Music Ally Focus #49: In the first in a short series of podcasts designed to help you understand how various elements of Web3 tech can be used in music, Grammy-award-winning artist RAC (AKA André Allen Anjos), and Head of Crypto at Hifi Labs, Jack Spallone, both speak to Music Ally Editor Joe Sparrow about racOS – RAC's new fan club / website which is also a DAO. the DAO – a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – allows fans to become RAC token holders, and they are given access to exclusive fe...
Mar 04, 2022•46 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Music Ally Focus #48: We have quickly published this podcast due to the rapidly developing situation in Ukraine, where Russian forces have invaded and numerous cities are under attack. Dartsya Tarkovska, co-founder of Music Export Ukraine spoke to Music Ally from Ukraine and explained the war's impact on artists and people in the music industry, and how the industry will need to change its approach to Ukraine and Russia in the future. Dartsya is clear that our hopes and prayers are not enough: o...
Mar 01, 2022•27 min•Season 1Ep. 69
Music Ally Editor Joe Sparrow speaks to Jeronimo Folgueira, CEO of music streaming platform Deezer about the company's current and future strategy, and also to get his thoughts on the state of music streaming today. He explained the various ways that he thinks streaming can better serve artists and fans: including more ways of buying and selling inside streaming apps, how the relationships between the streaming platforms and the major labels could improve, and how, in the changing relationship b...
Feb 25, 2022•24 min•Season 1Ep. 68
New money is pouring into the music industry: giant alternative asset management companies like Blackstone and KKR, are partnering with the likes of Hipgnosis and BMG to purchase music catalogue at great expense. But... why? Are they suddenly interested in buying some cool rock songs for some reason? Have they run out of other places to invest money in times of very low interest rates? Or have they spotted that music is undervalued? Music Ally's Joe Sparrow chats to journalist and analyst David ...
Feb 17, 2022•33 min•Season 1Ep. 67
Music industry veteran Karen Emanuel is CEO of Key Production – and is on the board of Moving the Needle, a UK group that supports women entering the music industry. She speaks to Music Ally Editor Joe Sparrow about what can be done to encourage more women to enter the music business, and how to support and showcase their work when they are in it. Also: what does she want to see in terms of representation, pay, and recognition for women in the industry in 2022 – and how can listeners can activel...
Feb 10, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 66
Spotify has a lot on its plate all of a sudden. In 2020 it signed the controversial, blunt-smoking, bow-hunting podcaster Joe Rogan in a $100m deal - and while there has always been pushback against some of his guests, this week things came to a head, as Neil Young asked Spotify to choose between him or Rogan due to the podcaster's Covid-19 views. His music is now being removed from the service. In the same week, Rogan once again invited controversial academic Jordan Peterson onto his show – cau...
Jan 28, 2022•22 min•Season 1Ep. 65
Double Elvis is the music-focused podcast company behind the hit rock n roll crime music podcast “Disgraceland” and others, including the recent hip-hop inspired audio drama podcast “Here Comes the Break”, which was made in partnership with Def Jam and featured an exclusive soundtrack. Music Ally has written a lot about the space where the music industry and podcasting meets so we’ve invited Double Elvis' CEO Brady Sadler to talk about podcasts teaming up with record labels, figuring out which m...
Jan 28, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 64
The long-held assumption is that artists make music, and that music is then the core connection between the artist and the fan – as well as the thing that is monetised. But that paradigm is rapidly changing. Christine Osazuwa, Strategy Director for Pollen Presents, speaks to Music Ally's Editor Joe Sparrow about how artists can and should seek new streams of income outside of the traditional sources of recording royalties and live tickets/merch – and how to connect with fans using platforms that...
Jan 19, 2022•22 min•Season 1Ep. 63
Music Ally Focus #41: Music Ally has just published its latest Quarterly Report – our yearly Trends Report is a forward-thinking series of analyses, with advice, ideas and context, to help you navigate a better route through the year ahead. ( Music Ally subscribers can access it here .) In this podcast we are going to pick over a couple of the topics from the report. First, we'll dig into New Revenue Streams , including the pricing of streaming and challenger music services and the one-off, 'non...
Jan 14, 2022•23 min•Season 1Ep. 62
Music Ally Focus Ep. 40: Every December, Music Ally publishes its hotly-anticipated Sandbox Campaigns of the Year issue, which rounds up the best, most innovative and interesting campaigns of the previous 12 months – and 2021’s is the biggest ever. (There's a link to the report below). It's an incredibly useful resource for anyone planning marketing in 2022: so in this podcast we invited three of Music Ally’s marketing experts to pick out two of the winning campaigns they liked the most. We spea...
