TikTok is launching an initiative called #BehindTheSong, which is designed to celebrate songwriters and producers. The post TikTok unveils its songwriting-focused #BehindTheSong campaign appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We knew that the modern music industry often involves more co-writers on songs, but here’s one we didn’t see coming: the Earth itself. The post Musicians name Earth as a co-writer to raise funds for climate activism appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

BELEM is the European Union-funded consortium announced last December with €2m of funding to explore lyric translation. The post BELEM seeks publishers and songwriters for lyric translations appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

In the US, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) was set up to collect mechanical royalties from streaming services, then pay them out to publishers and songwriters. The post Musicians press for US rule over post-termination mechanicals appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Startup Blokur has released its second ‘Songwriters’ Review’ report, based on its analysis of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube. The post Olivia Rodrigo was 2021’s top songwriter – but only 15% of the top 100 were women appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Collecting societies body CISAC has published its annual Global Collections Report this morning, revealing the latest figures and trends from its member bodies. The post CISAC and SCAPR publish their annual collections figures appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Accurate metadata is going to be the lifeblood for songwriters in the future (or, to put it less positively, inaccurate or missing metadata has been a big problem for them in the streaming era thus far). The post Songwriter tools: Session x SONA, and Bridger gets collaborative appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

British songwriters body The Ivors Academy is getting into the accelerator game, but not for startups. The post Ivors Academy’s Advocacy Accelerator aims to boost diversity appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Sony Music Publishing has launched a ‘Songwriter Assistance’ program offering counselling services and wellbeing resources. The post Sony Music Publishing launches ‘Songwriter Assistance’ program appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Last week, Crispin Hunt stepped down as chair of UK songwriters body The Ivors Academy. His replacement is Tom Gray. The post The Ivors Academy’s new chair is… Broken Record founder Tom Gray appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We’ve seen various attempts in recent years to improve the quality of metadata identifying the writers of songs and their splits. Session, for example, has created tools to encourage songwriters to start creating this metadata from the earliest stage of their working process. Another startup has emerged today with its own ideas. Family in Music […]

Hipgnosis founder Merck Mercuriadis has been leading the demands for songs (as opposed to recordings) to get a bigger share of streaming royalties. The post Hipgnosis is launching a new songwriters guild in the US appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Songtrust has revealed some new stats showing the growth of its business, both in terms of the songs that it collects royalties for, and the songwriters who it’s paying those royalties out to. The new numbers: 3m songs and 350,000 songwriters, up from 2m songs and 300,000 clients in December 2019. The company also says that its royalty […]

Apple Music has a new hub focusing on songwriters, producers and session musicians. It’s called ‘Behind the Songs‘ and launched on Friday as a home for related playlists like ‘Songbook’ and ‘Behind the Boards’, as well as Apple Music Radio shows including Nile Rodgers’ ‘Deep Hidden Meaning’. There will also be original video series including […]

Yesterday’s second session at the UK’s parliamentary inquiry into the economics of music streaming was another double-header, featuring representatives of musicians. Graham Davies is chief executive of songwriters body the Ivors Academy, while Horace Trubridge is general secretary of the Musicians’ Union (and a founder member of 1970s band Darts). The panel of MPs questioning […]

Spotify launched a songwriters hub on its service last December, gathering playlists and podcasts by or about the songwriting community. Now it’s launching a dedicated site, called Noteable, for those songwriters. The site, which comes with its own newsletter and social accounts, is being pitched as a place for writers and composers to “get the […]

The good news for Spotify is that something other than its Discovery Mode is causing a stink today. The bad news for Spotify is that the something is the ongoing battle over new streaming royalties for songwriters set in the US by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) – which Spotify along with Amazon, Google and Pandora […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noting how the music industry lacked an equivalent to what the film industry had with IMDb – and also how it was missing a verified source of data from across the music supply chain – Jacqui Louez Schoorl, with a background in both film and music, began working on what was to become Jaxsta in […]

Lead: If you aren’t making or appearing on a podcast, do you actually exist? Even with DSPs and record labels investing in them heavily and building whole podcasting divisions, there is still the issue of licensing music for them that is holding back their creative potential. Yet beyond that knotty problem, the sector is still an […]

Industry body Songwriters of North America (SONA) has launched a new hardship fund for songwriters, which will distribute emergency grants of $1k to creators hit by the Covid-19 pandemic’s economic impact. The new fund was set up thanks to a donation from publisher Sony/ATV last month, reported Billboard. Also in the US, collecting society BMI partnered […]

The UK’s Musicians’ Union and The Ivors Academy have teamed up for a campaign called ‘Keep Music Alive’ which the two organisations say “aims to ‘fix streaming’ and calls for industry stakeholders to come together to agree an equitable, sustainable and transparent model for royalty distribution in the streaming era”. It kicks off this morning […]

David Israelite, president of the National Music Publishers Association in the US, has never been a man to pull his verbal punches when taking digital services to task. “Songwriters: This week, Spotify and Amazon are quite literally taking you to court,” is how his latest guest column for Billboard begins, and it doesn’t get any less […]

“I was having panic attacks. I was completely anxious and stuck, because I wasn’t doing the thing I wanted to do. I struggled to write songs: I judged every idea as boring and not good enough, and that stopped me writing altogether. Four songs a year was all I could manage at one point…” Australian […]

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

One of the quirks of the podcasts market in 2019 is that ‘downloads’ is still an important metric, even as the likes of Spotify and Pandora have made ‘streams’ a bigger part of the market. Still, downloads count, and one of the established music podcasts just announced a new milestone. ‘And The Writer Is…’ is […]

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

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

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

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

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