Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Roblox is a buzzy platform with a huge user base making games, spaces and virtual experiences. As part of that process they can upload custom audio, which could be music - and now the US National Music Publishers Association is suing Roblox for $200m in damages for “Roblox’s unabashed exploitation of music without proper licences”. Joe and Stu discuss what this means for User Generated Content platforms like Ro...
Jun 10, 2021•15 min•Season 1Ep. 41
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. This week, YouTube announced that it has paid out more than $4bn to the music industry in the last 12 months, according to its head of music Lyor Cohen. Joe 'n' Stu ask what this means for streaming services, artists, and labels: is it as simple as "more money in is better?" And what might other streaming platforms like Spotify do in response? Oh, and here's the link to Budimir Šobat’s world record of the longe...
Jun 04, 2021•16 min•Season 1Ep. 40
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Joe 'n' Stu talk about understanding what NFTs *really* mean for the music industry and how they should be part of long-term thinking; what the music industry can learn from sports marketing; and how artists are making more money from memberships on livestreaming platforms than they are from touring. It's a recap of a few of the most impactful things they learned from Music Ally's Sandbox Summit Global conferen...
May 31, 2021•26 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow . Distributor Believe said that it is "contemplating" raising around €500m (around $608.5m) from its mooted IPO... the prospectus isn't yet public, but Believe has published some of the figures that will be key to its appeal to investors: In 2020, Believe generated €728m (886m) from 'digital music sales' and in the first quarter of 2021, the company made another €124m, up by 26% year-on-year. Joe and Stu analyse...
May 20, 2021•14 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Games firm Roblox is firmly on the music industry map now, and Roblox published its Q1 results , revealing that it generated $387m of revenues in the first three months of this year, up 140% compared to Q1 2020. It also has 43.3m daily active users, and music is increasingly a part of the Roblox experience - so Joe and Stu analyse what this might mean for the music biz, and how artists could use it to make cool...
May 12, 2021•16 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Will Page, the former chief economist at Spotify and PRS for Music, has published a new study of 'Twitch's Rockonomics' which contains data unearthed by Page – particularly the case studies of artists Laura Shigihara, Aeseaes, Sereda, Matt Heafy, mxmtoon and RAC – will be useful for any musician mulling whether to use Twitch. Joe and Stu talk about its insight into how Twitch's economy works and if it could be ...
May 03, 2021•19 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Apple has just announced its new show-level podcast subscriptions. Spotify also plans to announce its own similar offering , having invested heavily in podcasting in the last few years. So what does it mean for musicians and songwriters? Could show-level podcast subscriptions mean musician podcasters start creating their own paywalls with exclusive content – possibly including paywalled music too? Should artist...
Apr 29, 2021•13 min
We were thrilled to talk to techno legend Richie Hawtin and Endel CEO Oleg Stavitsky – two people at the cutting edge of where Music and AI intersects. Hawtin, the pioneering musician, DJ and technologist partnered with Endel, the Berlin-based platform that creates adaptive, real-time personalised sounds and music using AI on a brand new project, "Deeper Focus", which automatically creates music based on Hawtin's work. We chatted to Richie and Oleg about their new project, and their thoughts on ...
Apr 27, 2021•27 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow . Indian social media firm ShareChat is behind one of the most successful new TikTok rivals in India: Moj. It now has more than 120 million monthly active users – making it one of the leaders in the scramble to replace TikTok, after that app was banned in India last summer. ShareChat has just raised a $502m funding round, with investors including Snap, Twitter and Tiger Global Management. Joe 'n' Stu analyse the...
Apr 15, 2021•15 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Patreon is now valued at $4bn and their focus on the ‘creator’ economy seems to be working – so does this mean that we can assume that artists will now generate a substantial part of their money from superfans via platforms like Patreon? How do artists persuade fans to support them on these platforms - and will labels be shoved out of the picture or do they still have an important role to play? Stu and Joe anal...
