US industry body the RIAA has published its mid-year figures for 2018, outlining the growth in recorded-music revenues in the first half of this year. Retail spending on recorded-music grew by 10% year-on-year to $4.6bn, while wholesale revenues (after the cut taken by digital services) also grew by 10%, to $3.1bn. Streaming now accounts for […]

Spotify is testing a tool that will enable independent artists and labels to upload their music directly to the streaming service, without having to go through a distributor. The company has quietly been testing this tool with a few DIY artists and small labels, but is now opening it up to “a few hundred” US-based […]

Lead: the recent spat between Nicki Minaj and Travis Scott over who should have been number 1 in the US is arguably less about ego (although there was some of that at stake) and more about the role bundling plays in boosting and maintaining album sales. Once a rare thing reserved for a few big […]

The post Country Profile – Spain 2018 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

YouTube has announced some changes in the way it presents games videos on its service, folding its standalone YouTube Gaming app back in to the main service. Not just yet: the app will be ‘retired’ in March 2019 so that the company can “focus all of our gaming efforts on YouTube where we can reach […]

‘Offline’ music? That’s the raison d’etre of something called Carvaan in India: a portable music player launched by Saregama that is preloaded with 5,000 ‘evergreen’ songs in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Marathi versions, and which is thus aimed at older people who may not have reliable-enough internet access to stream music. The premium version of […]

A number of industry bodies in the UK have backed a new campaign calling on conferences and awards shows to do a better job on gender diversity. The MMF, AIM, WIN, PRS Foundation, Featured Artists Coalition, UK Music, BASCA, Help Musicians UK and SheSaidSo are among the organisations supporting the campaign, which is focused on advertising in […]

The latest research from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) on the US smart-speaker market is making headlines for its views on Apple’s HomePod – but we think it highlights a bigger trend. “Across the market, consumers migrated to the lowest-priced models,” claims CIRP about the latest market data. “For the two biggest competitors, Echo Dot accounts for […]

For a company that prides itself on its initiatives focused on diversity and gender-equality, Spotify won’t have enjoyed the overnight headlines about a lawsuit filed against the firm in New York. The lawsuit comes from Hong Perez, who worked as a sales executive for Spotify between 2015 and 2017, and accuses the company of gender […]

We’re eagerly awaiting more public details on Tencent Music’s IPO in the US, which will give the industry a deeper insight into the figures and trends around the Chinese company’s music-streaming services. Its filing hasn’t been published yet, but it seems there are some late shifts in the plans for going public. Reuters reported this morning that […]

Former Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson wasn’t just one of the greatest football managers of all-time: he also came up with some of the best soundbites. Particularly “squeaky bum time” – the phrase he used once to describe the period at the crunch point of the football season, when managers would be squirming about […]

We wondered yesterday what reports that Jon Platt’s departure from music-publisher Warner/Chappell was setting him up for a senior role at rival Sony/ATV meant for the latter’s current boss Martin Bandier. The post Sony/ATV boss Martin Bandier to step down in March 2019 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

2018 has seen an explosion in new devices NOT made by Amazon or Google, but which use those companies’ voice assistants – Alexa and Google Assistant respectively. The post Report claims eight new Amazon Alexa devices to launch before Christmas appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The rumours were true: Instagram is getting new features focused on shopping. They were announced yesterday, and will be focused on two specific areas of Instagram’s app: its stories section, and its Explore homepage. The post Instagram expands its shopping features through stories and Explore section appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Apple’s new iPhones will inevitably hog the limelight this week, but it’s just as important (from the music industry’s perspective, anyway) that the company’s latest iOS software is being released commercially too. The post Apple’s iOS 12 is live, including Apple Music changes and Siri shortcuts appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

US satellite-radio service SiriusXM has been coming under sustained fire for its lobbying around the proposed Music Modernization Act legislation, which this week has reached a crucial stage in its passage through the US Senate. The post Artists threaten to boycott SiriusXM over its MMA lobbying appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

AWAL Recordings is seeking a dynamic creative superstar eager to join a cutting-edge independent record label based in London. The ideal candidate is passionate about Internet trends, technology, and multimedia content with a creative flair. Doesn’t just look outside the box but wants to create the next evolution of the digital landscape in music. This […]

Sir Paul McCartney is on track for his latest number-one album, and a carefully-planned promotional campaign has been playing its part. We wrote last week about plans for a livestreamed McCartney concert on YouTube, but then on Friday Spotify unveiled its own partnership with Sir Paul. It’s under the streaming service’s Spotify Singles brand, but went much […]

It’s been a rapid rise to prominence for analytics startup Asaii: we wrote about the company in our Sandbox report in July 2017; it pitched at our NY:LON Connect conference in January 2018 and was then a MidemLab finalists in June. And now? Now Asaii is shutting down. “Asaii will be shutting down operations on October […]

One of the themes Music Ally explored in our recent report on country music was how streaming is helping the genre and its emerging artists find new audiences abroad. Now Spotify has published a blog post on the trend to celebrate International Country Music Day. “While the bulk of country listening takes place in the US, we’ve […]

You likely won’t know Little Baby Bum unless you’ve had toddlers in the last few years: it’s the most successful nursery-rhymes channel on YouTube, with its animated songs proving hugely popular. How popular? The British channel has 16.4 million subscribers and 17.5bn lifetime views, including its famous hour-long supercuts of nursery-rhymes. Now the company has […]

It looks like Apple’s acquisition of Shazam will soon go through, having been approved by European regulators. That will in turn spark more discussion of what the deal means for rivals: not just Apple Music’s rivals like Spotify, but Apple’s rivals like Google. As if by magic, there is news today on how Google’s own […]

Industry organisation Music Biz and research firm AudienceNet have published their latest study of US music habits, based on a survey of 3,000 Americans in July 2018. Among its findings: 20% said their favourite media/entertainment activity is listening to music: level with streaming video and ahead of viewing social-media content (19%), watching terrestrial TV (17%), playing […]

Warner/Chappell chairman and CEO Jon Platt will be stepping down from his role at the company, amid rumours that he could be the next boss of rival publisher Sony/ATV. “WMG is an amazing company. I’ve grown so much in my time here, not only as a music executive, but as a leader,” wrote Platt in […]

Spotify’s chief financial officer Barry McCarthy delivered a blunt rejoinder to a question about the threat posed by big-tech rivals like Apple, during his interview at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia conference on Friday. “I don’t think anybody is making a bigger investment in tech required to be successful in our business than we are,” he said, […]

Artificial-intelligence startup NumberEight has raised a funding round after completing three trials of its technology with music-streaming companies. The London-based company raised the undisclosed amount from investors including Beacon Capital, AI Seed, Ascension Ventures, 7% Ventures and angel investors including E100 angels from the London Business School NumberEight’s software is designed to sit within iOS […]

It’s tempting to roll your eyes at a startup pitching itself as ‘Candy Crush for the Music Industry’. What, an app that 20 minutes in suddenly makes it a thousand times more difficult to listen unless you spend money on power-ups? Hopefully London-based startup Gotickety will be better than that though. “Gotickety allows music fans the chance […]

Five of the industry bodies representing music creators in the UK have come together to form a new umbrella organisation. The UK Council of Music Makers(CMM) includes the Music Managers Forum (MMF), Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), Music Producers Guild (MPG), Musicians’ Union (MU) and the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers & Authors (BASCA), with a mission […]

US collecting society BMI has published its latest numbers, for the organisation’s fiscal year which ended on 30 June. BMI says it collected $1.2bn in domestic and international royalties, as well as money from direct deals administered on behalf of publishers. The organisation’s distributions for the year were $1.12bn, up 9.3% year-on-year. “The most public performance […]

UN agency the International Telecommuncation Union knows its onions when it comes to mobile statistics, so its latest report comes with plenty of credibility. It claims that by the end of this year, there will be 4.4 billion mobile broadband users globally, up from 4.2 billion at the end of 2017, and 3.2 billion at the end […]

Amazon’s latest music ‘original’ comes from a partnership with artist Jack White, based around his Washington DC concert from May this year. Amazon will release a ‘Prime Original’ documentary film on the gig called Jack White – Kneeling at the Anthem DC, which will focus on the gig as well as White’s exploration of the […]

While MusicWatch is focusing on the US, Nielsen’s latest report turns its attention to India – a country where it claims 94% of the online population listens to music, based on its latest survey. The India Music 360 report’s findings also include 20 hours of average listening a week – either as a primary activity or in […]

MEPs have voted to pass the much-discussed Article 13 of the European Copyright Directive. Of the 751 politicians voting on the directive today in Strasbourg, 438 voted in favour, 226 against and 39 abstained. The news is already being celebrated by music rightsholders and their representative bodies, but will come as a blow to the […]

Research firm MusicWatch has published its latest estimates on the US music-streaming market, claiming that there are now 51 million subscribers in the country. That would be a decent increase from the 35.3 million reported by the RIAA in its end-of-year statistics for 2017 – although that was an annual average over the year, rather […]

Music/tech accelerator Techstars Music is set to return for a third year, armed with a new partner in Japanese music company Avex, and a deeper partnership with major label Sony Music. An announcement by Techstars Music chief Bob Moczydlowsky revealed the news, as he kicked off the hunt for 10 more startups to join the […]

Sonos published its latest quarterly financial results overnight, for its fiscal Q3 (the second quarter of 2018, calendar-wise). They’re a mixed bag. The company’s revenues actually fell by 6.6% year-on-year, to $208.4m. However, the number of products that Sonos sold rose by 11.4% in the same period (to 886.5k units). The company said that these numbers are […]

French industry body SNEP has put out its figures for recorded-music income in the first half of 2018. The topline: revenues in France were up 3.3% to €256m (around $297.3m). Within that, physical sales fell by 12.9% to €91.6m (35.8% of the market) while digital revenues grew by 16.2% to €153.7m (60% – the rest was synchronisation, […]

We’ve seen some bold predictions about smart-speaker sales in the rest of 2018: in July, research firm Canalys claimed that there would be 100m of these devices in use globally by the end of the year. Now a study published by Adobe, and focusing on the US market, has its own prediction that’s making headlines: that by the […]

Jammber is the US startup that has created software for musicians and songwriters to log their credits from the earliest stage of the creation process (a bit like Auddly) while also offering a tool to help them organise tours. The company has just raised $2.3m in funding from music-industry investors including Sony Nashville’s Joe Galante […]

We’ve seen a few stories in recent years about artists being penalised (promotion-wise) on one streaming service because they’ve done a deal with another – Apple Music and Spotify usually being the cited services. Nicki Minaj’s recent criticism of Spotify for allegedly reining in its promotion for her new album ‘Queen’ after it debuted (slightly) […]

The announcement that Apple Music has added Top 100 charts for 116 countries may have come as a surprise to anyone who assumed the service had this kind of feature already. But no: Apple Music users *can* now browse the top 100s for a host of countries, from the UK and US to China, with […]

Lead: Songs can spike for a multitude of reasons – and often the spike is part of the marketing plan and therefore anticipated (or at least hoped for). But songs can also spike for esoteric reasons or just through sheer luck. Distinct from viral hits (ephemeral and often the start of the end of a […]

Sir Paul McCartney has a new album coming out, ‘Egypt Station’, and like a growing number of artists he’s promoting it through partnerships with various streaming services. YouTube included: Sir Paul will be livestreaming a performance on his YouTube channel this Friday (7 September) promising to play Beatles, Wings and solo classics as well as his new […]

If ever there was a warning bell ringing, it’s this: Europe is ‘driving growth’ for exports of British music, as the UK moves ever closer to its increasingly-chaotic ‘Brexit’ from the European Union next year. The claim comes from British industry body the BPI, which revealed this morning that overseas earnings by British labels were […]

From labels to streaming services to brands, they’re all saying the same things: hip-hop is the hottest independent music genre in India in 2018, and it’s only going to get bigger. Hip-hop is the fastest-growing genre for streaming service Saavn. Major label Sony Music and indie label Azadi Records are each negotiating deals with more […]

The already-heated debate around secondary ticketing in the UK has stepped up a notch: secondary firm Viagogo is suing promoter Kilimanjaro Live for its recent cancellations of Ed Sheeran tickets resold through the platform. Viagogo is accusing the promoter of “confiscating thousands of genuine tickets at the gate, forcing fans to buy new tickets, and […]

Congratulations to Camila Cabello, whose track ‘Havana’ has just reached the milestone of one billion Spotify streams. A landmark in itself, but what surprised us was that it’s the first time any woman has hit that number. The post Camila Cabello hits 1bn Spotify streams for ‘Havana’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

This month, the European Parliament will have a fuller debate and a new vote on its plans for copyright reform, including the much-discussed Article 13, which will cover safe harbour for internet platforms. The post YouTube enlists its creators to campaign against EC’s Article 13 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Music-marketing startup Feature.fm has a new, well, feature. It’s called ‘Action Pages’, and it’s designed to help labels and artists reward fans for their activities within streaming services Spotify and Apple Music (initially: more will be added in the future). The post Feature.fm ‘Action Pages’ to reward fans for streaming actions appeared first on Music […]

In a year of enhanced scrutiny of internet companies, the latest example is a group of British broadcasters lobbying for Facebook, Google and Twitter to face more regulation by a new watchdog created specifically for the purpose. The post UK broadcasters call for more regulation of internet firms appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music […]

eMusic made its name with a subscription-based music downloads service focused on independent labels, before adding major labels in 2010 – a controversial move at the time. Eight years on, the company is planning an even-bigger shift: launching a new music-distribution and royalty-management system that will use blockchain technology. This month, eMusic is launching a […]

This month’s report focuses on country music and how the genre is finally leaning in to streaming, with the major streaming services also making it a priority. We’ve talked to Amazon, Spotify, YouTube and the Nashville arms of UMG, Sony/ATV and Warner/Chappell among others to uncover what’s happening with country and streaming, and where it […]

As influencer marketing continues to become a more-common part of the music-marketing landscape, Warner Music Australia has announced an interesting joint venture with talent agency Born Bred Talent. The post Warner Music Australia signs new influencer partnership appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Amazon’s music boss Steve Boom has been talking about the company’s growth in music-streaming, amid its new marketing campaign that focuses on ‘voice’ – both in singing and Alexa voice-control terms. The post Amazon Music: ‘We’re in a leadership position everywhere’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We’ve been covering the rapid growth of Indian music firm T-Series’ YouTube channels (in terms of their subscribers) in recent months. Now the company’s main channel could be set to dethrone the biggest YouTube star of all: gamer Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg. The post T-Series tipped to overtake PewDiePie for YouTube subscribers appeared first on Music […]

Warner Music Group is setting its sights on growth in more emerging markets. It has appointed Alfonso Perez-Soto as its new EVP of Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. Reporting in to WMG’s international boss Stu Bergen, Perez-Soto will be hoping to bring his knowledge of building the major-label group’s business in Latin America. The […]

We’re currently working with an incredible and growing roster of emerging talent and already established labels from all over the world. We’re looking for someone to be responsible for the day to day management of our UK AWAL Label Management team, operating out of the London office. The role also works closely with our North […]

Music videos continue to be the most popular video category on YouTube, accounting for 32% of views on the platform. This, at least, is the estimate published by research firm Midia Research in its latest State of the YouTube Music Economy report. The post YouTube is ‘the main way consumers aged 16-44 discover music’ appeared […]

Fresh from tying up a deal with Spotify to be the official streaming partner for its new smart speaker, Samsung has announced an alliance with Ticketmaster too. The post Ticketmaster signs deal to sell tickets through Samsung’s Bixby appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Tensions are rising ahead of the crucial European Parliament vote in September on copyright-reform legislation. A group of British music industry bodies are lobbying together to persuade MEPs to vote to reform the way safe harbour works in Europe, under the banner of #LoveMusic. The post UK music industry ups #LoveMusic Euro lobbying effort appeared […]

The post Country Profile – Nigeria 2018 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We’ve thought for a while that there’s potential for more partnerships between the music and esports (competitive gaming) worlds. Now Universal Music Group and esports firm ESL are testing the waters. The companies are launching a joint-venture label, which will sign artists and promote their music across ESL’s esports tournaments and channels. That will include […]

Netflix is testing changes to the way it charges iOS users for its monthly subscriptions – and that’s a move that will be of intense interest to the music-streaming world in the coming days and weeks. TechCrunch has the details, reporting that Netflix is testing a new subscription method in 33 countries where, instead of […]

Virtual-reality music startup MelodyVR launched its app commercially in the US and UK on 1 May, then in eight more European countries on 26 June. So its just-published figures for the first half of 2018 – revenues of just £6.8k included – aren’t a reflection of where the company hopes to be as its app rolls […]

Music-streaming service Napster is on track to record a net profit in 2018, despite its revenues having dropped by nearly 28% since the company’s peak in 2016. Napster recorded net profits of $4.4m and $2.1m respectively in the first two quarters of this year, although its $76.5m revenues for the first half of 2018 compare […]

