Category Archives for "Music Industry News"
May 23, 2018
Why Record Labels Hate Free Streaming Tiers So Much
If you were to poll record label execs off-the-record on which music streaming service they like the most in a strictly business-sense, chances are that Apple Music would end up as the clear winner. Why? Apple has steadfastly refused to institute a free ad-driven tier. Even though labels, artists, songwriters and publishers realize revenue from […]
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May 21, 2018
YouTube Music To Finally Launch, Along With Full Artist Credits
After much speculation on features and timing, YouTube Music is slated for a soft launch tomorrow. The service will replace its YouTube Red service with with two tiers and a lot of features that users should like. YouTube Music’s tiers will include YouTube Music at the industry standard $9.99 per month that features mostly audio-only […]
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May 18, 2018
Music Discovery Trends Of 2018
Music discovery is the holy grail of the music business, as it develops a new fan base for artists and bands with the exposure. At one point in time, most discovery came mostly from radio, with a little bit of print advertising aimed at both consumers and retailers thrown in. In today’s digital age, radio […]
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May 16, 2018
The Billboard Charts Will Be Measuring Streams Differently
Many artists and industry execs may think that the Billboard charts are less relevant than they’ve ever been, but they’re still used as a measurement of success no matter how you look at it. That’s why it’s long been argued that the way that the charts count streams is insufficient. It appears that’s changing soon […]
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May 14, 2018
Pandora Learns That More Ads Doesn’t Equal More Subscribers
The streaming music service Pandora has been in financial difficulty for quite a while now, and it really needs to generate more revenue to stay afloat. One of the things that it tried was to increase the number of ads served up to free users, but it looks like that strategy has backfired. Everyone hates […]
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May 11, 2018
Online Radio Has A Data Problem That Few Are Talking About
Streaming my be the future for distributing music, but radio is still a big player in making hits. While so much about how music radio works seems dated, the fact is that people still listen, and advertisers still support it. Surprisingly, that’s not so much the case with online radio, and it all revolves around […]
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May 9, 2018
Sweden May Be Telling Us About Streaming’s Future
The latest IFPI annual study on last year’s global music sales has posted and there’s a wealth of data there, although no surprises. There is one piece of data that Mark Mulligan of the Midea research group dug out that may give us a look at the future of streaming. Mark noted that IFPI’s report showed […]
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May 7, 2018
Don’t Look Now But Twitter Is Making A Comeback
For a while it looked like Twitter would eventually become a casualty of the social media wars, as its user base had plateaued and it continued to lose money. That now looks to be in the past as Twitter has just posted its second consecutive solid quarter of profits. On top of that, the service […]
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May 4, 2018
More Music Is Played On YouTube Than All Other Platforms Combined
The latest IFPI report describing the economics of the recorded music business of 2017 is out and among the interesting tidbits is the fact that there was more music streamed from YouTube last year than Spotify, Apple Music and all other streaming platforms combined. Considering that the per user royalties paid back to the music […]
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May 2, 2018
With A U.S. IPO, Tencent Will Become The Next Big Streaming Service In North America
There have been multiple reports that Chinese streaming service Tencent Music is getting set to file for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) very soon. An even bigger story is the pegged valuation is in the neighborhood of $25 billion, which would make it the 4th largest U.S. listed tech stock ever, just a little behind […]
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April 27, 2018
Music Modernization Act Unanimously Passes The House
The Music Modernization Act is getting closer to becoming the law of the land as the bill was unanimously passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday (April 25), with 415 voting in favor and 16 representatives not voting. It now goes to the Senate for the final vote, then must be signed by […]
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April 26, 2018
It Looks Like Google Will Shut Down Its Play Music Service
There are big changes coming to Google and YouTube’s music streaming services soon as the company tries to consolidate them all into one offering. According to a report at 9To5Google, Google will shut down its poorly titled Google Play Music streaming service and merge it into the new upcoming YouTube Remix service. YouTube also has […]
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April 25, 2018
Spotify Rolls Out A New Interface For Freemium Users
Spotify’s direct listing earlier this month on the New York Stock Exchange doesn’t mean that the company is taking it easy, as it has just rolled out a new user interface with a number of new features on its freemium tier. The catch, for the moment at least, is that only new users will see […]
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April 23, 2018
Smart Speakers Help Amazon To 100 Million Prime Subscribers
Amazon has never officially discussed its Prime service subscriber numbers in the past, leaving room for lots of speculation. Was it 90 million? 120 million? 60 million? Finally we get some real confirmation from CEOÂ Jeff Bezos himself, who announced in its annual shareholders letter that the company has broken the 100 million barrier, a new […]
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April 20, 2018
Indie DIY Artists Are 2.7% Of The Music Market
Depending on how you look at it, new figures from Midea Research examining the total revenue for recorded music last year are either good news or bad news for indie DIY artists. As the study points out, DIY artists who release music through Tunecore, CD Baby and Bandcamp took in a total of $472 million last […]
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