tencent. It generated $208.8m in user spending via in-app purchases on Google and Apple’s app stores that month. Comparison time: Tencent Music generated less […]

Muse’s live shows are famously spectacular when it comes to the staging, so it’s no surprise that the band’s new concert film is out of the ordinary too. Drawn from their ‘Simulation Theory’ tour in 2019, it will be released to IMAX cinemas on 17 August in full wraparound vision – yes, there’ll be lots of social distancing […]

Neil Young’s official archives site is getting rid of the ability for fans to log in using their Facebook or Google accounts. Instead, they’ll be asked to register their email address and a password to access the site. In an article explaining the decision, Young – who’s been a prominent voice in the run-up to this year’s […]

China has become an important market for Japanese artists and labels in recent years. Now streaming service NetEase Cloud Music is staking its claim to be the “platform of choice for fans of Japanese music” in China. It’s wielding a report published by research firm Small Antlers Think Tank as its proof: a survey of […]

We’ve written about a blizzard of new livestreaming startups in recent months, but Aloha – which is the work of Swedish ‘audio operating system’ firm Elk – is a bit different. It’s described as “a virtual shared studio, rehearsal room, stage and or classroom with options to stream performances to audiences over social platforms” – so it’s a production […]

Last June, Genius accused Google of scraping its song lyrics without permission, and later in the year launched a $50m lawsuit against the tech giant and its partner LyricFind. It hasn’t gone well for Genius: a federal judge has now dismissed the lawsuit. The Hollywood Reporter has the full ruling, and the gist is… well, it’s complicated. The […]

We reported yesterday on the ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on the appeal by Amazon, Google, Pandora and Spotify against new songwriter royalty rates set by the US Copyright Royalty Board. The decision was seen as backing the streaming services in ruling against the procedure used to set the new rates. Now […]

Last month, Music Ally took part in the BPI and ERA’s New Kids on the Block online event, looking at children’s digital habits and what they mean for music. Research company Kids Insights produced a report for the event too, which has been published today. We contributed a section on some of the interesting stories […]

British organisation Attitude is Everything focuses on accessibility in the live music sector. Now it’s launching a new campaign called ‘Beyond the Music’ which aims to create more opportunities for Deaf and disabled people in the music industry. The campaign will be “supporting Deaf and disabled people to gain the necessary skills, experience, support and […]

$115 to see Metallica? We know concerts are in short supply, but this is outrageo… Oh wait. Metallica’s upcoming concert does cost $115 for a ticket, but that ticket covers a vehicle with up to six people: potentially just over $19 per head, which is actually rather good value. The band are the latest artist to […]

Who’d have thought it: untangling a company from its parent corporation takes time. Reuters is reporting that if Microsoft wants to buy TikTok within President Trump’s 45-day deadline, it will surely have to negotiate more time to actually separate the social app from ByteDance. “A technically complex endeavor that could test the patience of President Donald Trump’s […]

When we interviewed Amazon’s music boss Steve Boom earlier this year, we asked him if Amazon Music might follow Spotify’s push into podcasts. “I can’t talk much about it… we’ve been noting with interest how much time they’re spending on podcasting, but I don’t really have much to say on it,” he said. That may change […]

It was a busy day for Tencent Music, and for China’s digital music industry as a whole. Universal Music Group made two announcements about its latest deals there: one with NetEase Cloud Music, and the other with Tencent Music. The NetEase deal is significant: a multi-year direct licensing agreement (rather than UMG’s previous deal that […]

Music Ally is excited to announce more speakers and networking details for our forthcoming Sandbox Summit Global event.    New Speakers mxmtoon, Artist (US) The Future of Playlists Lizzy Szabo, Editor, North America, Spotify (US) Genreless Playlists, The Future of Playlists Tracy Patrick Chan, Head of Music Product & Engineering, Twitch (US) Focus on Twitch […]

While each of the major DSPs has launched their own suite of analytics and data dashboards, the competition around who is providing the most actionable and unique set of insights is getting fiercer and fiercer, with each platform leveraging their own strengths and building on what they already offer. Hoping to raise the bar further […]

When people think about what ‘the next Fortnite’ might be, they often fall into the trap of expecting it to look and play a lot like Fortnite. However, what if it’s less about guns, and more about a bunch of bouncy Minions-y characters bundling around neon-splashed obstacle courses like a cartoonish Takeshi’s Castle / It’s […]

Entertainment mogul and ‘Idol’ founder Simon Fuller has been busy with his multi-national pop band Now United in recent years, but now he’s got a new project on the go. It’s a partnership with TikTok to put a new group together. The press release doesn’t have many details other than the promise of an “in-app audition process on TikTok”, […]

Remember the controversy last year when Sony Music India claimed that its artist Badshah had broken YouTube’s 24-hour viewing record with his new video ‘Paagal’? After it emerged that views from Google ads were included in the total, YouTube did not accept the claimed record – and later changed its charts and 24-hour-record calculations specifically to exclude paid advertising views. […]

Another festival forced to switch from offline to online this year is Jazz Re:Fest in the UK. Its 2020 version will be held on 23 August, with four hours of performances streamed from a two-stage set in The Mill studios. That way, artists will be able to perform their 30-minute sets while the other stage […]

US music-streaming and livestreaming company LiveXLive has published its latest financial results, including a new record for quarterly revenues: $10.5m. That’s in the second quarter of 2020 (its fiscal Q1), with those revenues having grown by 11% year-on-year. The company reported a net loss of $7.5m though, although at least that was down from $11m this […]

The music industry is increasingly excited about the potential for ticketed livestreams, but we can’t ignore some of the risks involved too. For example, British band Ride were forced to abandon their concert last night and apologise to fans who’d bought tickets to watch it online, after technical troubles at the venue. Ride: Live From […]

Julianna Barwick is the latest artist to release music through meditation app Calm, following in the footsteps of Moby, Above & Beyond and Kygo. Barwick, who’s signed to Ninja Tune, is releasing three extended versions of tracks from her latest album ‘Healing Is A Miracle’, with Calm getting a 30-day exclusive on the new versions. […]

“Do you ever dance to your favorite DJ and wonder what track they’re mixing?” begins Spotify’s latest blog post, seemingly blithely unaware that the Shazam app was ever invented. Sorry, we’ll stop snarking: Spotify is actually doing something interesting around this question. It’s a new range of playlists under the brand ‘track IDs’ which are […]

