Zen 8 app adds AI music to Instagram and Snapchat stories
As Music Ally has been covering the latest wave of AI-generated music startups, we’ve argued that one of the most interesting uses for this technology is social – a way to create background music for videos and other posts in apps like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. That’s one reason why the acquisition of AI-music startup Jukedeck by […]
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Source: Music ally
30% of the Beatles’ Spotify streams are from 18-24 year-olds
Happy 50th birthday to the Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road’ album: we’ve been enjoying the ‘updated artwork’ meme from earlier this year getting plenty of re-shares. Streaming services have been celebrating the anniversary too, with Spotify putting out some stats on the Beatles more generally. The band’s music has been streamed nearly 1.7bn times on Spotify in 2019 alone, […]
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Source: Music ally
YouTube Music app to be pre-installed on new Android devices
The transition continues from Google Play Music to YouTube Music. Google has announced that the latter app will now be pre-installed on all devices running the latest versions of its Android operating system. That’s Android 9 and Android 10, to be specific. For now, this is likely to to be something of a niche: as a guide, Google’s […]
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Source: Music ally
‘Fan-made’ Taylor Swift tracks pulled down from Spotify
After a few months of quiet, there’s another ‘fake music’ farrago in the air. The Fader reported that “dozens” of Taylor Swift bootlegs had been uploaded to Spotify as individual ‘podcast’ files. “many of the songs themselves appear to be isolated vocals ripped from Swift’s Lover that have been placed over newly-made acoustic instrumentals,” it reported, describing […]
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Source: Music ally
Report: North American music still tops for global playlists
Analytics firm Chartmetric has published its ‘Global Music Industry Data Report’ for the first half of 2019, digging in to data from platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Instagram and Shazam among others. The bit that’s making headlines so far (yes, including ours above) is the section analysing programmed playlists on the big services by […]
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Source: Music ally
Auxuman launches AI-generated album with five virtual artists
Startup Auxuman’s claim to have released ‘the first-ever fully AI-generated music album’ isn’t quite right: Endel has released a string of them in 2019, while Boomy is enabling anyone to release albums created by its AI (I’ve tried that already). Even so, Auxuman’s project is interesting.
The album is called ‘Auxuman Vol.1’ and it features 10 tracks by five ‘artists’ – the twist being that each of those artists is themselves a virtual character. “AI-generated musicians whose music and words are entirely driven by Artificial Intelligence tools to introduce a new ‘soul’ behind non-human content,” as the press release puts it. “The next generation of virtual entertainers and their online worlds”.
Unashamedly-fake artists, in other words: the latest example of ‘synthetic reality’ with Auxuman keen to build out Yona, Mony, Gemini, Hexe and Zoya as personalities in their own right – Yona’s influences are cited as “various reading sources and musical taste, from Atwood to articles about teenage life and growth in metropolitan areas” for example.
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Source: Music ally
Euro copyright directive sparks Google change in France… for news
This week, Music Ally got a notification from Google that from late October, text snippets, video previews and thumbnail images from our website will not be shown in search results in France. We haven’t done anything wrong (we promise!) – this is an alert that anyone designated a ‘European press publication’ is getting, and it’s […]
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Source: Music ally
Facebook reveals new plans for social VR (oh, and AR too)
With Amazon’s blizzard of new-product announcements, not to mention the political ructions going on in the US, Facebook’s Oculus division’s OC6 developer conference might have struggled for attention. It’s well worth reading up on the announcements made at the show though: it’s an excellent snapshot of Facebook’s continued ambitions for virtual AND augmented reality technology. […]
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Source: Music ally
Maroon 5 team up with Apple for iOS photos-app promotion
Apple’s new iOS software (iOS 13) launched earlier this month, and one of its features suddenly has an interesting music angle. The feature is called ‘Memories’ – it actually launched three years ago, but was updated within iOS 13 – and automatically edits together photos and videos for particular events in someone’s camera roll. Now […]
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Source: Music ally
Midland and Vampire Weekend join the music-podcasts rush
More artist podcasts? You got ’em! Country trio Midland have launched their own spoken-word show called ‘Set It Straight with Midland‘. It sounds fun too: rather than promote the band’s music, each of the first season’s 10 episodes will investigate a famous, strange story from country-music history, starting with the theft of Gram Parsons’ corpse. […]
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Source: Music ally
K-Pop stars BTS are the latest artist to join TikTok
At the time of writing, it’s 19 hours since Big Hit Entertainment’s official Twitter profile for BTS made this announcement: “#BTS TikTok Channel Open!”. 19 hours later, BTS’ TikTok account is being followed by 2.2 million people. Their two posts so far have 2.9m and 1.9m likes respectively. BTS are the latest prominent artist to join TikTok with […]
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Source: Music ally
Ticketing startup Dice expands to Italy, with FKA twigs
It’s been a while since we’ve checked in with ticketing startup Dice – in March, when the company launched in the US. Now it’s expanding again, this time to Italy. Dice’s app is now live there, complete with an exclusive deal to sell tickets for FKA Twigs’ next Milan concert in November. Dice also says […]
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Source: Music ally
Country Profile – Spain 2019
After a blockbuster first half of the year, the Spanish music industry saw an unlikely spike in CD sales. While that might be a temporary blip, overall growth was at 27% and the news from Spain is hugely positive
