Tag Archives for " Forbes "

Music Industry News Roundup For The Week Of 11/4/16

Music Industry News Roundup

Here’s the Music Industry News Roundup for the week of November 4rth, 2016. We’re coming to the end of the year, and as a result, starting to see a number of year-end stories. And it looks like the piracy argument will never die. Check it out. YouTube Red is a bomb. It only managed to sign up […]

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Amazon’s Actually Losing Money From It’s New Music Service

amazon-losing-money

The major record labels are adamant about keeping the price of a music streaming subscription at $9.99 per month, regardless of the platform, so it was a great surprise last week when Amazon announced that its new Amazon Music Unlimited service was priced at $7.99 per month for Amazon Prime members. It turns out that the […]

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Goodbye MP3, We Hardly Knew Ya

Goodbye MP3

When it comes to technology, the music business has always been about convenience. It’s ultimately never about the sound or even a lower cost, it’s always comes down to what’s easiest to use. Still, it’s surprising to see the MP3 file format (or the “download” as many know it) accelerating so quickly towards the end […]

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Deezer Launches In The U.S., But Does Anybody Care?

Deezer-logo

After a year run up, the streaming service Deezer has finally launched in the United States. Spotify’s major competitor in Europe is now in the world’s largest market, but the question is, does it have enough to differentiate itself from the rest of the current streaming contenders in the space? The Paris-based service launched in […]

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Apple’s Publishing Royalty Proposal Is A Shot At Spotify

Apple's Music Publishing Proposal

Who says Apple’s music executives aren’t smart? In what may end up being a brilliant strategic move, the company discretely made a proposal to the governing Copyright Royalty Board to increase the song publishing royalty rate to 9.1 cents per 100 interactive streams, a significant increase over what is currently paid, according to the NY […]

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July 15, 2016

Maybe YouTube Isn’t Music’s Boogie Man After All

YouTube logo

Artists, bands and record labels have issued an all-out assault on YouTube this year over a variety of issues that mostly stem from what they consider to be low royalty payouts. The problem is, while it’s likely that many of the presumptions leading to the attacks have a basis in reality, their conclusions may be […]

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The Album Is Dying, And Good Riddance

Album sales

The music business was once all about the single song, transitioned to the album, and looks to be transitioning back again, as album sales sink lower and lower. While the writing may be on the wall that the concept of an album may be as outmoded as a buggy whip, artists, bands and record labels […]

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July 1, 2016

Apple Music’s Not Catching Spotify Anytime Soon And That’s Not Good

apple-music-1 year

As Apple Music reaches its first anniversary, the service is now up to 15 million paid subscribers, second only to Spotify’s 30 million. That number may not be as rosy as it seems though, since it may be well below what many in the industry initially expected. A recent report from Cowen & Co. predicted […]

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June 27, 2016

Why Brexit Might Actually Be Good For The Music Business

Brexit and the music business

Now that Brexit has unleashed its shock and horror on the financial markets worldwide, other much smaller sectors are wondering how it will affect them as well, and the music business is no exception. The traditional music business (meaning record labels) is run by a crafty street-wise bunch that know how to roll with the […]

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June 17, 2016

Twitter Invests In SoundCloud, But Why?

SoundCloud-Twitter

Twitter has made an investment in SoundCloud for a reported $70 million and if you’ve been following the story between the companies, you have to ask yourself “Why now?” About two years ago Twitter almost acquired SoundCloud before walking away at the last minute, and an acquisition certainly would have made a lot more sense […]

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June 8, 2016

What If Google Had Bought Michael Jackson’s Half Of Sony/ATV?

Google Buys Sony/ATV?

Word came out over the weekend that Google was a clandestine bidder for Michael Jackson’s half of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and the news had the music business wiping its collective brow in relief. Had that purchase happened, we might be looking at a very different industry landscape today. To recap, last March a buy-sell clause […]

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The Music Industry’s Big Data Problem

Big Data

One of the hopes that digital music brought was for a faster and more accurate way for everyone in the food chain to get paid. That sounds good on paper, but unfortunately hasn’t quite panned out the way anyone in the industry expected. While it’s true that it’s easy to count online sales and downloads in the digital […]

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Electronic Dance Music Still Has Room For Growth Despite Predictions

Andy_Moor_DJ_2010

It wasn’t that long ago when it looked like electronic dance music, or EDM, might be the savior of the music business, thanks to an impressive growth rate of 54% over the course of just three years. With overall CD and download sales slowing down, and streaming paid subscribers not increasing as fast as the […]

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