Spotify’s monthly active users grew 26% over the last year to 217 million at the end of 2018, the streamer reported on Monday. Now in 79 countries, a February launch in India added 2 million to its global total. Overall, Spotify posted a smaller first-quarter loss of $158 million vs $189 million for the same period last year.
Source: Spotify Passes 217M Active Users, Revenue Per User Slips
Source: For Musicians, Screen Time Is a Growing Source of Income
MuseNet works by using a deep neural network that’s been trained on a dataset of MIDI files gathered from a range of online sources that cover jazz, pop, African, Indian, and Arabic styles of music. The researchers behind the project say that the system is able to pay attention to music over long periods of time, meaning it’s able to understand the broad context of a song’s melodies, rather than just how they flow together in a short section.
Source: OpenAI’s MuseNet generates AI music at the push of a button
Pinterest is a great place to find digital art but a terrible place to sell it. The fact that anything online is infinitely copyable makes it tough for artists to establish a sense of scarcity necessary for their work to be perceived as valuable. Yash Nelapati saw this struggle up close as Pinterest’s first employee. Now he has started MakersPlace, where creators can generate a blockchain fingerprint for each of their artworks that proves who made it and lets it be sold as part of a limited edition.
Source: Pinterest employee #1 launches blockchain art market MakersPlace – TechCrunch
Until 2018, when users posted videos with snippets of songs, copyright holders often had them taken down. Now the social network is friending the industry by licensing content. During the past year, Facebook has expanded its music features for users as it continues to develop a strategy focused on sharing user-generated content (UGC).
Source: Facebook Embraces Music: How the Social Network Is Friending the Industry by Licensing Content
The influential European Songwriter & Composer Alliance (ESCA) has strongly backed the American Mechanical Licensing Collective, or AMLC, in its bid to oversee the US-based Mechanical Licensing Collective. The strong endorsement also included a sharp rebuke of the NMPA-submitted MLC proposal, which is backed by major music publishers and larger indie pubs like Downtown Music Publishing and Reservoir Media Management.
Source: 50,000-Member ESCA Endorses the AMLC; Slams the NMPA’s MLC Bid
Top Spanish football league LaLiga, with assistance from anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, has obtained a first-of-its kind dynamic sports blocking order in Denmark. Nine ‘pirate’ sites with large numbers of Danish visitors will now be blocked by major ISP Telenor in an effort to boost legal consumption.
Source: LaLiga & Rights Alliance Win Dynamic Football Piracy Blocking Order – TorrentFreak
In a filing submitted by the Digital Media Association, or DiMA, serious concerns were raised about the NMPA’s massive budget demands outlined in its MLC proposal. In particular, the group highlighted “stark substantive contrasts between the two submissions, and in particular between the operation and cost models set forth therein.”
Source: Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Google Withhold Endorsement of the NMPA’s MLC Proposal
In commentary submitted to the Copyright Office the Academy praises various aspects of the proposals of both the American Music Licensing Collective and the one via the Industry Consensus Group, sponsored by the National Music Publishers’ Association, the Nashville Songwriters International Association, and the Songwriters of North America. But ultimately the Academy endorses the latter applicant.
Source: Recording Academy Outlines Pros and Cons of Both MLC Applicants, Endorsing One But With Caveats
Artory, the blockchain-based digital art registry, raised $7.3 million through a Series A funding round supported by firms invested in the digital-music platform Spotify and other technology services. The funds were part of what allowed the registry to acquire more than 22 million individual records from 4,000 auction houses back in March.
Source: Blockchain-Based Digital Art Registry Artory Collects $7.3 M. in Series A Funding –