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Source: Music ally
Sandbox Summit 2019 London, 30 October #ModernMusicMarketing
Music Ally is delighted to be hosting its flagship music marketing conference Sandbox Summit at the London Art House on Wednesday 30th October. A day packed with thought-leading discussions and presentations at the cutting edge of music marketing, the event has become an essential fixture on the music marketer’s calendar. Thank you as ever to our headline sponsors Linkfire and The Orchard for helping […]
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Source: Music ally
Guard uses AI to analyse digital-service privacy policies
If the last few years of digital controversies has taught us anything, it’s that we should probably not be clicking our way through privacy-policy screens when signing up to new services without reading them. But reading privacy policies can be… a chore. Cue a startup promising that AI can help. The startup is called Guard, and […]
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Source: Music ally
Chartmetric is making sense of DSPs’ playlist-ladder systems
Music-analytics firm Chartmetric has published a blog post outlining some of the findings from its ‘Pre-Playlist Analyzer’ and ‘Post-Playlist Analyzer’ tools, and it makes for interesting reading. The tools can be used to measure tracks’ progression from one programmed playlist to another on the key streaming services, in an effort to understand how the ‘ladder’ systems work, […]
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Source: Music ally
YouTube adds 14 artists to its Foundry development program
YouTube developing music artists? It’s been at it for a while, with its Foundry ‘global artist development program’, which first launched in 2016 as a training scheme, of sorts, for artists including Dua Lipa, Rosalía, Dave and Mahalia. In April this year it was ‘refreshed‘ as an initiative offering marketing promotion as well as training […]
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Source: Music ally
Audius takes on SoundCloud… but takedowns could get interesting
Music Ally first wrote about blockchain-music startup Audius just over a year ago, when the company raised a $5.5m funding round (a traditional one, not an ICO) for a platform described as ‘SoundCloud on the blockchain’. The following month, it revealed that its advisers included Beatport CEO Robb McDaniels; former Avicii manager Ash Pournouri; Pandora head of artist product Shamal Ranasinghe; […]
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Source: Music ally
Report predicts live-music ticket sales will top $25bn in 2023
Research firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has recently updated its Global Entertainment & Media Outlook report, which makes all manner of predictions for the next five years. Among them the growth in sales of tickets for live-music events. The prediction is that global ticket sales will grow from just over $22bn in 2019 to more than $25bn in 2023. […]
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Source: Music ally
Amazon’s ‘voice interoperability initiative’ includes Spotify
“Voice services should work seamlessly alongside one another on a single device, and… voice-enabled products should be designed to support multiple simultaneous wake words.” That’s the key sentence in the announcement of the Voice Interoperability Initiative, which has been created by one of the prime movers in voice technology: Amazon. It has mustered more than 30 companies […]
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Source: Music ally
Dead End Hip Hop talks platforms, Patreon and hip-hop in 2019
Founded in 2011, Dead End Hip Hop (DEHH) has built a strong community around its discussions of hip-hop’s music and culture, with more than 233,000 subscribers on YouTube, and nearly 3,300 fans funding the company’s work through Patreon.
In an email interview with Music Ally, DEHH’s six-strong team – Kennith B. Inge, Roderic Wright (aka Modest Media), Brandon White (Beezy430), Rafael Ferrer (Feefo), Myke Jamison (Myke C-Town) and Sophia Bryce (Sophie) explained how they’ve grown, what’s coming next, and how they see hip-hop’s place in the streaming era.
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Source: Music ally
More artists join campaign against facial-recognition at gigs
There have been two main stories about the intersection of facial-recognition technology and live music. One was Live Nation’s investment in and pilots-partnership with a startup called Blink Identity, with its technology for identifying concertgoers as they walk past its scanners, without the need for them to show tickets. The other was a controversy around the use of […]
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Source: Music ally
Ivors Academy looks to next generation with new Youth Network
British songwriting body The Ivors Academy (formerly BASCA) is looking to the next generation, with a new ‘Youth Network’ initiative. The body says it will involve creating partnerships with universities, colleges and other organisations across the UK, as well as setting up a ‘Youth Council’ to give young songwriters a say in its campaigns, awards and […]
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Source: Music ally
What losing faith in playlists could mean for music marketing
Our latest issue of Sandbox went out to subscribers last night. In the cover feature, we look at how playlists marketing has gone through upheaval in recent months as the two biggest players (Apple Music and Spotify) take very different approaches to what playlists are and how they work. Weekly playlists are now squaring up […]
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Source: Music ally
Music listening in 2019: 10 takeaways from the IFPI’s new report
Global music-industry body the IFPI has published its latest ‘Music Listening’ report, for 2019, based on a survey of 34,000 people in 21 countries.
Whereas the body’s annual Global Music Report focuses on revenues, this study is all about people’s music habits: how much they’re streaming and buying music; what devices they’re doing it on; and whether they’re still getting it from unlicensed sources at least some of the time.
The survey was conducted in April and May this year by the IFPI and its research partner AudienceNet. The 21 countries were: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as China and India – although results from the latter two were not included in the IFPI’s ‘global’ figures in the report.
Here are Music Ally’s 10 key takeaways from Music Listening 2019, which we’ve been reading overnight.