Is there more money to be squeezed out of the ad-supported music market? Google hopes so. But for once, we’re not talking about YouTube in this context. Google’s advertising business is also putting some more effort into ad-supported music, with the launch of some audio-focused tools in its Google Ad Manager service, and an audio […]

Independent artists and labels have sold $75m of music and merchandise so far on the ‘Bandcamp Fridays’ series of sale days, during which the D2C platform waives its revenue share. Today’s the latest one, as part of Bandcamp’s decision to repeat the sale on the first Friday of every month – complete with an ‘Is […]

Events around TikTok and its proposed ban in the US are moving so fast, any data on how consumers are responding risks being out of date as soon as it’s published. Still, Sensor Tower has some new numbers on how TikTok’s rivals are benefitting from the uncertainty. “As talk of a ban ramped up from […]

As promised, President Trump has signed an executive order banning all transactions by US companies with TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. However, a separate order extends the ban to messaging app WeChat AND its parent company Tencent – including “any subsidiary of that entity”. Strap yourselves in. Given Tencent’s web of investments in and from music industry […]

One of the best steps forward for the Midem industry conference in recent years has been its expanded focus on Africa: not just booking a few speakers, but running events there and programming day-long strands at its flagship Cannes event. Now Midem is building on that with a partnership with Ugandan music festival Nyege Nyege. […]

Last year’s Music Tectonics conference in Los Angeles was a welcome addition to the industry calendar, and it’s returning for its second year on 28-28 October. As with other conferences, the event will be online, with the promise of “highly interactive small-group and one-on-one networking” and exhibitor/demo rooms, along with panels and keynotes. Among the […]

The Covid-elongated European football season isn’t over just yet: the next three weeks will see the Champions League and Europa League tournaments play out their remaining rounds. Now one of football body UEFA’s key sponsorship partners Heineken has teamed up with dance label Defected Records to soundtrack the rejigged tournaments. They’ll be holding an eight-hour […]

Amazon Music has announced a new initiative called [Re]Discover, which it says will focus on digging into artists’ back catalogues. It’s kicking off with Bob Marley this month: there’s a [Re]Discover branded playlist drawn from his entire career, but also the launch of an ‘Official Bob Marley Store’ on Amazon’s main shopping service, bringing together music streams, […]

A startup called SoundGym has launched a service called ToneGym, which it describes as “a new ear-training web application that uses deep gamification and deliberate practice methods to help musicians train, learn, improve skills, and unleash their full potential”. Or, if you want the soundbite: “A gym for the ears”. The web-based service will offer daily […]

Lead: we report back on our recent New Kids On The Block: Insight Into A New Generation online conference that we ran in conjunction with UK trade bodies the BPI and ERA, drawing out the 10 key lessons from the different panels and presentations. These include: children are much more active (and increasingly so) than previously presumed; […]

Singapore’s digital music business is small but – relatively – thriving, with a large number of streaming services, a strong tech scene and a high conversion rate from free to premium streaming. The post Country Profile – Singapore 2020 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We like to keep an eye on subscription-based entertainment businesses outside music, and yesterday two big companies’ financial results offered us some new data to consider. Sony Corporation’s results included the announcement that there are now 44.9 million people paying for the PlayStation Plus service, up from 41.5 million a quarter ago. PS Plus costs $9.99 a […]

We’ve written before about one area where Chinese music streaming services like NetEase Cloud Music beat most of their western equivalents: they have a thriving comments ecosystem where listeners are giving their views on music. The flipside of that: those western streaming services don’t have to worry about comment / community moderation, which can be […]

This will soon be the Daily Hipgnosis Cash-Splashing News Site if the company continues at this rate of snapping up music catalogues. This morning’s announcement concerns Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, the co-founders of Blondie, who have sold 100% of their writer’s share and neighbouring rights royalties to Hipgnosis for an undisclosed amount. This is […]

It’s not just the US where short-video apps are facing pressure from music rightsholders over their licensing deals (or lack of). It’s happening in India too, where a number of these apps have been spiking in popularity since TikTok was banned there in June.  Livemint reported that four music labels – including India’s biggest, T-Series – have […]

Earlier this week, we wrote about a controversy brewing Denmark with a dispute between collecting society Koda and YouTube. Koda announced that YouTube would be removing its members music from its platform, after the society declined a temporary extension to its licensing deal (while a new one is being negotiated by pan-Nordic hub Polaris) that […]

As long goodbyes go, Google Play Music’s has been LONG. It was July 2017 when YouTube’s global head of music Lyor Cohen first revealed plans to merge Google’s music streaming (and cloud locker) service with YouTube’s equivalent – then called YouTube Red, but since rebranded as YouTube Music. Nearly three years later, in May 2020, YouTube […]

Having published its latest financial results this morning, Warner Music Group held its quarterly earnings call this afternoon, with CEO Steve Cooper and CFO Eric Levin fielding questions from analysis. One of those questions focused on Spotify’s podcasts expansion, and whether it’s causing tensions around the potential impact on royalties paid out to companies like […]

Warner Music Group has published its latest quarterly financial results, for its fiscal third quarter (calendar Q2). They reveal the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic continues to have on its business. WMG generated revenues of $1.01bn last quarter, down by 4.5% year-on-year. However, its digital revenues grew by 11% to $720m as part of that, […]

It seems to be the season for TikTok alternatives to be staking their claims for young video creators. The latest example is a new app called Clash Video, which soft-launched last week for iPhones in the US. “We’re building the first Creator-Founded social network, empowering short form video creators through innovative monetization options, inclusive communities, and […]

Apple Music is working with artist Victoria Monét on “an exclusive virtual listening party” taking place this Thursday (6 August) to celebrate the release of her new album ‘Jaguar’ the following day. The event will be presented by Apple Music’s ‘Today’s Hits’ playlist and hosted by Beats 1’s Nadeska Alexis. According to Broadway World, this is […]

Warner Music Group’s push for diversity and inclusion across its company has a new boss. Dr Maurice Stinnett will be WMG’s new head of global equity, diversity and inclusion, having joined from a similar role at BSE Global, owner of NBA team the Brooklyn Nets and the Barclays Center venue. Stinnett certainly has seniority: he’ll […]

Storied label Motown Records is holding its second accelerator for artists this year, although thanks to Covid-19 the program will be virtual this time round. The 12-week program will see four artists from Detroit – Madelyn Grant, Curtis Roach, B Free and Sara Marie Barron – sharing $20k in grants and working with the label and […]