Dec 16, 2021•41 min•Season 1Ep. 61
In advance of the NY:LON Connect conference ( nylonconnect.com ), which returns for its sixth edition online over January 18-21 2022, we spoke to two previous conference participants to understand what these two experts see as the most meaningful and important topics as we look ahead into the fast-shifting music industry. The topics they zeroed in on include the creator economy, sub-Saharan Africa, increased transparency for artists, the current emphasis on catalogue, and, of course, the metaver...
Dec 07, 2021•31 min•Season 1Ep. 60
Private equity funds and firms like Hipgnosis are scooping up music catalogues. And 60% of Hipgnosis’s expensively-purchased catalogue of music is over ten years old, with only 2.5% under 3 years old. Will major publishers and labels be drawn into a bidding war over copyrights, and will new artists suffer as a result? Music-tech strategist Dan Fowler recently wrote a fascinating article called “The Changing Landscape of Music Publishing” which aimed to figure out what the impact of the big catal...
Nov 12, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 59
Smartlinking services like Linkfire are now ubiquitous to music fans and industry alike: they have become essential glue that holds all the disparate areas of the business together, sending fans from one place to another, and generating income along the way. We chat to Linkfire CEO Lars Ettrup about this quietly powerful sector, and we ask him if smartlinks are empowering independence for DIY artists, and if they even need a traditional website in an age where the most important URL for them to ...
Nov 04, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 58
Music Ally recently published its Q3 2021 report, which focused on music/tech startups and the future fo the music industry. In the report, we spoke to Chris Howard, serial entrepreuer, and CEO of The Rattle , which operates in London, Los Angeles and New York City. The Rattle stands “as a counter-culture to the traditional music and startup industries,” and what Howard said in our report - in particular his critique of the music industry’s (in)ability to engage with technology – ruffled a few f...
Oct 27, 2021•29 min•Season 1Ep. 56
Special guest Amit Gurbaxani recently wrote an article for us on the Indian All About Music music industry conference, and here, he gives us his expert insight into the Indian music markets. He chatted to Joe Sparrow about three of the key topics, and answered some questions submitted via social media. He spoke about how there is appetite – and money – for international touring acts in India, but not a live venue infrastructure yet; how Indian music is not just about Bollywood and that regional ...
Oct 19, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 56
Music Ally has just published its Q3 2021 report, which focused on music/tech startups . For the report, we spoke to Rishi Patel and John Acquaviva of music/tech investors Plus Eight Equity about how they see the future of the industry, and they kindly agreed to dig deeper into their thoughts in this podcast. Rishi and John explain to Music Ally's Joe Sparrow how the creator economy is a huge focus for them; how the incumbent music business companies “have a gun to their heads” and will be force...
Oct 15, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 55
In this episode, CTO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (which represents the interests of the global recording industry) Richard Gooch joins us to talk about metadata. He says that the idea that “music metadata is broken” is a misconception. He explains the new systems that he says form the infrastructure for a fairer music industry – for everyone from superstars to new artists in existing territories in sub-Saharan Africa, where the IFPI has a particular current focus...
Oct 08, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 54
TikTok has officially reached the milestone of one billion monthly active users (MAUs). The short-form videos app revealed the news in a short announcement blog post , although it did not give any other stats. In July 2020, TikTok had 689.2 million monthly active users and it only took 14 months to hit the one billion MAUs mark – which suggests that TikTok has been adding around 22.2 million users a month during that period. Joe and Stu discuss what this means for artists and the music industry ...
Sep 29, 2021•19 min•Season 1Ep. 53
It's all happening in the UK right now: there are some big and meaningful investigations into the music industry going on, which will almost certainly have big repercussions around the world when they conclude. This week, the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published a hefty report on music creators' earnings in the digital era. It has a huge amount of data, and aims to inform discussion in the ever-heated debate about artists and streaming royalties. It's a very long report – 224 pa...
Sep 23, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 52
Some musicians are finding NFTs irresistible, seeing them as a new way to connect with fans, make money – and sell slices of their music rights. It seems very easy to sell a small percentage of, for instance, your master recording copyright – with potentially huge rewards. But, warns this week's special guest, there are many ways you could get caught in a tricky situation that you may not have considered – including anti-money laundering laws, securities laws, international tax issues, and the h...
