Is it a crystal-clear factual statement with no verbal flourishes, or a delightfully gnomic stream of rhythmic consciousness? The post You’ll surely enjoy Bob Dylan’s opinion of music streaming appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Although it’s still the second biggest recorded music market in the world, Japan was famously one of the slowest to adopt streaming. The post Japan’s music streaming revenues have grown by 24% in 2022 so far appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

In Q2 (April to June), the number of households that subscribed to at least one VoD service in the UK fell to 16.42 million. The post Nearly half a million UK video on demand subscriptions cancelled in Q2 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

A guest column from Adrian Burger, founder of creative management agency Lafter. The post Music advertising has a streaming attribution problem appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

How much money is Twitch making? Amazon doesn’t yet split that out in its financial results. However, research firm App Annie has published a figure. The post Report claims Twitch has surpassed $1bn in mobile spending appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Music Ally has been talking to our sources in China to get a sense of the market’s development last year, for our latest country profile. The post Music industry seeks more subscription growth in China appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Industry body BVMI reported yesterday that more than 165bn audio music streams were measured in Germany last year, up from 138bn in 2020. The post Audio music streams in Germany grew by 19.6% in 2021 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Flow Moods, pitched as an “emotional jukebox” that only plays mood-based music, is launching with six moods to choose from. The post Deezer’s new Flow Moods feature is an ’emotional jukebox’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

‘Twitch Pro’ has more features: custom playlists, which can be shuffled while streaming, as well as curated playlists from Soundstripe’s music team. The post Soundstripe wants to help Twitch streamers avoid takedowns appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

If artists and their teams needed another warning not to pay companies promising to artificially inflate their streaming numbers, Spotify is providing it. The post Spotify may withhold royalties for ‘artificial streams’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Melodie’s catalogue will now be available to the music streaming services that Tuned Global runs for clients. The post Tuned Global strikes a deal with music licensing firm Melodie appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Could TikTok’s parent company ByteDance be about to provide competition in a streaming market dominated by Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music? The post ByteDance tipped to launch music streaming app Feile in China appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Do independent labels get a fair share of slots on music streaming services’ playlists? It’s a complicated question, with the answer having varied, historically, depending on which playlists you’re talking about (all of them, or just the big ones?), how you define independent (do major-distributed tracks count?) and other factors. The latest attempt to get […]

Lead: Each DSP has a programme dedicated to supporting new artists: weaponising the platform by endorsing them to a large audience, and hopefully accelerating their careers. Places on these programmes are, of course, keenly sought after – so what is experienced by that lucky few? Is it really the win-win it seems? What do artists need […]

Alright, this will come as no surprise at all to the majority of Music Ally readers. YouTube is the biggest music streaming service in the world, with its scale – both in terms of its overall users and the more than two billion people who specifically consume music on it. However, if you’re in the market for […]

Apple Music and Amazon Music are far from the only streaming services whose origin stories involve music download stores. PortalDisc is the biggest downloads store in Chile, but it is now moving into streaming with its new service PortalDisc App. Billed as “the first 100% Chilean music streaming service”, it’s a partnership with B2B digital music […]

Yesterday was the first day of SXSW 2021’s online conference, including a chat between former WME music chief Marc Geiger and Pandora founder Tim Westergren – now working on their new ventures, venue network Savelive and livestreaming firm Sessions. The topic was timely: the explosion of ways for artists to connect with fans and to try […]

Earlier this week we reported on a SoundCloud interview with Vice that suggested the company would be taking a 45% cut from its new ‘fan-powered royalties’ (user-centric) system. The company has since revealed that the interview misinterpreted its policies, and that its share is actually lower. A spokesperson told Music Ally that SoundCloud is not keeping 45%, […]

Sparkline is a new platform developed by technology consultancy company Decimal, who mainly work with music clients on development projects. Decimal pitches Sparkline as the “missing analytics tool for Spotify” – a bold claim hinging on its ability to allow users to get insight into third parties on the streaming platform.  The company identified that […]

Tencent-owned music streaming service Joox is one of Spotify’s key rivals in south east Asia, and that’s a region where K-Pop is enormously popular. Credit the company for being quick off the mark, then, following the recent news that Spotify has lost a big chunk of its K-Pop catalogue due to a breakdown in licensing negotiations with […]

Middle Eastern streaming service Anghami may be going public soon, via a special purpose acquisition company (Spac) in the US. Bloomberg reported that Anghami is “close to being listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York” in a move that could value the company at nearly $300m. The report added that the move could be announced […]

The bottom dropped out of the live music industry in 2020 due to Covid-19, but it’s becoming clear that the recorded music industry weathered the storm thanks to streaming subscription revenues, whose growth continued. US industry body the RIAA’s annual figures for 2020 are the latest evidence, revealing that the retail value of recorded music revenues […]

Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music had their say at the UK’s streaming economics inquiry yesterday: if you missed it last night, here’s our report on their session. But yesterday the parliamentary committee holding the inquiry also published the latest written evidence from the three major labels, in response to some specific questions from the politicians […]

When YouTube, SoundCloud and Twitch took part in a DSPs hearing at the UK’s streaming economics inquiry recently – well, Twitch’s rep didn’t get to speak – we knew there’d be another session for the big guns of the audio streaming world. Now it has been confirmed for next week: Tuesday 23 February. Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music […]

Lead: Indie-Visible – Marketing indie rock bands on streaming platforms can be tricky for a number of reasons: their traditionally album-based release cycle goes counter to the current approach of endless singles; their aesthetic, ethos and fandom require patience and context; and while their fanbase wants their favourite artists on streaming services, they also demand special physical products […]

It’s now a full decade since the launch of Turntable·fm, the music streaming service built around avatars and chat rooms. It got lots of buzz at its peak, but ultimately foundered – in part because it struggled with licensing. Could the idea work better in 2021? We’re going to find out. One of the original team, […]

Last September, we wrote about startup CreateSafe’s launch of a ‘record deal simulator’, which let anyone plug in figures for advances, recording and marketing costs, as well as artist/label splits, to gauge how many streams an artist would need in order to recoup. It was widely shared within the industry, and was also cited in the […]

There are still several sessions to go in the UK’s parliamentary inquiry into music streaming’s economics, with Aim, Beggars Group and Jazz Re:freshed next in the hotseat on 4 February, and streaming services still to come too. But we can already see strong pointers towards a recommendation by the committee of MPs that at least a […]

We’ve known Spotify was big in Mexico for some time now, but a new study claims that the company has an 80.7% share of the music streaming market there. The study comes from The Competitive Intelligence Unit (CIU), and claims that YouTube Music is in second place with 5.1% of the market, followed by Apple Music (4.5%) […]

One of the things that’s been clear in the debate about user-centric models for paying out streaming royalties – primer here if you need it – is that we need more studies based on recent data from big streaming services. So, news this week of a new study commissioned by the National Music Centre (CNM) in France from […]