It’s clearly the time of year for lawsuits and legal threats. Publisher Round Hill Music is suing distributor TuneCore and its parent company Believe. The lawsuit claims that the two companies “reproduced and distributed musical compositions owned or controlled by Round Hill… despite knowing that the Round Hill Compositions were never properly licensed. Moreover, beyond failing […]

Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc has signed music licensing deals with Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell, Universal Music Publishing, Merlin and a number of members of US publishing body the NMPA. Bloomberg reported on the deals this morning, adding that Snap is testing a new feature in Australia and New Zealand that lets people add […]

Shooting music videos is possible but challenging within the social distancing measures of this Covid-19 pandemic. The latest example of an artist getting a creative way around those barriers is Noah Cyrus, as part of the ‘A Sony Collaboration’ series of projects. You may remember we wrote about a Nicky Jam TikTok video created through the scheme […]

Events have moved fast since Friday for TikTok’s business in the US, it’s fair to say. We’ll start with the latest news: confirmation from Microsoft that it’s in talks about an acquisition of TikTok in the US and certain other countries, with a mid-September deadline to reach an agreement with the app’s parent company ByteDance […]

One Direction and Goldie? Now that’s a collaboration made in musical heaven, possibly. Sadly they’re not working together (yet!) but they have both just got new websites to celebrate significant anniversaries. It’s 10 years since One Direction were formed during TV show The X Factor, and their 10 Years of 1D website offers an interactive […]

We first wrote about startup Audius when it raised a $5.5m funding round in August 2018 for a service that was described as ‘SoundCloud on the blockchain’. When it launched its public beta a year later, it was interesting, but its ‘censorship-resistant’ philosophy created some headaches in the potential for unauthorised uploads, and the difficulty […]

Bandcamp has been getting a lot of love from artists in recent months, thanks to its Covid-19 relief and Black Lives Matter sales. One artist who’s not quite so keen, though, is British post-punk band Wire, who’ve been having some problems with their albums appearing on Bandcamp without their say-so. “You may have recently seen […]

Twitch is building on its recent growth of music livestreams by launching its first ever ‘Music Month’. It’ll be spending August promoting some of the musicians who are operating on its platform, including featuring their streams on the service’s homepage and its own official channel. The latter will include a show every Friday called ‘Follow […]

Another day, another big deal for UK-based Hipgnosis Songs Fund, which continues to enthusiastically splash its cash on music catalogues. The latest belongs (or rather, belonged) to Barry Manilow. “Hipgnosis has acquired 100% of Barry Manilow’s worldwide recording royalties (excluding Sound Exchange royalties) in his Catalogue comprising 917 songs,” announced the company this morning. We […]

The founders of music management company ATC Management have launched a new firm called Driift, to produce and promote ticketed online concerts. The team has already worked on recent livestreams for Laura Marling (who sold 6,500 tickets for her recent Union Chapel concerts), Lianna La Havas and Dermot Kennedy (who Driift says sold more than […]

Something is kicking off in the state of Denmark, and it’s the latest music licensing controversy around YouTube. Danish collecting society Koda issued a press release last week titled ‘Google removes all Danish music from YouTube’, although the first paragraph makes it clear that this removal hasn’t happened yet. The background is negotiations for a […]

As predicted, Facebook is officially launching music videos, courtesy of licensing deals with all three major labels plus indie licensing agency Merlin, as well as BMG, Kobalt, and other labels, publishers and collecting societies. It’s not a global launch. For now, it’s in the US, as well as in India and Thailand, where the new […]

Anjunabeats A&R & Recordings Manager (Involved Productions) London, Bermondsey UK Salary dependent on experience  With a rich 20 year history, Anjunabeats remains one of the world’s best-loved independent dance labels. We’re looking to grow our music team with a new A&R hire as we continue to redefine and evolve the sound of electronic music.  Working […]

FitXR is the UK-based startup that’s had a hit with virtual reality fitness game BoxVR. Earlier this month, the company raised $7.5m of Series A funding, and now it’s announcing a major overhaul of its main product. Renamed FitXR, the app will start with more than four hours of boxing workouts, each with their own musical soundtrack, […]

Spotify announced its latest financial results yesterday, with growth in listeners and subscribers at the top end of its forecasts, despite the Covid-19 pandemic. CEO Daniel Ek talked to Music Ally after the financials were announced, starting with his view on the growth. “It’s very encouraging. Already last earnings call we were seeing a lot […]

The early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic’s global spread didn’t hamper Spotify’s growth in the first quarter of this year. But how about Q2, the first full quarter (near enough) of lockdowns, furloughs and financial uncertainties across much of the world? Today we have our answer, with Spotify’s latest quarterly financial results. The post Spotify […]

UK firm Shodement has been building its ‘talent network’ since 2012, working on music projects and developing artists – the latter including investment, signing brand deals, booking live shows, managing releases and building fanbases. It also has a creative agency division working with big brands of all stripes, and runs events and festivals. Now it’s also in the […]

Audiobridge is one of the startups trying to do clever things in the cloud with the music recording process. Its iOS app enables musicians to work remotely on multi-track projects, recording and uploading tracks from their smartphones to sync them across the devices of their collaborators. The company is also raising money through an equity crowdfunding campaign, hoping to […]

Taylor Swift’s new album ‘Folklore’ may have been a surprise release, but its popularity is entirely unsurprising. According to Republic Records, the album sold more than 1.3m copies in its first 24 hours, and was streamed 80.6m times on Spotify and 35.5m times on Apple Music. Critical acclaim has been flooding in for the album, […]

British artist Wiley had something of a meltdown on social media on Friday and Saturday, posting a series of antisemitic tweets and Instagram videos over a period of several hours. Eventually his account on Twitter was temporarily suspended and many of the tweets removed, although a number of his posts are still live on Instagram […]

Fresh from striking an exclusive deal with Apple Music, the Verzuz battles series garnered its highest viewing figures yet from its latest episode. That’s the one where Snoop Dogg and DMX went head to head in a ‘battle of the dogs’ last Wednesday (22 July). Verzuz posted the stats itself, noting that the battle had […]

Will Josh Richards be the next new music star to emerge on TikTok? TalentX certainly hopes so. It’s the digital talent management company behind influencer collective Sway LA, of which Richards is a member, and he’s the first signing to the company’s new label TalentX Records. It’s a partnership with Warner Records, which it claims […]

