Music Industry News Roundup #7

Music Industry News Roundup Here’s the music industry news roundup from the last week. There’s good news and bad news, and some things to keep an eye out for to see how they play out in the future. Let’s get into it.

Sony Music buys Ministry of Sound. MoS is known for their compilations, which don’t play well in the streaming world since all the money goes back to the original label. This should play better on a major label that already owns many of the licenses.

The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) are going to war against Sony Music Entertainment. Speaking of Sony, music publishers feel that the label and publishing giant is taking the side of the streaming services instead of songwriters when it comes to the mechanical royalty rate ruling from the Copyright Royalty Board.

Can Deezer’s personal music assistant Flow differentiate it from the competition? That’s what the company is hoping, as it tries to wean users away from the free to a paid tier. It’s going to be an uphill battle though.

Once the scourge of the music business, torrent sites like Torrentz and Kickass Torrents are gone and the future of other large torrent sites are cloudy at best. You can thank streaming for that.

Nigerian musicians a big influence on the British music scene. They used to lie and say they were from Jamaica, but no more, as Nigerians leave their mark on every corner of the British music business.

Music for apps is becoming a larger revenue stream for artists and songwriters. More app developers realize that hit music can make people play longer, but now record labels are making it easier than ever to license the music they want.

Spotify’s new Release Radar feature provides a new way to discover new music. It provides a playlist of songs from newly released albums. Discover Weekly, which looks at songs released over the last 6 months, starts the week off on Monday, while Release Radar, which only looks back to the last 2 or 3 weeks, hits the weekend on Friday.

Ringo explains why The Beatles benefited from being late to CDs, late to iTunes and late to streaming. It doesn’t matter what the format is, the band continues to sell exceptionally well.

That’s the News Roundup of what went on in the music industry last week. Let’s see what next week brings.

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