The voting process is underway in the SXSW 2019 PanelPicker, where the public gets to vote on which session ideas should be programmed at the Austin conference next March. As ever, there are plenty of music sessions being pitched, so I’ve spent some time today reading through them on the PanelPicker website, to come up […]

Nicki Minaj isn’t happy with Spotify at all. But this isn’t an argument about royalties: it’s about her new album ‘Queen’ only getting to number two in the US chart in its week of release, with Travis Scott’s ‘Astroworld’ holding on to the top spot. According to Billboard, Scott’s album recorded 205k equivalent-album units last week […]

There has been a lot of bellyaching, handwringing and bluster spoken about Spotify recently doing direct deals with artists. Is it a stealth move by Spotify to cut out labels entirely? If it is, it’s the biggest kamikaze play in history. Is it a tactical bartering chip for when Spotify has to renew its licensing […]

The post Sandbox 207: Pre-Saves, Apple Music for Artists, Jory Boy and more appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

It’s not going to surprise anyone that in the latest totting up of smart speaker shipments Amazon’s Echo is leading the pack. The latest numbers come from Strategy Analytics, looking at the smart speaker market globally in Q2 2018. The headline figures are that Amazon shipped 4.8m speakers in Q2, giving it a 41% market […]

[The following is a comment piece by Gregor Pryor, co-chair of the Entertainment & Media Group at legal firm Reed Smith.] So Jaden Smith released his (remix) album solely on Instagram. It’s a typically obtuse promotional move from Smith, a pop star who once tweeted that “Instagram is not the answer”. Perhaps the release of […]

The latest forecast from eMarketer claims that a sharp growth in adoption of Spotify and a slowdown in the adoption of Pandora will see the former overtake the latter in the US within the next five years. The research company suggests that Pandora will have 75.9m users this year compared to 58.4m for Spotify (split […]

You will hopefully have seen our news alert yesterday on the news that Ticketmaster is decommissioning its two secondary ticketing sites in Europe. From October, GET ME IN! and Seatwave will be replaced by a new fan-to-fan ticket exchange platform that will not permit tickets to be sold for more than face value. The move […]

Lead: Affiliate marketing in music used to mean taking a few pennies from download sales that you drove on iTunes or CDs that you pushed on Amazon. But with Apple Music offering significant bounties for driving subscriptions – one factor behind its reported overtaking of paying Spotify users in the US – the stakes have […]

  It is not quite picking favourites between Spotify and Apple Music, especially when it has equity in the former, but Universal Music Group has certainly been getting a lot closer with Apple Music in recent months. Its latest move is around classical, a genre that has been dramatically underserved by streaming to date. As […]

Music IS social, and it always has been. We talk (and argue!) about it; we watch concerts together; go clubbing together; experience it as a communal soundtrack for birthday parties and religious worship and much, much more… Any over-confident tech startup promising to ‘make music social’ is drunk on their own disruption. But of course, […]

Spotify has made its latest move in its battle with Apple, striking a partnership with the latter company’s fiercest rival in the smartphone space: Samsung. Spotify is now the “go-to music service provider” for Samsung, across its various devices, from smartphones and TVs to smart speakers. “Users can get excited about Spotify becoming part of […]

Universal Music’s Republic Records has announced the latest digital milestone for Drake: he’s “the first artist to surpass 50 billion streams across all global streaming platforms”. The news comes just a month after his latest album ‘Scorpion’ became the first album to rack up more than one billion streams in a single week. “Additional details […]

The post Country Profile – Mexico 2018 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Tyler Blevins (aka Ninja) is the gamer who’s been attracting big audiences on Twitch and YouTube alike with his videos playing the game Fortnite. Oh, and he’s also the chap who helped Drake and Marshmello clamber on to this particular bandwagon earlier this year, playing the game with them online and breaking Twitch viewing records […]

A blockchain-ready music distributor? But of course: it’s 2018 after all. The platform in question will be called Muso when it launches by early 2019, and it’s the work of a startup based in Malaysia called Thenexus. “Low costs and no annual fees for bands, artists and producers. Over 300+ stores. Worldwide digital music distribution,” pitches […]

Zillow is the website whose features start with providing an estimate for the value of your house, to help you gauge whether to sell or rent it out (which the site can also help with). Now music firm Royalty Exchange has launched an app for songwriters that it’s pitching as ‘the Zillow for royalties’. That’s “a free […]

It’s been clear for some time that in terms of music subscribers, Amazon is now the third player globally behind Spotify and Apple Music. Could it have vaulted Apple Music into second place in the UK however? That’s the conclusion of the latest report from research firm Kantar Worldpanel as reported by Music Week. Its Entertainment Retail […]

The music industry is intensely interested in the growth of the market for smart speaker devices: Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other speakers controlled via voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri respectively. Research firms are also interested in this market, putting out regular estimates of how well these devices are selling […]

The music industry is intensely interested in the growth of the market for smart speaker devices: Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other speakers controlled via voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri respectively. Research firms are also interested in this market, putting out regular estimates of how well these devices are selling […]

Peace appears to have broken out after a heated row involving collecting societies and songwriting bodies in the US, over the Music Modernization Act (MMA). Songwriter bodies SONA and NSAI had strongly criticised Blackstone, owner of SESAC and the Harry Fox Agency, for what they perceived as an attempt to derail the legislation as it […]

‘Is Deezer really worth a billion dollars?’ asked one headline yesterday, as the streaming service announced a new funding round of €160m (around $185m) from new and existing investors. Well, is Deezer worth ‘unicorn’ status? Taking Spotify as the base for some super-rough calculations, the latter service has 180 million active users, and a current […]

Social music app Musical.ly is being shut down by its owner Beijing Bytedance Technology Co, which plans to merge the app’s community with one of its other apps, TikTok. Bytedance bought Musical.ly for more than $800m in November 2017, after the latter app had grown to more than 100 million users – mostly in the west. […]

Music for relaxation has quietly (well, it wouldn’t be loudly…) become one of the big playlist genres on music-streaming services. Now Universal Music Group is hoping to capitalise by launching a playlist called Peaceful Music. For now, it’s only available on one streaming service: Apple Music. Universal says that the playlist has been “co-created” with […]

In this issue we look at how whole new disciplines and skill sets are changing the power balance in the music industry. Jobs that didn’t exist even a few years ago are now so important that those who have perfected them will decide the future shape of the business – from data scientists to playlist […]

Apple’s quarterly financial results are always the trigger for a new round of figures on the global smartphone market, and such was the case yesterday. Research firms IDC and Strategy Analytics agree on the key trend: smartphone shipments are down slightly year-on-year. IDC claimed a fall of 1.8% to 342m smartphone units shipped in the second quarter […]

We reported earlier this year, somewhat sceptically, on digital-music service eMusic’s plans for a blockchain-powered relaunch. Now the company has given more details about how much money it’s planning to raise to fund its pivot to a ‘decentralised music distribution and royalty management system’. eMusic says that it’s shooting for $70m in its token sale, which […]

Spotify already has a pretty close relationship with Google for integration into its Google Home family of smart speakers. Now the companies are collaborating on one of the most well-used apps on Android devices: its clock app. “Starting today, you’ll be able to wake up to your favourite music on Spotify with the Google Clock […]

Socan is getting its wallet out again: this time the collecting society has closed its acquisition of fellow Canadian organisation Sodrac (the Society for Reproduction Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers). Socan is bullish about what the deal means for creators. “For the first time in Canada, a single organisation – Socan – will be […]

Could the world’s biggest social network have plans to park its tanks on the X Factor and The Voice’s lawns? Researcher Jane Manchun Wong has uncovered what may be plans for a new Facebook feature called ‘Talent Show’ by digging around in the code of its app. “Wong has discovered an interface that allow users […]

British artist Stormzy turned 25 last week, and celebrated with a birthday party on the island of Menorca. And, this being 2018, he celebrated by teaming up with Spotify to take some of his fans along. The streaming service identified the grime star’s top streamers in the UK on its premium tier and invited them […]

One of the earliest blockchain-music startups, Dot Blockchain, has a new partnership this week. It’s working with payments and metadata firm Exactuals on a partnership that the pair say is “ensuring both company’s clients’ song data is clean, correct, and up-to-date and synchronised properly in conjunction with registering the datasets to dotBC’s blockchain solution”. That […]

US company SoundExchange has published its latest quarterly figures, and they show strong growth in its payouts to artists and labels. The company paid out $208.7m in the second quarter of this year, up 17.5% year-on-year. That growth is also reflected in SoundExchange’s figures for the first half of 2018, with distributions up 17.4% to $398.6m, […]

A weekly playlist personalised to each individual user of a streaming service? Where on earth could iHeartRadio have got that idea? Okay, so the ‘Discover Weekly’ format is now almost a standard feature for streaming, with the US radio-streaming service the latest to join the hyper-personal bandwagon. To be specific, iHeartRadio’s new Your Weekly Mixtape […]

Vivendi published its latest quarterly financial results yesterday, including figures for Universal Music Group. And UMG’s parent company also provided an update on its plans for the major label, which will now involve selling up to 50% of the company to one or more strategic partners, having ruled out an initial public offering (IPO). Figures first: Universal […]

Spotify’s global head of creator services Troy Carter is leaving the company in September, although he will be taking up an advisory role for the music-streaming service after he departs.  Music Ally understands that Spotify’s global head of shows and editorial, Nick Holmstén, will be assuming Carter’s duties in addition to his existing job, reporting […]

Lead: There are 400m people using Instagram Stories every day and musicians are among the heaviest lifters here. Until recently, however, it was a curiously music-free set up; but new licensing deals with parent company Facebook  have seen audio being incorporated into posts. This is, in part, a move by the photo-sharing app to hold existing […]

“It’s something that’s struck me for years working in this industry: people just don’t know how to talk to artists about the business in the artist’s language!” That’s something that Zoë Gholson has worked hard on since 2009, when she joined music-streaming Mog as its marketing, social media and community manager. Since then, corporate acquisitions […]

France is the latest major market to publish its recorded music sales numbers for the first half of 2018, with the headline news being that on-demand streaming grew 39% from the opening six months of 2017 and now makes up 56% of the total market. Recorded music trade body SNEP reports that there were 27bn […]

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has taken pains to reassure labels that the company’s direct-licensing deals with independent artists should not be seen as a threat to labels, tying it back to Spotify’s ‘two-sided marketplace’ strategy. “As a platform, we’ve always licensed music from rightsholders both large and small, and we will continue to license music […]

Spotify has just published its financial results for the second quarter of 2018. The music-streaming service ended June with 180 million monthly active users, including 83 million subscribers. Those figures were up 30.4% and 40.7% respectively year-on-year, and up 5.9% and 10.7% respectively quarter-on-quarter. Spotify generated revenues of €1.27bn (around $1.49bn) in Q2 this year, […]

“There are three reasons I decided to learn Chinese,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a Chinese audience (in Mandarin) back in October 2014. “The first, my wife is Chinese. Her grandmother can only speak Chinese. When I told her in Chinese I was going to marry Priscilla, she was very shocked. Then I want to study Chinese […]

Amazon’s live-video platform Twitch wants to help people build audiences on their channels. It has just launched a site called Twitch Creator Camp, taking a leaf out of YouTube’s playbook (or, indeed, its actual ‘Playbook’ initiative of yore.) In Twitch’s case, the new site is billed as a place “where streamers can get the information they […]

BitTorrent (the company) has a new owner: blockchain firm Tron, which bills itself as “the world’s largest decentralised ecosystem”. BitTorrent confirmed the acquisition on its site, noting that its products have more than 100 million active users worldwide, and that it will now “provide robust support for Tron’s global business development and partnerships”. Variety cites financial filings suggesting […]

‘Is the album dead?’ has been a tiresome hot-take that keeps getting reheated by thinkpiece-writers since the heyday of Apple’s iTunes Store. The current streaming dynamics are only making it pop up more often. British industry bodies ERA and the BPI hope it isn’t dead though: they’ve teamed up with broadcaster the BBC for an […]

Spotify has made it clear that India is one of its key priorities for global expansion, post going public. Yet reports that some of its rightsholder partners are holding off on the necessary licensing agreements won’t go away. This time it’s the Financial Times claiming that “the large record labels that control the music industry have not […]

“Up to this point, if you were to summarise the industry’s marketing message around hi-res music, it’s ‘will you pay more for better sound quality?’ That’s a losing marketing message.” This may not be a surprising thing to say, until you realise who’s saying it: Mike Jbara, chief executive of MQA, the British technology company […]

AWAL serves a growing roster of emerging talent and established independent artists from all over the world and we are now expanding our London based UK team to include a new Senior Mechanical Assistant, reporting to the Royalty Manager. Supporting the Mechanical Licensing & Royalty Administration process, you will work across all mechanical licensing tasks […]

Spotify, Sonos and now Eventbrite: music-related companies are going public at a rate of knots in 2018. According to the Wall Street Journal, ticketing firm Eventbrite has filed confidentially for an IPO to take place later this year, working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Co on the offering. The confidential nature of the filing […]

Universal Music Group’s head of royalties Cindy Oliver has been talking about the major label’s moves towards accounting to artists on a monthly, rather than a quarterly or semi-annual basis. This is based on the label group’s ‘Global Clearinghouse’ initiative, which went live earlier this month. “Since we’ll have monthly ingestion and reporting of financial […]

And *that* is certainly a headline we couldn’t have envisaged writing when this bulletin started life 15 years ago, folks… Spotify probably thought it was having some light-hearted fun when it published a blog post called Five Artists That Can Help Us Decipher The Curious Language of Emoji last week. But a tweet promoting the piece saw the streaming […]

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has revealed a new milestone for the service: 1.9 billion logged-in users a month, up from 1.5 billion in June 2017. Wojcicki published the figure in a blog post giving YouTube channel-owners an update on its ‘five creator priorities’ in 2018, with another stat noting that “on average, users now watch over 180 […]

More than a decade ago, music games were something the music industry was excited about. Guitar Hero, Rock Band and SingStar had the benefit of not just being console games built entirely around music; they also had multiple iterations and a secondary revenue source by offering in-game purchasing of extra tracks to keep them fresh. […]

In 2011, PIAS Group’s head of digital marketing Darren Hemmings left to set up his own consultancy, Motive Unknown. Originally conceived as a solo freelance affair, seven years on the company has expanded to six people, working with a range of artist, label and non-music clients. Hemmings talked to Music Ally about how music marketing […]

Spotify has added a new feature to its back-end: the ability for artists and labels to submit unreleased songs for “playlist consideration” by its in-house team of curators. The feature goes live today in beta, as part of the company’s Spotify for Artists and Spotify Analytics tools. Spotify says that any artist, label, manager or […]

The post Country Profile – Philippines 2018 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The post Country Profile – Chile 2018 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

As part of Kobalt’s significant expansion of AWAL – our recorded music division – the Integrations Manager will support the growing operations team by ensuring accurate and timely review and cleanse of all Incoming catalogue/label distribution deal releases for digital and physical distribution. Reporting to the Senior Director of Release Management, the team is responsible […]

Forbes has published its annual ‘Celebrity 100’ list of the highest-paid entertainers in the world, with many headlines (and inevitable internet arguments) focusing on its claim that Kylie Jenner is set to be “the youngest ever self-made billionaire”. There are a fair few musicians in the list though, including three in the top 10. Sixth-ranked U2 are […]

Merchandise-management firm Merch Cat has launched a new app, Merch Cat Fan, which it hopes will drive sales of merchandise around live shows – with less queuing involved for fans. The idea is that fans will browse and buy merchandise on their smartphones using the app, then pick it up at shows or have it […]

Having created the most talked-about music video of 2018 with ‘This Is America’, Childish Gambino is also getting up to some inventive stuff with Snapchat. Gambino and RCA Records worked with Snap to create a new Snapchat lens based on his song ‘Summertime Magic’, which will be geofenced to 23 cities – starting with Los […]

The Financial Times has a good piece on video-streaming service Netflix’s ambitions in India where it’s starting to invest more money in original shows and films. It quotes CEO Reed Hastings speaking at a Delhi conference, saying “Even we couldn’t have predicted the last two years of Indian internet growth” and adding that in terms of Netflix […]

Amazon is about to fire the starting trigger on its annual Prime Day of shopping deals, and research firm eMarketer has put out some new analysis of the company’s place in the US online-retail sector to accompany it. Its analysts reckon that Amazon will do $258.22bn of US retail sales this year, accounting for 49.1% of all […]

The video for Maroon 5’s single ‘Sugar’ has been popular on YouTube, with nearly 2.7bn views so far for the band’s exploits crashing wedding receptions. YouTube liked it so much, it’s now commissioned an entire series based on the video’s concept. w‘Sugar’ will be an eight-episode show behind the YouTube Premium paywall, executive-produced by Maroon 5 frontman […]