The IFPI and its member bodies are on a drive to crack down on stream-ripping piracy destinations, but ‘streaming manipulation’ sites are also very much on their radar. The latest proof is an injunction issued in Germany against a site called likeservice24·de, which IFPI claims is “a widely-used website engaged in illicit music streaming manipulation […]

Streaming service Boomplay’s MD East Africa Martha Huro was one of the speakers at the NY:LON Connect conference yesterday, in an MQA-hosted session on opportunities for regional DSPs. She offered insight into trends on the pan-African streaming service. “70% of our total streams come from African content,” she said, adding that this guides Boomplay’s strategy […]

The latest musicians to curate channels on Sonos Radio were announced yesterday: D’Angelo, FKA Twigs, Björk and the Chemical Brothers are the latest artists to turn DJ for the hardware firm’s streaming service. But another detail in the announcement caught our eye: the fact that Sonos Radio is now “the third most streamed service on Sonos”. That’s […]

Early last year, there were rumours that Middle Eastern streaming service Anghami might be up for sale, fresh from generating more than 10bn streams in 2019. A year on, and Anghami remains independent, but it is raising money. Dubai-based investment firm Shuaa Capital has taken a stake in Anghami, although the terms of the transaction have yet […]

We reported last month on plans for a parliamentary inquiry in the UK into the economics of music streaming. Industry bodies, artists, DSPs and other interested parties have been submitting their evidence, and now we know who’s going to be offering their views at the first oral evidence hearing next Tuesday (24 November). The session will kick off with […]

Midia Research has published a blog post about ‘understanding how Spotify thinks‘, spurred by its recent announcement of its new Discovery Mode feature – and the subsequent criticism from artists. It turns Spotify’s three interest groups – investors, audience, and rightsholders and creators – into a neat Venn diagram, but a sentence further down it jumped out […]

The latest salvo in the debate about music streaming’s economics – and particularly royalties for artists – comes from the European Music Managers Alliance (Emma). In a statement issued this morning, it has praised streaming for returning the recorded music industry to growth, but claimed that “the fact that streaming services are still licensed on […]

Outside the US, streaming service Audiomack has been a little under the radar thus far. That’s something it’s hoping to change in one of the regions the music industry sees huge potential in: Africa. It has signed a deal with smartphone firm Transsion Holdings, whose handset brands include Tecno, Infinix and Itel. The details aren’t clear […]

It’s barely a month since we were reporting that African streaming service Mdundo had five million monthly active users. Now the official total has risen to 6.4 million. That’s according to the company’s new quarterly update. Thanks to growth in the east, west and south of Africa, the company’s user total is up 144% year-on-year. Mdundo also says […]

Classical music streaming service Primephonic’s new initiative, Ludwig, is more than just a marketing wheeze. It’s a 10-week “digital crash course” in classical music, with a weekly podcast; bi-daily email lessons; playlists on key composers and genres; and access to Primephonic’s app and catalogue of music. The latter point hints at the interesting aspect: Ludwig is […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotify started testing its Premium Duo subscription plan in March 2019 in five countries: it was a $12.99-a-month Spotify subscription for couples, complete with a ‘Duo Mix’ playlist blending their tastes. It expanded to 14 more countries in Latin America in September last year, but now it’s going more global, launching in 55 markets. The idea is to tempt […]

The debate about streaming royalties and ‘user-centric’ payments – primer here if needed – has largely been confined to the music industry so far. Could politicians get involved? Jo Stevens of the UK’s Labour Party, who’s the shadow secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, got involved during a radio discussion last night. Asked by presenter […]

Classical music streaming service Idagio is launching in Japan later this month, tying in with its live video stream of a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra on 21 June. The Japan launch will include Idagio’s catalogue of more than 2m tracks, and its ‘Global Concert Hall’ series of livestreams. There’s certainly an audience to […]

Research firm Roy Morgan has published a report on music streaming usage in Australia. It claims that more than 12.7 million Australians – 61% of the population – now stream music on a monthly basis. That’s 3.7 million more than did so three years ago. The report also has some figures for the market shares of the various […]

The question of when the Swedish music industry will plateau is a crucial one for the global industry, which looks to Spotify’s homeland for an indication as too how far streaming-led growth can go. Before Covid-19, at least, the signs were promising for Sweden’s continued growth: in 2019 recorded music income in Sweden grew 3.5% […]

Streaming service MePlaylist, whose president of global marketing is Mathew Knowles (aka Beyoncé’s father), is aiming to challenge the traditional way African music is pigeonholed in the west. “There’s a tendency to always put African music and African artists in a bucket, and that bucket is called ‘World Music’. We want to change that perception,” said […]

Spotify’s management team must quiver every time they see the word ‘fake’ deployed in a headline, given past controversies around ‘fake artists‘, ‘fake albums‘ and ‘fake streams‘ on the service. But here we are with another one for the list: fake features. OneZero has a story about how “scammers are gaming Spotify by faking collaborations […]

As one of the main pan-African music streaming services, Boomplay has grown rapidly in the past couple of years. In July 2018 it had 17 million monthly users, but grew this to 53 million by August 2019, and then 62 million by the end of that year. The latest figure for Boomplay is 75 million users, with 86% […]

Spotify was ‘the audio platform with the highest daily engagement’ in the US last year, according to a new study by research firm Insider Intelligence. How is that measured? By daily minutes spent listening. The study claims that this metric jumped from just under eight minutes in 2018 for Spotify to just over 10 minutes in […]

The album isn’t completely dead and the playlist isn’t yet the be-all and end-all – which means that artists are somewhat creatively discombobulated in what is really a curious transition period. But with that comes the scope to experiment and push the boundaries. Justin Bieber could be the one firing the starting pistol for the […]

In the streaming age, what is a ‘deluxe’ album anyway? It’s more than just extra tracks and alternative versions. A number of artists have explored Spotify’s ‘enhanced’ playlists format, which inserts videos between the music tracks, for example. And video is also at the core of the strategy for the deluxe version of Lil Baby’s […]

*This topic was discussed in-depth on Music Ally TV. Watch the show in full here   In a world where the playlist is king, it is hardly surprising that getting on New Music Friday (NMF) has become the be-all and end-all of music streaming marketing, an opportunity to get your track in front of 8m people worldwide, […]

The Nordic region is one of the most mature territories for music streaming in the world. Now the Polaris Hub – the licensing hub formed by collecting societies in Denmark, Norway and Finland – has published its annual report on digital music in the region. “The number of inhabitants subscribing to a music streaming service has gone […]

Recorded music revenue in Nigeria will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 5.6% over the next five years to reach $40m in 2023, according to PwC, which is tipping the country to be the world’s fastest-growing Entertainment and Media market over the next five years, albeit in percentage terms. In PwC’s Entertainment and […]

UK body ERA has published some new research showing that Brits aged 55 and over are the fastest-growing segment of music streamers. From its panel survey, ERA estimates that 2.3 million over-55s were using subscription music streaming services in February 2020 in the UK, almost double the 1.2 million figure a year before. That 90.2% […]