MyPart is the Israeli startup that’s been working on technology for deep analysis of music, for A&R and other purposes. Part of the Abbey Road Red incubator, we profiled the startup earlier this year, and reported on its pitch at the NY:LON Connect conference in January. Anyway, you know another company that famously built tech […]

BeatStars is the online music marketplace that famously sold Lil Nas X the $30 trap beat that he’d use for ‘Old Town Road’. By June 2019, the company had paid out more than $50m to its community of producers supplying beats for sale, and that had grown to $70m by April 2020, when BeatStars signed […]

We reported earlier this month on plans by Indian collecting society IPRS to start charging licensing fees for music livestreams – and initial criticism that the plans could leave artists out of pocket. Now the plans are changing. Medianama reported that the introduction of the new tariffs appears to have been delayed until September, amid […]

‘Tencent Musician’ is Tencent Music’s program for independent artists in China, offering them distribution and promotion across its three streaming services. To celebrate the initiative’s third birthday, Tencent Music (TME) has published some figures. “The program has generated 590 million yuan in revenue for original music content creators since its inception,” it announced. That’s around […]

‘Fake music’ on streaming services is an ongoing challenge for labels and artist teams to tackle. That’s the case whether the music is really by a star but uploaded without their permission under a different artist name, or the flipside of that: music by an unknown artist uploaded in a way that makes it appear […]

The first edition of MUdaL was a great success – fostering new thinking, initiatives and connections for the region during these difficult times. (Translated from Spanish: Spanish language version) MUdaL managed to bring together, in its first edition, 3,000 registered participants , including artists, bands, booking and management agencies, along with industry professionals across Latin America and beyond […]

Digital Deliveries & Rights Manager  Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep are two of the world’s leading independent dance labels. Based in Bermondsey, London, Anjuna celebrates 20 years at the forefront of electronic music this year. We’re growing rapidly and need an experienced, meticulous and solutions-oriented individual to bolster our digital supply chain and rights management capabilities. You’ll […]

Another Covid-19 lockdown trend is the sharp growth of viewing hours for livestreaming video services, particularly Twitch. Industry firms StreamElements and Arsenal·gg have published their latest ‘State of the Stream’ report quantifying this growth. “Twitch’s 2nd quarter chart bars look like skyscrapers compared to Q1’s single floor dwellings,” it claimed, with a chart showing monthly viewing hours […]

The key Covid-19 trends for social media seem clear: spikes in users and engagement (because lots more people are at home doomscrolling through their feeds) but big challenges to ad revenues, with brands holding back their budgets. Twitter’s latest financial results are the latest evidence for both. The company averaged 186 ‘monetisable daily active users’ (mDAUs) in the […]

This should be received wisdom by now, but still isn’t: getting on streaming playlists isn’t a marketing strategy. It’s certainly part of a wider plan, but putting your faith entirely in getting a prominent slot on a playlist is a big eggs-in-one-basket mistake. And besides, in 2020, it’s all the other activity and your story […]

Facial recognition technology is currently a hot potato in all kinds of sectors, music included. So the idea of a music app that monitors the listener’s facial expression to provide recommendations may spook a fair few people. It’s interesting to see what’s possible though, and a new app called MMP is using machine learning technology to […]

Research news of the day! “Millennials know ‘No Diggity.’ But Gen Z? Maybe half of them, at best.” This is one of the findings from an interesting study published by The Pudding on how well (or not) hit songs from the 1990s are being remembered. It’s based on more than 3m datapoints collected via a music quiz […]

TikTok is paying a growing number of music creators through its licensing deals – see this week’s agreements with Believe and the NMPA for the latest on that. Now the social app is launching a $200m fund in the US for ‘creators’ more generally – as in people creating videos on its platform. “We’re launching the TikTok Creator Fund to encourage those […]

Streaming service Pandora is getting into the livestreaming game with a series of performances branded Pandora Live. The first one takes place next week (28 July) with country star Kane Brown, with the promise of more “across country, Latin, R&B, pop, and rock” to follow this year. Besides streaming performances live, Pandora said that there’ll be […]

Bandcamp has held four of its special sales – Fridays where the platform waives its revenue share of all music and merch sales – since March, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. According to CEO Ethan Diamond, those four days generated more than $20m of sales for artists and […]

“Surprise,” wrote Taylor Swift in a social post yesterday. “Tonight at midnight I’ll be releasing my entire brand new album of songs I’ve poured all of my whims, dreams, fears, and musings into.” The album – ‘Folklore’ – was written and recorded in Covid-19 isolation. “Before this year I probably would’ve overthought when to release this […]

Another day, another licensing deal for TikTok, and this one’s a biggie. It’s signed a global, multi-year agreement with the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) in the US. That’s big because the NMPA has been rattling its sabre at TikTok for some time over licensing, with publishers angry at the lack of royalties coming their […]

Apple is facing antitrust scrutiny over the way it runs its App Store, including the 30% cut of in-app purchases (which drops to 15% for subscriptions after a year of someone paying) that it takes. But look! Here’s a study that has found “Apple’s App Store commission rate is similar in magnitude to the commission rates charged […]

Ninja Tune-signed artist Actress has launched what we can term a “guess-to-unlock” campaign for new (and free) track ’88’. The British electronic act started it all rolling by tweeting a very simple message on 14th July. “Album on bandcamp in 24hrs,” he wrote. There was some speculation among his fanbase that this was going to be the […]

We’ve already reported on BTS’s successful ‘Bang Bang Con’ livestreamed concert in June. Now it’s been awarded an official Guinness World Record for attracting the ‘most viewers for a music concert live stream’. The official figure is 756,000 fans from more than 100 countries – and what made that even more impressive was that this was a paid livestream, with […]

Lots of music companies see India and Africa as important areas for growth in the coming years, and that applies to companies focusing on lyrics too. LyricFind announced its expansion plans yesterday, with two new remote teams in India and South Africa. The Indian team will be focusing on providing lyrics in Hindi and Marathi, […]

Napster has launched a new charitable giving programme in the US called Napster4Good. People taking out a new Napster subscription can nominate a charity to receive a portion of their $9.99 a month, for as long as their subscription lasts. What’s more, the entirety of their first month’s subscription will go to that charity. Napster has […]