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Source: Music ally
Country Profile – Australia 2019
Four years of growth, combined with a strong established industry with room for further expansion has put the Australian recorded music business into a new optimistic mindset
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Source: Music ally
SingleServ app wants to help artists raise money for charities
Music Ally has seen a few music-streaming apps making promises like payouts “over 2x more than Spotify”, but there’s a twist in the case of SingleServ: the payouts are going to charities. Launched as an iPhone app, the company describes itself as a “cause-based streaming platform that allows musicians to directly fundraise for charities by using their […]
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Source: Music ally
Sandbox Issue 236: Power Plays. THE NEXT STEP FOR PLAYLISTS
Lead: Playlists are still enormously important for breaking acts and for building careers – but they are increasingly a moving target that gets harder and harder to hit. As they change what they are, how they work and what they do, those marketing through playlists could find themselves shunted back to square one. This is […]
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Source: Music ally
Reeperbahn Festival day two: Gender equality, secondary ticketing and more
With digital now firmly driving the music industry, the second day of the conference at this year’s Reeperbahn Festival saw a lot of chatter about the industry’s resolutely-analogue elements: human beings. From gender equality in terms even the least humane person can understand, to where bots meet humans, and how smaller, people-centric businesses can survive in the face of big-money land-grabs.
Music can play a major part in reducing gender inequality
In the suitably futuristic “Future Dome,” Reeperbahn showcased an impressive programme of panels on sustainability and equality. And with steady persistence, each speaker made it clear in front of an industry that has often dragged its feet: gende
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Source: Music ally
TikTok trumpets its role in helping DJ Regard have a viral hit
TikTok and its parent company Bytedance’s licensing negotiations with music rightsholders continue, as does its dispute with licensing hub ICE in the UK, which has been taken to the country’s copyright tribunal. Yet alongside all this, TikTok continues to make its presence felt as a platform for music discovery and marketing campaigns. It’s no surprise […]
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Source: Music ally
Reeperbahn Festival day one: Copyright, Brexit and more
Authenticity, Copyright law, and – oh yes – Brexit were all on the agenda during the first day of conference sessions at the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg.
In an era where perceived authenticity counts for so much, songwriters composing for clients who want songs for adverts might be asked to create songs that fulfil two seemingly opposing needs: writing songs that are authentic – but also that sound alike – or even “just-a-like” a famous hit. Can you balance this, and what does it tell us about music consumers today?
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Source: Music ally
MelodyVR to launch a music-VR subscription later this year
How is that brave new world of musical virtual-reality doing? The latest financial results from startup MelodyVR offer some clues, as well as news of the company’s plans to shift from a a-la-carte pricing to a subscription model later this year. Financials first: MelodyVR generated £128.4k of revenues ($160.1k) in the first six months of 2019, but […]
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Source: Music ally
Amazon Music gets an HD tier, starting in the US, UK, Japan and Germany
Amazon Music has become the biggest music-streaming service yet to add a higher-quality tier. Amazon Music HD launches in the US, UK, Germany and Japan this week.
It will cost $12.99 a month for Amazon Prime members and $14.99 a month for non-members. That’s $5 more than the cost of the existing Amazon Music service in each case, while undercutting the $19.99 price for Tidal and Deezer’s higher-quality tiers.
“The way the industry heretofore has priced this has been basically saying ‘we want this to be niche’. But I think the industry understands that sound quality isn’t niche,” Amazon Music VP Steve Boom told Music Ally ahead of the launch.
“We’re in the music business: why wouldn’t audio quality matter! And why would we want to reserve it just for a small group of people who are going to pay twice the cost of a regular subscription?”
Amazon will be offering a three-month trial of Amazon Music HD, including to existing Music Unlimited subscribers. The tier has more than 50m songs available in ‘HD’ quality – CD-quality, 16-bit 44.1kHz tracks – including “millions” of tracks in ‘Ultra HD quality’. The latter category covers a range of 24-bit tracks with sample rates from 44.1kHz to 192kHz.
“It will have what we believe to be the largest catalogue of lossless, uncompressed files in the industry,” said Boom, who described the HD / Ultra HD branding as an important sign of Amazon’s intent.
“It’s very important for us to demystify and simplify this area. It’s been difficult to understand! The first time you go on a website and try to look into lossless audio and are presented with all these different numbers. ‘I don’t know what any of that means!’” he said.
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Source: Music ally
Martina McBride criticises Spotify again over playlist algorithm (and Spotify agrees)
Earlier this month, we reported on country star Martina McBride’s anger at Spotify’s recommendation algorithm, after its first 135 suggestions of tracks for a ‘country music’ playlist she was making were all by men.
Spotify’s head of artist and label marketing in Nashville, Brittany Schaffer, seemed to have smoothed over the waters with a coffee meeting and a promise (in an Instagram comment) of “working more closely with you and the other women who are instrumental to this industry”.
Now, though, McBride has been giving interviews explaining why she’s still cross with Spotify – including its lack of an official (corporate) statement on the matter. “How come they haven’t come out and said, ‘We’re working on this,’ whether it’s true or not?” she told People. “I find it shocking that they feel so indestructible that they don’t even take the time to make a comment about this.”
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Source: Music ally
Napster’s Angel Gambino talks tech, Ek and streaming’s evolution
Angel Gambino has been in the digital trenches since the late 1990s. Her career has seen her work in early social gaming (for Gameplay·com); test the digital waters for TV (at the BBC and Viacom); and forge content strategies for social networking (Bebo).
In 2019, she’s putting the lessons learned to work in her current role as chief commercial officer at music-streaming firm Napster. Music Ally spoke to Gambino about her career memories, from getting Bill Gates to work with the BBC to what happened when Rupert Murdoch beat Viacom to the acquisition of MySpace – via her warning to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in the early days of the “difficult and ugly” process of getting his company up and running.
