Blog

PANDORA MEDIA has made a move to reduce pressure from shareholders, asking major record labels for money or better deal terms to help the webcaster reverse losses. BLOOMBERG reports, “Top executives at PANDORA have reached out with a couple of proposals for their counterparts at the record labels, which sell PANDORA the rights to vast […]

Continue Reading

The amount of money pouring into record companies from sync keeps on growing. According to IFPI figures, record companies accrued $355m from licensing their tracks to video games, movies and TV in 2015 – up 6.6% year-on-year. The US is the world’s largest sync market, accounting for 57% of 2015’s revenue with $203m, while other […]

Continue Reading

We all know that the world of recorded music is always changing. High resolution audio has already penetrated the audiophile marketplace. Now it’s the mass market’s turn. In order to bring everyone who loves music up-to-date on the status of high resolution audio, we turned to the ultimate sources — Owen Kwon, President of Astell&Kern, […]

Continue Reading

Maria Schneider is a five-time Grammy winning performer, composer, director, and creator of one of the first fan-funded classical albums.  These are her thoughts on how YouTube, Google, and Alphabet are treating musicians. Open Letter to YouTube, “Pushers” of Piracy by Maria Schneider Hank Green’s recent open letter in support of YouTube (that was in response […]

Continue Reading

Entire iTunes collections are going AWOL, downloads are getting mangled, IDs are fighting with one another, and Apple Music is acting weird again.  What needs to change? Has iTunes become an unmanageable monstrosity?  In the latest battle against its own ‘bloatware,’ Apple sent two engineers to a user’s home after 122 GB of his personal music collection vanished […]

Continue Reading

According to John MacFarlane, CEO of Sonos, the music industry will hit a billion paying music streaming users and it will only ”take around 5 years” (so by 2021). Interesting… But how? ”Apple and China will take the lead” and everyone else will follow, says MacFarlane. (1) Apple effect The early entrants in the music streaming market […]

Continue Reading

Instagram is launching analytics for businesses and brands that use the platform, according to a post on the Later.com blog. The new feature will be called ‘Insights’, and will provide information on the demographic of a users’ followers, including location, age, and gender.  Besides follower analytics there is also a section that will focus on post analytics. Providing follower […]

Continue Reading

Read enough articles, and you’ll think songwriting is in the throes of decline and decay.  In Nashville, the number of songwriters has been decimated since 2000, according to one tally, and even hit songs are producing paltry payouts (according to another).  Composition licenses are also at the root of a major legal actions involving Spotify, Rhapsody, Xbox […]

Continue Reading

Tidal subscribers are surging at unprecedented rate… In fact, since Kanye’s album dropped exclusively on Tidal in February, the platform has doubled its subscriber number.  Now, it’s added at least another one million thanks to a Beyonce exclusive.  All of which means Tidal has nearly tripled in size in about three months. That’s a 200% […]

Continue Reading

How many streams does it take to get into the Spotify top 200? Charting on Spotify can change things for an artist, and potentially alter an entire career.  But most artists (and even labels) have no idea what it takes to climb into the coveted top 200 ranking.  Now, there are some concrete stats: according […]

Continue Reading

Back in November last year, DMN reported the unveiling of the new ‘Hi-Res MUSIC’ logo for digital download services. Now the RIAA have announced that the Hi-Res music logo is going to be available to music streaming services as well.  “The expansion of the Hi-Res MUSIC definition to encompass streaming technologies reflects the continued evolution of the marketplace to […]

Continue Reading

Want better payouts from YouTube? Then stop accepting lower payouts from YouTube. It’s really that simple. The music industry is often accused of promoting ‘brain drain,’ engaging in constant infighting, offering wild overcompensation for underwhelming results, suing instead of solving business problems, and routinely getting out-strategized by smarter big tech interests.  But beyond these enormous, self-imposed handicaps, […]

Continue Reading

This is how you can hack your streaming royalties. Earlier this year, DMN starting asking artists and labels to share their streaming royalty statements, which unearthed a pile of incredible per-stream statistics.  That’s part of an ongoing data-sharing project to battle the incredible lack of transparency in the streaming music space (and, please send your […]

Continue Reading

What’s one way to change YouTube’s f-you attitude? Competition. As the music industry prepares for war against YouTube, another giant is sensing opportunity.  Amazon has now launched a YouTube-like video platform that allows content creators to earn revenue through advertising and royalties on uploaded videos, with far greater control and collaboration.  Which might be exactly the kind […]

Continue Reading

Smartphones are slowly supplanting desktops when it comes to almost every form of music piracy.  But this is a lot more complicated than just shifting screens. Last week, Digital Music News delved into the quickly shifting terrain of music piracy, one that now involves less torrenting and a lot more stream-ripping from YouTube.  It also involves greater amounts of […]

Continue Reading

Spotify is rolling out an entire slate of original videos.  Is that a big part of the future of streaming music? Today, Spotify announced the addition of 12 new original video series on music and popular culture.  The series — which will reportedly last up to 15 minutes each — will be available in the U.S., U.K., Germany […]

Continue Reading

Are you stuck on YouTube and don’t know how to get out? Justin Bieber was the first superstar to come out of YouTube, but it almost feels like he was the last.  Since Bieber’s ascent, hundreds of thousands of artists have flocked to the platform, often recording endless covers and never crossing over.  That sometimes includes artists […]

Continue Reading

Earlier this year, research group MusicWatch shared data with Digital Music News that showed 53 million Americans actively pirating music content.  But even more shocking was how they were doing it: instead of torrenting on the Pirate Bay, more and more piracy is now happening on YouTube via stream-ripping, with direct streaming piracy and storage […]

Continue Reading