“Who in the room knows Roblox?” asked WMG’s chief innovation officer for recorded music Scott Cohen at the NY:LON Connect conference in January. Only a few people put their hands up in response. “It’s a gaming platform for kids, and they not only play games, they create their own games and play those games with […]

Lead: Music-centric filters on social apps are designed to appeal not just to hardcore fans but also to get enough “shareability” to pull in potential new fans. They are also being used by labels themselves to create a form of augmented branding. We look at who is doing them well, if they are worth the investment and […]

In a fast-growing region for recorded music income, Mexico has continued to shine, its impressive annual results showing continued growth and impressive numbers. The post Country Profile – Mexico 2020 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Imagine if, a few weeks after you started paying for Spotify or Apple Music, some of your favourite artists’ back catalogues disappeared from the service? There have been pullouts like this in the past (Taylor Swift, most famously) but in 2020, we take it for granted that the catalogues of music streaming services are both […]

British artist Lianne La Havas has just released her latest, self-titled album, and one of the marketing elements for it wants to encourage fans to get planting… virtually. The ‘Flowerbed’ website is exactly that: a digital flowerbed where fans can plant a new flower every day. They make those flowers bloom by signing in to Spotify […]

The longer this lockdown goes on, the more artists are finding different ways to experiment with the format of livestreams – and also to charge for them. Country star Tim McGraw is the latest example. He’s going to be holding a “unique all-live album premiere” event on 22 August, broadcasting from Nashville to tie in with […]

British artist Ellie Goulding has a pair of new videos out for her new tracks ‘Brightest Blue’ and ‘New Heights’. They’re the result of a partnership between label Polydor and Vevo for the latter’s ‘Official Live Performance’ series, but what’s notable is their use of ‘XR’ technology, which blends camera footage with computer-generated content in […]

“KKBOX Group and Bitmark’s Open Letter to Beatmakers” may be slightly over-egging the pudding of what’s basically the launch of a new licensing platform. The letter, from Taiwan-headquartered digital music firm KKBox’s group chief content officer and rights tech company Bitmark’s CEO, is announcing OurBeat, which in fairness is an interesting thing. “Anyone who registers […]

On 17 July, artist Logic announced his retirement ahead of the release of (seemingly) his final album ‘No Pressure’ a week later. “It’s been a great decade. Now it’s time to be a great father,” he tweeted. As it turns out, it’s also time to sign a megabucks exclusive deal with a livestreaming video service. […]

Joe Rogan, Kim Kardashian West, Michelle Obama… and now Addison Rae. Spotify’s lineup of podcast exclusives continues to swell, with Rae the latest to join its roster. She’s currently the second most popular star on TikTok with 51.4 million followers – behind only Charli D’Amelio’s 72.6 million – and now she has a deal with Spotify’s […]

Who needs expensive Bluetooth headphones or fiddly earbuds that get lost somewhere between the sofa and the shops? Not Elon Musk, that’s for sure. His latest startup, Neuralink, is reportedly working on a brain/computer interface that can stream music straight to your grey matter. “If you’ve solved hard problems with phones / wearables (sealing, signal […]

In February this year we wrote about Amplify London, a new partnership between YouTube Music and UK charity London Music Fund to support grassroots projects for young musicians. Now the first five projects to benefit have been announced, which will reach up to 200 11-21 year-olds across London in the UK. The projects include: a […]

The Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) has signed a deal with Facebook for use of the repertoire it represents in videos, music stickers and stories on the platform. The deal also covers similar usage on Instagram, with IPRS saying it “will cover licensing and royalties whenever music represented by the IPRS is used on Facebook […]

One of the hits of the Covid-19 lockdown has been the Verzuz battles on Instagram, where high-profile artists go head-to-head for… well, they’re less battles and more mutual love-ins, exchanging their hits in an atmosphere of respect. Anyway, they’ve been hugely popular on Instagram Live: Jill Scott and Erykah Badu attracted more than 740,000 viewers […]

Our main feature explores the evolution of live music, as we look towards a time when concerts are able to resume safely. What have we learned from the livestreaming boom during the Covid-19 lockdown, and what are the prospects for ‘hybrid’ online/offline concerts in the coming months? We’ve also got a feature recapping two thought-provoking […]

We reported recently on production company Broccoli Content’s launch of an ‘Equality in Audio’ pact to change the lack of diversity in the podcasting industry. Spotify was one of the companies signing up – admittedly after a bit of public nudging from Broccoli Content boss Renay Richardson – and now the streaming service has published some research that shows […]

Metalcore band Underoath are the latest artist to do something more involved with livestreaming. Underoath: Observatory is a series of three concerts, each of which will see the band playing one of their albums in full, from a venue in Florida. Tickets for each show cost $15, while a three-show ticket bundle is $45. However, each […]

Earlier this year, we published an article about how Atlanta rapper K Camp’s ‘Lottery’ track went viral on TikTok and Instagram last year, kickstarted by teenager Jalaiah Harmon’s video of herself dancing to the track. The track was renamed ‘Lottery (Renegade)’ early this year to ensure that people searching for its ‘Renegade’ hook found it on streaming […]

UK collecting society PRS for Music is suing airline Qatar Airways for copyright infringement, and the case will be heard in the English courts – an early boost for the society. “The airline, which operates over 200,000 flights per year, and offers music as an integral part of its in-flight service with up to 4,000 entertainment […]

We sometimes use ‘fight’ and ‘battle’ metaphors when talking about the music streaming market. Well, you wouldn’t want to get into a scrap with the latest entrant into that market. Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is the popular mixed martial arts organisation, and now it’s launched its own music streaming app: UFC Ultimate Sound. It’s the result […]

Reliance Jio Platforms is the parent company of Jio, the largest telco in India and the owners of the JioSaavn music streaming service. The company has been on a spree of funding announcements in recent months – raising more than $20.2bn from various technology companies and investors. We reported on Facebook taking a $5.7bn stake in April, […]

Joe Biden, Kim Kardashian West, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Wiz Khalifa and Apple’s official Twitter account all had a message for followers last night: to send them bitcoin, and because they were feeling generous, they’d send back double. Sit down and grab the smelling salts for this revelation: their accounts had been […]

And still the new livestreaming startups keep coming: we have two more to tell you about today. Gramrphone was one of the six winners in the #NextStageChallenge hackathon earlier this year – Music Ally was a partner in that event. Its service helps artists to stream live from their digital audio workstation (DAW) via Gramrphone’s software, creating their […]

