Industry News Roundup For The Week Of 10/7/16

Here’s the music industry news roundup from the week of October 7th, 2016. There’s a little less on streaming this week for the first time in a while, but still lots to cover. Let’s get to it.

Music supervisors don’t think they’re hurting songwriters. I wrote about this last week and now a music sup responds. The bottom line is that if you change your music to please people you’re really compromising your art.

Americana music is being kept alive by the Brits. Is this the same thing that happened with Blues in the 1960’s happening all over again?

Spotify is launching in Japan, but it might not be successful. It’s a different music culture over there, and digital music still hasn’t caught on.

iHeart is looking for the casual music fan. It’s new streaming service is trying to stay out of the way of Spotify and Apple Music.

Streaming revenue is increasing for labels, but not so much for artists and songwriters. So what else is new? History repeats itself again.

Shazam is making a lot of money, but not from music. It’s the image and sound recognition technology that advertisers pay big bucks for.

Piracy isn’t new; we’ve been stealing music for a long time. Although this article outlines more recent instances, I can remember Rupert Perry telling me that EMI felt it was losing as much as 20% of its sales way back in the days of the reel-to-reel tape recorder.

It just might make sense for Spotify to purchase SoundCloud. Mostly because it gives new artists a way onto the platform without using an aggregator.

SiriusXM launches a talk show about music. It’s called Volume and has been dubbed “Sports talk for music.” I’ve waited a long time for this.

EDM is trying to expand to Asia. The genre is slowing elsewhere in the world, but Asia is still a big open market that promoters are keen to develop.

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