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With each passing year, the music industry continues to develop and broadens its awareness of issues, and further its efforts towards inclusivity and innovation. Here we look at four major topics which will be a major focus of the music business into 2020 and beyond.

YouTube overhauled its music streaming app in early 2018, and it's taken off since then. Much of that growth stems from launches in developing markets like India and Brazil, that capitalizes on the popularity of its free video streaming platform on mobile. Spotify has contended that YouTube is the biggest free music streaming service in the world since it filed to go public. And since it made its direct listing, YouTube Music has proven a formidable competitor. Spotify still boasts a lot more users than YouTube -- 248 million total including 113 million premium subscribers -- but the success of YouTube cannot be discounted.

With the barrier between fans and artists at an all time low your music, no matter how good it may be, will inevitably come up against criticism from listeners. Rather than simply quitting music or hunting down the offending party, we here explore five more practical and constructive ways of dealing with critiques of your music.

Heading into a new year (or new quarter, season, headspace; depending on when you read this), many a thought turns to “I’m going to start getting paid my worth” and “I’m not working for no or low payment anymore!”

In the wake of analysts from both Evercore and Bernstein giving Spotify an underperform rating, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the company is in early talks to acquire a podcasting network called the Ringer.

With many in the industry projecting that podcasting will become the next big thing in streaming, Spotify has increasingly been putting resources into the format. Their interest in the Ringer, which offers both sports and pop-culture programming, is the latest move in these efforts.

Whether it’s traffic outside, wildlife, or simply loud housemates, noise is ever-present, and when trying to record or even practice, some measure of soundproofing is often called for. This is all well and good if you own the building you live in, but for renters, things can get a little more complicated. Here we look at how to effectively soundproof an apartment, without inciting the wrath of your landlord.

Tuning up a guitar is one of the most basic skills that many guitarists learn. If you start playing when your guitar is out of tune, you might not enjoy the notes. You need to know how to tune a guitar the right way so that you can get the best sound every time you play. Tuning a guitar is simple and there are different methods that you can use. This guide will help you know how to tune an acoustic guitar. If you learn these methods, then you will have no problems tuning your guitar the right way.

The streaming era is driven by singles, which means you should be releasing standalone tracks.

But let me clarify something upfront: Albums are still important. The album format gives you a better chance to shape a story around your music, define your sound, get press coverage, and sell merch. Plus, many streaming platforms still prioritize albums both in terms of how they display releases on your profile and in their own consideration processes for what music might get a little extra editorial or algorithmic push.

iHeartMedia today announced a “new organizational structure” and “technology transformation” as it modernizes the company, and as often happens during such moves, layoffs are taking place. According to Country Aircheck and All Access, there have been multiple layoffs in the country and other sectors of the largest radio network in the U.S., including top roles at WPOC/Baltimore, KAJA and KRPT/San Antonio, KASE and KVET Austin, WSIX/Nashville and others.

If you want to make sure your next release is a splash, advanced planning is essential. But just how far in advance? Here we look at how to pick the ideal timeline for dropping new music with as few mishaps as possible.

While brand is something typically associated with selling products or services, the same principles can be applied to music. Here Jane Evans share eight key tips for effectively promoting your music ‘brand’ across social media.

Director Denny Tedesco scored with his 2008 film “The Wrecking Crew,” his critically praised documentary on the legendary session musicians of the ‘60s who performed with everyone from the Beach Boys and Phil Spector to Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley — so it makes perfect sense that he’s begun work on a film about legendary 1970s session musicians called “Immediate Family.”

A leak may have revealed Spotify’s upcoming foray into smart home speakers. New setup images for something called ‘Spotify Home Thing’ have appeared online. Spotify released its first hardware product in May of 2019, dubbed the Car Thing. Spotify started testing the Car Thing device in the United States, and the blog post announcing the test said not to be ‘too surprised’ if more hardware devices show up in the future.

A new report from BuzzAngle Music says that US-based music streams broke one trillion for the first time in 2019.

The previous high for US-based music streams was set in 2018 with 809.5 billion, representing a 25% increase. Music streaming accounted for 85% of all music consumption in the United States. That number is up 7.6% from the 2018 high of 77%. Interestingly enough, overall album consumption (including ‘equivalents’) rose in 2019 by 13.5%. Post Malone helped fuel that growth by dethroning Drake in 2019 as Artist and Album of the year. His album, Hollywood’s Bleeding, was the biggest selling album of 2019, with more than two million counted sales.

Gibson has teamed up with Slash to produce the Slash Collection — four electric and two acoustic guitars.