It’s all gone a bit quiet on the antitrust complaint front regarding Spotify versus Apple. Spotify filed a complaint in Europe against Apple more than a year ago, sparking a sharp rebuttal from the tech giant. We’re still waiting to see what action, if any, the European Commission takes over the complaint. However, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek […]

We covered the launch of the IFPI’s latest Global Music Report yesterday, and the official figures showing that global recorded music revenues grew by 8.2% to $20.2bn in 2019 – the biggest total since 2004. Now the analysis is continuing of what the figures tell us about trends in the market. Midia Research, which put out its own […]

We’ve written a fair amount about the differing strategies of Spotify and Apple Music when it comes to spoken-word content. Spotify is piling in to podcasts and giving them equal billing to music on its ‘audio-first’ platform, while Apple is keeping Apple Music and Apple Podcasts as separate entities and apps. But wait: Apple Music […]

We tend to focus on startups’ tech and business models rather than their founders’ psychology, but new livestreaming startup Sessions is fascinating on both counts – in the latter case, seemingly as a response to CEO Tim Westergren’s experiences at Pandora. “The big piece of unfinished business for me at Pandora was, ironically, the artists,” he told […]

Lead: The playlist hasn’t killed the album… yet. Instead, artists and labels are caught between both and are starting to experiment with the shapes that releases can now take. Justin Bieber has begun chopping up his album into a series of EPs, designed in part to find the sweet spot on streaming services that drive […]

We’ll put the big caveat up front: predicting the impact that the Covid-19 coronavirus will have on any industry or sector this year rests on the supremely shaky notion that anyone can predict what will happen with the pandemic itself over the next eight months. Some countries are getting back to work and easing social […]

Lead: The likes of New Music Friday and Today’s Top Hits might theoretically get your music in front of the most people; but if they are not listening, then what’s the point? In a business that has long run on the assumption that “big is best”, the opposite is proving true when it comes to […]

It took Spotify eight and a half years to sign up 50 million subscribers; it has taken Disney+ five months. And yes, that’s an unfair, apples to oranges comparison in terms of different kinds of services at different times. It’s just to show the startling scale of the initial growth of Disney’s video-streaming service. Launched in the […]

British music industry body the BPI has been analysing its data on music streams in 2019. It includes the finding that tracks from that year accounted for 21.1% of all streams, with tracks released in 2018 accounting for 18.6%. That means the lion’s share of streams in 2019 in the UK came from tracks released […]

In its last set of financial results, Tencent Music revealed that it had 644 million mobile monthly active users of its online music services, including 39.9 million who were paying. That represents the scale of its business in its homeland, China, but now its parent company Tencent Holdings is planning some music-streaming expansion in another part […]

The IFPI has delayed the publication of its Global Music Report, with no new date yet set for its analysis of recorded music figures for 2019. A new report from Counterpoint Research is plugging one of the knowledge gaps: the number of people subscribing to music services globally. It claims this figure grew by 32% in 2019 […]

There’s good news from Spain about the growth of its recorded music market in 2019, but very bad news expected for the rest of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Industry body Promusicae announced both yesterday. Recorded music revenues grew by 22.5% to €296.4m (around $324.5m) in 2019 in a market that is now three quarters […]

Back in November 2018, we wrote about Chinese technology firm Huawei’s claim that its Huawei Music streaming service had 100 million monthly active users – a surprise to many people in the west who hadn’t been following its growth. Since then, Huawei has become one of the more controversial tech companies in the world thanks to scrutiny in […]

Indian management consultancy firm RedSeer has published a report about the ‘audio OTT’ (i.e. music streaming) market there, including exploring the potential for growth in paid subscriptions. Some of the figures are familiar: for example its claim that only around 1% of current listeners are paying for subscriptions, but that the average revenue per subscriber is ’80 […]

We’ve been writing about what streaming services are doing to support music-industry relief efforts and artists, but the coronavirus pandemic is also having an impact in how they’re recommending music (and other content) to their listeners. We wrote about Deezer’s new ‘Stay at Home’ hub earlier this week, but Apple Music is also adapting to the time […]

Flo, owned by SK Telecom, is one of the main music streaming services in South Korea. It used to run a near-real-time chart (updated hourly) showing what the most popular songs were on the platform. That has now been replaced by a new Flo Chart that updates every 24 hours that allows it to use […]

It’s not great for your work/life balance to spend the weekend feeling grumpy every time you spot that ‘people are streaming music less due to coronavirus’ story doing the rounds – based on a limited comparison of stream counts from the Spotify charts. It’s true that other forms of media may be more appealing to […]

Malaysian rock band Bunkface have a song called ‘Akhir Zaman’ [‘The End of Times’] which included homophobic lyrics like the line “LGBT can go to hell” (or “LGBT can go die”). The band had released a statement denying that this was hate speech, suggesting instead that they were protesting against the movement for LGBTQ+ rights in […]

Amid all the blow-by-blow speculation about the progress of Spotify’s licensing renewals with major labels, it’s been easy to forget that – sit down for this revelation – other streaming services also have deals that periodically need to be renewed. Apple Music, for instance, which according to the Financial Times has quietly sealed its new deals with […]

In nearly a decade between being founded and going public, Spotify is estimated to have raised $2.6bn in funding. Compare that to video-streaming startup Quibi, which hasn’t launched yet, but has already raised $1.75bn – including a new round of $750m this week, a month ahead of its debut. This is the company co-founded by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey […]

A much-hyped freemium music service has launched in India, but without one of the world’s major music companies. Déjà vu, anyone? Almost exactly a year on from Spotify’s debut in India amid a dispute with publisher Warner Chappell, Bytedance has officially launched its widely-anticipated Resso streaming service in India. There’s no legal battle this time, but Universal […]

Recently we were pondering just how far exclusives with DSPs will go. It’s not quite back to the days of full albums, but the cases of both Coldplay and Justin Bieber with Apple Music in the past few weeks suggests there is a testing of the boundaries happening. So what about exclusive mixes? That’s what […]

We’ve got our first update for our recently published post listing the biggest global music streaming services by subscribers. Akazoo, which focuses on emerging markets in territories like eastern Europe and Latin America, ended September 2019 with 5.5 million premium subscribers. The figure, disclosed in a financial filing, was up 28% year-on-year. Meanwhile, Akazoo’s registered users […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In keeping with a trend playing out across audio-streaming services in India, regional language music has emerged one of the biggest drivers of growth for JioSaavn, the platform announced in a press release this week. With over two billion streams between January and September 2019, Punjabi is now the second-most played language on JioSaavn, ahead […]

Music-metadata standards organisation DDEX is launching its latest standard: Media Enrichment and Description (or MEAD for short). It’s a significant expansion of the metadata that labels and distributors provide to digital services with their music, based on brainstorming sessions back in 2017 with the likes of Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, major labels, collecting societies and other interested […]