Amazon already owns one of the key livestreaming video platforms, in Twitch. Now its Amazon Web Services division is launching something that could help brands (perhaps including labels) to create their own-brand versions of Twitch. It’s called Amazon Interactive Video Services (IVS) and is described as “a managed live streaming solution that is quick and easy to […]

In the Q1 2020 edition of our Music Ally Report (which you can read here if you missed it) we looked at ‘the hi-power growth of lo-fi hip-hop playlists’ on YouTube and Spotify alike. Round-the-clock streams of chilled-out hip hop have attracted millions of subscribers to YouTube channels run by curators like ChilledCow and Chillhop Music, […]

Liteboxer is the latest fitness startup that’s making music a key part of its service. It launched yesterday, with both TechCrunch and Engadget running with the ‘Peloton of boxing’ shorthand to describe the company’s offering. That means a combination of hardware and software: a free-standing machine with lights to guide your punches, which connects to a smartphone or tablet app […]

Another day, another catalogue acquisition for deep-pocketed investment firm Hipgnosis Songs Fund. This time it belongs to Grammy-winning songwriter and producer RedOne, whose credits include collaborations with Lady Gaga (‘Poker Face’, ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Just Dance’ included); Nicki Minaj, Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez. Hipgnosis has acquired 100% of RedOne’s songs and recorded music interests: […]

Amazon Music is the latest streaming service to launch a programme to push emerging artists. It is called Breakthrough and echoes the initiatives of Spotify (Radar), Apple Music (Up Next), Deezer (Next) and other rivals. The initial crop of acts is drawn from the US, UK and Germany – Arlo Parks, Jay1, Kiana Ledé, Gabby Barrett, Provinz […]

Spotify’s ‘audio-first’ strategy – as originally outlined here – is about one audio app to rule them all, currently focused on music and podcasts, with an eye to other kinds of content in the future. All delivered through the same app. Apple’s strategy is markedly different: its audio is split between three different apps. Music in Apple […]

It’s important that the industry (us included) starts to move away from talking about the ‘live concerts shutdown’ as a global trend, now that a growing number of countries are tentatively opening up their live industries again. In Japan, for example, the government has further relaxed its restrictions on mass gatherings. Having previously capped indoor events […]

Let us take you back on a short tour of Facebook music-video speculation. Start in 2012 when reports claimed Vevo – then the key aggregator of music videos – was in talks to ditch YouTube in favour of a partnership with Facebook. Then move to 2015, when video was one of the topics in the social network’s tentative talks […]

Advertising industry body the IAB has published its latest figures on the podcast ads market in the US. “With an expected growth rate of 14.7%, US podcast advertising revenues are nearing the $1bn mark,” it claimed. Are they really, though? The report doesn’t actually give a figure for its 2020 revenue prediction, but it does […]

We’ve reported on Linkfire’s various partnerships to get conversion (or ‘attribution’) data from streaming services, so that music marketers can tell not just that fans tapped or clicked on smart links, but whether they streamed, followed etc afterwards. But this isn’t an idea confined to one smart-links company. Feature·fm has just announced the addition of […]

Pitbull is the latest artist looking to do more with livestreaming and video content, and he’s found a partner to help. He’s working with US firm LiveXLive in a “multi-year revenue-share content partnership” that will see Pitbull play a series of pay-per-view livestream concerts, while also launching a video podcast (or ‘vodcast’). The latter will […]

Slowly but surely, the crossover between Amazon Music and its parent company’s Twitch subsidiary is growing. Amazon Music’s channel on the livestreaming platform has been ramping up during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the streaming service has also been throwing some promotional weight behind artists’ own streams on Twitch. Now it’s launching a series of ‘Amazon […]

To adapt the old cliché about buses: you wait ages for a music livestream startup to arrive, then two come at once! Except actually, the two are arriving just after what feels like another couple of dozen. Can FanTracks and Bulldog DM stand out from the crowd? FanTracks is launching with a prominent artist at […]

SoundCloud’s evolution from a streaming service to a suite of distribution and related tools for artists continues. The company now has a ‘Mastering on SoundCloud’ service, powered by Dolby. “As the last step of your upload flow, you can make any track release-ready in minutes for one low cost per master,” promises SoundCloud. “Pick from […]

TikTok remains banned in India, and some of the rival short-form video services there are enjoying their moment in the sun as a result. One of them, Roposo, has given some startling figures to Bloomberg on its growth in the wake of the ban. “It’s peaking at 500,000 new users an hour and expects to […]

British collecting society PRS for Music has offered another warning that the Covid-19 pandemic will be delivering its biggest hit to songwriter royalties later this year. PRS has just paid out its July 2020 distribution, £132.4m, which was up by 3% year-on-year. However, CEO Andrea Martin warned the society’s members that there are tough times […]

Last week’s reports of an imminent Spotify launch in Russia were correct, but it’s part of a wider expansion in eastern Europe for the streaming service. Yesterday, it launched in 13 new countries in the region: Russia plus Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and Ukraine. The […]

The latest music company making promises about how it plans to make its senior management more diverse is Live Nation. “We commit to increasing diversity at every level of our company. This will start at the very top with our Board of Directors, where we plan to nominate more Black, indigenous and people of color […]

Apparently rumours on Twitter have suggested that music artist Jason DeRulo earns around $75k for every TikTok video that he posts. Complex went to the horse’s mouth to establish whether it’s true, asking DeRulo about it in an interview. “I think it’s tacky to say what I do make from them, but it’s far more than […]

“The MP3 file has become the URL,” said Spotify boss Daniel Ek 10 years ago, in 2010. Yet the MP3 lives on: it’s actually celebrating its silver (25th) anniversary today, with the file extension name .mp3 having been minted on 14 July 1995 by the Fraunhofer Society. Within five years, the MP3 would be turning the record […]

You might know Music Tectonics for its music industry podcast, or for its conferences in the US. Created by PR company Rock Paper Scissors, it’s now pulling its content and community together in a mobile app. Released for Android and for iPhone yesterday, it’s aimed at anyone working in / interested in the intersection of music and technology. It offers […]

Nielsen Music / MRC Data has published its mid-year report on the Canadian music market, revealing that despite the Covid-19 pandemic, total audio consumption rose by 5.7% in Canada in the first half of 2020. That’s based on the research firm’s formula blending album and track sales with on-demand audio streams. Breaking that down, Canadians […]