Very few details are available on this, but an intriguing new startup popped up on our AngelList feed this morning. It’s called Streamative, and its CEO is Ben Kweller. Yes, musician Ben Kweller, or as his profile on the investment site puts it: “Acclaimed recording artist and songwriter for 20+ years. Huge advocate for artists and […]

Given the growth of the recorded-music market overall, it’s hard to make apocalyptic predictions about how specific forms of piracy will damage the industry. Not that rightsholders haven’t been tempted to do that with ‘stream-ripping’, with several reports and industry-body announcements proclaiming that tools for turning YouTube streams into downloads are the new menace. The […]

Startup Stashimi has built a platform for artist messaging bots, working with artists including G-Eazy, Zedd, Kelly Clarkson and Blake Shelton. The company says it has more than 100 artists using its tool to create bots for Facebook Messenger, and this week it’s published some figures for two of them: G-Eazy and Zedd. Stashimi worked with G-Eazy’s […]

Austin-based startup Blink Identity has raised a $1.5m seed-funding round from investors including Live Nation, Techstars and Sinai Ventures. The company was part of this year’s cohort of Techstars Music startups. Its focus is on ‘facial recognition at scale’ with an emphasis currently on live events: identifying people as they walk past its scanners, for example to […]

Thus far, the music aspects for smart speakers have focused on voice-control features, rather than the quality of the audio. Deezer is hoping to drum up more subscribers for its ‘high-fidelity’ Deezer HiFi tier from owners of Google Home smart speakers. It’s offering a deal for Google Home users in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and Germany […]

Artist and entrepreneur Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs has given an interview outlining his frustration with the music industry’s approach to supporting black executives. “You have these record companies that are making so much money off our culture, our art form, but they’re not investing or even believing in us,” he told Variety. “For all the billions of […]

In the west, secondary-ticketing platforms are increasingly controversial in terms of their role within the music industry. In China, though, one of the most popular sites has just raised a significant funding round.  Moretickets’ Series C round was worth $60m, led by investment firm TPG Growth – last covered here in January when it bought […]

Universal Music Group is launching a new division focusing on French-speaking African countries, based in Côte d’Ivoire. It will be led by industry veteran Moussa Soumbounou, who’ll report in to Universal Music France CEO Olivier Nusse. Cameroon, Congo, Mali, Senegal and Togo will be among the countries falling under the new division’s wing, with plans […]

A story about Amanda Palmer crowdfunding leading the Music Ally Bulletin? Today’s email is brought to you by 2012… But no: Palmer continues to be one of the most successful crowdfunders in the music world, but nowadays she’s operating on fan-funding platform Patreon rather than Kickstarter. We’ve reported before on Palmer’s Patreon community: she has 11,115 […]

Lead: In an age of constant digital distractions, sometimes it is better to play the short game. We trace the rise of the micro ad and how it is being tailored to stand out when users are rapidly hopping and grazing across a variety of platforms. Can the “three-second rule” help advertising and marketing make its impact felt in a time of constant distractions? We look […]

Tied to the publication of the new report from British industry bodies ERA and BPI (Magic Numbers: How Can Data & Analytics Really Help The Music Industry?) and written by Music Ally, an afternoon of presentations and panel discussion on the current state of music analytics / data and their future was held at the […]

Tru Thoughts is looking to hire a Digital Assistant to work in-house at our office in Brighton. The candidate should be confident and organized, with a demonstrable passion for the label’s music (and a love of being by the sea). This role will consist of working alongside Project Managers and the Press Department to plan and execute successful campaigns; with a particular […]

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced details of its latest use for AI – a deep-learning system capable of isolating the individual instruments used in a music video. “The system, which is ‘self-supervised,’ doesn’t require any human annotations on what the instruments are or what they sound like,” explained MIT. “Trained on over 60 […]

Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez are among the musicians with the largest followings on social networks – but also those with the greatest number of impersonators. That’s according to the New York Times, which commissioned a company called Social Imposter to research the number of people pretending to be one of the top 10 accounts […]

This is where we’re at in the evolution of music-streaming: a single album has been streamed more than 1bn times in its first week after release. That album, of course, is Drake’s ‘Scorpion’, with label Republic Records having confirmed the figure to The Verge, as well as the artist himself having posted about it. “New era. […]

It’s now one day until a crucial vote in the European Parliament on the EU’s draft Copyright Directive, and music bodies are leading the charge of creative industries in urging politicians to support the proposed legislation – and specifically its Article 13, which focuses on the obligations of online platforms around copyrighted content being uploaded […]

It’s now one day until a crucial vote in the European Parliament on the EU’s draft Copyright Directive, and music bodies are leading the charge of creative industries in urging politicians to support the proposed legislation – and specifically its Article 13, which focuses on the obligations of online platforms around copyrighted content being uploaded […]

Spanish collecting society SGAE is facing a big problem in early 2019: the potential for some of the world’s biggest publishers to take their catalogues elsewhere. Warner/Chappell, Peermusic, Sony/ATV, Universal Publishing and BMG have given SGAE six months’ notice of their intention to not renew their contracts with the society, according to reports in the Spanish media. […]

Warner Music Group has announced a new partnership, with Sony Pictures subsidiary Internet Media Services (IMS), which the label hopes will boost its advertising revenues in some under-monetised parts of the world. IMS will be managing the ad inventory for WMG’s YouTube channels in Russia, Poland, Spain, Portugal, and all of Latin America bar Brazil. […]

Amazon’s annual ‘Prime Day’ has become a date to ring in the diaries of anyone who likes bargain-hunting online. This year’s starts on 16 July, and the reason we say ‘starts’ is because it’ll actually last for 36 hours rather than a single day. What’s new this year, for Amazon in the UK, is a real-world […]

The latest element in artist Years & Years’ campaign for their new album ‘Palo Santo’ is a set of augmented-reality ‘effects’ for Facebook’s Camera feature. Fans using the camera to record video selfies can trigger one of 11 different effects based on the album’s artwork – with the visuals overlaid as they film their clips. According […]

AWAL serves a growing roster of emerging talent and established independent artists from all over the world and we are now expanding our UK Marketing team to include a new Project Manager, reporting to the Senior Director of Marketing and Project Management. Responsible for managing relationships and marketing initiatives with a wide range of clients, […]

“Drake’s new album Scorpion is currently being streamed over 10 million times per hour,” chirped Spotify’s official Twitter account on Friday. There hasn’t been an updated-stats tweet since, which is possibly explained by the announcement on the Twitter feed of Spotify’s greatest rival. “#Scorpion x Apple Music. The most streams in a single day, on any streaming […]

Instagram has announced its latest milestone tonight: more than 400 million people are using its ‘stories’ feature every day to share photos and video clips on an ephemeral basis. There’s also a new feature for those people to play with: music. Instagrammers can now add music to their stories, thanks to Facebook’s recent set of […]

Lead: Just 18 months ago, pre-saves were a breath of fresh air for marketers struggling to stand above the cattle run of global releases on a Friday. But as they become ubiquitous, it is almost back to square one with everyone finding themselves lost again in the tumult. We look at what needs to be done […]

Artist Imogen Heap is heading off on a world tour soon under her ‘Mycelia’ banner – you may remember us reporting on the plans from her launch event in December – and she’s been testing a new tool to let fans know about it. Heap worked with Sendmate, the messaging tool recently launched by startup Record Bird, to […]

Hot on the heels of launching its longform-video section IGTV, Instagram has published a ‘Creator Handbook’ to provide tips and recommendations for anyone creating video for the platform. “Think of this guide as a way to get started capturing vertical video content, whatever your camera,” is how the guide is pitched to creators of all stripes, musicians […]

Peloton is one of the highly-valued startups trying to apply technology to the area of fitness, with livestreamed classes that people can pedal along with at home on the company’s customised exercise-bike and app. In May 2017, its last funding round ($325m) valued the company at $1.25bn, making it the latest Silicon Valley ‘unicorn’. Anyway, it’s […]

Ticketmaster UK is in hot water this week after revealing that a data breach earlier this year could have affected a number of its customers. The breach affects customers who bought tickets between February and 23 June, with Ticketmaster saying that customers’ personal information AND payment details may have been compromised. The biggest problem, as […]

We’ve heard at several conferences recently that Chinese streaming service NetEase Cloud Music might be a happier hunting ground for western artists than rival services operated by Tencent Music. Now NetEase is talking about some of the success stories to reinforce that view. More than 30% of activity on its service – including streams but […]

“Music data, I think, is really unique. We really believe that we can extract unique insights based on how you stream. You can understand habits. You can understand moods, mindsets, tastes. And you can start to predict behaviour.” Danielle Lee is Spotify’s global head of partner solutions, charged with helping big brands tap in to […]

AWAL serves a growing roster of emerging talent and already established independent artists from all over the world. As the AWAL community continues to grow, we’re looking for someone to help support these labels and artists. We’re very passionate about music of course and working knowledge of the industry is crucial. You also need to […]

As part of Kobalt’s significant expansion of AWAL – Kobalt’s recorded-music division, the Coordinator will support the growing global Release Management team by ensuring accurate and timely build of all AWAL Recordings releases for digital and physical distribution. Reporting to the Senior Director of Release Management, the Coordinator will assist all our Release Managers based […]

Since 2016, renowned British record producer Steve Lillywhite has been running Jagonya Music & Sport, a company that places music in Indonesia’s Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. KFC Indonesia sells around 600,000 CDs a month, making it a huge player in the Indonesia music industry. Music Ally spoke to him to find out more about this […]

Virtual-reality music app MelodyVR is expanding beyond its initial launch markets of the UK and US. As of tomorrow (26 June) it will also be available in France, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Greece, Austria and Belgium – mirroring the European rollout of Facebook’s Oculus Go VR headset. In an announcement to the markets this morning, […]

The latest study of Spotify claims that placement on the streaming service’s Today’s Top Hits playlist can be worth between $116k and $163k to an artist. The study was carried out by Luis Aguiar and Joel Waldfogel of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some highlights: “Appearing on Today’s Top Hits, a […]

It may face tough competition from Instagram, but Snapchat remains a vibrant platform for social expression, while the app that kickstarted the ‘stories’ phenomenon continues to be a development ground for new video formats. No wonder a number of labels and other music companies want to explore its potential as a marketing platform, although many […]

The post Country Profile – Indonesia 2018 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

As the streaming landscape is continuing to grow and change, AWAL is looking for a personable as well as analytical Digital Account Manager to join our Global Digital Accounts team. This amazing opportunity will allow you to work with an incredibly diverse roster of up and coming as well as established acts, helping to drive […]

This year’s Cannes Lions conference has featured a succession of artists talking about their creative processes and the wider culture. After earlier sessions featuring Vic Mensa and Jax Jones, this afternoon’s program closed with St. Vincent, on a panel about live music hosted by Live Nation. Live Nation’s global president of media and sponsorship Russell […]

Universal Music Group’s global head of new business Olivier Robert-Murphy was joined by artist Jax Jones at the Cannes Lions conference today, for a session titled ‘Re-humanising the Creative Process’ focused on how brands and artists can collaborate. The post Jax Jones: ‘Creativity is a constant exercise. It’s a muscle that you train’ appeared first […]

Streaming has helped to make hip-hop the most popular recorded-music genre in the US, according to industry-tracker Nielsen. A panel at the Cannes Lions conference today explored what this means for brands, who are mulling how best to work with established and emerging artists in the field. Artist and producer Vic Mensa was joined by […]

LDH – it stands for Love + Dream + Happiness, since you ask – is a Japanese creative artist management group, which has been striking some interesting deals with brands. At the Cannes Lions conference today, some of its key figures – including artists Afrojack and Verbal as well as chief creative officer ‘Hiro’ and […]

It is a rich and exciting time for tech startups in music – with new services arriving regularly and promising to do all manner of thrilling new things. While only a handful of them will ever “make” it, it’s still a full-time job just keeping up to date with the runners and riders. But that […]

Whenever Music Ally has to define esports for someone who hasn’t followed the sector, we tend to say it’s ‘competitive gaming with an audience’, citing tournaments using games from League of Legends to FIFA, and the tens of millions of people who watch them online on platforms from Twitch to YouTube. One thing we’ve picked […]

Artist and producer Labrinth is preparing to release his second studio album. Today he talked about some of the creative processes behind the record, in a Cannes Lions conference session hosted by Sony Music. The post Labrinth talks creativity and music: ‘You have to be calm amongst the storm’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: […]

When Spotify launched its ‘I’m With The Banned’ campaign in July 2017, it was a surprising sign that the music-streaming service was willing to take political stands – in this case, against the Trump administration’s efforts to introduce a travel ban covering six predominantly-Muslim countries. Spotify’s chief marketing officer Seth Farbman hosted a panel at […]

Fresh from a series of media interviews to promote the launch of YouTube Music Premium – including a chat with Music Ally – YouTube’s global head of music Lyor Cohen gave a keynote speech at the Cannes Lions conference today. The post Lyor Cohen on YouTube and the music biz: ‘We have a new love […]

“This is about where we are – not we, YouTube, but where the industry is – and how do we move forward? And to me that’s the key: how do we elegantly move forward as we are transitioning from 18 years of decline, where artist development may have gone a little thin?” Lyor Cohen was fresh off […]

YouTube Music Premium, the new subscription tier for Google’s video service, is launching fully in 17 countries today, including 12 additional markets to the five that were announced in May. The UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Canada, Norway, Ireland, Finland, Norway and Sweden are among the countries joining the US, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico […]

Role / Title: Sales, Marketing & PR Manager Reporting to: Managing Director Managing: Sales Co-ordinator, Marketing Assistant, Digital Marketing Co-ordinator Contract: Full-time Location: London (two thirds) and Colchester (one third), UK Salary: Depending on experience OVERVIEW Chandos Records is one of the world’s premier classical music record companies, best known for its groundbreaking search for neglected musical […]

Lead: The album exclusive is pretty much dead. But in its place has come the growing demand from DSPs for bespoke and unique content. They all want to be serviced with something their rivals don’t have – but this is a huge time (and cost) drain on artists and labels. On top of this are […]

US Senate and House committees recently sent Facebook more than 2,000 questions about how it operates its business, as part of the fallout from the recent Cambridge Analytics revelations. Overnight, the social network provided its answers, with the full document well worth a read (alright: a scan, if you’re busy). One answer is particularly interesting: Facebook making […]

Football’s World Cup kicks off later this week, with 32 countries hoping for glory (or, in England’s case, hoping at least for something better than abject embarrassment and penalties ineptitude). Deezer is on the bandwagon, launching a promotion called ‘Football Fever’ with playlists curated by local artists in each of the 32 participating nations. Kasabian are at […]

Musical VR startup TheWaveVR has revealed its latest partnership with an artist: electronica group The Glitch Mob. It’s turning their album ‘See Without Eyes’ into… well, something you see with your eyes. “A VR odyssey of shifting dreamscapes choreographed to a 20-minute custom mix of the album” as the startup puts it, which will be […]

Happy 120th birthday, classical-music label Deutsche Grammophon. The celebrations will include an interesting partnership with Google Arts & Culture to digitise a stash of rediscovered and previously-unreleased tracks from the label’s archives. The recordings were made from the early 1900s, and include “a reading from one of his novels by iconic Russian author Leo Tolstoy, […]

Could peace and love be returning to the US digital-music ecosystem? Don’t answer that question… But there is a new rapprochement of sorts in the relationship between satellite-radio firm Sirius XM and royalty-collector SoundExchange. Sirius XM has agreed to pay SoundExchange a lump sum of $150m to settle a pair of lawsuits that had accused […]

Independent music company Marathon Artists launched its LABs accelerator in 2016, bringing together a group of six music/tech startups to work with its label, management and publishing arms, as well as a group of external mentors. This year, LABs has returned, with partners including Domino, Audiotube, Tileyard Studios and Music Ally, and a theme of […]

How can independent labels make the most of disruptive new technologies, from blockchain and AI to virtual and augmented reality? A session at the Midem conference last week explored the issue. The panel included Jason Reed, head of digital at Domino; Becky Brook, business development consultant at Jaak; and Luke Dzierzek, CEO at Scored. The […]

The global ‘over-the-top’ video market will grow from $22.6bn in 2018 to $30.6bn in 2022, according to the latest prediction from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Its Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2018-2022 report suggests that 79.6% of OTT revenues – over-the-top means video delivered outside the traditional cable/satellite/terrestrial broadcasting networks – last year came from subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services […]

Kanye West’s listening events in Brooklyn, Miami and Chicago for his new album ‘Ye’ were understandably focused on the music. But there was a tech aspect too: West’s team and marketing agency 1AM worked with British ticketing firm Dice on the events, making tickets available through its app. 1AM’s Julieanna Goddard tweeted about the plans for the […]

The Midem 2018 conference only finished on Friday, but organiser Reed Midem has already announced one of the key planks in next year’s event: the Midem Music Awards. The twist: “Entirely based on platform-enabled fan data and verified by an independent adjudicator, this innovative concept will introduce a completely new way to measure and reward […]