Singer/songwriter Catie Turner’s song ‘Prom Queen’ is finding an audience on Spotify. Since its release earlier this year, the track has been streamed nearly 1.3m times on Spotify, while a live acoustic video has been watched more than 700k times on YouTube. What’s interesting is that a lot of this buzz has come in the last week, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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), […]

Boomplay has become one of the most prominent music-streaming services to have launched in Africa, and now it has announced a new figure for its growth. It now claims to have more than 53 million users, up from 42 million in April this year, when the company raised a $20m funding round. Boomplay also says that […]

It seems silly to raise the question of what was the biggest hit of summer 2019, given the chart dominance of ‘Old Town Road’ in various parts of the world in recent months. Yet here’s the thing: it wasn’t the most-streamed song of the summer on Spotify or on YouTube. Both services have put out their global charts […]

Eight years after uploading his first track to SoundCloud, Chance the Rapper has passed the milestone of 1bn streams on the service. It’s no surprise that SoundCloud is shouting about it: Chance is ‘the first independent SoundCloud Premier creator’ to reach that total on its platform. It’s a reminder of an artist that SoundCloud considers […]

Despite all the industry-conference panels predicting that high-resolution music is the next big leap for our industry, the idea has yet to really catch fire with mainstream listeners. For sure, artists and labels like the idea of music sounding like it did in the recording studio; companies like MQA have been working hard to put […]

Just the latest potential shakeup to the US system of music-licensing is the Department of Justice’s antitrust division’s review of the ‘consent decrees’ which govern collecting societies ASCAP and BMI. Now the body that represents streaming services, the Digital Media Association (DiMA) has teamed up with radio-industry body the Radio Music License Committee (RMLC) to […]

Nigerian music-streaming service Playfre launched earlier this year, although rather than licensing music directly, it was more of a curatorial/social layer on top of YouTube, from which its music is sourced. CEO Chika Nwaogu has been talking to VentureBurn about the startup’s plans, which include the goal of raising between $500k and $1m of funding. “It will be mainly […]

One of the interesting industry questions in 2019 concerns the outlook for niche music-streaming services: for example those focused on specific categories like classical, jazz or metal, which are often seen as being under-served by the big global streaming services. Now add ambient/electronic music to the list. There’s a new service called 9128, which is the […]

Here’s the thing about the ‘user-centric’ model of music-streaming payouts: it’s nowhere near as simple as a lot of people think it is, on several levels. The idea of each streaming subscriber’s monthly payment (well, the portion of it that is paid out in royalties) being divided only between the artists they have listened to […]

Spotify and YouTube have both staked their claims to be driving the boom in global listening to Latin American music, but other music-streaming services are making plenty of efforts to promote Latin artists too. Deezer’s latest move is the launch of a ‘Deezer Originals’ channel in Spanish, offering exclusive content and artist commentaries. For example, […]

Warner Music Group published its latest quarterly financials yesterday, with its revenues up 10.4% year-on-year to $1.06bn, including 12.5% growth in its digital revenue to $648m – 61.2% of the total. Within that, WMG’s recorded-music revenue grew by 13.8% to $913m, but its publishing revenue actually fell by 7.5% to $147m – “lower market share and loss […]

Slipknot are back with a new album, a big tour and some nifty Facebook camera effects (as we reported yesterday). But the band’s Corey Taylor has also been having his say on the topic of music-streaming royalties, in a series of tweets. He was responding to a tweet from fellow musician Nils Lofgren criticising Spotify over […]

Classical music-streaming service Primephonic has commissioned a survey of nearly 1,300 American adults to find out what they think about streaming. No surprises for guessing that some of the results back up the company’s own business model: for example, 9% of respondents “would pay for a streaming service specifically dedicated to their favourite genre, suggesting […]

Does country radio in the US have a diversity problem? The debate has already been rumbling for a while, but a new research study puts some numbers to the lack of women on mainstream country radio – as reflected by Billboard’s official Country Airplay Chart between January 2018 and July 2019. “This study’s findings are not surprising: […]

It won’t be long before more Brits are listening to podcasts than are listening to music downloads, judging by the latest figures published by UK radio-industry body Rajar. Its latest survey suggests that 16% of Brits aged 15+ now listen to podcasts, compared to 18% who listen to digital music tracks. The tipping point has already been […]

With a population of fewer than 600,000 people, Suriname might not be a priority for the big music-streaming services, but that leaves an opportunity for local competitors. TrackDrip being a brand new example. It’s an on-demand music-streaming service that launched in Suriname (which is off the coast of South America, if you were about to Google it) […]

Indian telco Reliance Jio appears to have overtaken rival Vodafone Idea to become the biggest mobile operator in India, with 331.3 million subscribers. TheNextWeb reports that this compares to 320 million people using Vodafone Idea, and the most recent figure of 320.6 million for the other big telco in India, Airtel. What’s the Music Ally relevance for […]

This will come as little surprise if you’ve watched a jazz artist at a recent festival in the UK and taken a look at the audience around you, but young listeners are flocking to the genre. The Guardian has an article on the trend, with some figures from music-streaming services as backup. “Spotify told the Guardian […]

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: streaming is paying off rather well for the world’s largest music company. Universal Music’s revenues grew by 18.6% year-on-year for the first half of 2019, according to yesterday’s financial results from its parent company Vivendi. The company’s revenues were €3.26bn (around $3.68bn), with UMG’s recorded-music revenues growing […]

Boomy is one of the startups exploring AI-generated music, and launched in beta earlier this year. Now it’s emerging from that beta period, with test users having already created more than 100k songs using its technology. The general public is now being invited to sign in at Boomy’s website and start creating songs. “Our data shows […]

Here in the UK, the school summer holidays have started just in time for the first ever Fortnite World Cup – a big bet on esports by the game’s publisher Epic Games. And here’s some even better news for all those demob-happy children: they’ll be able to watch the Fortnite World Cup from within Fortnite […]

Adding that qualifier to the headline isn’t meant to be snarky: it’s just that Motown Records head Ethiopia Habtemariam was hardly likely to open up about any headaches she sees with streaming in an interview with Spotify’s own blog. Still, the interview – to mark the 60th anniversary this year of Motown – is worth a […]

We’ve all heard of the smartphone as a driver of digital music consumption. Well how about music as a driver of smartphone adoption? That, according to Tomás Rodriguez, managing director of Warner Music Mexico, is what we are seeing in Mexico, as the country continues a hot digital streak that has seen recorded music revenue […]

Warner Music Group has a revamped website for its Warner Classics & Erato arm, which it hopes will capitalise on the potential of streaming for the classical-music audience. So much so, that Warner has built streaming directly in to the new website. Visitors will be able to stream 30-second clips from the Warner Classics & Erato […]

The US recorded-music market enjoyed healthy growth in 2018, with retail revenues up by 12% to $9.8bn, while on the industry-revenues side, music subscription income grew by 32% to $5.4bn. It was the third straight year of double-digit growth overall for the world’s biggest music market, as the US averaged 50.2m paid subscriptions for the year. […]

