Music Industry News Roundup For The Week Of 4/14/17

Here’s the Music Industry News Roundup for the week ending on April 14th, 2017. The news this week is varied, but interesting, with Spotify in the lead again. Let’s get into it.

Recording artists are lobbying Capitol Hill to get paid for radio airplay. This has been an ongoing struggle for a couple of decades but the NAB always wins. It might not be so easy this time.

3 Rights societies collaborate for better royalty collection. ASCAP, France’s SACEM and the U.K.’s PRS are hoping that the blockchain technology from IBM will help with better and faster worldwide collections. Blockchain has been offered as a solution by a wide array of tech startups, but having the muscle of an IBM could actually give it a chance.

Google has to change how it presents music in order to prosper. There are two destinations with Google Play and YouTube music, and that’s one too many.

It might list its shares directly without raising any money, which gives its investors an easier way to cash out.

 Then he brought it back to Apple Music. Curious, but too little too late, unfortunately. This won’t help either Jay-Z or Tidal.

Amazon is actually the world’s biggest streaming service. That’s based on the number of Prime members it has, who automatically get access. This doesn’t mean they’re actually using the service though.

Another plagiarism lawsuit catches Ed Sheeran this time. And it cost him $20 million and co-writes.

DailyMotion relaunches to try to take on YouTube. But it’s going to have a lot less user content, so it really isn’t challenging YouTube much.

Spotify is better than broadcast music radio. Well, duh. Especially with long blocks of commercials these days, radio is becoming unlistenable.

A guild for music supervisors has launched. It’s only for the UK and Europe, but can the US be far behind?

That’s the Music News Roundup of what went on in the music industry last week. Have a great week ahead!