Indian music and film company Saregama has been talking about the strong growth it’s seeing from audio music-streaming services, as well as from YouTube. By the end of 2017, the company’s music catalogue was generating 724m quarterly streams on audio services like Saavn, Gaana and Wynk Music according to local site Medianama. That’s up from 503m […]

We reported last week on Snapchat parent company Snap, Inc’s pitch to the music industry for the power of its AR lenses. The day after its Midem keynote, the company unveiled a new partnership in a different area relevant to our industry: ticketing. Snap is working with SeatGeek on a feature that will see musicians and sports […]

This story may sound somewhat parochial, but bear with us. Amazon has paid an undisclosed amount for the rights to stream 20 English Premier League (football) matches for each of the three seasons starting in 2019. The games will be streamed to fans as part of the Amazon Prime Video service in the UK – this isn’t […]

If you browse the Apple Music app this morning, you’ll notice it has quietly added a pre-save mechanic for upcoming albums. Except they are not called pre-saves; they’re termed “pre-adds”. You do, however, have to do a little bit of digging to find it. Tap on the “Browse” tab and scroll down – all the […]

We’re looking for an experienced Content Operations Manager to join the expanding AWAL team. Reporting to the Senior Director, Digital Operations, the successful candidate will be responsible for leading the global Content Operations function, ensuring the continued quality of our release deliveries and maintaining excellent relationships with priority partners. Deep expertise with digital music metadata […]

We’re looking for a Digital Supply Chain Coordinator to join the close-knit and rapidly growing AWAL team supporting the Digital Supply Chain Managers in their day to day work. Your role will help ensure the trains run on time, acting as a key interface between the global business and our partners on release setup/rights issues […]

Mind State Vol 1 (out today – 8th June) is a new compilation from the drum & bass world, compiled and arranged by Ben Verse, former MC in Pendulum. Released by Getahead Records/AEI Media, it is designed to raise money for, an awareness of, Help Musicians UK (HMUK) and get the dance community to eradicate […]

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and YouTube may hog many of the streaming headlines, but Rhapsody International / Napster is still going as a global streaming service too. Its president and CEO Bill Patrizio outlined the company’s strategy, in a keynote session at the Midem conference today. He was interviewed by Midia Research MD Mark Mulligan. […]

Music manager and entrepreneur Scooter Braun was the biggest keynote draw of this year’s Midem conference, interviewed by Variety executive director Shirley Halperin. The post Scooter Braun: ‘It’s a youth-driven business: invest in each other’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The post Country Profile – Canada 2018 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

From man-heavy diversity statistics for music companies to fears that women artists are losing out in the recommendation algorithms of music-streaming services, there are a number of challenges facing the music industry around the gender gap. A panel at the Midem conference this morning explored some of them. Moderated by Vanessa Reed of PRS Foundation, […]

How is Snap, Inc working with artists and labels on music campaigns? The parent company of Snapchat hasn’t talked publicly often about its music strategy, but its VP of partnerships Ben Schwerin gave a keynote at the Midem conference in Cannes today, accompanied by Geffen Records president Neil Jacobsen. The pair were interviewed by Billboard […]

Concord Music Group has quietly become one of the most interesting rightsholders in the recordings, publishing and theatrical performance rights world. At the Midem conference in Cannes today, three of its executives – CEO Scott Pascucci, chief business development officer Steven Salm, and chief publishing executive Jake Wisely – talked about the company’s evolution so […]

20 music/tech startups are finalists in this year’s Midemlab contest at the Midem conference in Cannes. This afternoon’s last session saw the experiential technologies startups showing off their products and platforms. The judging panel included Danielle Kayembe, CEO at Greyfire Impact; Ismail Elshareef, SVP of fan experience and open platform at Ticketmaster; Marwan Elfitesse, startup […]

20 music/tech startups are finalists in this year’s Midemlab contest at the Midem conference in Cannes. This afternoon’s second session saw the marketing and data/analytics startups pitching their wares. The judging panel included Eleonore Oudea, venture capital associate at Kima Ventures; Kate Russell, technology journalist from the BBC; David Weiszfeld, CEO of Soundcharts; and Music […]

20 music/tech startups are finalists in this year’s Midemlab contest at the Midem conference in Cannes. This morning’s first session saw the music discovery and distribution startups showing off their products and platforms. The judging panel included Colleen Theis, COO at The Orchard; Christina Cassala; freelance business journalist; Scott Sellwood; head of commercial music publishing […]

20 music/tech startups are finalists in this year’s Midemlab contest at the Midem conference in Cannes. This morning’s first session saw the music creation and education startups pitching their wares. The judging panel included Joanna Kirk, MD of Starther and co-founder of Startup Sesame; Robb McDaniels, CEO of Beatport; Sirena Bergman, freelance journalist; Guillaume Quelet, […]

BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch was the closing keynote speaker for the first day of the Midem conference in Cannes today, and he stayed true to his reputation for plain-speaking about the established companies in the industry that he is trying to disrupt. The post BMG boss Hartwig Masuch: ‘Our ambition is that we are a […]

Africa isn’t one music market: it’s a collection of them. And most of them aren’t that well understood by the music industry elsewhere in the world. That’s why the day-long Midem African Forum is such an interesting strand at this year’s Midem conference in Cannes. Music Ally sat in on some of the main sessions […]

There’s an ignoble history of dodgy ‘brands and music’ sessions at industry conferences: long on ‘it’s not just about a big cheque’ and ‘it’s all about authenticity’ babble, but rather shorter on genuine insight. Happily, Citi’s global consumer CMO Jennifer Breithaupt swerved the platitudes in her keynote at the Midem conference in Cannes today, instead […]

At today’s Midem conference in Cannes, a pair of afternoon sessions at the event’s ‘Streaming Summit’ focused on some of the evolving trends around the music-streaming world. The first explored the question of whether streaming services are “the new A&Rs”, with a sparky (if, unfortunately, all-male) panel including Epidemic Sound CEO Oscar Hoglund; Playground Music […]

The UK recently got a new body to campaign in support of secondary ticketing: the Fair Ticketing Alliance. It’s thus in direct opposition to the FanFair Alliance, which campaigns against what it sees as abusive practices in the secondary market. Now one of the FTA’s co-founders, Scot Tobias of secondary service Worldwide Tickets, has been […]

British instrument-maker Roli has received new investment from tech giant Sony, through the latter’s VC arm Sony Innovation Fund. CEO Roland Lamb told Bloomberg that the deal is a “significant investment and relationship for us”. While Roli isn’t saying how much Sony invested, TechCrunch notes that before this deal, Roli was listed on investment site PitchBook as having raised […]

Position:  Digital Account Manager Location:  London, UK Reporting to: Director, UK Digital Sales The Orchard has an immediate opening for a digital sales specialist to manage key digital retail relationships in the UK.  Essential to this role is a solid understanding of the digital retail landscape as well as a core understanding of the digital […]

JAAK is a London-based startup building a new global network for intellectual property rights registration, management and monetisation, starting with the music industry. JAAK has been developing and testing KORD, a decentralised network protocol which enables stakeholders to record and communicate IP rights. JAAK’s first use of KORD will provide the music industry with a […]

Lead: In part two of our online and social media merchandise special, we go beyond Instagram to look at the wide variety of tools and platforms opening up here, how to best deploy them and where they can be used to make artist/fan relationships watertight. Technology, data, personalisation and lyrics are all helping change the […]

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Positiva Records – the label behind artists such as Reel 2 Reel, Spiller, Vengaboys, Alice Deejay, Shapeshifters, Paul van Dyk, David Guetta, Jonas Blue and Swedish House Mafia. It was originally set up by Nick Halkes and Dave Lambert in 1993 as part of EMI’s first serious move […]

In well-established hardware markets like smartphones, the main research firms tend to agree – more or less – on the main market-share figures. For smart speakers, it seems there is more room for disagreement, aided by the fact that the main players aren’t publishing many figures themselves. For example, check out research firm Canalys’ latest […]

When privacy campaigners express concerns about the rise of smart speakers, the suggestion that big-tech firms are ‘listening in’ (and, indeed, potentially recording) private conversations is often raised as a worry. A story yesterdayabout an Echo recording a conversation between a husband and wife and then sending the audio to someone in their contacts list will […]

Unsatisfied with the sound levels at a concert? A new startup called Peex says it’ll offer fans the chance to customise the audio in real-time. The company’s technology takes an audio feed from the soundboard at a concert, then separates it into five ‘stems’ (e.g. the different instruments) which are then transmitted to audience members, synchronised with […]

Soundation is one of the startups trying to help musicians of all levels make music online. The Swedish startup claims to have more than 75,000 monthly active users of its browser-based studio service, mainly in the US, and is one of the more established companies in the space having launched in 2009. Now Soundation has raised […]

The last few weeks has seen the term ‘de-playlisted’ used regularly by Music Ally, thanks to Spotify’s new policy on hateful conduct. Now it seems we may have to add ‘re-playlisted’ into the mix. Bloomberg claims that rapper XXXTentacion could be on his way back to Spotify’s programmed and algorithmic playlists in the future, even if fellow […]

Independent licensing agency Merlin is celebrating its tenth birthday by revealing that 2017 saw its highest number of new members since its first year of operation. The organisation has grown from a team of three when it launched in May 2008 to 21 staff now, servicing tens of thousands of independent labels. It also paid […]

The launch of the YouTube Music subscription service has sparked questions about what it all means for Vevo, which distributes music videos to YouTube while also running its own apps and website. Today, the company has answered that question: it will “phase out” its owned-and-operated mobile apps and site, and move forward as a pure […]

The post Country Profile – Israel 2018 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Having been digital holdouts for years, Def Leppard have taken to online with gusto in recent months. It’s the live arena where their next digital dalliance is happening, in part to promote the anniversary tour around 1987’s blockbusting ‘Hysteria’ album, but also to drive up the band’s total streams.  The Def Leppard Tour Book is an […]

Until recently, the idea of spotting emerging musicians through big data – analytics-driven A&R – was notable mainly for the ‘gut over data’ grumpiness it sparked on conference panels. However, things are heating up in this space: in March, Warner Music Group acquired a startup called Sodatone that does exactly this task, while UK firm […]

In March 2017, Music Ally reported on a new startup in Sweden called Amuse, which was billing itself as “the world’s first mobile record label”. It had an app through which unsigned artists could upload their music for distribution, with the company then monitoring the data to spot artists with traction, to get behind promotionally. Just […]

When we reported yesterday on Sony’s plans to up its stake in EMI Music Publishing, we noted that the deal would require regulatory approval before it could go through. Now independent body Impala has warned that this approval may be tough for Sony to secure. “The European Commission will want to avoid reinforcing the Sony/Universal duopoly, the […]

Musician Tom Gray of British band Gomez – currently firing up crowds on the 20th anniversary tour celebrating their ‘Bring It On’ album – has an idea for major labels about how to follow up their windfalls from Spotify’s public listing. In short: he thinks they should cancel the unrecouped debts of the legacy artists […]

The music industry has been abuzz with speculation about what, exactly, Facebook has planned for music beyond its first set of user-generated-content focused licensing deals. Few people have suggested that the social network’s agenda includes using artificial intelligence for “translating music across musical instruments, genres, and styles”. However, that’s exactly what a team within Facebook’s […]

We know Boiler Room for its DJ-set videos, although it has also published music documentaries online. Now it is spreading its wings further with the launch of a service called 4:3. We’ll let the announcement speak for itself: “4:3, is for a culturally connected audience, the Netflix of the underground. 4:3 aims to expand gateways […]

British blockchain startup Blockpool is best known to Music Ally readers for its recent partnership with Björk and One Little Indian, to reward fans who pre-ordered her new album by giving them cryptocurrency. Now it has announced a partnership with a company called OpSec, which could also have implications for music. It needs a bit […]

In early April, Music Ally was first to report on a new startup from ticketing firm Ticketfly’s co-founder Dan Teree. Codenamed Big Neon, it was slated to be a “highly scalable, mobile-centric event ticketing platform” using blockchain technology. Now the company has been officially announced, but with a new name – Tari – and a wider […]

Another day, another AI/music startup – this one hailing from Toronto and called OptimiseLab. It’s using the slogan ‘538 for music’ – a reference (we think) to well-known statistical-analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, run by data-journalist Nate Silver. “We are building patent pending AI technology to analyse, improve, and compose music,” explains OptimiseLab’s profile on investment site AngelList. “Our first […]

If you’re still not sure what the game Fortnite is all about, ask a passing 10 year-old. The action-shooter has become one of the biggest gaming crazes since Minecraft, with similar appeal to tween and teen gamers, as well as older players and Twitch / YouTube live-streamers. Now Fortnite’s publisher, Epic Games, is making a […]

Despa-WHO-to? K-Pop band BTS are the flavour of the month (again) on YouTube with their new single ‘Fake Love’. According to the video service, the official video did 35.9m views in its first 24 hours: the biggest such total in 2018 so far, and third in the all-time rankings for this particular metric (behind the 43.2m views […]

2017 was a big year for the music industry in China: according to the IFPI, last year it was one of the world’s 10 biggest recorded-music markets for the first time. Excitement around the growth of the music-streaming services run by tech companies like Tencent and NetEase is palpable within the western industry, but a […]

Steve Greenberg is certainly a music man with some pedigree. The renowned music executive and founder of S-Curve Records is also a Grammy-winning producer of hits for artists including Joss Stone, Hanson, Baha Men, Jonas Brothers, AJR and Andy Grammer. In his time he’s also been head of A&R at Mercury Records, president of Columbia […]

Virginie Berger has joined Belgian venture-capital fund LeanSquare as a venture partner, moving from pan-European licensing platform Armonia, where she served as CEO for the past two years. As well as being founder of Paris-based tech/media consultancy DBTH, Berger’s career has also included stints at Microsoft, NRJ, Omnicom and MySpace France. Her role at LeanSquare […]

After a lengthy beta-test period and a succession of licensing deals with music companies, VR music startup MelodyVR is preparing for its commercial launch. In an announcement this morning, the publicly-listed company revealed that it “intends to launch its flagship music product (The MelodyVR app) in the coming weeks”, including a version for Facebook’s upcoming […]

Yesterday was the deadline for all British companies with more than 250 employees to report their ‘gender pay gaps’ to the UK government’s Equalities Office. The definition of this being the difference between the average hourly earnings of men and women for each company. Each firm has reported their ‘mean’ gender pay gap (based on […]

“China was my hobby for the best part of 10 years: something which the company allowed me to run as a hobby on the side as long as I wasn’t spending too much money. It was five years before we made any money whatsoever, and 10 years until we felt we had a business…” Simon […]

This may seem obvious in the light of some recent news stories, but prominent artists really do need to be careful when endorsing brand-new blockchain startups running ICOs. The latest example is a company called Centra, which raised more than $32m last year from an ICO based on its CTR token, with plans to build […]

HTC is expanding its Vive X global VR and AR accelerator program, with a new ‘hub’ based in London. It has also appointed Dave Haynes as its director of Vive X in Europe. He’s a familiar face for the music industry over here, joining from a post as head of business development and partnerships at […]

Music Ally’s latest country profile focuses on Brazil, including an interview with Deezer’s country manager Bruno Vieira. He expresses optimism about the growth not just of music-streaming in Brazil, but of people willing to pay for a streaming subscription there. “We are very positive that over time users will adopt the premium model because it […]

If Spotify needed a reminder yesterday to focus on the music-streaming competition rather than swinging share prices, Apple provided it. The latter company announced that The Weeknd’s new EP ‘My Dear Melancholy’ was streamed more than 26m times in its first 24 hours on Apple Music, including 6m streams for its lead track ‘Call Out […]

“Our goal is to write music as well as John Williams, which then sounds like it’s recorded at Abbey Road and produced by Quincy Jones. Obviously we’re not there yet…” No, this isn’t the latest ambitious young band with an eye for a pullquote. It’s Drew Silverstein, CEO of startup Amper Music. And the music […]

Applications are underway for 2018’s crop of music/tech startup contests. Besides Midemlab in June, there’s Primavera Pro Startups 2018 in May, as part of the Primavera Pro conference in Barcelona. Registrations are open until 20 April for this year’s contest, with five startups due to be chosen to pitch at the event, which was won […]

The Position Production Associate will assist all efforts surrounding the organization, coordination, and execution of production and content rights management under the guidance of the Director for Production and A&R Admin. Responsibilities Assist production department and client teams in the distribution, manufacturing and setup of releases. Liaise between our production department, and all key internal […]

We first wrote about Fortnite: Battle Royale last month, when Drake popped up on Twitch playing the game against a popular streamer. But the rise of Fortnite is well worth following for its own merits: a gaming brand that’s come from nowhere to generate more than $100m a month from in-game purchases, and become a […]