Gambino’s career started at the epicentre of the first dotcom boom in San Francisco in the late 1990s. She remembers “this hope, this energy and this belief” at the time that technology could change society for the better.
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Source: Music ally
YouTube excludes paid-ad views from its music charts and 24-hour records
YouTube is making a change to the way it calculates its YouTube Music charts, and its ’24-hour debut’ records. From now on, paid advertising views will not count towards either.
The change follows a recent controversy when Sony Music India claimed that artist Badshah had broken YouTube’s 24-hour-debut record, before it emerged that paid ads had played a role in his milestone.
“In an effort to provide more transparency to the industry and align with the policies of official charting companies such as Billboard and Nielsen, we are no longer counting paid advertising views on YouTube in the YouTube Music Charts calculation. Artists will now be ranked based on view counts from organic plays,” announced YouTube in a blog post today.
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Source: Music ally
US politician Tim Ryan reveals his policies… as a Spotify album
Democrat congressman Tim Ryan is one of the runners in the race to take on Donald Trump in the next US presidential election.
Not one of the front-runners, or even a mid-runner in fairness: he didn’t clear the bar of fundraising and polling to qualify for this week’s televised debate between candidates. However, Ryan is turning to unorthodox means to keep himself in the minds of voters: he’s released an album on Spotify.
Sadly it’s not a collection of deep-discofox crustpunk-catstep bangers, but rather an album of spoken-word tracks outlining his views on education, climate change, healthcare, gun control and immigration, among other topics.
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Source: Music ally
Fan project turns Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’ into a VR video
Hot on the heels of Björk releasing her new virtual-reality album, there’s a new VR experience for Daft Punk’s classic track ‘One More Time’. However, in this case, it isn’t an official release by the band.
‘Interstella VR’ has been produced as a fan project by Australian developer Jake Donaldson and a small team of collaborators as a showcase for the potential he sees in music VR experiences. It’s been built for HTC’s Vive VR headset, but Donaldson says it’ll also work with the Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality devices.
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Source: Music ally
Lucy Dacus is spending 2019 releasing ‘slow music’ holiday songs
Artist Lucy Dacus is stepping out of the traditional album-release cycle in 2019, choosing instead to release a series of tracks tied to public holidays and other notable dates.
She covered ‘La Vie En Rose’ for Valentine’s Day; released ‘My Mother & I’ for Mother’s Day; and then a track called ‘Forever Half Mast’ for Independence Day.
In a blog post outlining her strategy, Spotify noted that Dacus will release more tracks for Halloween, Christmas and (although this isn’t a public holiday… yet) Bruce Springsteen’s birthday. At the end of the year, the tracks will be compiled as a physical EP.
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Source: Music ally
Apple HomePod set to get ‘Ambient Sounds’ mode this autumn
Apple’s HomePod smart speaker didn’t get much of a look-in at the company’s press event earlier this week, which focused more on iPhones, iPads, watches and the company’s new video-streaming and games subscription services.
But Apple has quietly updated its HomePod product page to remind owners of a pair of new features coming to the device this autumn – and a third that hasn’t (as far as Music Ally is aware) been previously announced.
The two already-revealed features are multi-user support, so that the HomePod can recognise different voices in a family and thus play music based on their profiles, and live streaming of more than 100k radio stations via integrations with iHeartRadio, TuneIn and Radio·com.
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Source: Music ally
Spotify launches a podcast about musician mxmtoon
Oakland-based singer/songwriter mxmtoon has built an audience of 3.6 million listeners on Spotify – aided by slots on playlists including New Music Friday, Lorem and Alone Again.
Now she’s getting a different kind of support from the streaming service: its Spotify Studios division is making an eight-episode podcast all about her. It’s called ’21 Days with mxmtoon’, and follows the three-week process of recording her first album ‘The Masquerade’ in New York.
“This podcast traces her path to this pivotal moment while she fights pressure, trolls, self-doubt, and most importantly, the clock,” as the blurb puts it. Spotify has published the first three episodes, with the remaining five set for release next week alongside the album.
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Source: Music ally
Lil Nas X promises to release 25 remixes of ‘Panini’
If you thought that the succession of remixes of Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ were a *bit much* we’d advise you to look away from your screen now. “PANINI REMIX 1 OF 25 TONIGHT!” he tweeted yesterday.
This was shortly before dropping said remix, which features rap star DaBaby. ‘Panini’ was originally released as a single in June this year, making headlines for its interpolation of Nirvana’s ‘In Bloom’ (Kurt Cobain has a credit on the composition).
However, the track was overshadowed by the ‘Old Town Road’ remix juggernaut – its official audio version has 46m views on YouTube and 204.5m streams on Spotify, but those figures pale in comparison with ‘Old Town Road’.
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Source: Music ally
Spotify takes flak for location-tracking family-plan move
Spotify knows where you live… but it would like to check that you’re still living there, every so often, if that’s okay? This is part of the new terms and conditions for the company’s much-discussed Premium Family plan.
An August update to the t’s and c’s included this clause: “We may from time to time ask for re-verification of your home address in order to confirm that you are still meeting the eligibility criteria.”
CNET spotted the clause, and found a privacy expert to criticise it. “The changes to the policy allow Spotify to arbitrarily use the location of an individual to ascertain if they continue to reside at the same address when using a family account, and it’s unclear how often Spotify will query users’ devices for this information,” said Christopher Weatherhead of Privacy International, suggesting that this has “worrying privacy implications”.
