Music Ally Focus

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 par...

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,...

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 focu...

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...

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...

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 discussi...

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 hav...

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...

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 a...

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 t...

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 viewe...

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 a...

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 d...

👋 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 maj...

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...

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 Som...

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 lan...

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 withou...

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 platfor...

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...

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 th...

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 J...

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 t...

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 creati...

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 mu...