Apr 09, 2021•15 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. "There are elements of live listening that will eventually exist on Spotify too. You should imagine that functionality being available," Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told Music Ally in February this year, when we asked him whether his company had plans for radio and/or Clubhouse-style live audio. Lo and behold: Spotify just announced its acquisition of startup Betty Labs , the creator of a live audio app called Locker...
Apr 01, 2021•16 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Global recorded music revenues grew by 7.4% to $21.6bn in 2020 , according to industry body the IFPI, which published its annual Global Music Report this week. That’s a deceleration compared to 2019, but with 2020 being the year of Covid-19, labels will see the latest figures as a success. It’s also the sixth consecutive year of growth, and the highest annual total since 2002, when global revenues were $22.1bn....
Mar 26, 2021•16 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Spotify has just launched a new data-heavy website that explains how the company pays out royalties. Spotify isn’t explicitly describing it as a defence of music streaming, but given the recent upsurge in debate about musicians and streaming royalties – not to mention the UK’s parliamentary inquiry focusing on the streaming economy – the timing is no accident. Joe and Stu discuss what this new tranche of data m...
Mar 19, 2021•14 min
Sign up for Music Ally’s free weekly newsletter, The Knowledge – at-a-glance analysis of the modern music industry. Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive at BPI & BRIT Awards, discusses artists, labels, streaming and equitable remuneration with Music Ally's Joe Sparrow. Throughout the current UK parliamentary inquiry into the economics of music streaming, Music Ally has worked hard to report fairly the full range of views in the debates about how streaming pays off for musicians. We've reported at l...
Mar 15, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. We're in a moment of intense hype around non-fungible tokens of all kinds, music included. Grimes sold $5.8m of her NFTs in 20 minutes last week, while Mike Shinoda recently made tens of thousands of dollars from a single NFT , including a new song. Now artist 3lau (aka Justin Blau) has set his own record: $11.6m of NFT sales. Joe and Stu discuss if this is another crypto bubble, and what the actual good uses o...
Mar 10, 2021•17 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow . Streaming service Tidal has a new majority owner: fintech firm Square. That's the mobile payments company founded by Twitter boss Jack Dorsey, which is now paying $297m in stock and cash for the stake. Tidal co-owner Jay-Z will be joining Square's board as part of the transaction. Stu explains to Joe why a fintech company wants to buy in to streaming music, and how it will try and make new opportunities for ar...
Mar 05, 2021•13 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. This week, Spotify held a huge event announcing a raft of announcements, including new functionality and what they presented as positive examples of artists generating money from the platform. Stuart Dredge, who authored Music Ally's live coverage of the event , and then spoke to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek after it, explains to Joe what he thinks these announcement mean, and where Spotify is going next. 👋 Sign up f...
Feb 26, 2021•13 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. This week, the long-awaited appearance of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music at the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into streaming economics took place, and Stu – who has reported on all the sessions and is now known as "the inquiry whisperer" – explains to Joe about the strong signals on where the committee is heading in terms of its likely recommendations, and some interesting signs of willingness on the part of ...
Feb 24, 2021•15 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Audio startup Clubhouse is having a moment – and while attitudes towards it are evenly split between "evangelism" and "disdain", it's a concept that has connected with millions of people. moreover, what does an app that unites people to chat about stuff mean for a platform like Spotify – which is very firmly ‘audio first’ now, including spoken word content alongside music. Stu and Joe chat about the possible re...
Feb 18, 2021•13 min
Deezer's User Centric Payment System trial - what's the latest? In 2019, Deezer announced it was going to trial the User-Centric Payment System - a very different way to pay rightsholders based on streaming users' listening behaviour, and hailed by some as a fairer method. UCPS is a controversial topic: $11.4 billion in revenue was generated by music streaming last year, and deciding how that money is shared is complicated. On our Music Ally TV Show, Alexander Holland, Deezer’s Chief Content and...
Feb 04, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Sony Music is buying Kobalt's label and distribution arm Awal, and its neighbouring rights division. After the initial announcement, the price paid was confirmed as $430m . Stu and Joe analyse the purchase, including what the knock-on effect is on the remaining indie distributors, and speculate on what new activity the distribution space might see as competition to win over artists hots up. 👋 Sign up for Music...