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Source: Music ally
The challenge with podcast music-licensing: annual renewals
If you read our report of the event we ran with the BPI in June, you’ll already be well aware that licensing music for podcasts is… challenging. Now Billboard has published an interesting feature outlining some of those problems in more detail.
It explains some of the basics: for example that licensing a song for a podcast is like a sync deal, so needs permission from the recording and composition rightsholders.
But the part that stood out to us: “An annual track license generally costs between $500 and $2,000 for the master recording, plus the same amount for publishing, sources say, and must be renewed for a podcast to remain online”.
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Source: Music ally
Vevo says its music videos generate more than 800m daily views
A birthday we almost forgot about: Vevo is 10 years old this year. The music-videos firm has published a few new stats to celebrate the performance of the 400k-plus videos in its catalogue.
Vevo says that its catalogue is currently averaging more than 800m views a day, rising to near-1bn on the weekends. It also says that it has seen a 300% growth in daily views over the past five years.
That period, of course, includes the moment in May 2018 when Vevo decided to ‘phase out’ its owned-and-operated services – its website and mobile app – in favour of working purely through distribution partners. YouTube remains the most prominent, but Vevo now also makes its catalogue available through Amazon, Apple, Roku, Sky, Virgin Media and Viewd.
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Source: Music ally
Deezer steps up its efforts to introduce user-centric payments
Deezer is hoping to launch a pilot of a user-centric payment system (UCPS) by early 2020 in France, if it can persuade labels to back the idea. As part of its preparations, it has launched a website this morning explaining UCPS to music fans.
As a quick reminder: user-centric payments divide the streaming royalties from each listeners monthly subscription only between the artists they have listened to that month.
That’s instead of the existing ‘market share’ system used by streaming services, which gathers royalties into a central pool, then divides them and pays them out based on each artist’s share of overall streams from all listeners.
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Source: Music ally
NY:LON Connect keynotes confirmed: Cecilia Qvist, Sun Lee, Scott Cohen
The first three keynote speakers have been announced for NY:LON Connect, the conference co-organised by The Music Business Association (Music Biz) and Music Ally. Spotify’s global head of markets Cecilia Qvist; YouTube Music’s head of music content partnerships and subscriptions for Korea and Greater China Sun Lee; and Warner Music Group’s chief innovation officer – recorded […]
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Source: Music ally
Esthero interrupts her own track to protest streaming royalties
Canadian artist Esthero has found a novel way to make her views known about streaming royalties: within a track that she’s released on streaming services.
One minute and 37 seconds in to ‘Gimme Some Time’, she interrupts the music. “Hello there, sweet listener. So, I really hope you’re enjoying my song. This is Esthero by the way. But I hope you’re enjoying it enough to go over to www.esthero.net… and purchase the uninterrupted version,” she says.
“It’s really hard as an independent artist to make money, and Spotify and other streaming services only pay about .003 to .008 cents per stream. It’s really not a liveable income. So once again, I really hope you enjoy my music, and I hope you enjoy it enough to actually go and support and buy the song from me…”
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Source: Music ally
KPMG India predicts growing prominence for music subscriptions
Research firm KPMG’s India division has published its annual Media and Entertainment Report for 2019, which describes India’s digital future as a “mass of niches”. It’s very good for rooting what’s happening around music-streaming in the context of the wider digital-media ecosystem, as well as the Indian economy. There are some good music specifics though.
“The Indian music industry is expected to grow at a CAGR [compound annual growth rate] of 15.8 per cent over FY19-FY24. The key catalyst for this growth is likely to be audio streaming, which is expected to grow at around 5 per cent higher than growth of the overall music industry,” being one claim made by the report, which sees advertising revenues as a key driver for streaming.
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Source: Music ally
Technical Support and Customer Success role – DISCO – European Union
We’re a music tech startup based in Australia, with a remote staff in the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. Our app, DISCO, is used by some of the world’s best music and media companies to manage their music assets and workflow. Some of our clients include Universal, Netflix, Sub Pop, Concord, Warner Music, Mute, BBDO, […]
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Source: Music ally
BBC reveals some of its experiments with augmented reality
British broadcaster the BBC has been experimenting with smartglasses – augmented-reality specs – to explore what potential these devices might have for television in the future.
“The immersive nature of augmented reality, effectively projecting holograms into your eyes and enabling you to physically interact with those holograms, could offer exciting new ways to watch TV, access the news and learn about subjects in a far more effective way than has ever been possible before,” reckons the Beeb’s Cyrus Saihan, who’s published a blog post explaining what the broadcaster has been up to.
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Source: Music ally
Musicians star in ‘Seize the Awkward’ mental-health campaign
Four musicians are taking part in a new mental-health campaign aimed at teenagers and young adults. Lindsey Stirling, Hayley Kiyoko, Aminé, and Christina Perri are the stars of the latest ‘Seize the Awkward’ campaign, which is being run by the Ad Council in the US.
Each artist features in their own short video released through the organisation’s YouTube channel, as well as one where they all feature, explaining ‘How to talk to a friend about mental health’.
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Source: Music ally
UMG’s schlager YouTube channel is doing 30m views a month
This story has been written to the soundtrack of gravelly-voiced German artist Ben Zucker, as well as the ‘Ultimatver Party Hitmix’ of his compatriot Sonia Liebing. It’s been quite the listen.
