Music Ally Focus

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...

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 fundin...

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 w...

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...

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 con...

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...

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 th...

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...

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 finte...

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, e...

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 committe...

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 ‘aud...

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 tha...

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 activi...

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...

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 evidenc...

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 th...

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...

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 ac...

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 i...

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?  ...

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 d...