Midia Research’s latest blog post digs in to how the structure of music hits has changed over the past 20 years, albeit with a limited dataset: the Billboard top 10 in July 2000 and July 2020. It offers four main conclusions. First, songs are shorter overall: a 16% decrease from an average length of four minutes […]

More than 15 million people follow Spotify’s ‘Global Top 50’ music chart, making it an important discovery channel on the service. Now it’s looking to do the same thing for podcasts, albeit locally. This afternoon, Spotify is launching podcast charts in 26 countries, including the US and UK. The format mirrors its music rankings: the […]

Besides being musicians, Zoë Keating and David Lowery have been two of the most prominent voices for artists’ rights in the streaming era. Solo artist Keating has regularly published her streaming income data to further transparency around payouts for artists. She was an early adopter of Bandcamp, went public with her concerns about YouTube’s artist […]

K-pop is the genre that ate the world whole. Acts like BTS, Blackpink, Twice and TVXQ are not just some of the biggest acts within the genre – they are some of the biggest acts in the world. There is a lot that other artists can learn from how K-pop markets itself, how its acts […]

Musixmatch provides licensed lyric features to the likes of Google, Apple Music, Amazon and Instagram, having deals in place with over 10,000 publishers globally. It also has direct relationships with over 1m artists who are verified on the platform through their labels, their publishers or even directly.  Hot on the heels of the announcement that […]

More than 70k videos appeared in YouTube’s ‘trending’ section last year. That’s the tab that spotlights videos that YouTube’s algorithm thinks are currently taking off, and it can drive significant traffic to them. So how does it work? Data scientist Ammar Alyousfi has been doing the hard work, analysing the data from those 70k videos […]

Warner Music Central Europe has created a stream-to-unlock initiative to push ‘100Tausend’ (‘100 Thousand’), the new single from German artist Mike Singer which is released on 17 July. Users going to a page on his website pick their streaming service of choice and then they have to play ‘Paranoid’ (the first single from the new […]

The Streets are the latest artist to explore ticketed livestreams, with plans for a pay-per-view concert on 6 August filmed at the Earth venue in London. It’s part of the band’s series of drive-in concerts across the UK, planned to replace the string of festival dates which were cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The […]

Spotify Singles has been combining artists’ re-recordings of their own songs with covers of other musicians’ tracks for some time. Now Apple Music is getting in on the idea with its new ‘At Home With Sessions’. Emerging British artist Arlo Parks is the first to feature, reworking three of her own tracks. As the name […]

We reported on Friday about the bumpy start for Rave Family Block Fest, the dance music festival being held within the game Minecraft. People who’d paid for tickets to attend were finding it difficult to access the event, and when they did get in, they realised that the music itself had to be streamed separately […]

Music Ally is long enough in the tooth to remember the days when big music stars really could cause traffic spikes that might crash big digital services. That’s rarely the case nowadays, which is why we were extremely sceptical on Friday when we saw the headline ‘Juice Wrld’s fans crash Spotify as posthumous third album […]

The US’s new Mechanical Licensing Collective body (MLC) has provided an update on its plans to launch a portal for independent songwriters to register their works. At the NY:LON Connect conference in January, MLC chair Alisa Coleman said the aim was to have the portal live early in the second quarter of 2020. Then the […]

The Financial Times is the latest publication with an approving profile of Bandcamp. It’s part of a wave of admiration for the platform after its recent Covid-19 and Juneteenth / Black Lives Matter rev-share waiving sales, as well as the wider issue of artists’ income from streaming. There’s a new figure too. “Over a 30-day […]

The mobile games industry is one of the sectors benefitting from the Covid-19 pandemic, at least in terms of people’s engagement with its products. According to analytics firm App Annie, there were an average of 1bn mobile game downloads a week during the second quarter of this year, up by 20% year-on-year. “Quarantined consumers also set […]

As the guests on the recent #TheShowMustBePaused edition of the Music Ally TV Show made clear, music companies promising to address a lack of diversity in their businesses is good, but the proof will be in what they actually do to make that happen. With that in mind, see what book-publishing giant Penguin Random House UK […]

Sony Music’s parent company is investing $250m in Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite. Sony Corporation announced the deal yesterday, and said it “allows Sony and Epic to aim to broaden their collaboration across Sony’s leading portfolio of entertainment assets and technology, and Epic’s social entertainment platform and digital ecosystem”. That could spell more opportunities for […]

Artist Ashnikko’s breakthrough last year was fuelled by TikTok, when her track ‘Stupid’ went viral. Now, for her new track ‘Daisy’ she is prioritising the platform – this time with Apple’s music hardware brand Beats by Dre on board as a marketing partner. That means a music video with prominent placement for the new PowerbeatsPro headphones, […]

We’ve written about UK-based startup NumberEight a few times in the past: for example its Midemlab contest pitch in 2018, and its first funding round later that year. The company has been working on “contextual intelligence” technology, using various sensors on smartphones to understand what their owners are doing, and then (after anonymising them) to help digital services serve […]

If Music Ally’s news has packed a little more… punch recently, it might be because our editor’s lockdown-fitness activity is jabbing, hooking and upper-cutting thin air in virtual reality game BoxVR. Now the game’s developer, British startup FitXR, has raised $7.5m of Series A funding – specifically $6.3m from VC firms and a $1.2m innovation loan […]

US industry body the Recording Academy has faced a lot of criticism about the diversity of its membership in recent years. It’s hoping to win some praise for its 2020 intake though. More than 2,300 new people have been invited to join, and while the big names include John Legend, Ozuna and Yolanda Adams, it’s the demographics […]

Music distributor UnitedMasters has launched a new tier for the artists who use its service. it’s called UnitedMasters Select, and it’ll cost them $5 a month – but will enable artists to keep 100% of the royalties for their music. The alternative is a free tier where the royalty split between artists and UnitedMasters is 90/10. […]

Spotify’s algorithm tried to make us stream R3HAB and we said… yes, yes, yes! The streaming service is celebrating the fifth birthday of its algo-personalised ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist by revealing that Moroccan-Dutch DJ R3HAB is the ‘most discovered’ artist from the playlist in the most countries – 16 – since its launch in 2015. There’s also a big […]

In June 2019, Wixen Music Publishing sued streaming service Pandora, alleging ‘unauthorized commercial exploitation’ of lyrics from songs in its catalogue. The case focused on Pandora’s feature showing lyrics from partners including LyricFind, which was mentioned in the lawsuit. How’s the case going? Well, there’s been a development this week. The latest filing reveals that Pandora moved to […]

