Music Industry News Roundup #3
Here’s some interesting music business news from the last week. As always, it’s surprising how some old topics keep on coming back to life, and the new topics that we never expected pop up.
Streaming music has surpassed YouTube music views. They said it would never happen, but streaming music is now more popular that YouTube for listening to music. This is extremely important because it’s really a paradigm shift happening right before our eyes, as music streaming becomes the big dog of music distribution. Watch the financial pie get bigger for everyone in the food chain!
Spotify and Apple Music are beating YouTube with blockbuster hits. Huge hits like Drake’s “One Dance,” Rihanna’s “Work,” Desiigner’s “Panda” and Zayn’s “Pillowtalk” don’t appear as much on YouTube as on the streaming services.
Spotify paid subscribers now at 37 million. That’s a good strong metric for success, except that so many of subscribers are on a discounted $0.99 per month or 3 months for $10 plans, so there’s no telling what will happen when those run out. Spotify figures they’ll lose between 1 and 1.5 million subs, but experts figure it will be higher. Still, the streaming service continues to grow at a faster rate that the competition.
Sony/ATV’s purchase of the other 50% of Michael Jackson’s catalog is in jeopardy. It appears that European regulators may block the acquisition because it will give Sony too much control of the publishing world. I guess that owning 60% of any industry would get anti-trust regulators to open their eyes.
Speaking of Sony, it’s being investigated in the U.S. for colluding against Rdio. The streaming service filed for bankruptcy last year (a lot of its assets were purchased by Pandora), but Rdio’s 3 founders are filing an anti-trust suit saying that Sony colluded with Warner Bros and Universal in licensing issues to force them into bankruptcy.
The music and tech industries are out of touch when it comes to copyright laws. That’s the conclusion from an article in the Wall Street Journal, but most industry experts think that the existing copyright laws need a serious updating since they apply more to a time before the high-tech age we live in today.
A classical composer has a similar viewpoint. It’s not only pop and rock songwriters that are suffering from existing copyright laws. Jennifer Higdon feels she’s not getting free market value for her compositions, which are played by orchestras worldwide.
Distrokid has created a new system for getting artists paid. This allows for multiple people to get paid, even with different percentages of ownership, instead of the current system of a single payment to one person that has to be divided after the fact.
Soundcloud is taking another step to becoming a full-fledged streaming service. It’s added a new radio-like feature similar to what other services have. Users have said it’s very “Pandora-like,” although I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.
That’s the News Roundup of what went on in the music industry last week. Let’s see what next week brings.