Why? Because we’ve been investigating Universal Music’s ‘Ich Find Schlager Toll!’ YouTube channel (translation: ‘I think Schlager’s great!’). It’s one of the projects called out by Universal Music Central Europe’s boss Frank Briegmann in a speech this week at the company’s Universal Inside 2019 event.
Schlager is very much a German phenomenon (“a catchy instrumental accompaniment to vocal pieces of pop music with simple, happy-go-lucky, and often sentimental lyrics,” as Wikipedia describes it), and one that’s traditionally more associated with CD sales than streaming innovation.
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Source: Music ally
Sony unveils new Walkman complete with MQA hi-res support
Search for ‘Walkman’ on Google, and the ‘people also ask’ boxout reveals that common searches include ‘When was the Walkman discontinued?’ and ‘Do they still make Walkmans?’.
The answer to the latter being ‘yes’ – a new one was unveiled yesterday by Sony. The Walkman NW-ZX507 (Sony’s consumer electronics division continues to have an… interesting approach to memorable product names) is an Android-based digital music player with a touchscreen, capable of playing music downloads but also streaming via installed apps.
Hi-res tech firm MQA is also involved – as it has been with Walkmans since 2017 – so people will be able to stream MQA-quality music via services like Tidal, Xiami Music and Nugs.net on the new device.
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Source: Music ally
100,000 people watched MelodyVR’s GMA Summer Concerts stream
Music virtual-reality startup MelodyVR recently broadcast one of US TV show Good Morning America’s ‘Summer Concert Series’ gigs featuring Marshmello and Kane Brown.
How did that go? MelodyVR says that the concert generated more than 100k live streams through its app alone. It’s now been archived for fans to watch in the app at their leisure.
However, MelodyVR says that the benefits of the partnership with ABC’s morning-show went beyond the people who actually watched the concert in VR. The startup reckons that a promotional segment about its app was watched by “tens of millions” of Americans on Good Morning America in the week leading up to the gig.
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Source: Music ally
UK’s CMA suspends plans for court action against Viagogo
British regulator the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been harrying secondary-ticketing firm Viagogo for some time now over how it presents tickets to its customers.
In July, the CMA announced plans to move forward with legal proceedings against Viagogo for contempt of court, claiming that it had failed to comply with a court order mandating changes.
Two months on, though, and that court action has been suspended. “Following continued pressure, Viagogo has now addressed the CMA’s outstanding concerns about how it presents important information to its customers,” announced the regulator yesterday. CMA boss Andrea Coscelli elaborated.
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Source: Music ally
Apple Music launches its official web-app in beta
It’s taken a while, but Apple Music is finally available as a web app, rather than just through iTunes and its native apps for other devices.
The new web client went live in beta yesterday, and lets subscribers search for and play music (including from their cloud libraries), and browse Apple Music’s collection of playlists and radio-like stations.
The live station Beats 1 isn’t yet available through the web interface, though, while for now the app is for existing subscribers: new users will have to sign up through one of the existing (non-web) apps.
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Source: Music ally
Alibaba reportedly buying a 20% stake in NetEase Cloud Music
Big moves are afoot in China’s music-streaming world, with reports that tech giant Alibaba is acquiring a 20% stake in NetEase Cloud Music, as part of a wider $2bn investment in the latter’s parent company NetEase.
MBW suggests that the deal may value NetEase Cloud Music as high as $9bn – less than half that of rival Tencent Music, but still an impressive step up from the $3.5bn that it was valued at in 2018 when it raised a funding round of $600m.
Alibaba has its own music subsidiary (Ali Music Group) and streaming service (Xiami), but the two companies signed a partnership last year to share some of their previously-exclusive catalogues.
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Source: Music ally
US recorded-music business grew by 18% in first half of 2019
Pop the champagne corks! Well, if you’re one of Music Ally’s American readers reading this story at the start of your working day, perhaps leave that until… whatever time won’t get you sacked for too-early-in-the-day boozing. But yes: celebrations, because the latest mid-year figures for the US recorded-music market are out from the RIAA, and they look very positive.
The topline: more double-digit growth, with retail (consumer-spending) revenues of $5.4bn for the first half of 2019, up 18% year-on-year, while on a wholesale (trade) basis, they grew by 16% to $3.5bn. Within the retail figures, streaming revenues grew by 26% to $4.3bn, and thus now account for 80% of the overall market. Within that, paid-subscription revenues grew by 31% to $3.3bn – 62% of the overall total – with the US averaging 61.1m paid music subscriptions in the first six months of 2019. That’s year-on-year growth of 30.3%.