In June, Music Ally reported on the ambitions of British music-streaming firm Roxi (formerly Electric Jukebox) to go public. Now the company has confirmed how it plans to do that. Roxi announced this morning that it has appointed advisers for an initial public offering (IPO) on the London Stock Exchange in the final quarter of 2019. The […]

As the big global music-streaming services continue to mull their strategies for sub-Saharan Africa, local players are springing up to stake their claim to a piece of the nascent streaming market. The latest is Smubu, a music-streaming startup headquartered in Kenya, but focusing on a group of countries including Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. It has […]

Lead: This issue we have a special extended feature looking into the phenomenon of Trigger Cities. These are places outside of the obvious music markets that are now – due to streaming and how algorithms are fed – playing a key role in helping break artists and genres. This represents a whole new dynamic for […]

Music Ally has been reporting recently on BTS World, the mobile game launched as a partnership between BTS’ management company Big Hit Entertainment and gaming firm Netmarble. Now a report claims the companies may be looking to do something even more ambitious together: “to launch a brand-new music-streaming platform”. That’s according to the Korea Herald, citing […]

We’re used to referring to Line Music as a Japanese music-streaming service, but this week it’s set to expand to Taiwan, according to the Taiwan News. “According to Central News Agency, Line Music will provide a free, 30-day trial to first-time users,” it reported, noting that Hong Kong-born Mandopop singer Coco Lee will be the ‘brand […]

South African telco Vodacom’s My Muze music-streaming app has been downloaded more than 1m times since its launch in April this year. Those downloads have come on Android alone, although the service is available in a web-browser version for Apple devices, according to the Financial Mail. It also reported on how Vodacom has been pricing the […]

The latest industry figure to come out batting for the ‘user-centric’ model of streaming royalties is Emmanuel De Buretel, in an interview with French newspaper Les Échos, subsequently spotted by MBW. De Buretel warned that the current system of dividing up royalties risks “a drying up of income for many artists outside urban and electro music, and the […]

The latest streaming service upping its efforts to credit more people who worked on recorded music is Tidal. It has launched a new feature that it’s describing as “interactive credit pages” which it promises will help listeners “explore everyone, from the unheralded background singers and lyricists, to the producers, and mixing engineers’ who are instrumental […]

Japanese music-streaming service Line Music has just celebrated its fourth anniversary, and it’s promising some significant new features over the coming months. The service, run by social-media firm Line, now has 11 million monthly active users, with more than 32 million downloads of its app so far. Anyway, those new features include the introduction of a freemium […]

There are lots of exciting green shoots for an independent music scene in India, but music from films continues to be the dominant factor in what people are listening to there. That was one of the talking points at the recent Music Inc conference, as reported on by journalist Amit Gurbaxani for Firstpost. He notes that Spotify […]

Chance The Rapper has re-released a pair of old mixtapes for the first time on streaming services, but while 2012’s ’10 Day’ remains unchanged, 2013’s ‘Acid Rap’ is missing one of its big tracks: ‘Juice’. It’s been replaced with Chance’s voice explaining why it’s missing (“I really wanted ‘Juice’ to be on the mixtape, but […]

Earlier this year we wrote about music-analytics firm Chartmetrics’ theory of ‘trigger cities’ capable of propelling tracks to become global hits. Now the company has published a second in its series of blog posts focusing on the region of south-east Asia in this regard. There’s some good data on how Spotify is functioning as a platform in […]

A team working within African music distributor Africori has launched a series of playlists for global streaming services, which focus on music from Africa. The team is Afriquency, and its playlists include Afro Fresh Friday, Afro Vybz, La Fête (focusing on Francophone African music) and The New Collective (which focuses on emerging artists. “Africa is […]

Music Ally really has been trying not to go too far down the Donald Trump road of slinging the word ‘fake’ willy-nilly. That said, in the last two years we’ve ended up reporting on ‘fake artists’ (who turned out to be production-music artists releasing their work commercially); ‘fake uploads’ (from people repackaging old and/or unreleased […]

Indian music-streaming service Gaana is planning to test cheaper subscription options that separate out some of the features from its current premium tier. That’s according to CEO Prashan Agarwal, in an interview with the BusinessLine website. “We need to de-couple Gaana Plus offerings. Currently, there are three key benefits that a user gets from Gaana Plus: ad-free […]

A report claiming that classical music could be ‘streaming’s next genre’ comes with an important caveat – to its credit, one that’s openly stated – that it was commissioned by a classical-music streaming service. Idagio enlisted research company Midia Research to survey 8,000 adult music consumers across eight countries, including the US, UK and Germany. […]

A Rolling Stone headline claiming that ‘fake streams could be costing artists $300 million a year’ could be seen as over-egging its story, given that the source is a single indie-label boss citing anonymous sources. Still, Hopeless Records founder Louis Posen *is* making a useful contribution to the debate about the scale of ‘fake streams’ […]

One of the features artists and labels have most appreciated in Apple Music’s beta analytics are the ‘heat-maps’ of their streams, showing activity around the world. Now The Orchard is taking the idea and using it in a fan-facing marketing campaign for British grime star Skepta. His “streaming heat map” website is available to all, […]

Research firm eMarketer has predicted a tipping point for Americans’ entertainment habits this year. “For the first time ever, US consumers will spend more time using their mobile devices than watching TV, with smartphone use dominating that time spent,” claimed the company, in its latest data-release. “The average US adult will spend 3 hours, 43 minutes […]

Music Ally first wrote about startup Super Hi-Fi in September 2018, when it announced a partnership with The Associated Press “to transform AP’s daily global news content into audio-based stories that can be seamlessly embedded into any digital music service partner”. The company’s focus is on “the space between the songs” on streaming services, with technology […]

When Goldman Sachs published its ‘Music In The Air’ report in 2017, predicting trade revenues from paid streaming of $28bn by 2030, it sparked excitement and controversy in equal measure – the latter once people wondered which Goldman Sachs clients would most benefit from sky-high predictions. Keep your pinch of salt handy, then, for the […]

Remember streaming exclusives? Everyone seems to have given up on them. Well, everyone except Tidal. It has announced that it has the exclusive on Originals, a posthumous album from Prince containing a number of unheard demos from the legendary artist, and it will be on the streaming service from 7th June. It appears this will […]

Music Ally wrote about the ‘dry streams paradox’ earlier this year in our Sandbox music-marketing report: it refers to the situation where millions of streams for a song driven by a popular playlist on Spotify or Apple Music doesn’t translate into engaged fans for the artist who recorded it. The topic was the subject for […]

New details have emerged on TikTok’s parent company Bytedance’s plans to launch its own music-streaming service. Bloomberg reports that the new service will launch this autumn “in a handful of territories, mostly poorer countries where paid services have yet to garner large audiences”. The countries aren’t named, but one clue comes from the news that Bytedance has […]