Mark Zuckerberg’s apology tour of the media continues, with an interview with website Vox about Facebook’s recent data controversies. “I think we will dig through this hole, but it will take a few years,” said Zuckerberg. “I wish I could solve all these issues in three months or six months, but I just think the […]

Fresh from being acquired by Sony Music, dance label Spinnin’ Records is experimenting with its streaming playlists – with a particular focus on how they’re accessed through smart speakers. “While curated music content is becoming the norm, voice-recognition is rapidly changing the digital landscape. According to Google, about 20 percent of all mobile search queries […]

We reported last Thursday on Apple Music adding a dedicated music-videos category. Just after we clocked off for Easter, Spotify launched its own salvo in what’s shaping up as a new battle for ‘exclusives’ between the two companies (not to mention YouTube and Vevo). Taylor Swift debuted a new vertical-orientation video for her track ‘Delicate’ […]

Latino boy-band CNCO have a new album on the way, and for the second time they’re working with location-based-marketing startup Landmrk to promote it. In August 2016, their label Sony Music US Latin used Landmrk for a campaign called CNCO Go, which encouraged fans to visit ‘hotspots’ in Latin America and Spain to hear the […]

2018 is already a very active year for lyrics-focused company Genius: its latest $15m funding round was revealed in early March, before a partnership with Spotify on a podcast called Déjà Vu which was announced last week. Now Genius is working with YouTube on something else: a new format called ‘Song Stories’ which will tell […]

Music firm Kobalt’s latest financial results show that its revenues grew by 23.5% to $321m in its last fiscal year, which ended on 30 June 2017. However, the group’s operating loss grew by 45.6% to $24.3m, while its net loss for the year grew by 69.8% to $33.1m. Although given the company’s ability to raise […]

SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor has been talking to the Financial Times about what he says is a corporate comeback for the streaming service, following its troubles of 2017. According to Trainor, SoundCloud’s revenues last year surpassed its goal of $100m, with its user base growing in each of the last three quarters after an (underreported […]

Research firm Verto Analytics has put out some new numbers comparing Apple Music and Spotify in the US, but it’s important to understand exactly what it’s measuring. And what it isn’t. “This month’s Verto Index looks at the top streaming music properties, from Apple Music to TuneIn Radio, among U.S. adults (ages 18 and above)” […]

Apple Music is expanding its catalogue… with music videos. From today, Apple will have a catalogue of music videos – including curated playlists – sitting within its subscription service. Apple is describing this as “one of the most extensive music-video catalogues available” – although without a specific number on that – and will make it […]

Facebook has announced that it’s shutting down its ‘partner categories’ ad-targeting feature. “This product enables third party data providers to offer their targeting directly on Facebook,” explained the social network in a brief blog post. “While this is common industry practice, we believe this step, winding down over the next six months, will help improve […]

Spotify’s latest podcasts move is a partnership with lyrics-focused firm Genius. The companies have collaborated on a podcast called Déjà Vu, which launched yesterday. It’s a panel-based podcast discussing “the ways that modern hitmakers connect to the iconic musicians from the past who paved the way”, focusing on a different current star each episode. “Does […]

The first two episodes of K-Pop stars BTS’ new ‘Burn the Stage’ documentary series went live on YouTube overnight. The first episode was made available for free on the band’s own channel, with the second (and future) episodes being kept behind the YouTube Red subscription paywall. That first instalment is already proving popular: the 21-minute […]

Indian music giant T-Series has long been one of the most popular channels on YouTube, and its growth is continuing apace. Its film-music focused catalogue has just reached a new milestone on Google’s video service: more than 40 million subscribers. Indian news site RadioAndMusicBiz notes that this is up from 30 million in December 2017, […]

British broadcaster the BBC has published its latest ‘annual plan’ report setting out its creative plans for the year, and its wider strategy. There are some interesting bits on music. Like this: “For the first time, in October-December 2017 we estimate 15-34s listened more to streaming music services than all BBC Radio (5 hrs vs. […]

Spotify has Discover Weekly, Release Radar and Daily Mix. Apple Music has My New Music Mix and My Favourites Mix. Now Pandora is launching its own personalised playlists for listeners. Well, it’s testing them with a “small group” of its Premium subscribers anyway. And Pandora is going bigger with the number of playlists: more than […]

Two separate announcements yesterday highlight the fact that big-data and machine-learning for A&R purposes are enjoying a bit of a moment – after years of being mostly seen as a controversial niche when they cropped up in the on-stage conversations at industry conferences. Music Ally has been to countless panel sessions where A&R veterans scoffed […]

The latest startup trying to create a business out of gig-goers social-media habits is Live Music Loyalty. The New Jersey-based company has launched a free iOS app billed as a “concert photo community” that encourages people to share their gig photos, mark their upcoming concerts, and follow artist profiles. There are also rewards and rankings […]

Music Ally is in the process of compiling a list of current blockchain-music startups, and at the time of writing we’re up to 31. One of them is Opus, which has been developing an “open-source decentralised music-sharing platform” with a demo based on the Ethereum blockchain and peer-to-peer technology IPFS. The company is one of […]

More Facebook/privacy news – and stop us if this sounds familiar – the social network reportedly WON’T be unveiling its new hardware products at its f8 developer conference in May, as planned. As we predicted earlier this week, the ongoing revelations about how startup Cambridge Analytica accessed and used data on up to 50 million […]

Want to launch a new Facebook Messenger bot in the next few weeks? Good luck with that. As part of the fallout from the ongoing Cambridge Analytica revelations, the social network has “paused” app reviews while it implements changes to its platform. It has now emerged that this also applies to the approval of all […]

Music Ally is pleased to announce some of the key speakers for Sandbox Summit NYC – the one-day music marketing conference sponsored by Linkfire and Push Entertainment which takes place at Opry City Stage, Times Square, New York on Wednesday 25th April. After the hugely successful inaugural Sandbox Summit in London, we have responded to demand in the US […]

It’s hardly a shock to suggest that Spotify’s $1-for-three-months premium trials increase its subscribers. But Midia Research has calculated how much this boost is worth. “On average, Spotify’s global subscriber base grew by a net total of 2.8 million each quarter between Q4 2015 and Q4 2017 in the quarters that these ‘super trials’ were […]

Indian telco Reliance Industries is merging its own music-streaming service JioMusic with independent player Saavn, in a deal that it says values the merged entity at more than $1bn. It’s promising that the resulting business will offer “global reach, cross-border original content, an independent artist marketplace, consolidated data and one of the largest mobile advertising […]

Spotify has published some guidance on its financial outlook for 2018, including predicting that it will have 92-96 million premium subscribers by the end of the year. That would represent annual growth of between 30% and 36% from the 71 million subscribers that Spotify ended 2017 with. The new guidance also suggests that Spotify is […]

“The reality, particularly for artists, is that people want to feel like they can connect with you. And it’s really hard to connect when you’re perfect all the time…” It’s interesting that Lauren Wirtzer Seawood is saying this, given that she’s the head of music partnerships at Instagram – a social-media platform that’s still seen […]

For all its troubles in the last year, SoundCloud still elicits affection from a lot of artists who made their first moves on the platform – including some who’ve since become global stars. Now the streaming service is flagging that up much more prominently with a new initiative called ‘First on SoundCloud’. It’s partly about […]

There’s another once-promising music startup heading for the deadpool, and this one’s a shame, because when it first emerged, Cymbal was one of our favourite music-discovery apps. The app was a way to search for songs and see what ‘likeminded’ people were listening to, but like its closest equivalent Soundwave (later bought by Spotify in […]

I love you for your pink Cadillac, crushed velvet seats, riding in the back, streaming Discover Weekly down the street… Spotify’s latest partnership will put its service onto the dashboards of Cadillacs (not just pink ones) through their ‘infotainment’ systems. Spotify and Cadillac have designed the app with a car-friendly interface, as well as prioritising […]

That speculation that Apple Music’s Jimmy Iovine is on his way out of the streaming service – and its parent company – won’t go away. This time it’s the Wall Street Journal reporting that Iovine “will transition into a consulting role in August and step back from daily involvement with the company’s streaming-music business”. The […]

Spotify and Deezer have announced their latest artist-focused partnerships. For Spotify, that’s an initiative called ‘Louder Together’ which is an extension of its Spotify Singles program. The new thing isn’t just about getting artists in the studio to record covers, but rather about organising collaborations between different artists on original songs. Artists Sasha Sloan, Nina […]

Chinese technology company Huawei may be best known in the west for its hardware, but it’s also gearing up to launch a music-streaming service in South Africa. Huawei Music will launch this year, with a catalogue initially made up of 80% South African music, with plans to add international content later. According to local news […]

More than 26m smart speakers were shipped globally in 2017 according to research firm Futuresource, with the Amazon Echo and Google Home ranges proving popular devices. That was the spur for an event hosted by British music-industry bodies the BPI and ERA last night in London, and a report exploring the impact for music, published […]

If you haven’t read this weekend’s articles about data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, it’s well worth spending 10 minutes with this piece from the Guardian and/or this piece from the New York Times. Then, perhaps, another five minutes revoking the access to your Facebook account for every unknown-developer personality test app you’ve ever completed on the […]

US band OK Go’s latest brand partnership is with Google, and it has an educational focus. The pair have launched something called the OK Go Sandbox, which they describe as “a collection of materials created for and with K-12 educators: design challenges, educator guides, and more”. K-12 meaning primary and secondary education: so the full […]

When it comes to experimenting with virtual-reality technology, Sony Music has one advantage over other labels: its relationship with Sony’s consumer-electronics division, with its PlayStation VR headset. We’ve seen that relationship work last year with a VR experience for classical musician Joshua Bell, but now in 2018 it’s rising star Khalid getting the virtual treatment. […]

Facebook’s music-licensing efforts continue apace, with the announcement of three more deals this weekend. The social network now has agreements with French collecting society Sacem; Canadian PRO Socan; and music publisher Wixen Music Publishing. As with Facebook’s other recent deals, these are licensing agreements covering user-generated content across Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Oculus VR. […]

Spotify held its ‘investor day’ event earlier this evening, revealing that it will go public on 3 April in the process. You can read our liveblog of the event here. But what did we learn from the nearly-three-hour series of presentations from Spotify’s management? Here are some takeaways to chew on. The post 10 key […]

Indie licensing agency Merlin has announced agreements with the three biggest music-streaming service owners in China: Tencent, NetEase and Alibaba. The deals will see the catalogue represented by Merlin – music from more than 20,000 independent labels and distributors – made available on Chinese streaming services including NetEase Cloud Music, Xiami, QQ Music, Kugou and […]

Indie-labels licensing agency Merlin says that its members’ earnings from Latin America have grown five-fold in the last three years, fuelled by music-streaming services. The company expects to generate more than $60m of audio-streaming revenues from Latin America for its member labels in 2018. Merlin CEO Charles Caldas will be flagging up the Latin American […]

Linkfire has become a popular tool for music marketers using ‘smart links’ to direct fans to artists’ music on digital services, while getting analytics back from those clicks. Now the company has announced a deeper partnership with one of those services, Pandora, which will be providing Linkfire with “advanced attribution data” for its customers to […]

Why did Lyor Cohen take the job as head of music at YouTube in 2016? In his keynote speech at SXSW today, the music-industry veteran explained. “My greatest fear at the time was that distribution was going to be too highly consolidated between Apple and Spotify. It was scary that this could be a two-horse […]

As part of our research service for Music Ally subscribers, we publish a daily news bulletin, sent out by email every morning. It celebrated its 15th birthday last year, which means we’ve got archives covering the bulk of digital music’s history. It can be fun looking back through those archives, so we thought we’d share […]

Among the areas of historical tension between music rightsholders and Google has been the use of its advertising network on piracy sites. Although in this case, Google has been pretty responsive, regularly providing updates on how it’s cracking down on ‘bad ads’ and advertisers across that network – something that’s not just about piracy. The […]

YouTube has been one of the main engines behind the global success of K-Pop band BTS in the last year. Now they’re getting their own series on its YouTube Red subscription service. The eight-episode series is called BTS: Burn The Stage, and will launch on 28 March, offering fans an “intimate, personal portrayal” of the […]

Last year, we wrote about a Google research project called Magenta, which is exploring the intersection of machine-learning / AI and creativity, music included. Among its releases was a ‘neural synthesizer’ called NSynth, which used AI technology to “learn the characteristics of sounds, and then create a completely new sound based on these characteristics”. Now […]

Grammofy was a classical music-focused subscription-streaming service that launched in May 2016 in the UK and Germany, but then shut down in November 2017. At the time, the company said that despite “continued growth and vigorous efforts” it hadn’t been able to “build the necessary mid-term financial solidity to fund the man-hours needed to continue […]

In early February, Apple revealed that its Apple Music streaming service had 36 million subscribers. A month on, and that figure has increased to 38 million. The new figure was provided by the company’s SVP of internet software and services Eddy Cue during his appearance at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. It’s a significant […]

Augmented reality (AR) technology is about seeing virtual content and information in the real world around you, whether you’re looking through a smartphone or a pair of smart glasses. But can there be augmented reality without a visual element? Audio-hardware firm Bose hopes so. It has been showing off a pair of AR sunglasses that […]

As the founder of Playlists.net and subsequently a playlists/streaming-focused executive at Warner Music, Kieron Donoghue knows a thing or two about the streaming ecosystem. Now running indie label Humble Angel Records, he’s published a blog post calling for Spotify to offer better and more-affordable self-serve advertising options for artists on its platform. Donoghue compares Spotify […]

Amid all the industry conversation about how smart speakers will affect the way people listen to music, the assumption has been that the music in question will be made by humans. Here’s a new Alexa skill to make you think, though. It’s called DeepMusic, and has just launched for Alexa-powered devices like the Echo speakers. […]

There’s already a couple of powerful search engines for music: they’re called Google and YouTube, and they’ve sparked the odd controversy, as Music Ally readers will know. But is there room for a *dedicated* music search engine? Startup Quant hopes so: it’s launching Quant Music at SXSW this week with the ambition of becoming “the […]

A $670m pot of music-licensing revenue that hasn’t been tapped? That’s the kind of claim that gets rightsholders’ interest, although there’s a natural scepticism too when the goldmine is being quantified by a company whose business is focused on tapping that revenue stream. Still, Clickamix is definitely worth investigating: it wants to work with publishers, […]

India has long been one of the most interesting music markets in the world, and one that dances to its own rules, particularly with the influence of the film industry – Bollywood included. So how is the Indian market evolving in the streaming age? A panel at Music Biz and Music Ally’s NY:LON Connect conference in […]

The question of what appears in Google search results when people look for their favourite music artists has sparked controversy in the past: rightsholders regularly attacked Google for returning links to illegal downloads. They’ll be happier about Google’s latest search feature, which has been announced tonight. It’s called ‘search posts’, and will offer social network-style […]

Kobalt is making AWAL the brand for its entire recordings division, while promising to invest $150m and hire 100 more staff to build up that side of the business. Kobalt acquired digital distributor AWAL in 2012, as it prepared to launch its own label-services division. Since then, AWAL has been the entry level for Kobalt’s […]

Startup Pacemaker has been putting its artificial-intelligence DJ technology through its paces, in what it’s describing as a ‘DJ Turing Test’ against dance star Steve Aoki. Pacemaker’s AI DJ is part of its iOS app, where it automatically turns people’s Spotify playlists into flowing mixes. The company has run a test in which 100 people […]

A year ago, Music Ally ran the first-ever interview on New York startup Stationhead as the company emerged from stealth mode. Since that first interview, publications including Billboard, TechCrunch and Forbes have followed up with positive takes on the potential of Stationhead’s app. This week, its team is going through the final stages of design tweaks and […]

“You’d be surprised by who’s willing to support your music.” 