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Source: Music ally
Marketing Executive – Anjunabeats – London
With almost 20 years of touring and hundreds of releases under its belt, Anjunabeats remains one of the world’s best-loved independent dance labels. We’re looking for an early career marketing all-rounder to help us write our next chapter! Working from our brand new London office, just a short walk from London Bridge Station, you’ll be […]
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Source: Music ally
Sandbox Issue 235: Talking TikTok Triumphs
Lead: TikTok is an essential consideration for artist marketing in 2019, particularly for pop acts. But for all the strategies and careful coordination, the best things on the app are often those that blindside everyone. We spotlight the best recent uses of music (and surprise catalogue reappearances) on TikTok in recent months and also look […]
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Source: Music ally
Mabel teams up with Samsung for ‘world’s first vertical gig’
We like Mabel a lot. We’re excited about many of the ways that music fans are sharing their love for music using mobile phones and social apps. But we apologise for raising a weary eyebrow at news that Mabel played “the world’s first vertical gig” for Samsung at “London’s new destination to experience the latest […]
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Source: Music ally
X Ambassadors launch video for blind and partially-sighted fans
What does a music video made for blind and partially-sighted people look like? Artist X Ambassadors have worked with Microsoft to find out. The ‘audio-only music video’ is for the band’s track ‘Boom’, and has been released as an application for computers, mobile devices and Microsoft’s mixed-reality HoloLens headset. It uses a spatial-audio technology called ‘Windows […]
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Source: Music ally
Jeffrey Epstein to be focus of Sony Music JV’s first podcast
Of all the possible topics for a major-label press release landing in Music Ally’s inbox, Jeffrey Epstein is definitely the most surprising. The late financier, who took his own life last month while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, is the subject for the first show being made by Three Uncanny Four Productions, the podcast-production […]
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Source: Music ally
Google and YouTube to pay $170m in child-privacy settlement
After months of speculation, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) yesterday announced details of its settlement with Google and YouTube over alleged violations of child-privacy law. The big number: $170m. That’s how much Google and YouTube are paying to settle the allegations that YouTube “illegally collected personal information from children without their parents’ consent”. $136m of that […]
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Source: Music ally
‘Juicing’ YouTube views with ads isn’t just an India thing
Sony Music artist Badshah came under the spotlight recently when his label claimed he’d broken YouTube’s first-day-views record; YouTube pointedly didn’t confirm it (and still hasn’t); and then debate ensued about the strategy of buying Google ads to boost a video’s view-count on YouTube. As Times Music COO Mandar Thakur crisply put it in a panel at […]
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Source: Music ally
Sony Music UK buys merchandise firm Kontraband
Major labels buying merchandise companies is an established trend now, from Universal Music’s Bravado division acquiring rival Epic Rights in January, and Warner Music paying $180m for German merch firm EMP in October 2018. The latest example was announced this morning: Sony Music UK is acquiring merchandise firm Kontraband for an undisclosed amount. The deal […]
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Source: Music ally
Startup studio Betaworks launches camp for ‘the future of audio’
Betaworks isn’t an ‘accelerator’ as such: it styles itself as a ’startup studio’ – meaning that besides running accelerators, it also builds new things in-house, and invests in external startups. GIF search-engine Giphy and mobile game Dots are two of its hits so far. Now it’s focusing on audio with its latest startup ‘camp’ program, […]
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Source: Music ally
Musiio reveals its first commercial client: Audio Network
We’ve written a few times about music/tech startup Musiio this year: the company uses artificial-intelligence (AI) technology to analyse catalogues of music, for purposes including search, metadata-tagging and playlisting. Now the company has announced its first commercial client: Audio Network, the production-music firm acquired by Entertainment One earlier this year (with eOne now in the process of […]
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Source: Music ally
Amanda Palmer says artists still fear crowdfunding criticism
Amanda Palmer was one of the first artists to make big headlines with a crowdfunding campaign, thanks to her 2012 Kickstarter campaign which raised nearly $1.2m for an album, art book and tour. Since then, she’s switched to ongoing fan-funding on Patreon, where she has more than 15,000 patrons paying from $1 per ‘thing’ that she produces. This week, […]
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Source: Music ally
Y Viva España! Spanish music revenues up 27% in first half of 2019
Remember when Spain was one of the world’s recorded-music basket cases, thanks to piracy? No more. The years between 2014 and 2018 saw steady growth (5.4%, 10%, 6.7%, 6.1% and 5.9% respectively according to the IFPI) of total revenues, but things have stepped up a couple of notches in the first half of 2019. According […]
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Source: Music ally
Tracking hit as Gmail iPhone app offers image-blocking option
Well, it’s not so much ‘blocking’ as it is an option for Gmail’s iPhone app not to automatically display external images when people are reading emails. But that in turn will have an impact on some of the technologies used by marketers to track (for example) emails being opened. Not that this is the main reason Google […]
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Source: Music ally
Spotify subsidiaries launch new business and horoscopes podcasts
The production lines are rolling for Spotify’s recently-acquired podcast studios, Gimlet and Parcast. Yesterday each had a brand new podcast to announce. Gimlet’s is called ‘The Journal’, and is a partnership with the Wall Street Journal for a daily show about “money, business and power”. That daily cycle could be important: it’ll generate useful content that […]
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Source: Music ally
Taylor Swift’s ‘Enhanced Album’ Spotify playlist has 1m followers
According to Republic Records, Taylor Swift’s new album ‘Lover’ has whizzed past the mark of 3m ‘album equivalent units’ worldwide since its release a week and a half ago. Interesting, since a third of that consumption came from China alone. But we’re also interested in the role played by Swift’s ‘Love Taylor, Lover Enhanced Album’ playlist on […]
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Source: Music ally
Russian startup Fluent launches its adaptive-music app
The idea of adaptive-music apps, where music adapts in real-time to what you’re doing, has been around for a long time – from the heyday of British startup RjDj to 2019’s LifeScore. Now there’s another startup exploring the potential: Moscow-based Fluent, which has launched its “immersive music” app for iPhone. Its pitch: “Spotify plays static files. AI generates bland, soulless […]
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Source: Music ally
Music/tech VC firm DBTH Capital raises a €35m fund
The latest company hoping to make a splash in the music/tech investment scene is DBTH Capital, whose founding partner is veteran music executive Virginie Berger. It’s got some money to make that splash too. “Happy to announce that my VC Fund, DBTH Capital has raised €35 million in a first close of its first fund. The […]
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Source: Music ally
Warner Music Group talks startups, technology and investment
In Music Ally’s latest analysis report, we take a look at the three major labels’ strategies around music/tech startups and investment. The full report is for Music Ally subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial, which includes access to the latest report. An extract from it follows, focusing on Warner Music Group.