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2019 overnight, and there are plenty of big numbers as you’d expect. Overall revenues grew by 39.4% year-on-year to RMB 5.74bn ($855m) as TME recorded an RMB 987m ($147m) net profit – as usual benefitting from the fact that a significant chunk of its […]

This is one of those figures we’re slightly cautious about, as it doesn’t come directly from the streaming service in question. But it does seem as if ‘I Don’t Care’, the new track from Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber, has set a new record for single-day streams on Spotify. That’s based on a figure shown this […]

Kieron Donoghue – founder of Humble Angel Records and former VP of global playlists strategy and curation at Warner Music – has been blogging about the trend of “playlist stuffing” that he has been spotting on streaming services. As songs qualify as a stream and, therefore, a payment after 30 seconds, he says a key tactic has […]

Warner Music Group has published its numbers for the fiscal second quarter (ending 31st March 2019) and the headlines are that total revenue across all parts of the business was up 13.2% and that it saw net income of $67m compared to a net loss of $1m in the same period last year. Digital was, […]

A judge in the Bombay High Court in India has ruled against streaming and download service Wynk in its long-running licensing dispute with record company Tips Industries. It is a protracted story but, in brief, Tips and Wynk had failed to agree licensing terms back in 2017 and this saw Tips requesting that its catalogue of […]

Danny Rukasin and Brandon Goodman co-manage Billie Eilish and they have been talking to MBW about the stealth development underpinning her career and how her debut album – When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? – is having to work in the streaming and playlisting era. “While playlists drive single consumption, albums can be […]

Any discussion of what streaming services do (or don’t) pay out is always going to get people’s blood pressure up. Are streaming services saving the business? Or are they part of a Big Tech turbo-conspiracy to exploit (and rip off) creators? Kim Bayley, CEO of ERA, has waded into the debate and argues that accusations […]

Gaana’s chief executive Prashan Agarwal isn’t content with the impressive growth so far in the number of Indian people streaming music. “The penetration of music streaming is only 10% in the Indian market with around 150 million users. The market needs to grow to 600 million in the next 2-3 years,” he told the Business Standard this […]

Marketing agency Motive Unknown boss Darren Hemmings’ latest blog post goes in hard on the world of streaming right from its title: ‘Music Streaming Services Are Gaslighting Us’. His argument: “At every step of the way, streaming services are essentially gaslighting us that this ecosystem is an amazing new development. Just like Silicon Valley in […]

The idea of ‘top-up’ crowdfunding-style payments within music-streaming subscription services is something Music Ally has floated in the past: the idea that (for example) Spotify’s billing relationship with its subscribers could be used to help them spend a dollar or two a month more on individual musicians, likely in exchange for exclusive content and other […]

There are plenty of opinions about Netflix’s Mötley Crüe biopic ‘The Dirt’, based on our social feeds. But what impact has the film had on demand for the band’s music? A press release for the band suggests that it’s paying off. “The age demo for fans streaming Mötley Crüe’s music includes a much younger demographic. […]

Are you frustrated with the size of your fanbase? Tired of banging your head against a brick wall with ticket and merchandise sales? Unable to reconcile your streaming figures with the number of genuine fans? Then you might be suffering from The Dry Streams Paradox. What’s that? It’s the challenge that a growing number of […]

Napster remains a consumer-brand streaming service, but the company’s energies are focusing ever-more keenly on its B2B business, and ‘powered by Napster’ services launched by brands and other partners. Now Napster’s parent company Rhapsody International is making a new push with that strategy in Asia, via a partnership with Vietnamese tech company GNT. The pair […]

Some of its thunder may have been stolen by YouTube Music’s free, ad-supported launch on Google Home and other smart speakers, but Amazon has nevertheless launched its own free tier for Alexa-enabled devices. As reported prior to the launch, the tier is supported by advertising, and can be used by people without a Prime membership. […]

If you’re directing fans to stream a new track by an artist, what happens if they’re tapping on that link on their smartphone, but are on the free tier of a service like Spotify? That’s one of the questions raised in our latest Sandbox music-marketing report – and answered by Cindy James, VP of streaming […]

Thomas Hesse used to be the digital-business boss at Sony Music, but nowadays is an angel investor and startup founder (of still-stealthy Jamm Music) in his own right. He’s also written a column for Billboard that may hint at what the latter company is planning. His focus is on the music-streaming world’s equivalent of “whales” in casinos: […]

2019 is going to be a very big year for K-Pop stars BTS, spurred by their new mini-album ‘Map of the Soul: Persona’. Milestones are already tumbling. The band’s ‘Boy With Luv’ video smashed YouTube’s single-day viewing record, notching up 78m views in its first 24 hours last week. That takes the record from another K-Pop band, […]

In the music industry, we’re now fairly comfortable with the fact that every major streaming service has pretty much all the recorded music: exclusives are increasingly rare. In the streaming-video world, of course, it’s a very different story: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and other services have access to different portions of the catalogue of TV shows […]

Julian Casablancas of The Strokes and Cult Records has been speaking to Billboard about his various music projects, his record label and dealing with the creative process. But buried in the middle of the interview he talks about his dislike and distrust of most streaming services – and what their rise means for artists and labels. “In […]

Yesterday we reported on music streaming service Boomplay raising $20m to expand across the African continent having signed a licensing deal with Warner Music Group last month. Now uduX, a new streaming service based in Nigeria, has signed its first licensing deal with a major label – Universal Music Group. (UMG was also the first […]

Deezer is launching a new hub for Korean pop music on its streaming service. The new K-Pop channel will feature programmed playlists (including some from guest artists like iKON and Stray Kids). “K-Pop is one of the world’s fastest growing genres and is resonating with more and more fans. Deezer’s streams of the genre have already increased […]

There’s a view being put about that on-demand music-streaming services will ultimately kill radio – admittedly, it’s being put about mainly by on-demand music-streaming services for now. What do radio moguls think about it all? Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia, has been offering a counter-view. “Between 70 and 80 percent of Spotify users say the […]

Who knew? Billie Eilish is quite popular with music-streamers, as well as with the streaming services. Billboard reports that her album ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ is on course for more than 170m on-demand audio streams in the US alone in its first week. Although just as impressive is its predicted total of […]

Pianist Lang Lang likes to have fun with technology: we remember him playing ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ on-stage using an iPad and the Magic Piano app back in 2010, for example. On Friday, he released his latest album ‘Piano Book’ through UMG subsidiary Deutsche Grammophon, and there’s some inventive digital shizzle going on around it. […]

Music publishers are currently engaged in verbal fisticuffs with a group of music-streaming services, and Spotify in particular, over the group’s plans to appeal against new songwriter royalty-rates set by the US Copyright Royalty Board (CRB). But in a valedictory interview with Variety on his last day as chairman and CEO of publisher Sony/ATV, Martin Bandier suggested […]

Earlier this week, we reported on figures published by research firm eMarketer, suggesting that Spotify might overtake Pandora for US listeners by 2021. Now the company has broken out some more of its predictions for the US market, this time focusing on Amazon’s music-streaming business. “Amazon Music will cross 35 million monthly listeners in the US this […]