Sep 15, 2021•30 min•Season 1Ep. 51
Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow talk over the shock news that the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced that Sony Music’s $430m acquisition of distributor AWAL from Kobalt “ raises competition concerns ”, and gave the major label a five-day deadline to respond. If those responses do not satisfy the regulator, it will launch a deeper ‘phase two’ investigation of the deal. Stu and Joe discuss why this has happened, what the responses of various connected parties wer...
Sep 10, 2021•17 min•Season 1Ep. 50
Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow talk over the possibilities (and accidentally insult both golfers and jazz fans) in Apple's purchase of Primephonic, the classical music streaming service, which they promise will be reborn as a better experience, with more features. Classical music has proved famously tricky for the big streaming services to get right, thanks to the specific challenges around metadata and catalogue navigation, but in other ways it’s been very simple: peaceful piano ins...
Sep 01, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 50
Rebecca Versteegh, Head of Music Partnerships at the “Gen-Z Marketing Agency” Creed Media is our special guest this week. Creed has only been around for three years but has become well known for its success at TikTok marketing and works with all three major labels. While TikTok success is highly sought after by many marketers, it’s the next step that holds interest for a lot of them: translating that attention across to streaming platforms in the forms of plays, follows and fandom elsewhere in t...
Aug 20, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 48
Tim Westergren was the former founder and CEO of Pandora, and helped build the current digital music landscape. He left the company in 2017, frustrated by “the music industrial complex vortex”, and last year launched a new startup called Sessions – a live-streaming platform for emerging and established artists. He says Sessions does something unique: it spends its own money to bring in viewers for performing artists, and gives artists a direct connection, and all the data, on their fans. Tim tal...
Aug 10, 2021•26 min•Season 1Ep. 47
Spotify has published its financial results for the second quarter of 2021: it now has 365 million monthly active users (MAUs) including 165 million premium subscribers, and added nine million users and seven million subscribers during Q2. The results also contained some interesting info about Greenroom, its Clubhouse-style app, showed slow growth in the "Rest of World" areas – and revealed an operating profit of €12m in Q2. Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow rummage around in the announ...
Jul 29, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 46
Hashtag challenges and dance contests are vital to TikTok and rival apps and services are adopting them too. YouTube Shorts is no different, and as the service continues its rapid global rollout, it has snagged a partnership with K-Pop giants BTS . They have launched the ‘first ever worldwide dance challenge’ on YouTube Shorts based around their new track ‘Permission to Dance’. Joe and Stu discuss what this means for short-form video, and whether people will simply do the dance on TikTok instead...
Jul 21, 2021•18 min•Season 1Ep. 45
👋 Music Ally’s free weekly newsletter, The Knowledge : musically.lnk.to/knowledgepo Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Music Ally has reported extensively on the hearings at the UK parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) inquiry into the economics of music streaming – which has now published its report. And it’s fair to say major labels will be wincing the most as they read its recommendations – which include: Introducing broadcas...
Jul 15, 2021•34 min•Season 1Ep. 45
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. British politician Kevin Brennan wrote a guest article for UK newspaper the Independent which offers a few hints on the outcome of the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into artists' streaming income. The British music industry will now be preparing for a big lobbying battle around applying equitable remuneration (ER) to streaming, although this is not a big surprise given the issue’s prominence in the hearings of the U...
Jun 23, 2021•17 min•Season 1Ep. 44
Music business news, analysed in brief by Music Ally's Stuart Dredge and Joe Sparrow. Spotify has evolved from a pure music-streaming service to an 'audio-first' platform including podcasts and live audio. Perhaps major labels are going down a similar evolutionary path. Sony Music is the latest to beef up its podcasting activities. It has acquired UK-based radio, podcasts and TV producer Somethin' Else for an undisclosed amount, as part of an expansion of its global podcasts division. Joe and St...
Jun 18, 2021•16 min•Season 1Ep. 43
There are now more ways than ever for an artist to connect with audiences, and to make money doing it – exactly the kind of complex task that many artists look to a manager to help them with. So how do forward-thinking managers help artists connect with their audience, strike innovative deals, and make money in new ways? Joe Sparrow talks to three young managers who are all navigating this new landscape to find out what they have learned: • Sarah, Muise Management – who works with Shygirl, LYZZA...
Jun 18, 2021•49 min•Season 1Ep. 42