As noted in our overview of the three majors’ strategies, WMG has a multi-faceted approach to its engagement with music startups. To find out more about the specific strategic thinking behind WMG Boost, its involvement in Techstars and to discuss some of the less obvious benefits of plugging into the startup ecosystem, Music Ally spoke to a trio of WMG’s leading lights in biz-dev.
They were: Oana Ruxandra, fresh from her promotion to lead WMG’s business development whilst also serving as executive VP of new business channels and chief acquisition officer; Jeff Bronikowski, SVP, global business development and head of new technology and innovation; and Alex Kamins, WMG’s VP, global digital business development – innovation.
All three were enthusiastic about what they saw as WMG’s nuanced, inquisitive and “lean-in” approach to engaging with the notoriously unpredictable startup world.
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Source: Music ally
Big Ear Games sees more potential for music-learning apps
The intersection of mobile gaming and music education is a category Music Ally has been tracking since 2011, when a Finnish startup called Ovelin started to get attention for a music-learning game called WildChords. It later rebranded as Yousician, and as of summer 2019 has generated more than 100m downloads of its apps.
Now history might just be repeating itself. Big Ear Games is another Finnish startup sitting at that intersection, with a free app for iOS and Android devices. The company was a finalist in the Midemlab startups contest in June in the music creation and education category.
“We are seeing a lot of excitement about what we do. People like the product,” says CEO Aviv Ben-Yehuda, talking to Music Ally shortly before heading to China for meetings with potential partners.
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Source: Music ally
Indian telco Airtel launches TV, video and music bundle
We’ve been talking about the prospect of music-streaming services being bundled with video and other services for some time now, often through the lens of what the big, global technology companies like Apple, Google and Amazon will be doing. However, in India there’s another angle to this debate: telcos. Witness Bharti Airtel (Airtel for short), […]
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Source: Music ally
BMG boss suggests major-label valuations are overblown
BMG’s chief executive Hartwig Masuch has been taking his latest potshots at the three major labels, this time focusing on whether their cost structures will prove unwieldy as deals tip more in favour of artists, from frontline catalogue to renewals of existing deals. “The deals for big hits today are much more aggressive than people […]
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Source: Music ally
Report claims that Facebook could start hiding ‘like’ counts
Social networks are trying to row back on some of the unintended consequences of their key mechanics, with ‘likes’ (or at least the public display of how many times posts have been liked) particularly under the microscope. Instagram has been testing hiding likes in some countries, and now it seems Facebook – which popularised the […]
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Source: Music ally
Report 424: Music/Tech Startups in 2019
Our focus is on music/tech startups, and their interaction with the music industry. Screenwriter William Goldman’s famous line about Hollywood – ”Nobody knows anything” – applies just as well to the task of spotting successful music/tech startups. But what Music Ally does know is that whenever we’ve been curious about startups in the present, it’s given us […]
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Source: Music ally
YouTube tipped to be fined up to $200m in child-privacy case
There has been gossip about an imminent settlement between Google/YouTube and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for some time now. The latest burst of reports suggests that YouTube will be paying between $150m and $200m in fines, as part of settlement of charges relating to children’s privacy – and specifically to data collection and […]
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Source: Music ally
Spotify commissioned an Instagram AR effect for artist Headie One
British artist Headie One is the latest musician to experiment with an augmented-reality (AR) camera effect in a social app – in his case, Instagram. It’s based on the artwork from his new mixtape ‘Music x Road’: a reflective mask and chest-tattoo that fans can superimpose on themselves for the purpose of Insta amusement. What’s […]
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Source: Music ally
Startup Resonoo is putting AI to work on spotting hit songs
Back in May 2018, Music Ally spotted a new startup called OptimiseLab, which was building “AI technology to analyse, improve, and compose music”. Initially, it was focusing on the first of those: a tool that “accurately predicts music popularity scores and provides customised advice on song improvement”. 15 months on, and OptimiseLab has just rebranded to Resonoo, […]
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Source: Music ally
Partisan co-founder talks music-licensing for podcasts
When Music Ally and British industry body the BPI held an event about music and podcasts earlier this year, one of the main talking points was about the difficulty of licensing music for podcasts. “Rights are a disaster,” being just the snappiest summary of the current situation. Now podcasting-industry site Hot Pod News has been talking […]
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Source: Music ally
Spotify can now share 15-second music clips to Facebook stories
The ability to share songs to ‘stories’ posts on Instagram has become a regular announcement by the various streaming services. Now Spotify is improving its integration with Facebook’s stories feature, by adding the actual music. “Today, we’re rolling out a more powerful way to connect with fans on Facebook Stories — with 15-second song previews,” announced Spotify […]
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Source: Music ally
Kilimanjaro Live responds to critics of Ed Sheeran resale policy
Within the music industry, Ed Sheeran and promotions firm Kilimanjaro Live have won plenty of praise for their stance against ticket touting. Not just for criticising the practice, but for taking action – helping fans with a genuine reason for reselling tickets to do it, while also clamping down on those sold through secondary platform […]
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Source: Music ally