Apple held its services-focused press launch last night, and as predicted there were announcements of new subscription-based video, news and games products. Apple TV+ will launch later in the year with original shows from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams, as well as the ability to subscribe to other providers (through […]

The rate of growth in global streaming revenues (retail, not trade) is going to slow down every year between now and 2026. Boo! But wait: those revenues are going to more than double between 2018 and 2026. Hurray! This is all according to Midia Research’s latest report, which forecasts that global streaming spending will grow from […]

Will Spotify’s launch in India trigger a price war among competing music-subscription services? It’s possible: JioSaavn has just slashed the price of its annual JioSaavn Pro subscription by as much as 75%. That’s according to a report on the website NewsBytes. “Previously, the plan was available at Rs. 999/year, but now, you can get the same […]

Have you heard about ‘dry streams’ yet? They’re streams that come without a great deal of interest in the artist themselves: for example, on mood or activity-driven playlists on streaming services where listeners aren’t necessarily noticing who made the tracks. We’ve been exploring the phenomenon in our latest Sandbox digital-marketing report. “Being featured in large […]

New figures from industry body the BPI show that streaming subscriptions accounted for 54% of British labels’ income in 2018, as the revenue from these subscriptions grew by 34.9% year-on-year to £467.6m (around $615m). That contributed to a 32.8% rise in all music-streaming revenues for labels to £516.4m, with ad-funded audio-streams generating £19.1m (up 25.8%) […]

Lead: The Dry Streams Paradox is when there is a huge gap between the number of streams an act gets and the number of fans they have or can reach. Just because someone plays one of your songs, it does not follow that they even know what your name is. Does this all mean that […]

Google was rumoured to be launching its own games console at the GDC event this week. Actually, the big reveal was something slightly different: but still a big move in the games world. Google’s new thing is called Stadia: a new cloud-gaming service that will let people play games by streaming them on TVs, laptops, […]

There’s a little bit of confusion around the name of this new app: its profile on investment site AngelList refers to it as Tuner, while its website refers to it as Brassroots. We’ll surmise that a rebranding is underway, although from what to what we’re still unsure about – it’s also possible that Tuner is the company name and […]

Soon, it’ll be quicker to list the music-streaming services that *aren’t* streaming into podcasts as an additional content format. Middle Eastern / North African service Anghami is the latest, having added more than 250 shows from more than 40 local podcast studios, as well as global shows from outside the MENA region. “The local podcasting community is […]

Warner Music Group has become the second major label to sign a direct licensing deal with African digital-music service Boomplay, following Universal Music’s deal in November 2018. WMG’s deal covers a catalogue of 1m songs for 10 countries: Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Boomplay will make the music […]

Apple’s next press event is on 25 March, and it’s expected to focus on services – including the long-rumoured launch of a Netflix-style video-streaming service. Analyst Wedbush has published its thoughts on what this could mean. “If Apple executes with minimal speed bumps and aggressively acquires content given the company’s massive installed base and unmatched brand loyalty […]

The controversy last year around de-playlisting R. Kelly and XXXTentacion has likely put Spotify off the idea of going further and removing artists’ music from its platform unless the content itself is hateful (e.g. neo-Nazi lyrics). But the recent documentaries about R. Kelly and Michael Jackson is spurring a debate about what role (if any) […]

We’re well aware of the ‘don’t bore us – get to the chorus!’ maxim (cheers, Roxette!) for popular music in the modern streaming era. But that can now seemingly be extended to ‘don’t bore us – get to all the songs with good choruses quickly on the album please!’ At least, that’s the gist of an […]

Global music body the IFPI has named the top 10 ‘best-selling digital singles’ of 2018. And in a sign of how streaming is changing the dynamics of the biggest hits, six of them were actually released in 2017. For example, the top track of 2018 was ‘Havana’ by Camila Cabello, which came out in September 2017. […]

Original content is all the rage at Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services, so why shouldn’t Pandora join the party? Its new parent company SiriusXM has created a dedicated ‘content team’ at Pandora to focus on music, sports, comedy, politics and entertainment. That said, this new team is made up of existing execs: Pandora’s VP of […]

The Middle East is currently a big strategic focus for global streaming services like Spotify and Deezer, but they face competition from established local service Anghami. Now it has released some new figures on its business, in an interview with MBW. “A significant number over 1m are paying for Anghami, which is, as my memory serves, […]

Last week, Music Ally reported on the latest figures from US industry body the RIAA, including the fact that the number of paid music subscriptions in the US grew by 42% to 50.2 million in 2018. That was an annual-average figure, rather than a year-end figure. Anyway, research firm MusicWatch has now published its own figures […]

We recently wrote about music-streaming service Gaana’s growth to 80 million active users, making it a leading service in its home country India. Yet Gaana is keen to build its brand around the world, including the US. This June, it’ll hold its second Gaana Music Festival Stateside, in Holmdel, New Jersey and Mountain View, California. RadioAndMusic reported that […]

Classical-music composer Ludovico Einaudi clearly isn’t afeared of hard work: he’s just signed a new deal with UMG’s Decca Records to release seven albums in seven months. The project is called ‘Seven Days Walking’, and kicks off with the 15 March release of an album called ‘Seven Days Walking: Day One’. The other six albums […]

De La Soul’s classic albums were due to be released digitally for the first time this week, but the launch has now been postponed by label Tommy Boy after a succession of critical social-media posts from the rap trio. “Because Tommy Boy has not had the opportunity to sit down together with De La Soul […]

Reading a report about India earlier this week, we spotted a reference to the music-streaming market there needing to go beyond subscriptions and advertising for its revenues. How, though? Consultancy firm Midia Research has published its answer: telcos. “To unlock the scale opportunity, streaming has to look beyond subscriptions, and also beyond ad supported,” claimed founder […]

Indian digital-music service Hungama has published a report – Sound of Fame – which outlines some of the trends on its platform in 2018. The company said that its user base grew by 48% last year, with a 22% increase in average listening-time per user. The number of streams on Hungama Music tripled in 2018, but the […]

US regulator the Federal Trade Commission has created a new task force which it says will be “monitoring competition in US technology markets, investigating any potential anticompetitive conduct in those markets, and taking enforcement actions when warranted”. This, after a succession of news stories about how the biggest US technology companies are running their businesses […]

Job description Who are we? Primephonic is a digital music start-up that has been dubbed by the media as ‘the Spotify of classical music’. With the best 100% classical music streaming service we are reinventing the digital classical music experience and reigniting a global passion for the genre. Classical music lovers are currently heavily underserved […]

A figure that’s been bandied around about the Indian digital-music market is ‘100 million’ – that’s how many people were thought to be using music-streaming services in India last year. Now there’s an update in a report published by Deloitte and Indian music-industry body IMI about the ‘Audio OTT economy in India’ – Audio OTT being ‘over-the-top’ […]

