The
march toward 218—the number needed to effectively
block any bill in the House—continues to move
forward. In recent days a dozen more members of
Congress on both sides of the political aisle have
gone on record opposing any attempt to adopt a
performance right for AM/FM airplay.
iHeartMedia’s
IPO May Demonstrate Future Of Music Radio
In
an effort to pay down its massive debts, iHeartMedia
is set to file for an IPO, a move by the bankrupt
internet radio company which could be indicative of
what the future may hold for other music companies
involved in radio, and specifically internet radio,
may do moving forward.
7
Scientific Studies Prove Exercise Makes You A
Better Musician
What
does it take to become a successful musician? Some say
it’s hard work. Others suggest it is in the DNA.
However, inborn talent can only take you so far. The
success in the music industry is not different from
the successes in any other field. You need to have
some passion, loads of dedication, andright attitude.
But there’s something that comes before everything
else.
Spotify’s
New Ad Metrics Reveal What Happens After A Click
In 2017 Spotify launched its Ad Studio feature that allowed artists and their labels to share their music via 30-second or less audio ads played to the users on the platform’s free tier. While the short ads proved to be an effective tool, they provided limited data of what actually happened after a listener clicked on the ad. Now the company has rolled out some new streaming conversion metrics that will show more about how listeners react to an ad campaign.
Battle
Over Radio Royalties Goes West: What's at Stake as RMLC
& GMR Head to Court
An
important legal battle over songwriter royalties
is going back to Cali, in a win for Irving Azoff
and his boutique performing rights organization
(PRO) in its ongoing fight with radio.
Amazon
in Talks to Launch Ad-Supported Music Offering:
Exclusive
Amazon
has entered into discussions to launch a
free, ad-supported music service, sources familiar
with the plan tell Billboard --
intensifying its competitive threat to global
streaming leader Spotify. The world’s biggest
e-retailer would market the free music service
through its voice-activated Echo speakers, sources
say, and would offer a limited catalog. It could
become available as early as next week. To obtain
licenses for the free music, Amazon has offered to
initially pay some record labels per stream,
regardless of how much advertising Amazon sells.
Tips
To Optimize An Official YouTube Artist Channel
Since
YouTube's unrolling of its Official Artist
Channel, how artists distribute and listeners
consumer their music has shifted, and with their
content now largely consolidated, artists now have
a powerful tool at their disposal, provided they
market it correctly. Here we look at how to get
the most out of your AOC.
How
You Should Be Marketing Your Next Album, Single Release
For
many artists, marketing their work is by far the most
loathsome aspect of being a DIY artist. Whether you hate
it or not though, selling your music is essential, so
you might as well get good at it. Here we look at what
exactly you should be doing to market your next release.
dotBC
Adds Digimarc's Barcode For Audio Watermarking
dotBC
and Digimarc have partnered to add Digimarc's Barcode
for Audio watermarking technology to the dotBC offering.
This will connect the metadata and rights ownership
information supplied by artists, songwriters and rights
holders to the audio file itself.
Songwriters
Urge Users To #CancelSpotify
A
growing group of songwriters are taking to social media
to urge users to #cancelspotify in protest of the
streamer's decision to challenge a US Copyright Royalty
Board decision to raise streaming payments to
songwriters 44% over the next 5 years.
Despite
Streaming’s Growth, Music Industry Remains Half The
Size It Was In 1999
While
paid streaming subscriptions have, in many circles, been
billed as the savior of the music industry, the reality
is that the business is still operating at a severely
reduced capacity since the devastation visited on it in
the early days of digital.
Streaming
Platforms are Keeping More Money From Artists than Ever
(and Paying Them More, Too)
In
2018, artists and record labels were paid 1.1% less of
the total money handed over by US consumers to music
“retailers” – a sector now dominated by streaming
services – than in 2016. That percentage stat might
not sound hugely noteworthy, but think on this: 1.1% of
the total music retail revenues in the US last year
($9.8 billion) equates to $108 million.
Apple
Music Now Leads Spotify in U.S. Subscribers.
Here
is a surprising headline within the music streaming
pantheon: Spotify appears to have lost one of its
crowning achievements, as Apple Music has topped the
pureplay in the number of paid U.S. subscriptions. The
Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, calls it
“a shift that escalates the music rivals’ contest
for listeners worldwide.”
How
To Grow Your Mailing List At Your Next Show
Whatever
platform you use, staying directly in touch with your
fanbase in the form of e-blasts is critical to selling
your music, but this is only effective if you have list
to send them to. Here we look at some key tips for
connecting with your audience and building your mailing
list at your next show.
Apple
Is the Real Winner in Spotify’s Battle Against
Songwriters’ Rate Hike
Streaming
giant Spotify, after years of attempting to woo the
songwriting community, is now at the front of an effort
to pay it less. It’s a move that has seen the company,
the market leader with 87 million worldwide subscribers,
hand second-place Apple, with an estimated 43.5 million
subs, an opportunity to make up ground.