These were the words of my singer songwriter friend E.W. Harris back in 2010 (insert a thick US Southern drawl for a more accurate quote). He had just financed his new album via a crowdfunding campaign, a concept still alien to me at the time. […]

After the AirPods earphones and HomePod smart-speaker, what next for Apple’s audio-hardware ambitions? According to Bloomberg’s resident Cupertino-whisperer Mark Gurman, a pair of noise-cancelling, over-ear headphones could launch as early as the end of 2018. Or not. “It’s possible Apple will redesign the headphones again before launch, or scrap the project altogether,” warned the sources […]

German hip-hop group Die Fantastischen Vier is the latest example of an artist exploring the potential of augmented reality (AR) technology. The band have launched a free iPhone app called Tunnel AR, which is an interactive music video for their recent single ‘Tunnel’. The app enables fans to project the video onto a nearby table, […]

What is Palo Santo? It’s a fictional city where androids and humans live side-by-side, of course. But don’t worry if you didn’t know that: this is only just being revealed, bit-by-bit, to fans of British band Years & Years. Or perhaps we should say bit-by-bot, since one of the initial planks in the campaign for […]

Like us, you’ve probably been wondering when a prominent vodka brand would weigh in to 2018’s music-industry debates around diversity and inclusion. Congrats if you had ‘early March’ in the sweepstake: Smirnoff has teamed up with Spotify on a marketing campaign called the Smirnoff Equaliser. It’s based on the fact that the top 10 tracks […]

The Pew Research Center’s surveys of Americans are well-respected, so its new study of social-media habits is well worth perusing today, to see some of the trends at work. Facebook remains the top platform overall, used by 68% of American adults according to the survey, with around three quarters of them logging in every day. […]

Last week brought confirmation that Spotify’s hip-hop boss Tuma Basa was leaving the company, having helped to make its RapCaviar playlist a well-known standalone music brand. So why is he leaving and where will he end up next? The answer to both questions, according to Billboard, is a new job at YouTube. The trade site […]

While recent ERA and BPI figures have made much of the growth in revenue and consumption of music streaming services in the UK, they didn’t explains how many people in Britain pay for a music subscription. Now we have a – tentative – answer: ERA consumer tracking figures – which are based on 2.5k people […]

‘User-centric’ streaming payouts refers to a proposed system where the royalties generated by someone’s subscription would be divided only between the artists that they listen to, rather than going into a central pool divided by market-share on the platform as a whole. ‘If you only listen to Ed Sheeran, your money only goes to Ed […]

Music Ally recently interviewed BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor about the UK’s recorded-music market trends in 2017: from the growth of subscription streaming and safe harbours to Brexit and diversity. Recent BPI and ERA figures show a big increase in music streaming in the UK in 2017 – why was this? This increase is being […]

‘User-centric’ licensing is where the royalties from a streaming subscription only go to the artists who that subscriber listens to, rather than into a bigger pool split by overall share of all the streams on the platform. There have been calls for streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to switch to user-centric systems, partly […]

Silicon Valley is always keen to understand how scaleable a startup’s business model is: what will make them the next billion-dollar unicorn and beyond? But in music, is that line of thinking problematic? A panel run by Music Ally at the by:Larm conference in Oslo today explored the question of whether the search for the […]

Christof Ellinghaus, founder of Berlin-based indie label City Slang, is keen for governments to take action to remove YouTube’s safe harbours, and thus address the ‘value gap’. “We’re all stopping to sell records at this moment. Our bands are getting bigger and bigger, but we are selling less and less of their music,” said Ellinghaus, […]

There’s been a lot of public worrying about the future for magazine journalism in recent times, with magazines and blogs shutting down, freelance journalists scratching around for work, and tensions around issues like clickbait and sponsored content. The panel was moderated by Roisin O’Connor from The Independent, and included Tshepo Mokoena from Noisey in the […]

Today’s by:Larm conference in Oslo included a panel on blockchain technology and the music industry. No wait, stop! Don’t click away! Come back! In fact, there have been so many blockchain panels at music-industry conferences in the last two years, we’ve probably used that intro joke before. It’s true, though, that there’s a bit of […]

Are the new wave of artificial-intelligence startups here to eat musicians’ lunch, or to help them become even more creative? A panel run by Music Ally at the by:Larm conference in Oslo today explored the sometimes-sensitive issues around AI and music. The panel included Scott Cohen from The Orchard, Sophie Goossens from Reed Smith and […]

“Feels great to have the cat out of the bag. Transparency breeds trust,” tweeted Spotify CEO Daniel Ek last night. The cat in this instance being Spotify’s long-awaited filing for its direct public offering (DPO), which was published last night. The document offers the most detailed insight yet into Spotify’s current business and future prospects. […]

Views are no longer the most important currency on YouTube: it’s been watch-time for a while now – as shown by the fact that the platform’s new minimum requirements for ‘partner’ status include 4,000 hours of watch-time in the last year, rather than a certain number of views. So, a new study of YouTube based […]

Can Spotify, Google and Amazon *really* not identify who to pay publishing royalties to for Drake’s global hit ‘God’s Plan’? Or for Ed Sheeran’s ‘Perfect’? Or for Post Malone’s ‘Rockstar’ or Camila Cabello’s ‘Havana’ or… Well, you get the picture. Artist-rights blog The Trichordist has published a post from industry lawyer Chris Castle in which […]

It will come as no surprise that a study commissioned by collecting-societies body CISAC criticises ‘safe harbour’ exceptions in copyright law. But the study, from Ashbel Smith Professor Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas at Dallas, is a good summary of the arguments being marshalled by music rightsholders as they campaign for reform of […]

US radio group iHeartMedia is battling to restructure its debts in order to avoid bankruptcy, and its latest potential saviour is a fascinating one: Liberty Media. That’s the same Liberty Media that’s the majority owner of satellite-radio firm SiriusXM, which recently acquired a $480m stake in Pandora, which competes directly with iHeartMedia’s iHeartRadio service. The […]

2017 was a good year for Live Nation in financial terms, with the live-entertainment giant’s revenues rising by 24% to $10.3bn last year, according to its latest financial results. 86 million people attended concerts put on by Live Nation, which was up 21% year-on-year, as the company hailed “its seventh consecutive year of record results” […]

Two separate announcements from major labels Universal Music and Warner Music shed some light on how they’re tackling content around the music of their artists. UMG has appointed Celine Joshua to a new position as general manager, commercial, content and artist strategy. Her role will include heading a new label called ’10:22 pm’ focused on […]

The by:Larm festival and conference is always a highlight of the year for Music Ally, and we’re delighted to be heading back to Oslo this week for the 2018 event. We’re also running five panel sessions and a couple of insights talks during the conference, covering some of the digital topics close to our heart […]

As of 20 February, YouTube’s new monetisation policies went into effect, with channels required to have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch-time in the last year before they are allowed to be ‘monetised’ through ads. When YouTube announced the changes, it claimed that around 90% of channels affected were making less than […]

There is more consolidation afoot in the digital music-making space, following the news earlier this month that BandLab was buying Gibson’s Cakewalk division. Now one of its rivals, Splice, has snapped up veteran remix-contests site Indaba Music for an undisclosed amount. “Over the years, Indaba has connected its community of musicians to over a thousand […]

2018 may be the year of the AI/human music collaboration. British AI music startup Jukedeck is the latest company to work with musicians in an effort to show it’s a friend not a foe for human creators. The firm has teamed up with South Korean music stable Enterarts, with some of its K-Pop songwriters taking […]

The proposed Classics Act is trying to clear up the digital-licensing status of songs recorded before 1972. When it was introduced earlier this year, we noted that Pandora was supporting the bill, in stark contrast to satellite-radio firm SiriusXM – despite the latter now being one of its main investors. Now SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer […]

Fears that the mania for blockchain startups and initial coin offerings (ICOs) are a bubble will hardly be assuaged by a new report published by news site Bitcoin.com. “Tokendata, one of the more comprehensive ICO trackers, lists 902 crowdsales which took place last year,” it explained. “Of these, 142 failed at the funding stage and […]

The mobile-phone industry has swooped in to Barcelona for the annual Mobile World Congress event this week. Expect all manner of new smartphones to be announced, as well as related technologies. The news got underway this weekend with a pair of Android handsets at opposite ends of the smartphone spectrum. The Alcatel 1X is a […]

Startup Auddly’s service aims to help songwriters and musicians to start creating metadata around their songs from the earliest stages of writing and recording. Now it’s launching a campaign to promote these practices, called #MetadataPays, in partnership with British collecting society PRS for Music. The campaign will focus on a three-step process for musicians to […]

Airbnb isn’t just a platform for finding non-hotel accommodation around the world. It’s been edging in to music for some time via its ‘Experiences’ initiative, which includes getting hosts to hold secret gigs in unusual locations. Now that’s getting a proper rollout to 25 cities including London, New York, Tokyo, Paris, San Francisco, Sydney and […]

Digital music firm LiveXLive, which focuses on live-music videos as well as its recently-acquired streaming service Slacker Radio, has been approved to list on the public NASDAQ market. Boss Rob Ellin described it as “an exciting and major milestone in our evolution that we believe will expose the company to a wider audience of potential […]

Deezer has announced its latest deal with a mobile operator: Singtel in Singapore. It’s not quite a hard bundle, but it’s more than just a marketing partnership. Singtel’s post-paid customers will be able to pay 0.88 Singapore dollars a month (around US$0.66) for the first two months of a 12-month Deezer Premium subscription, then will […]

Billboard’s recent Power 100 list of music-industry executives was criticised for being dominated by men. Now industry network Shesaid.so has opened nominations for its own Alternative Power 100 list – the second year for an initiative that aims for a more diverse selection of executives and creators within the industry. It’s not just about gender. […]

The ‘Bulgarian scam’ on Spotify, revealed earlier this week by MBW, allegedly involved an entity uploading a collection of sub one-minute tracks to Spotify; then arranging them into a few playlists. Devices tied to Premium Spotify accounts were then used to stream those playlists round the clock: even at a monthly cost of nearly $12k […]

Music virtual-reality company MelodyVR announced a multi-year licensing deal with publisher Warner/Chappell yesterday. The agreement covers VR distribution of the publisher’s catalogue of songs around “an extensive library of original content, throughout numerous European territories”. MelodyVR has been signing a succession of deals with labels and collecting societies, but executive chairman Anthony Matchett said that […]

Apple Music and YouTube may have been the key digital and sponsorship partners for last night’s Brit Awards, but it was Spotify that got an (admittedly-unwanted) shout-out from the event’s host, comedian Jack Whitehall. Speaking about two-gong winner Dua Lipa: “If she had a pound for every time someone listened to her on Spotify, they […]

The music agreements keep coming for Facebook, which now has a deal with online licensing and processing hub ICE – the joint venture between European collecting societies PRS for Music, STIM and GEMA. “The licence covers Facebook, Instagram, Oculus and Messenger and provides online music licensing for over 290,000 rightsholders, across 160 territories,” explained ICE […]

How did Chance the Rapper, Lil Uzi Vert and other artists have such success building an audience on SoundCloud? Because they saw it as more than just a music-streaming service. That’s according to SoundCloud’s director of label relations Julia Killer, who was talking at the FastForward conference in Amsterdam last week. “Do not think of […]

Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, has told Music Ally that 2018 will be “the year of music for YouTube and Google” and suggested the animosity between the video platform and the music industry will soon be a thing of the past. “It’s too easy of a soundbite – ‘value gap’,” he said. “I […]

Finnish mobile games firm Supercell has published its financial results for 2017, revealing that it made $2.03bn of revenues, and a profit of $810m. The twist: the company did that without even releasing a new game that year. Supercell only has four games available: Hay Day and Clash of Clans were originally released in 2012, […]

How to follow up the success of a video where the highlight was your dad-dancing on a flight of stairs? For Drake, the answer is giving away $996,631.90 to strangers. That’s the clever premise of the video for ‘God’s Plan’ – already a big global hit thanks to the streaming services – which sees Drake […]

How much money does YouTube make from advertising? Parent company Alphabet has never announced that, leaving analysts to make their best guesses. In 2013, eMarketer claimed that the site was generating $5.6bn in annual revenues, for example, while in 2015 UBS suggested that had grown to $8.5bn. A recent claim from Nomura that an advertising […]

One of the key selling points for ticketing app Dice has always been its promise not to charge booking fees for its mobile tickets. Now the company has changed its policy, and has been explaining the decision to customers after a Twitter spat with British band Shame made it public. “Everyone’s favourite ‘no booking fees’ […]

A new report published by a lobbying coalition called Re:Create – we’ll get to who that is in a bit – is trying to put some numbers to the independent creative economy in the US. The report is deliberately narrow in focus, attempting to calculate how much musicians, filmmakers, artists and other creators earned from […]

From the recent open letters from women working in the Swedish and Australian music industries condemning harassment to the ‘step up’ storm currently engulfing Grammys organiser the Recording Academy, diversity is a huge topic for our industry in 2018. The term covers a number of related issues, from harassment to equal opportunities to enter and […]

NoCopyrightSounds first came to the attention of many people in the music industry for its role as the launchpad for Norwegian artist Alan Walker’s track ‘Faded’. How could a YouTube channel devoted to making tracks available royalty-free for gaming channels on that service to use as their backing music spawn a global hit? It’s a […]

There is, to put it mildly, a lot of hype and misinformation around the world of blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) – including their potential for the music industry. Music Ally has already noted a blockchain backlash within many rightsholders, who question whether the tech and its fresh-faced startups can ever deliver […]

When Alex Kennedy founded his own startup, he was excited about the potential. What he didn’t realise was that the ride would be an emotional and financial rollercoaster. The post Healthy startup life: ‘Read more books and less tweets’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

From merchandise and ticketing to crowdfunding, modern music artists have more options than ever to go ‘direct to fan’ and build a sustainable income to complement their recordings. But how can they make the most of those options? A panel at the FastForward conference in Amsterdam today debated how the D2F (or D2C) world is […]

The music industry is understandably excited about its streaming-fuelled return to growth over the past couple of years, but there’s also a widespread awareness that this isn’t the time for resting on laurels. The challenges and opportunities around how streaming should evolve were a topic up for discussion in a panel at the FastForward conference […]

Music Ally first encountered British artist ShaoDow earlier this month at AIM’s Indie-Con event in London. Less than a fortnight later, he was holding court at the FastForward conference in Amsterdam. The topic: ‘The Artist Entrepreneur’ – an exploration of how this particular musician has built his fanbase and income not just from his tracks, […]

Coming off the back of 2014’s Dissecting The Digital Dollar report and 2017’s guides on both digital deals and transparency (as well as the beta launch of the Digital Deals Comparison Calculator), music management body the MMF organised a managers roundtable in London earlier this month, chaired by Music Ally. The purpose was to openly […]

A pair of interesting articles on blogging platform Medium may provide some industry inspiration today. First, there’s Idagio product director Bas Grasmayer’s piece asking “what people in music tech would tell their 18 year-old selves”. From former Geffen CTO Jim Griffin (“Get 8+ hours of regular sleep a night. Doing it right is like the […]

The initial wave of reviews in the press about Apple’s HomePod smart speaker have been very positive about its hardware – specifically its audio quality. Now Consumer Reports has published some ‘early results’ of its comparative tests pitting the device against rivals. “Apple’s speaker does deliver very good audio performance, though it’s not the best-sounding […]

The fact that ‘AI music’ can mean several, very different things is well illustrated by the latest pair of startups exploring strains of artificial intelligence tech applied to music. Musiio’s focus is on using AI to analyse large catalogues of music. “The tools we provide allow you as a business to process more data than […]

Direct-to-fan platform Bandcamp has published its annual review of its business, including the stat that its all-time payments to artists are now past the $270m mark. That compares to nearly $200m at the end of 2016, meaning that the $70m+ paid to Bandcamp artists in 2017 represents a quarter of all payouts since the platform […]

Three separate stories this morning come together into a strand illustrating 2018’s status as a continued landgrab for new music-streaming subscribers. YouTube is finally readying a global push for its YouTube Red tier; Apple Music is launching its student membership plan much more widely across the world; and Spotify is offering lovebirds a Valentine’s-themed two-month […]

‘Young people are ditching Facebook’ is a tech-industry trope that’s been running for at least five years now, without yet having an obvious impact on the social network’s growth or revenues. However, eMarketer’s latest report at least has data to back up its claim: “This year, for the first time, less than half of US […]

We can’t resist an app pitch that includes the phrase “revolutionary 4D magic coming” with a man in a cape flying out of a smartphone screen. The app is called Like, and it’s the latest social music/video app that is showing the first shoots of becoming a Musical.ly-sized craze. At its heart it’s still a […]

Having conversations through the medium of 15-second video clips, which may or may not include ending up getting a video back from Snoop Dogg and/or Chamillionaire? There’s an app for that! It’s called Convoz, and the latter artist is actually its founder. Chamillionaire describes the app as “the place where you go to talk to […]

Music virtual-reality startup MelodyVR has been in closed beta since the end of 2016, holding its plans for a commercial launch until it judges the market is ready. The company has just reiterated that this will be in 2018. “MelodyVR is well positioned for a successful public launch of its VR music platform in 2018,” […]

JOB SUMMARY Kobalt Music Recordings is looking for a flexible, confident and highly organised International Label & Product Manager, based out of our London office. Reporting to the International Marketing Manager, the role will involve working with our artist and label clients well, alongside our network of International marketing managers, distribution partners and licensees to […]

Yesterday, we reported on Google implementing its new policy for secondary ticketing ads on its search engine. Now UK lobbying group FanFair Alliance has issued its response, which welcomes the changes while urging Google to go further. “FanFair unequivocally welcomes the updates to Google’s ad policies. As a result of these changes, we are already […]

B2B digital-music firm 7digital has issued a trading update showing strong growth in its full-year revenues. The company says it expects to report revenues of £17.3m for 2017, up 52% year-on-year. “Losses at Adjusted LBITDA level are expected to be significantly reduced from the previous period and be better than market expectations,” claimed the company […]

Streaming service Napster has a new, permanent boss. Bill Patrizio is no stranger to the company though: he was named as interim CEO in May 2017, while retaining his position as president of consumer media at RealNetworks – which continues to hold a stake in Napster. “He has led a resurgence of the company in […]