The Slash Collection will be unveiled at the ‘Gibson Experience’ during Winter NAMM this week. Gibson says Slash worked closely with the company to create the guitars. It features four Les Paul Standard electric guitars and two J-45 Standard acoustic guitars.

A new report from analyst Kevin Rooke is indicating that Apple’s revenue from AirPods exceeds that of Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat, and Shopify combined. In his report, Rooke presented the following graph to show just how much money AirPods are earning in comparison to earnings from the giants in technology:

he global recorded music industry enters the new decade with a more incestuous web of ownership than ever before, as this infographic from Cherie Hu illustrates. It all began when Spotify offered the major labels an ownership share in lieu of early royalty payments. Then it accelerated as Spotify and China’s Tencent Music swapped pre-IPO shares.

But this twisted trend hit new heights when Tencent Music bought a $3 billion 10% stake in the world’s largest major music group, UMG.

While many thought the streaming age would bring about the end of physical media as we know it, the opposite seems to be true, with not only vinyl, but other seemingly antiquated formats like cassettes also making a comeback. With the explosion of streaming, physical media appeared to be out for the count. However, the vinyl revival of the past several years shows the format’s resiliency, and much to everyone’s surprise, the majors are now reporting physical music revenue growth compared to 2018. Heck, even cassettes are making a comeback.

For any event organizer, maximizing ticket sales is top priority, but at a certain point, it can feel as though you’ve exhausted your toolbox of marketing tricks. Here we look at thirty creative ideas for promoting your next show or event that you may not have considered.

Successful marketing is a challenge in any industry, and the music business is no exception. Here we break down the essentials for crafting an effecting marketing campaign across platform.

Paid streaming music subscriptions surpassed 61 million in the US in 2019, according to year-end stats from the RIAA.

Streaming now accounts for 80% of the US recorded music market. With this level of saturation, most music streaming growth in 2020 and beyond will need to come from emerging markets.

In an effort to assess how different labels fared during the industry transition to streaming, the good people at Chartmetric breakdown different trends of music from the past three years across seventeen different markets.

It’s the week of the CES consumer-tech show in Las Vegas, which means a feast of headlines about smart toothbrushes, giant televisions and cuddy robots. The organiser of the show, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), has also put out some predictions for the growth of the US consumer-tech market in 2020. That includes the forecast that spending on on-demand music streaming services will grow by 15% to $9bn in the US this year. That would be another pointer towards a deceleration of growth, however: the RIAA’s figures for the first half of 2019 showed 31% growth for paid subscriptions, although we don’t have full-year figures yet.

SoundExchange has, for a number of years, allowed artists to allocate a certain percentage of their royalties to “creative participants”. While this was once a straightforward process, with a new year comes new tax laws and, starting January 1 of 2020, these participants will now be considered taxable entities.

Hashtags can be an effective way to boost your presence on social media and organically pull in user attention, but using the wrong hashtags can attract more bots than people, and ultimately do more detriment than good.

Living, as we are, in the fast-paced era of social media marketing, a conventional press release may seem antiquated to some music marketers. The reality is far different however, and a well-crafted press release can be just what your band needs.

There are nearly 40,000 tracks uploaded daily to Spotify. That’s an astounding number and, in a way, that’s great. The sheer volume of music available through just one app means that it’s never been easier for musicians to get their music out into the world. The problem, though, is that it’s also incredibly easy for your music, no matter how good it is, to get buried. “The barrier to entry has become so low that now the barriers really exist in that secondary level, the promotion, the marketing, the how do I get attention to this music?”

If you’re a composer, your lifeblood is the back-end performance royalties you receive when your music is aired on a television show. At one time you could expect a nice up front fee for your services as well, but those days are now mostly in the past. Now thanks to new policies put forth by both Discovery Network and Netflix, those performance royalties are now in jeopardy as well.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Facebook is seeking to attain rights to music videos for its stagnating video-on-demand service that it hopes will challenge YouTube. Reportedly, the social media giant is negotiating music licensing deals for its Watch service with major labels Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group. While Facebook does not currently have the right to stream music videos, it has already attained some music licensing rights. It has a deal in place that lets the platform’s users include music in the background of videos that they specifically post on the platform.

We’re excited to announce that we will have two jam sessions this year! One will take place on Monday evening after the last session at the Hilton Ballroom and one will take place on Tuesday evening at The Tap! Artists will have the opportunity to sign up for both nights. Due to there being limited time slots, names will be randomly drawn on February 3rd.

There was little doubt that the Radio Music License Committee would respond to this month’s filing by the Justice Department, which said broadcasters were using a “simplistic” misreading of the law in their antitrust case against Global Music Rights. But few probably expected the RMLC would use the sort of double-barreled rebuttal that it just delivered in federal court in Los Angeles.