Music
streaming has a far worse carbon footprint than the
heyday of records and CDs – new findings
It
is easy to get nostalgic for the era when most music
lovers bought LPs. They would save their pennies for a
Saturday trip to the local record store, before heading
home clutching their glorious new vinyl in a plastic bag
to drop the needle on the turntable and listen on
repeat. But is it actually true that earlier generations
placed a greater value on recorded music than music fans
in the present day? We decided to investigate the
numbers to see if they told a different story. As it
turns out, they do – and it’s far worse than we
expected.
IFPI
Global Music Report 2019: Music Sales Rise For Fourth
Straight Year to $19 Billion
Global
music sales grew for the fourth consecutive year in 2018
with streaming now accounting for almost half of all label
revenue, according to the International Federation of the
Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) "Global Music Report
2019." Total music sales for the year
amounted to $19.1 billion, a 9.7 percent rise on 2017's
figures and the highest rate of growth since IFPI started
tracking the market in 1997. It is also the highest sales
total since 2007 when revenues reached $18.4 billion.
Streaming
accounted for nearly half of music revenues worldwide in
2018
The
scales are about to tip in favor of streaming music
becoming the number one driver of global recorded music
revenues — a shift that appears to be on track for
sometime this year. According to a new industry report,
global recorded music revenues jumped 9.7 percent in 2018
to reach $19.1 billion — up from $17.4 billion in 2017.
Streaming music revenues, in particular, now account for
nearly half (47 percent) of global revenue, thanks to a
sizable 32.9 percent jump in paid streaming last year.
This brought streaming revenues to $8.9 million in 2018,
and puts them on track for a further jump in 2019.
“Why
we bought a CD factory in 2019”
“There
will always be demand for physical media,” states Tony
van Veen as he proudly announces the acquisition of the
assets of the physical media businesses from AVL Digital
Group by the Disc Makers executive team.
The
new DIY Media Group is much more than just a CD factory.
The company offers today’s content creators—musicians,
labels, authors, publishers, and filmmakers—a full suite
of high-quality physical media solutions including CDs,
DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, vinyl records, USB cards, books,
eBooks, and printed garments. “Physical media remains
one of the best ways to legitimize an artist and drive
artist income in the streaming era,” states van Veen.
How
To Set Up A Successful Music Marketing Campaign
In
this fourth of AWAL's five part Decoded series on how to
effectively allocate money in your music career, we dig
into the process behind setting up your next music
marketing campaign for success, and hear from multiple
industry experts about some of the lessons they learned
during their time in the business.
What
Musicians Need To Know About Spotify’s Personalized
Editorial Playlists
Spotify
has recently been testing the waters with its new
personalized editorial playlists, a kind of hybrid between
curatorial and strictly algorithmic playlists. Here Chris
Robley outlines what artists need to know about this new
listening format entering the streaming arena.
Artist
Management Commissions - What's Fair?
While
managers in the music business have always has a lot to do
with an artists' success, never have they made or broken
an artist more than in the current music economy, and
never have they had to work harder - so what is a
sustainable business model for managers in the modern
music industry that still fairly compensates them?
RIAA
Continues Its Legal War To Turn ISPs Into The Copyright
Police: Sues Charter Communications
The
RIAA's war to force internet access providers to become
copyright cops has continued to move forward. The RIAA
planned this strategy out years ago, in the wake of losing
the SOPA fight. Back in 2012 we wrote about an internal
plan to try to convince courts that Section 512(i) of the
DMCA actually mean that ISPs had to completely kick users
off the internet based solely on accusations of
infringement. The end goal here is, as always with the
RIAA, to get everyone else to try to police the internet.
Could
Strict Copyright Laws Stifle Creativity And Discourage Originality?
Back
in March of 2015, Pharrell Williams claimed that the
Blurred Lines copyright lawsuit will stifle creativity.
Speaking for the first time since a jury determined that
he and Robin Thicke copied Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to give
it up’. He explained: “The verdict handicaps any
creator out there who is making something hat might be
inspired by something else. If we lose our freedom to be
inspired, we’re going to look up one day and the
entertainment industry as we know it will be frozen in
litigation. This is about protecting the intellectual
rights of people who have ideas.”
Creating
a band website: A complete checklist
Is
your band or solo career getting to the point that you
want to book more shows? You might need an EPK that’s
easy for press to grab information from. Or maybe you just
want a space on the web to call your own?
Let’s
be honest, your specialty is writing music and performing
it, not building a website. You sit down, ready to begin,
then feel completely lost about where to start. Does the
idea of creating a band website make your eyes glaze over?
We’ve made a handy checklist to help you through it. So
let’s get started!
Dozens
of Music Companies File Copyright Suit Against Charter
Communications
The
internet service provider allegedly failed to "take
reasonable measures to curb customers from using its
Internet services to infringe on others’
copyrights." More than 50 leading record labels and
publishers have filed a lawsuit against Charter
Communications, Inc. for contributing and profiting off
its internet subscribers' copyright infringement.