Amazon hasn’t made a big deal of its latest smart-speaker feature, but it’s an extremely interesting development for anyone who’s been thinking about how playlists evolve in a world of voice control. Users – initially on Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited in the US, we think – can now say commands like ‘Alexa, create […]

Earlier this month, a group of six senior women from the music industry wrote to the Recording Academy calling for it to up its game on diversity, and offering their help. One report yesterday suggested that they have been “seriously underwhelmed” by the response. So, in a world where the term ‘hepeating’ has been coined […]

In a world of streaming, social networks and the ability for any artist to get their music up on digital platforms, how is the role of the label A&R evolving? A panel at AIM’s Indie-Con conference in London today addressed the topic of ‘A&R in the digital age’. The speakers included Vidhi Ghandi from Ninja […]

Around 20,000 new songs are added to streaming services like Spotify every single day. A sobering statistic for an independent artist wondering how they can cut through the noise to reach people who’ll love their music. So how are artists using streaming services, social networks and other means to build their audiences and sustain their […]

If Music Ally had a pound for every time we’d heard someone predicting The Death Of The Label, we’d have enough money by now to buy at least two of the majors. The post Record labels, huh? What are they good for in 2018? appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

What’s more important for an independent artist in 2018: getting A-listed by prominent radio stations, or bagging some prominent slots on the playlists curated by Spotify and Apple Music? A panel at AIM’s Indie-Con conference in London today explored the evolving world of plugging with a focus on independent artists and labels. It included Secretly […]

Laura Marling’s last album, ‘Semper Femina’, is a wonderful piece of work: something I’ve returned to again and again since its release, discovering new details every time. Hats off to that, then. But also to the team that worked hard on the marketing campaign for an album, released through More Alarming Records via Kobalt Music […]

Since its IPO last year, Snapchat parent company Snap, Inc has had a rough time of it on Wall Street, with investors uneasy about the social app’s sluggish growth. Yesterday brought some good news for the company in its latest financial results though: it beat analyst forecasts with stronger-than-expected growth, and saw its share price […]

Ticketing firm Eventbrite has joined UK lobbying group the FanFair Alliance, to ‘support the fight against industrial-scale online ticket touting’. This follows Eventbrite’s partnership with face-value-resale platform Twickets last year, as well as the company’s ongoing expansion of its music-ticketing activities. The post Eventbrite joins the UK’s FanFair Alliance lobbying group appeared first on Music […]

Apple announced plans to acquire music-recognition firm Shazam in December 2017, but European regulators may yet throw a spoke in the works of the deal. “The European Commission has accepted a request from Austria, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden to assess under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of Shazam by Apple,” […]

Apple’s HomePod smart speaker goes on sale this Friday (9 February) in the US, UK and Australia, with the first wave of reviews published yesterday. How does it compare to the Amazon Echo and Google Home ranges? Reviewers have been broadly positive, with the HomePod’s audio quality coming in for particular praise. “From dance pop […]

Google has implemented a new policy on secondary-ticketing websites, which will now have to ‘radically increase their transparency’ to be certified to book advertising on its platform. To be certified, secondary sites will have to not ‘imply’ that they are a primary marketplace; prominently disclose their status as a ticket reseller / secondary marketplace; prominently […]

It’s been a while since anyone thought mobile games would be the next big revenue stream for the music industry. But experiments continue, with dance star Avicii the latest to test the app-store waters. He’s fronting a game called Avicii Gravity HD, developed by Swedish mobile games firm Hello There. “In fast-paced Avicii Gravity HD, […]

Nelson: not just the chap whose statue stands on a column in Trafalgar Square seething at pigeons. Nelson is also the name of a “friendly in-browser Spotify jukebox” that’s gone live this week. Using Spotify’s recommendations API and web playback SDK, it’s a nifty way to play with Spotify’s recommendations engine. After logging in with […]

Lino wants to build “a decentralised autonomous content economy, where content value can be recognised efficiently and all contributors can be incentivised directly and effectively to promote long-term economic growth”. Not bad for something named after your carpet, eh? Lino is the latest startup hoping to tap blockchain technology in an attempt to eat at […]

Canadian PRO Socan has launched a new royalty income and tracking system for customers of its Audiam subsidiary. Called ‘Layla’ (we’re sorry for the guitar-solo earworm you’ll be enjoying all morning now) it’s aimed at publishers and self-published songwriters. The system promises to track who’s recording their songs, where they’re being listened to and how […]

We’ve seen a few blockchain-music startups in our time, but Choon is the first one named after what you might shout at the DJ when feeling over-excited and emotional in a club. That’s a world that the startup’s founder Gareth Emery knows well, mind. His career has seen him crack the top 10 twice in […]

Social Media and Digital Content Editor Warp Records is looking for a Social Media and Digital Content Editor to join us, promoting our roster of groundbreaking artists. You should be an all-rounder with great copy writing skills, plus the eye for and the skills to create and commission engaging images, film and design for social media […]

Research firm eMarketer has published some data for YouTube viewership in the UK, claiming that more than 90% of people classed as ‘digital video viewers’ regularly visit the service. “In 2018, 40.4 million people, or six out of 10 people in the UK, will watch video via the YouTube app or website at least once […]

Cür Music was one of the digital music services that shut down in recent years: having rebranded personal-radio service Raditaz in 2014, its owners raised $9.6m in funding; launched in beta in January 2016 with $2.99-a-month and $6.99-a-month subscription options; agreed to pay $8m in advances to major labels; and then in August 2016 laid […]

Apple says its Apple Music service now has 36 million subscribers, up from “well over” 30 million in late September 2017. The milestone was shared with the Wall Street Journal as part of a wider piece on Apple Music’s progress – including the claim that it’s growing faster than Spotify in the US. “Apple’s subscriber-account […]

In late January, former Playlists.net and Warner Music Group executive Kieron Donoghue launched his new venture, a ‘streaming-first’ independent label called Humble Angel Records. He promised royalty payout rates for artists ‘at least double’ the average of those offered by major labels – paid on a monthly basis, using startup Stem’s platform – as well […]

Major labels are very excited about upping the audio quality of music-streaming services, under the banner of ‘hi-res music’. Audio hardware firms are excited too, while some streaming services (Tidal, Deezer and dedicated services like Qobuz for example) have adopted the technology. And music fans? That’s the challenge: as yet there isn’t an obvious surge […]

Spotify is adding credits for songwriters and producers to songs on its service, although for now they’ll only appear within its desktop app. From today, listeners can right-click on a track and choose a ‘Show Credits’ option to see the credited performers, songwriters and producers in a pop-up window. The post Spotify adds songwriting and […]

Abbey Road Studios in London has announced that HumTap and Lickd will be the next two companies to join its Abbey Road Red startup incubator, under the wing of a new boss for the program. Karim Fanous, formerly head of research and insight at Music Ally (that’s us!) is taking over from Jon Eades, who […]

British artificial-intelligence music/tech startup AI Music is raising £5m of funding, as it prepares to launch its first product. The company has developed technology capable of “shapeshifting” songs, using AI to remix tracks on the fly. “We’re raising £5m, and we have a lead investor that’s happy to take the whole thing,” said CEO Siavash […]

Drag’n’drop audio-mastering startup CloudBounce is joining the blockchain bandwagon, with plans to launch an initial coin offering (ICO). The company, which competes with services like Landr, announced its plans tonight at the Abbey Road Red incubator’s demo event in London. “We’re doing the next step in building a better community and better and faster audio-processing […]

It’s unusual to see a company proudly announcing in its quarterly financial results that people have been using it less. But Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 goal of focusing more on ‘time well spent’ on Facebook makes it an unusual case. “Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time […]

Two new Music Ally webinar training courses start next week: ‘Connections’ and ‘Advanced’. A great way to start the year, our ever popular training courses will provide you with a solid grounding of digital knowledge with the best tips and practical insights whilst preparing you for what the future holds in this space too. Don’t […]

Mix-licensing startup Dubset Media Holdings has announced its three latest pieces of content, which appear to be exclusive to Apple Music. At least it’s getting first dibs on the DJ mixes by Steve Aoki, Sigala and DJ Suss One, which have been released on Apple’s streaming service this week. Dubset says it’s part of a deal to deliver “hundreds” […]

Telco partnerships have always been a key part of Deezer’s business model, and its latest sees the company expanding its ambitions in Asia. It’s working with Hutchison 3 in Indonesia, through its Tri operator brand in that country. Tri customers will be able to pay for a monthly Deezer Premium+ subscriptions using their balance credit, […]

2017 was a good year for Canadian collecting society Socan, which has reported record revenues and distributions to its membership. The society’s performing-rights revenues grew by 6.4% to more than $350m in 2017, with more than $300m distributed to songwriters, composers and publishers. These figures included $49.3m of ‘internet audio streaming’ revenues up 46% year-on-year. However, […]

Fresh from its stock-swap with Spotify, Tencent Music has another interesting partnership with a western firm: Sony Music. The pair have teamed up to launch Liquid State, a label that will focus on dance music from Asian artists, as well as live events. “Liquid State has been created to support and enhance the discovery and development […]

It’s just over a year since Pandora laid off 7% of its staff in the US in order to “to focus and realign existing resources on execution and make further investments in product innovation to drive advertising revenue and subscription growth”. Now it’s in for another round of layoffs, this time “an organisational restructuring designed to […]

When you have sold over 100m albums and shift more tickets today than you did in your supposed peak in the 1980s, you are “not exactly hurting” for money and can therefore afford to take your time when considering the leap into new, digital revenue streams. This, according to Def Leppard’s lead singer Joe Elliott, […]

UK-based musician Laura Kidd writes, produces and records music as She Makes War, with three albums under her belt so far. She’s crowdfunding her fourth using PledgeMusic: here’s her take on the experience as an artist. “In the time since I crowdfunded my second album ‘Little Battles’ in 2011, using sites like PledgeMusic to raise […]

Rights Negotiator (Mid-level management) Permanent Who are PPL? As a collective rights management organisation at the heart of the UK’s music industry, PPL ensures those who invest their time, talent and money to make recorded music are compensated when their music is used in public by businesses or broadcast on TV or radio. Based in […]

Elton John held a press event with YouTube yesterday (24 January) to announce his farewell tour – a 300-date, multi-continent extravaganza that will start in September and run into 2021. While that news dominated the headlines, he also used the event to unveil a potted history of his career in music in VR as well […]

The most pointed quote of the second day of Music Biz and Music Ally’s NY:LON Connect conference in New York came from Jesús López, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Latin America and Iberian Peninsula. He used US president Donald Trump’s infamous ambitions to fortify the US border with Mexico as a jump-off for a reminder […]

Kobalt CEO Willard Ahdritz delights in ruffling feathers within the music industry, so his appearance as a keynote speaker at Music Biz and Music Ally’s NY:LON Connect conference in New York promised to deliver a fair few zingers. He was interviewed by Music Ally CEO Paul Brindley. The post Kobalt CEO blasts ‘elitist’ concerns about […]

Is it too much to hope that we’ve seen the last ‘death of labels’ story in the modern music industry? Labels aren’t dying as an industry entity, but they are evolving in interesting ways, as are management companies, publishers and music companies with their roots in the digital world. It’s the blurring of the boundaries […]

What kind of partner does the music industry make for music/tech startups in 2018? There have certainly been bumps in the past, from venture capitalists swearing never to invest again in startups requiring music rights, to shutdown firms blaming rightsholders for their business failure. Yet for their part, rightsholders argue that their focus is rightly […]

Should Ed Sheeran be getting worried about artificial intelligence dethroning him from his place atop the modern pop pantheon? It may sound like crazy foolish talk, but that was the question sparked by a session on creative AI at Music Biz and Music Ally’s NY:LON Connect conference this afternoon in New York. There is already […]

Seth Farbman used to be chief marketing officer at clothing retailer The Gap. Now he’s marketing a music-streaming service, as CMO of Spotify. Farbman joined Music Biz and Music Ally’s NY:LON Connect conference in New York this morning for a fireside chat on how he sees the world. The moderator was Music Ally’s head of […]

Apple HomePod, the company’s first smart speaker, will go on sale on 9 February in the US, UK and Australia, with pre-orders kicking off online this Friday (26 January). The company announced the dates today, having delayed the device’s planned launch in December 2017. It will compete with Amazon Echo and Google Home among other […]

Def Leppard, one of the last multi-platinum digital holdouts, have licensed their entire catalogue to download and streaming services. It is available today (19 January) on all the major streaming and download platforms. The band, whose global album sales top 100m, were conspicuous by their absence from iTunes, Spotify and more. This was partly down […]

Spotify’s latest announcement focuses less on music, and more on the other kinds of audio content available on the streaming service: podcasts, audiobooks and news. The company is launching a new ‘multimedia format’ called Spotlight, which will show photos, video and text as people listen to spoken-word content. The post Spotify debuts ‘Spotlight’ format for […]

The music industry is very familiar with the all-you-can-eat subscription model for streaming. Now Native Instruments is applying it to a different audio market: loops and samples. The company, best known for its Maschine music-production hardware and its Traktor DJing tools, has launched a new site called Sounds.com which will offer a catalogue of more […]

The successful candidate will account manage SME’s business relationship with Spotify, and will quickly become SME’s global internal expert on this distribution channel having assumed responsibility for the macro operation of our business partnership, as well as for developing projects and initiatives that optimise revenue/opportunities for both Sony Music and Spotify. Responsibilities will include, but […]

What does the year ahead hold for technology, media and telecoms? Consultancy firm Deloitte has published its annual ‘TMT’ trends report with plenty of topics to chew on. Here’s a grab-bag of some of its most interesting predictions: More than one billion smartphone users will create augmented-reality content at least once in 2018, with 300 […]

2017 was a good year for Facebook Messenger, as the social network’s own-brand messaging app grew to 1.3 billion monthly active users. However, its boss David Marcus has admitted to one downside in his annual blog post predicting trends for the year ahead. “Over the last two years, we built a lot of capabilities to […]

Music virtual-reality startup MelodyVR is preparing for its long-awaited commercial launch, with more than 5k hours of live performances and other content shot with artists. “We’re not going to say we want to be the killer app for VR because we’re not that arrogant, but we want to be in the top five to ten […]

US satellite-radio firm SiriusXM has launched the latest iteration of its in-car service, called 360L. That represents “360-degree listening” with a blend of satellite radio and streaming to pipe music into vehicles, starting with the 2019 Ram 1500 truck. Drivers will get SiriusXM’s lineup of 200+ live radio channels, as well as recommendations for other […]

Musician David Lowery has published the latest data on payouts from a range of streaming services, sourced from “a mid-sized indie label with an approximately 200+ album catalog now generating over 200m+ streams annually”. It’s a very interesting snapshot as ever: both of average per-stream payouts and of the market shares of the various services. […]

A study conducted by CrunchBase has found that only 17% of startups receiving their initial round of venture funding in 2017 had at least one woman as a founder. What’s more, that percentage has stayed static since 2012, having risen steadily in the three years before that. In 2017, all-women teams accounted for 3% of […]

Finnish electronic duo Phantom have become the first artist to use new technology from Notch, which is best known for its software providing live visuals for a host of big acts. Its new tool aims to help artists create virtual-reality videos based on the music itself. “The interactive music video visualises sound in VR. It […]

Jorja Smith will be the first global artist promoted as part of streaming service Deezer’s ‘Deezer Next 2018’ initiative. She’ll get playlist and promotional support on the platform, with three more global ‘priority’ artists set to be announced later in the year. Up to eight more artists will be announced in each of Deezer’s key […]

Transparency remains a big challenge for the music industry in 2018, according to Gregor Pryor, co-chair of law firm ReedSmith’s global Entertainment and Media Industry Group. “As ever, the challenge with distribution is data hygiene. Getting composers and creators focused on all of the supply chain is a difficult thing to do,” he said in […]

We’ve come a long way from Scary Spice, Sporty Spice, Ginger Spice, Baby Spice and Posh Spice, it’s fair to say. Japanese pop group Kasotsuka Shojo have been getting a wave of coverage in the west for being the first J-Pop group where each member “represents a different cryptocurrency”. “We want to promote the idea […]

B2B digital-music firm 7digital has signed a contract with US streaming service 8tracks. The company says the deal has a minimum term of one year. 7digital has also signed a new contract with its largest shareholder, retailer MediaMarktSaturn, to migrate the latter’s Juke streaming service on to 7digital’s platform. The post 7digital signs contract with […]

Pandora was the fourth biggest non-game app across Android and iOS in 2017 in terms of revenues, according to app analytics firm SensorTower’s end-of-year report. Its analysis of in-app purchases ranks Pandora behind only Line, Tinder and chart-topper Netflix – with the latter thought to have earned $510m from in-app subscriptions in 2017, up from […]