Warner Music Group bought the Songkick app and website in July 2017, and has continued to run it since as a way for people to find out when artists they like are playing concerts near them. WMG is also continuing to invest in Songkick: today, for example, it announced the appointment of a VP of technology […]

Research firm Counterpoint Research has published its latest estimates for the size of the music streaming market globally. It claims that by the end of March there were 394m music subscriptions globally, representing year-on-year growth of 35%. Counterpoint also offered its estimates for some of the biggest players, suggesting that Spotify accounted for 33% of […]

People in the music business (us included) bang on about Fortnite a lot, but we think Roblox is another gaming platform that should be less under the radar for our industry. A new report by children’s media research firm Dubit offers some stats that might help. “Half of all children aged 9-12 in the USA […]

If you’re a regular reader of Music Ally, you may have spotted that we have some Animal Crossing fans on the team. We’ve seen a couple of music marketing campaigns make use of the latest version of the game, Nintendo Switch title Animal Crossing: New Horizons – pop artist Alice Chater turning her music video […]

Spotify’s latest campaign to create personalised playlists for listeners is called Soundtrack Your Workout, aimed at people who are exercising. On the new website, they choose a workout length (from 15 minutes to two hours); choose to include only music, only podcasts, or a mix of the two; explain what exercise they’re doing (yoga, running, […]

Veeps! Another new livestreaming startup for artists? Actually, no, this one’s been around since 2017, and was founded by Benji and Joel Madden from rock band Good Charlotte. It’s a platform for ticketed livestreams, and the latest artist to sign up is a biggie: former One Direction star Liam Payne. He’s going to be launching […]

We wrote about startup Yoop in May, as the latest entrant to 2020’s livestreaming-platform scramble. Its concept was an ‘eSpace’ virtual venue, which artists would be able to play ticketed live performances in. Now Yoop is expanding its activities: it’s creating eSpace venues in Los Angeles, New York, Nashville and the UK, to complement its […]

Podcasts have sent Spotify’s valuation soaring in recent weeks, but they’re also starting to generate income for the company. Yesterday, it announced a ‘strategic podcast advertising partnership’ with advertising giant Omnicom Media Group, which sees the latter committing a $20m spend for the remainder of 2020. Note, this is a drop in the ocean of […]

In November 2018, YouTube said it had spent $100m developing its Content ID system for detecting copyrighted music in uploads and giving rightsholders options to remove, leave or monetise those videos. That level of investment is beyond many music startups, but there are partnerships to be done. The latest example is with US streaming service […]

Spotify’s head of songwriter and publishing relations Jules Parker says that the streaming service’s addition of songwriter credits had a knock-on effect for labels and distributors. “Since we began publicly displaying song credits on Spotify in 2018, we’ve seen a 60% increase in how often labels and distributors credit songwriters on their new releases, allowing […]

Analytics firm Sensor Tower has published its latest rankings for mobile apps, reporting that TikTok was the most downloaded non-gaming app globally in June 2020, ahead of Zoom and Facebook. The company claims that TikTok was downloaded more than 87m times across Apple and Google’s app stores, up 52.7% year-on-year. However, its top two markets […]

Lead: Livestreams have moved to try and fill the massive hole left by the total cancellation of tours and festivals around the world. As more acts do them, however, it becomes incrementally harder to stand out and draw in big enough audiences to make them worthwhile. We speak to those building a whole new gig economy here […]

TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have been hit by a ban in India as part of a wider crackdown on apps of Chinese origin. But there may be trouble brewing for the companies in the US, too, due both to the political jockeying around hardball trade negotiations between the US and China, and specific […]

Happy International Indie Music Season! Well, it’s not quite started yet: the three-month project (IIMS for short) starts on 17 July with a three-day conference and performances series, which has been designed as “a platform for the global music industry and China to meet”. Music Ally China is an official partner of the event: our […]

A report published by the research division of the South China Morning Post puts some new figures on the growth of internet access in China – a key driver for the streaming music market there. The report claims that there are now 904 million internet users in China – 63% of the population – with […]

We reported last week on VR music startup MelodyVR’s financial performance in 2019 – £195k of revenues but a net loss of nearly £15m. The company is continuing to explore new partnerships to grow its business, though, with the latest being a deal with Live Nation in the UK. The pair will launch a series of […]

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about livestreamed concerts during the Covid-19 lockdown, it’s that fans relish interactivity: at its simplest level seeing an artist read and respond to comments in between songs. Genius is going further though: it’s launching a new “performance-oriented livestreaming and experiential platform” called Genius Live, with lots of interactivity. Wiz […]

US industry body the Recording Academy has announced a partnership with racial justice organisation Color of Change, including making a $1m donation to it. The pair will be working together on initiatives including creating a Black music advisory group for the Academy; a membership campaign to sign up more Black voting members; and an industry-wide […]

Research firm Nielsen Music/MRC Data has published the ‘fifth wave’ of its ongoing study of Covid-19’s impact on the music and entertainment industries, based on surveys in the US up to the week of 10-14 June. Among the findings: audio and video music streams have recovered from their initial decline in the early weeks of […]

In June, creative-software company Adobe announced the launch of a library of royalty-free music and audio with partners Epidemic Sound and Jamendo. Now two bodies representing musicians in the UK have attacked one of those deals. The Ivors Academy and the Musicians’ Union aren’t happy about Epidemic Sound’s business model of paying composers upfront in […]

Universal Music Group has big ambitions in India, having launched local hip-hop label Mass Appeal India last August; building its VRYL Originals roster of artists; and expanding its leadership team early this year. Now UMG has announced a distribution deal with Indian label Desi Melodies, which focuses on Punjabi music – at a time when […]

YouTube had analytics that musicians were using long before Spotify for Artists, Apple Music for Artists, Amazon Music for Artists and the rest. Along with SoundCloud, it was an early tool for artists to see (for example) where their fan hotspots were around the world, and plan tours accordingly. YouTube’s analytics weren’t specifically for musicians though: […]

There’s an ongoing debate about why the base cost of a music streaming subscription ($9.99 a month) hasn’t risen since 2008. What’s happening in adjacent entertainment markets? The Washington Post reports that the recommended retail price (RRP) of major games is set to rise by 10 dollars when Sony and Microsoft release their next-generation consoles later this […]