Coalition
of Publishers and Songwriters Has Experience Needed to Run
the New Mechanical Licensing Collective
This
week, an industry-leading coalition of songwriters and
publishers, led by its representatives -- the National
Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), the Nashville
Songwriters Association International (NSAI) and the
Songwriters of North America (SONA) -- is submitting our
plan for creating the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC)
to the Copyright Office to become the entity envisioned by
the MMA. Our MLC submission sets forth a roadmap to
establishing and creating a new licensing entity that can
administer and pay mechanical royalties, and fulfill the
extensive requirements of the law, by the statutory launch
date of January 1, 2021. It's an aggressive timeline that
demands comprehensive industry participation.
Songwriting
Workflow: What One Month Of Daily Releases Taught Me
What's
it like to release a new composition every day for a
month? Composer Martin Fowler recently took on this
challenge (and then some), working to release new music
everyday for an entire month. Here he documents his
experience, and what he learned from it.
Spending
Music Money Smart
It’s
tempting to point fingers when things go wrong. Where
there’s cash or credit involved, there’s room to
scapegoat — not having enough, misusing what’s
available, losing opportunities to get more, you know the
drill. It’s easy to write off slower-than-expected
trajectories as the natural result of insufficient
funding. In most brains, understandably, more is better.
The
Value Consistant Branding In Music
As
an artist, cultivating and communicating and image to your
fans is important for success, but just as important to
that success is consistently maintaining said image, so
that consumers know who you are and what it is that you
create.
How
To Prepare For A Post-Album Music Industry
The
album is not dead, but it is fading away; and stats shared
by MIDiA analyst Keith Jopling confirm the trend. Adults
that claim to listen to whole albums monthly, stands at
just 16% according to Q4 ‘18 data from MIDiA, a drop
from 22% in the previous quarter.
Skip
Rates: Why The First 30 Seconds Matter More Than Ever
With
the album on the wane and attention spans shorter than
ever, the first 30 seconds of of a song matter more than.
Not only do they need to capture the listener's attention,
but in streaming, they determine if the songwriter is
going to get paid at all.
The
Importance Of Artwork In Your Music
With
the rise fo streaming the prominence of album artwork has,
quite literally, been greatly reduced. That said, it's a
mistake for artists to discount the incredible importance
of album art when it comes to releasing and promoting your
music.
Big
question: Could Google buy Universal Music Group?
It
would have been the most talked-about story to hit the
music business in decades.
Three
years ago, the world found out that Google
had made a play to buy 50% of Sony/ATV Music Publishing
from the Jackson Estate. The stake, which eventually
went to Sony Corporation
in a $750 million deal, would have seen Google – now
Alphabet, the world’s fourth largest company – acquire
ownership of over two million copyrights, including a
deluge of hits going back decades.
Spotify
vs. songwriters: Sony/ATV’s Martin Bandier and
Warner/Chappell’s Carianne Marshall urge composers to
fight royalty rate challenge
Outgoing
Sony/ATV boss Martin Bandier, who reportedly earned a
personal fortune in the region of $100m from Sony’s
recent acquisition of EMI Music Publishing, believes
Spotify isn’t sharing enough of its revenue with
songwriters.
In
a new letter to Sony/ATV’s songwriters, Bandier has
slammed an appeal from Spotify, Amazon, Google and
Pandora against new statutory streaming rates announced by
the US Copyright Royalty Board last year.
These
appeals are intended to reverse the CRB’s decision,
which would see streaming royalties paid to songwriters
and publishers in the States rise by at least 44% by
2022.
Music
Publishers Issue 'Fact Check' Of Spotify Blog Post
'Attempting To Deceive' Songwriters
Spotify
has released a blog post laying out their decision to join
Amazon, Pandora and Google in appealing a US Copyright
Board decision that would raise streaming payments to
songwriters by 44%, over time. Now, David Israelite of the
National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) has issued
point-by-point "fact check" of Spotify's claims.
Streaming
Revenue Impressive, But Can It Ever Make Up For Lost
Physical Sales?
With
streaming revenue showing a massive increase in comparison
to previous years, the major three record labels are
rejoicing at their annual haul. A big part of this income
still draws from physical sales however, and as these
old-school revenue streams continue to thin to a trickle,
will streaming be able to fully compensate?
Streaming,
Artists Without Labels Are Driving Music Industry Growth
[Mark Mulligan]
Three
key factors shaped the music industry over the last year,
according to Mark Mulligan of MIDiA: continued growth,
streaming and artists direct (artists without
labels).These findings are highlights of the MIDiA
Research report: Recorded Music Market 2018: Stream
Engine.
Local
Radio Freedom Act' Is Actually Anti-Creator,
Anti-Property-Rights [Richard James Burgess]
The
National Association of Broadcasters and its horde of well
paid lobbyists are now working to coerce congress into
cosponsoring a bill dubbed the Local Radio Freedom Act, an
ironic title given the bill's far more sinister
anti-creator, anti-property rights content. Here A2IM CEO
Richard James Burgess explains why both parties should
lambast the bill.
Apple
Music the only major streaming service not appealing
royalty increase for songwriters
Spotify,
Google, Pandora, and Amazon are all coming together to
appeal a recent U.S. Copyright Royalty Board ruling that
would see songwriter royalty payouts increase by 44
percent. Apple, meanwhile, is seemingly the only major
streaming service not planning to appeal.
Study:
Facebook Lost 15 Million Users In Two Years.