January has already seen a flurry of new research into smart speakers, timed to coincide with the CES show in Las Vegas. The latest example comes from NPR and Edison Research, who surveyed 1,816 Americans in November and December. 16% said that they own a smart speaker, which scales up to around 39 million people […]

There has been a surprise ending to the long-running legal battle between Live Nation and the owners of ticketing firm Songkick: a $110m settlement that sees Live Nation acquiring some of the company’s remaining technology assets and patents. This, despite Songkick suffering several setbacks as it pursued litigation against the live-entertainment giant. “We are pleased […]

Samsung will soon be unlocking the FM radio chip in its smartphones in the US and Canada, according to the maker of the NextRadio app. Note, this isn’t (yet) an official announcement from Samsung itself, but NextRadio owner TagStation claimed that the move will mean owners of the smartphones can listen to broadcast-radio while consuming […]

Pandora signalled its interest in the world of podcasts in late 2015 when it became the ‘exclusive streaming partner’ for the second series of podcast Serial. Now its recently-appointed CEO Roger Lynch says the company is ready to double down with the intention of creating “the podcast genome project” – referring to its famous system […]

Rumours have been bubbling for several months that Facebook was planning a shift for its news feed back towards ‘personal’ content from friends and family, rather than ‘public’ posts and content from brands and media. Now CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed the changes, which he says are part of the social network’s determination to make […]

Facebook’s latest music-licensing deal, following its agreements with Universal Music Group and Sony/ATV, is something a corker: it’s with Irving Azoff’s Global Music Rights. That would be the Irving Azoff who’s regularly castigated YouTube in recent times over its licensing and royalty payments? The very same. “Today, we are excited to announce that Global Music […]

Video-streaming service Hulu has announced its latest milestone: 17 million subscribers. That’s up from 12 million in May 2016, which means the service has averaged just 263,000 net new subscribers a month over that period. Compare that to Netflix, which has been adding around five million subscribers a quarter in recent times, albeit with a […]

We know from Snapchat’s last quarterly financial results that the social app had 178 million daily active users, but the company hasn’t broken down what those people are doing within its app. The Daily Beast has now got its hands on some internal metrics that show how popular – or unpopular – individual sections of […]

An article by musician Blake Morgan about an artists meeting held by Spotify has been ‘unpublished’ by Huffington Post, in a move that’s already giving the piece a wider airing on other sites. “If anyone were to dispute your account of the meeting in question, we wouldn’t be able to verify or stand behind the […]

The parent company of distributor CD Baby has executed a mini-rollup of B2B services. AVL Digital Group has acquired AudioMicro, which in turn owns YouTube-monetisation tool AdRev and label-services provider DashGo, as well as its own sync-licensing platform. The intention here is to offer AudioMicro’s services as part of CD Baby’s package for artists and […]

Yesterday saw a meeting in Brussels between a group of European Commission representatives and (unnamed) internet platforms to discuss illegal content. While piracy was included in the brief, the driving force behind the meeting was more about extremist content and hate speech. “Terrorist propaganda and content that incites violence and hatred online is a serious […]

JOB SUMMARY: We’re looking for a Digital Marketing Manager to join the Kobalt Music Recordings team and work with our growing roster of emerging and established talent from all over the world. Based out of our London office and reporting to the General Manager you will be working within the UK & International marketing teams […]

App analytics firm Apptopia claims that 825 iOS apps released in 2017 used Apple’s ARKit augmented-reality framework. That included around 300 when the technology went live in Apple’s iOS 11 software in September, plus another 525 over the final three months of 2017. The post Report: Apple’s ARKit has been used by 825 apps so […]

Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and the rest of the voice-assistant gang will soon be getting a new member, from an unexpected source. Set-top box maker Roku has announced plans to launch the ‘Roku Entertainment Assistant’ by this autumn, which will be used to control entertainment on its own devices, as well […]

AdAge has been profiling Lyor Cohen’s plans for 2018 as head of music at YouTube, including boiling down his pitch to artists, managers and labels as “We’re going to make you rich and famous”. That includes providing financial support for music videos and promotion for new releases, as well as the previously-reported plans for a […]

We reported on the latest music-consumption stats from the UK yesterday, but now Nielsen has published its data for the US, revealing even bigger growth for 2017. Specifically, sales and streams of albums and songs grew by 12.5% last year in the US, driven by a 59% increase in on-demand audio streams. Nielsen also noted […]

Spotify may go public in the first quarter of this year, according to several reports citing the company’s confidential filing of documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in December. “All indications are that Spotify wants to list in Q1, and timing of the confidential F-1 filing would support such a calendar,” claimed Axios. […]

Here at Music Ally, we covered a lot of new music/tech startups for the first time in 2017. We’ve now chosen 20 of them that we think have the potential to make an impact in 2018 and beyond, from analytics to artificial intelligence, and from blockchain tech to radio monitoring. The post 20 music/tech startups […]

Business Insider has been mining some stats for some of the most well-known YouTubers, and has identified a decline in their monthly views during 2017. PewDiePie, Zoella and DanTDM all saw their monthly views fall in the last year, as well as the number of new subscribers to their channels every month. The piece notes […]

Fresh from the pre-Christmas news of its first licensing deal, with Universal Music, Facebook has continued to build out its music team, with former Googlers looming large. Among Facebook’s latest hires: Joe Bognanno, former manager of music content partnerships at Google and also director of royalties at SoundCloud, who is now Facebook’s commercial music publishing […]

If Spotify was hoping 2018 would see its publishing woes die down… well, Wixen Music Publishing has put those hopes to rest. The publisher has filed a lawsuit seeking damages of at least $1.6bn for Spotify’s use of songs written by Tom Petty, Rage Against The Machine, Neil Young, Stevie Nicks and other artists/songwriters. The […]

Guitarist Scott Henderson’s career has seen him mixing jazz, blues, funk and rock in his solo work, as co-leader of fusion band Tribal Tech, as well as playing with artists like Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea. He’s also got more than 30 years’ experience teaching other people to play, in his role as an instructor […]

At the end of September this year Music Ally was invited to attend the inaugural All About Music conference in Mumbai, India. We’ve since been speaking to some of its main contributors, and taking a look at the key themes that emerged on how India is evolving as a music market. All About Music is […]

Music labels and publishers have spent much of 2017 wondering what Facebook’s plans were for licensing music. Today the social network announced its first major-label licensing deal, with Universal Music Group. The companies are describing this as a “global, multi-year agreement” that will license Universal’s recorded-music and publishing catalogues for “video and other social experiences […]

2017 has been an exciting year for online video of all kinds, music videos included. Now there’s a new awards ceremony for that, which aims to celebrate emerging talent creating music videos and other short-form music-related work. The Shiny Awards take place on 22 February 2018 in London, and the deadline for entering is the […]

Here it is – Sandbox’s massive run down of the best, most innovative and most exciting music marketing campaigns of the past 12 months. Download the report HERE. As usual, all campaigns are listed in non-partisan alphabetical order. But this year there is a twist. We have given campaigns that have impressed us special commendations […]

Bloomberg has an interesting piece about Apple’s potential plans to bring its iOS and MacOS app ecosystems together. “Starting as early as next year, software developers will be able to design a single application that works with a touchscreen or mouse and trackpad depending on whether it’s running on the iPhone and iPad operating system […]

We reported earlier this month on new Apple guidelines that seemed to squash iOS apps created using template-based tools – for example, the various platforms that help musicians create and release their own mobile apps. After protests, Apple has changed the guidelines, which should mean these platforms can continue operating. The rules did say that […]

Gracenote has a new customer for its MusicID music-recognition technology: streaming service Mixcloud. The latter is going to start using MusicID to fingerprint music in the 1,000 hours-plus of DJ sets, radio shows and podcasts uploaded to its platform every day. The post Mixcloud will use Gracenote’s MusicID to identify tracks appeared first on Music […]

This guest column comes from Maarten Bloemers, CEO and co-founder of GUTS: “The secondary ticketing market has recently been under scrutiny in the UK, with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) this month publishing the findings of a year-long investigation. The post Guest Column: How fixing the secondary ticketing market will help future music events […]

This guest column comes from Robert Ashcroft, CEO of PRS for Music: “The issues of data, value and protection for songwriters have never been so high on the agenda. In early 2016 I had a conversation with George Howard for a blog he was writing for Forbes about the biggest issue facing the industry in […]

With the year almost over, it’s time to look back, reflect on what we have learned in the music business in 2017, and consider how we’ll build on it in 2018. That’s a huge job, so we’ve tried to do some of the heavy lifting for you with our review of the year, looking back […]

Spotify and Deezer’s CEOs have both signed a letter to European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker calling for the EC to ensure they get a “level playing field” on platforms owned by large US technology companies including Apple and Amazon. The pair – along with a group of European games companies – are calling for “clear […]

In the mid-2000s, Pete Downton had a PowerPoint presentation. It included a slide with a map of the world plotting Warner Music Group’s licensing partnerships with 40 mobile operators: a network with a theoretical reach of 1.8 billion customers. “There was a certain amount of truth in that, because we had deals in place to […]

SoundCloud is redesigning its app’s home screen with more focus on playlists and recommendations, including two new own-brand playlists showcasing trending hip-hop and dance tracks. The app’s homepage will now be based around sideways-scrolling carousels of playlists and albums, some of which will be tuned to the listener’s tastes. These will include ‘More of what […]

Imogen Heap’s Mycelia event in London today wasn’t just about announcing a world tour and Creative Passport initiative for artists. There was also a panel of ‘reflective bytes from absorbent minds’ about some of the issues raised in Heap’s keyonote. The panel included Eva Kaili, Member of the European Parliament; Sammy Andrews, CEO of Deviate […]

We’ve seen a few music-industry conference venues in our time, but never a giant tipi until today. Built in the grounds of musician Imogen Heap’s home in Havering-atte-Bower, it was the location for Heap to talk about the next steps for her Mycelia project. She was unveiling Mycelia’s proposal for a ‘Creative Passport’, which is […]

Lead: Labels and artists spent 2017 getting their heads around how playlists have created a new centre of gravity for the record business. The old ways of promoting a record (discounting at retail, plugging at radio, pitching to the specialist music press) have all gone and now playlists are the conundrum everyone wants – and […]

Deezer is launching its hi-res ‘HiFi’ tier in Japan this month, working with local partners Onkyo, Pioneer Marketing and Yamaha. Deezer HiFi will offer FLAC-quality streaming in Japan with a catalogue of more than 36m songs, according to its announcement. A three-month free trial will be offered to people signing up with devices bought from […]

Vevo is the world’s leading all-premium music video and entertainment platform with over 24 billion monthly views globally. Vevo delivers a personalized and expertly curated experience for audiences to explore and discover music videos, exclusive original programming and live performances from the artists they love on mobile, web and connected TV.   Take a look […]

Research being conducted in Finland into a ‘user-centric’ payments model for music-streaming suggests that the biggest tracks may be the main losers under such a system. That’s according to Lottaliina Pokkinen, head of legal affairs at the Finnish Musicians’ Union, although she stressed in a session at the Slush Music conference in Helsinki this week […]

“The industry’s problem to solve is we’ve been addicted to promotion for the entire time that the music industry has existed. We’ve always given stuff away to sell something. But that mindset in the consumption world just doesn’t really stack up…” The music industry’s view in the ‘value gap’ debate, at its simplest is ‘YouTube […]

Beggars Group (4AD, Matador, Rough Trade, XL, Young Turks, New Gen) is looking for a talented London-based Designer/Front-End Developer to work with our artists and labels. We are looking for someone with a real love for music and an interest and awareness of how the industry is developing and changing online. We love coming up […]

Jaak is one of the startups exploring the potential that blockchain technology has for the music industry. The company is working on a number of pilot schemes, and its CEO Vaughn McKenzie has been a regular speaker on blockchain panels at industry conferences. Yesterday he flew solo at the Slush Music conference in Helsinki, interviewed about […]

Attendees at the Slush Music conference in Helsinki this morning may have turned up expecting to hear The Orchard co-founder Scott Cohen telling them why the music industry is broken, and how he’s going to fix it. That was, after all, the title of his session. It was a red herring. “Once a week somebody […]

JOB SUMMARY AWAL serves a growing roster of emerging talent and already established independent artists from all over the world. As our AWAL community continues to grow, we’re now looking for someone to join our client management team to help support these labels and artists using the cutting-edge AWAL tools. You need to have exceptional […]

2017 has been a fascinating year for digital music, from the growth in paid streaming to a wave of new accelerators and initiatives to help talented music startups get up and running. A pair of sessions at the Slush Music conference in Helsinki this morning provided some insights into the music/tech world. Raine Group partner […]

We’ll be blunt: for many music startups, the ‘exit’ is either shutting down when nobody wants their product or service, or an ‘acquihire’ of their team and/or tech by a bigger fish without the kind of valuation that gets investors salivating. Might there be bigger and better exits ahead? A panel at the Slush Music […]

Google is updating its rules on how ticket-resellers can advertise on its search engine, with the changes due to take effect in January 2018. Secondary ticketing services globally will have to be certified with Google before they can advertise using its AdWords platform. “To be certified, resellers can’t imply that they are the primary or […]

Spotify users have streamed 6.6bn songs from K-Pop artists since the company launched its K-Pop hub in 2015, racking up more than 14.4bn minutes of listening. That’s according to a blog post published by Spotify yesterday hailing the growth of streams for South Korean pop artists on its service since its hub went live in […]

The market for ‘paid online music’ in China is expected to grow by 59% this year to $455m according to research firm iResearch, whose prediction is quoted prominently in the Financial Times’ latest piece on China. It focuses on the evolving dynamics of the Chinese streaming market, where the exclusive licensing deals signed by Tencent […]

Indian streaming service Saavn is having a busy month, thanks to a partnership with Amazon, a marketing campaign running on Snapchat, and a pair of new strategic investors for the company. Saavn has also seen its latest original track, ‘Bom Diggy’, become a hit not just on its own service in India, but also on […]

South Korean boy-band BTS made a splash at the American Music Awards last weekend, and now they’re breaking records on Twitter too. They’ve been included in this year’s Guinness Book of World Records for “having the world’s most Twitter engagements for a music group”. Dedication’s what they needed for that. The post K-Pop band BTS […]

The executive director of US artist-rights body the Content Creators Coalition, Jeff Boxer, has resigned after three women published blog posts alleging sexual misconduct (links here, here and here). “The Executive Board of Content Creators Coalition is deeply troubled by reports of sexual misconduct by our executive director, Jeff Boxer. We convened an emergency board […]

Analyst firm Edison Investment Research has put out a note on Sonos’ prospects in the smart-speaker market, with its devices now supporting Alexa as well as Spotify Connect. It’s not optimistic. “By enabling both Spotify Connect and Amazon Echo, Sonos has removed the requirement for users to use its software which is a sign that […]

ATM Artists are an independent management company based in London and Los Angeles representing a diverse roster of talent. We pride ourselves on the ability to evolve and innovate. From career management to brand partnerships, event production to marketing campaigns. We believe an artist or brand campaign comes in many layers and we aim to […]

While we’re on the subject of different kinds of reality, Jaron Lanier is a useful man to listen to, having been one of the original pioneers of virtual reality technology. Wired has been talking to him about the difference between VR and ‘mixed reality’ (MR), and his thoughts may prove handy for any music companies […]

Sorry, the rumours about Apple making an AR headset and/or smart glasses are going to keep on coming until the company actually makes one. At least there’s some concrete fact to the latest story: Apple has acquired a startup called Vrvana that was making an AR headset called the Totem. TechCrunch claims that the acquisition […]

We’re big fans of the recent album by Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile, and we’re also impressed by the inventive Spotify-fuelled marketing campaign around it. So is Spotify: the streaming service has featured the campaign as a case study on its Spotify for Artists blog. The post Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile launch ‘mixtape exchange’ […]

Swedish alternative-investments firm EQT has taken a 40% stake in production-music company Epidemic Sound, whose CEO Oscar Höglund we interviewed earlier this week about this summer’s ‘fake artists’ controversy. The investment also sees VC firm Creandum upping its stake in Epidemic Sound to 20%, although the actual investment amounts and valuation have not been announced. […]

Chinese music service NetEase Cloud Music says it now has 400 million users, having increased its monthly active users (MAUs) by 44% year-on-year. The company also says that its users are skewed towards the 15-35 year-old demographic in China’s tier one and tier two cities, with those listeners creating 620k playlists and posting 1.5m comments […]

Apple has just announced that its HomePod smart speaker won’t be on sale until early in 2018. Now Bloomberg has been shedding more details on the backstory of the product, which if the article is true, paints a picture very different from the finely-honed R&D machine that Apple is often seen as. Among its claims: […]

Facebook has taken its latest step forward in its path towards music-licensing. the social network has appointed Jeremy Sirota as its label music business development manager, operating out of New York. Sirota joined the company from Warner Music Group this month according to his LinkedIn profile. His last role at WMG was as SVP, head […]