Feb 02, 2021•11 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. On Tuesday 19th January, the UK parliamentary inquiry into the economics of music streaming . The three major labels' UK bosses gave evidence, as well as from UK rights management collectives PPL and PRS for Music. The session saw some very well-briefed questions that got to the heart of some of the key issues in the debate about musicians and streaming income… and there were some moments that made us want to b...
Jan 20, 2021•12 min
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. The British music industry will be clearing some diary time next Tuesday (19 January) for the next sessions in the UK parliamentary inquiry into the economics of music streaming . The second session will see the three major labels' UK bosses giving evidence together. Artists and songwriters who gave evidence in previous sessions appear to have successfully set the tone and direction of the inquiry, and the parl...
Jan 18, 2021•11 min
This show is for artists, managers, labels, publishers and DSPs – in fact, anyone involved in this complex relationship. In the show, we'll discuss: What should change in contracts between artists, songwriters and other rightsholders? Why do EMMA's managers want change and how can it happen? Will the EU Copyright Directives 18-20, which address contract reform, make a difference - or make things more complex? BTW, with regards to artists' earnings, if you missed the last show on Deezer's User-Ce...
Jan 18, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Andrew Jervis, Bandcamp's Chief Curator, will explain how to get the most out of Bandcamp's artist-fan relationship tools - including fan accounts, the music feed, and artist recommendations. He'll also explain best practice for selling physical and digital bundles, and show how Label accounts work. Andrew will use recent case studies and success stories to give you inspiration - and you can ask him anything about tailoring your use of the platform to suit an artist's unique ethos, fanbase and c...
Sep 29, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Episode 14 of Music Ally TV - China, in context: understanding a music industry on the cutting edge In this Episode: Kanjian’s VP of International Business, Tinko Georgiev, International Marketing Manager Jane Polubotko and International Business Specialist Yutong Situ explain how in China, artist branding must hit different touch-points, and how building a long-term, diversified approach across multiple businesses is essential for success. They also explain what artists looking to break into Ch...
Sep 09, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 14
In this special episode, Joe Sparrow spoke to musicians Zoë Keating and David Lowery - two of the most prominent voices for artists’ rights in the streaming era. They spoke in the light of recent public discussions about how the model pays off for musicians – #BrokenRecord in the UK for example – and how they think streaming could and should improve. Keating has regularly published her streaming income data to further transparency around payouts for artists, and Lowery runs artist-rights blog Th...
Aug 14, 2020•32 min•Season 1Ep. 13
This episode: A learnings-focussed workshop that asks: how do you put marketing at the very centre of an artist's career? Coherence, coordination, and - yes - *synergy* are the goals in the age of multi-faceted marketing campaigns- but by its very nature, that's all complicated to do. So what are the practical steps to build a multi-platform, multi-faceted campaign that feels synchronised? Expert guests include Ali Murphy, International Marketing Manager of Secretly Group, Charles Kirby-Welch, C...
Aug 12, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Music Ally Today takes a key story from Music Ally’s daily music industry newsletter and gives you the analysis you need to know. Joe and Stu discuss how events have, it's fair to say, moved fast since Friday for TikTok's business in the US. The latest news is confirmation from Microsoft that it's in talks about an acquisition of TikTok in the US and certain other countries, with a mid-September deadline to reach an agreement with the app's parent company ByteDance – not to mention the US presid...
Aug 03, 2020•14 min
Music Ally Today takes a key story from Music Ally’s daily music industry newsletter and gives you the analysis you need to know. Today: Joe Sparrow and Stuart Dredge discuss how Spotify ended Q2 with 138 million subscribers and 299 million monthly active users, having added eight million and 13 million respectively that quarter. Meanwhile, Spotify generated revenues of 1.89bn in Q2, up by 13% year-on-year. It recorded an operating loss of €167m and a net loss of €356m for the quarter. PLUS: Stu...
Jul 30, 2020•21 min