While a sudden, unannounced album drop may work for a choice few high profile artists, such a strategy (or lack thereof) is usually ill-advised. Here we look at how to careful plan your release strategy in the coming year to ensure maximum impact.

More than 267 million Facebook user names and phone numbers have been exposed in a database sitting on the web without any password protection. If that sounds familiar, that’s because the same thing happened back in September, when more than 400 million records were exposed.

Mega-ISP Cox Communications has now been slapped with a monstrous, $1 billion fine for massive copyright infringement of both publishing and recorded music copyrights.Among the long list of plaintiffs are Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Bros. Records, with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) corralling the litigants. That group first filed against Cox last year (you can find the full, initial complaint here). But despite continued defense efforts by Cox, the jury found the ISP guilty of both vicarious and contributory infringement on more than 10,000 works.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Facebook is seeking to attain rights to music videos for its stagnating video-on-demand service that it hopes will challenge YouTube.While Facebook does not currently have the right to stream music videos, it has already attained some music licensing rights. It has a deal in place that lets the platform’s users include music in the background of videos that they specifically post on the platform.

Live Nation announced that it had reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department in response to alleged violations of their consent decree. The new agreement will extend the validity of the decree through 2025.

Billboard parent company Valence Media is acquiring the Nielsen Music insights and product suite that fuel its charts data, it was announced Wednesday (Dec. 18). The purchase reunites Billboard with the leading music consumption analytics platform after a decade-long separation.

Juggling life’s responsibilities in conjunction with finding time to work creatively on your music can seem impossible at times, and attempting to do too much in too little time can quickly contribute to burnout. Here we look at how working smarter and more efficiently, instead of just harder, can help make managing your career more sustainable.

TuneCore’s Studio Directory helps artists find nearby studios that have been handpicked and approved. They have partnered with over 45 recording studios across the U.S. and will be adding more. Artists can search by city/state, genre specialization, price-range, and service offerings.

Just promoting your music is fairly straightforward, but doing so efficiently and seeing actual results requires a little more nuance. In this quiz we assess just how much you know.

While press has historically been a key part of helping an artist break out, into the industry, the world of music industry journalism has become so crowded that many artists are pursuing different digital avenues in their marketing strategy.

It is being reported that the U.S. Justice Department will soon take legal action against Live Nation because they believe that the company has been trying to coerce concert venues into using its Ticketmaster subsidiary.

After just 7 weeks, Agape Songs is moving forward with it's new delivery service for Radio, Media, Churches, and more.

Launched on October 21, over 110 titles are already available for airplay and promotional download. to visit the website and for more information click here.

Just promoting your music is fairly straightforward, but doing so efficiently and seeing actual results requires a little more nuance. In this quiz we assess just how much you know.

After just 7 weeks, Agape Songs is moving forward with it's new delivery service for Radio, Media, Churches, and more.

Launched on October 21, over 110 titles are already available for airplay and promotional download. to visit the website and for more information click here.

As streaming rates begin to level off, questions are being raised as to what’s coming next for the music industry, with some industry predictors are suggesting that augmented reality could be the format of the future. Everyone on the supply side of music, from artists to record labels, would love to see a new music release format of some type that would make listeners pay a premium again, but that ship may have already sailed.

Don’t Be The Music Producer With $5 Artwork. We’re sorry to possibly burst your brand’s bubble, but, people do judge books by their covers, and they certainly do the same with your music project. It’s a common occurrence for creative types to go through a phase where they think, “branding doesn’t really matter, it’s all about the quality of my work.” This is not only false, but carrying this mentality is more self-destructive than you think.

Spotify is the world’s top streaming service — by subscription revenue and paying audience. That’s according to new data from MIDiA Research, which says Spotify has 108 million subscribers, which is good for a market share of 35.6%. Spotify also has subscription revenue of $1.67 billion, making it the dominant player in the subscription-based space.

The U.S. Department of Justice is backing Irving Azoff and his Global Music Rights (GMR) organization in its long legal battle with the Radio Music License Committee (RMLC) over the royalties radio stations pay songwriters. GMR only represents a small cadre of 82 songwriters. But these songwriters have written more than one-hundred top-charting, smash-hit songs. Since 2016, GMR and the RMLC have been battling in the courts, with each accusing the other of attempting to fix royalty rates.

In October, Spotify announced the addition of a new “pay per click” ad placement that allows artists and labels to announce new releases to both free and paid subscribers as part of a new “two-sided marketplace” strategy.

The placement marks the first time that Spotify has allowed paid promotion on its Premium service.