Music Industry News Roundup For The Week Of 12/30/16

Here’s the Music Industry News Roundup for the week of December 30th, 2016, the last week of the year. As expected, there hasn’t been much in the way of blockbuster news, but there have been some interesting pieces.

Mozart was not #1 in album sales. A story made the rounds that a box set by the composer outsold even Drake, but the measurements have proven to be specious at best. It was a bad year for the physical album as a whole though, as the article points out – even for Drake.

Here’s a list of the top 50 biggest songs on Beats 1 radio last year. There are many that are expected, but a few surprises as well.

Rolling Stone has 6 reasons why 2016 was a great music year. There are a few that I don’t quite agree with, like radio being healthy and album releases being events, but other than that its spot on.

6 music tech predictions for 2017. Culled from 20 industry tastemakers, these are mostly out-of-the-box in that you probably haven’t heard about them before. They also lean towards live music rather than recorded.

Warners is getting back into compilation albums. This is spurred on by the fact that singles are hot again thanks to streaming [subscription required].

Deezer plans to take over the streaming world. The streaming universe is still young and will be expanding for some time yet, so why not?

Tencent is a big threat to Apple Music and Spotify. It already dominates Asian streaming and has the money to come West [subscription required].

Billboard looked at the 10 best music memes. I must admit that I missed these during the year, but don’t feel too bad about it.

PC World looks at what went right and wrong with VR in 2016. Virtual Reality still hasn’t caught on the way everyone had hoped, but it did make some progress.

Warners is going head first into VR though. It plans “hundreds” of VR music releases in 2017.

Many Top 40 hits had ambiguous key centers. This is a little music geeky but interesting. It shows the evolution of the hit song and consumer tastes.

That’s the Music News Roundup of what went on in the music industry last week. Happy New Year everyone. See you next year!