Tencent already owns three of the main music-streaming services in China. Now it has invested in a fourth: Douban FM. However, the deal is being described (by TechNode) as a strategic investment that will see Tencent providing support in the form of ‘product design and copyright authorisation’ rather than cash. The report notes that Douban FM […]

Apple may be announcing its long-rumoured video-streaming service next month, and analysts are chewing over the implications. One, Tim O’Shea of Jefferies, has published a report with some big numbers – but also some questions about the impact such a service would really have on Apple’s wider business. O’Shea suggested that Apple will charge $15 a month […]

Here’s an interesting new tactic for music-streaming marketing: Apple Music is encouraging subscribers to get their mates onto the service too. “Give Apple Music to your friends,” explained a promotion that was push-notified to subscribers, according to news site AppleInsider. “Apple Music is better with friends. So give one of yours a free month.” The deal […]

Idagio is one of the companies (see also: Primephonic) trying to build a business out of a music-streaming service focused purely on classical music. It has a new milestone to report: more than 1m app downloads globally, with an admittedly-less-useful stat that it now has subscribers in 180 countries. It’s taken four years to reach the […]

Music-streaming service Qobuz will go live in the US today: a launch that the company has been teasing for several months. The company will be offering its established blend of hi-res streams AND downloads to American users for the first time. “Nobody else is offering high-res music like this,” its US managing director Dan Mackta […]

Shiri? Isn’t that what you talk to on your iPhone when you’ve had a few-too-many gins? But no: Shiri is actually a new music app launched by the National Library of Israel, with a catalogue of more than 400k tracks by Israeli artists. It’s been launched to promote local musicians, as well as to make […]

We’ve written a lot about Indian streaming services Gaana, Saavn (now JioSaavn) and Wynk Music over the last couple of years. Their next source of competition may come from telco Vodafone, which recently merged with another Indian mobile operator, Idea Cellular. The latter company already has its Idea Music app, which combines streaming, downloading, playlists […]

Spotify said yesterday that podcasts are just the ‘start’ of its ambitions to focus on all forms of audio. What next? We’d suggest that meditation / mindfulness will be high on the company’s radar – and not just because one of its first subscription-bundle partnerships was with meditation app Headspace back in 2016. Investor interest […]

Taking a bite out of broadcast radio is at the heart of Spotify’s move into spoken-word content – and is high on the agenda for other streaming services too. The opportunity (but also the challenge) is illustrated by the latest figures from British radio-measurement body Rajar. It says that 88% of the UK population – […]

Metal-focused streaming-radio startup Gimme Radio is raising money, but through equity-crowdfunding rather than turning to VC firms. The company has launched a campaign on crowdfunding platform SeedInvest. It’s trying to raise $1.5m with a minimum amount of $500 per investor, and if it succeeds, Gimme Radio would be valued at $6m. The campaign also offers […]

Producer and artist Swizz Beatz has called for artists to get a bigger share of streaming royalties. “I’m friends with all the streaming companies, but what I will say on record to them is we’re not getting enough money for those services and those companies to be trading for billions of dollars,” he told MarketWatch. […]

Welcome to the first Music Ally Report of 2019. We’re taking a look at some of the key challenges that lie ahead for our industry this year – and how they might be tackled. From diversity to startups via fake music and taking a bite out of radio, we hope it’s a constructive take on […]

Japan may be the world’s second-largest recorded-music market, but in terms of music-streaming, it is still early days for a country where CD is still the prime format. Midia Research has raised some concerns about the rate of streaming growth in Japan: “Up 30% in 2018, which puts it on a par with US for […]

Remember Frank Ocean’s ‘Endless’ album? It’s okay if you don’t: its release in August 2016 was rather trumped by the launch a day later by ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ – the latter on his own label, with ‘Endless’ having seen out his contract with UMG subsidiary Def Jam. At the time, the move was thought to […]

Lead: While Netflix viewers are currently obsessing over Marie Kondo and her rules on de-cluttering the home (instructing viewers to only hold onto the things that “spark joy”), a different approach needs to happen in digital marketing. Rather than binning everything but the essentials, archivists and markets should be retaining as much as they can […]

It’s not just the likes of Spotify, Deezer and Pandora trying to take a bite out of traditional radio by moving into podcasts. Indian streaming service Hungama Music is following suit with the launch of what it’s terming ‘original audio programming’. That means radio-style shows in languages including Hindi, Telegu, Punjabi, Bengali and Marathi, but starting […]

RealNetworks has announced that it has doubled its stake in music-streaming service Napster to 84%, after agreeing a deal with co-owner Columbus Nova Technology Partners. RealNetworks is paying $1m in cash up-front, a further $14m “over time subject to certain conditions”, although the final bill could reach $40m if Napster is sold (or has a “similar liquidity […]

It ain’t Christmas any more, Mariah! Ariana Grande has seized the Spotify 24-hour-streams record that Mariah Carey snaffled in December. The latter’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ was streamed 10.8m times on Christmas Eve, but now Grande’s new track ‘7 Rings’ has the record, after nearly 15m streams in the 24 hours after […]

News site Quartz has an interesting article analysing the song lengths on the last few albums by artists including Kendrick Lamar, Drake and Kanye West. Its conclusion: “Popular music is shrinking. From 2013 to 2018, the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and […]

Indian music company T-Series still hasn’t managed to knock gamer PewDiePie off his perch as YouTube’s most-subscribed-to channel: it’s on 80.5 million subs at the time of writing, compared to PewDiePie’s 80.9 million. Given their respective growth over the past year, it seems only a matter of time before T-Series is top dog – but […]

Like jazz, classical music is a sector that is often described as being under-served by the big, global streaming services, thanks to challenges including its extra layers of metadata, not to mention the length of its tracks – a half-hour performance doesn’t monetise well in a per-stream environment built for single songs. Anyway, British industry […]

Former Spice Girls manager and American Idol creator Simon Fuller is hard at work with a new band in 2019, Now United, which includes members drawn from a host of countries. He’s been talking to Billboard about why (audio) streaming hasn’t been playing a role in the band’s early days. “[Today’s] music industry is all about: […]

It’s a year since streaming service Tidal unveiled its ‘Masters’ feature, offering studio-quality hi-res music for subscribers to its top-end ‘HiFi’ tier. That was a partnership with hi-res music firm MQA, but it was only available from Tidal’s desktop client, rather than its mobile app. Until now, that is. At the CES show in Las […]

This week, it’s the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Get ready for a blizzard of new-gadget announcements, from TVs and speakers through to robots and smart toilets. The show’s organiser is industry body the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), and every year it publishes its predictions for tech sales in the year ahead, as […]

More details are emerging about the fake Beyoncé and SZA albums uploaded to streaming services just before Christmas, which gathered old tracks and unreleased demos from the artists under different artist names (Queen Carter and Sister Solana respectively). Music distributor Soundrop has revealed that the albums were uploaded through its pipeline, telling Rolling Stone that it took […]