June, 2019

The licensing deals Spotify has with the record labels and publishers, on which its business depends, leave it with precious little control over its own gross margin, making it difficult to translate revenue growth into commensurate earnings growth. With a series of recent moves by the company, however, it is becoming clearer just how extensive and systematic Spotify’s efforts are — and how far it is prepared to go — to try to claw back whatever measure of control it can wherever it can.

Source: Spotify Works the Margins

The Santa Monica-based firm is a fully-automated music licensing marketplace, which boasts what it calls “the largest pre-cleared catalog of music in the world”. Its database now contains over 450,000 artists, songwriters and catalogs from over 190 countries, while the firm’s licensees include the likes of Netflix, NBC Universal, Microsoft and Disney.

Source: How Songtradr is simplifying sync – and aiming to become the definitive B2B music licensing platform

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have long touted the possibility of attaching coins to a copyright or intellectual property, which could for example enable the fractional ownership of artwork, such as an oil painting. For Nolan Bauerle, this idea is “a little bit convoluted” and “2017”.  Instead, Bauerle aims to sell a token related to the sales of his forthcoming science fiction book ‘The Satoshi Wedding Murders’.

Source: Royalty reversal: Crypto coin rewards early artist discovery

Over the past year, Songtrust has added another 55,000 artists and songwriters to its rights management service. The company, a subsidiary of Downtown Music, a publishing and rights management firm that manages rights for artists such as John Lennon, One Direction and Santigold, now has 205,000 artists on its roster and has 2 million songs it tracks.

Source: Songtrust adds another 55,000 artists to its rights management service – TechCrunch

The New York Times has followed up on the Universal fire losses, having In a follow-up to the Times’ original investigative piece of two weeks ago, journalist Jody Rosen has dug deeper and reported a list of more than 700 additional artists whose tapes were destroyed, culled from UMG’s own “Project Phoenix” effort to assess what was lost in the months and years following the devastating blaze.

Source: Universal Fire Plot Thickens as New York Times Uncovers List of Affected Artists

The company, which pays considerable sums for song rights in the hope that the tracks’ revenue will prove profitable in the long run, said its licensing and publishing earnings surpassed $9,000,000 between 2018 and early 2019. Hipgnosis execs also claim that their portfolio’s collective value has increased by more than $10,000,000 over the same period.

Source: Hipgnosis Says Its Monster Bets Are Already Paying Off: “There’s More Evidence to Back Our Thesis”

Creators have realized that “YouTube can do whatever the hell they want to,” Wyatt Jenkins, Patreon’s VP of product, told The Verge. Because of that, they’ve started looking for ways to establish other relationships with their viewers.

Source: YouTube looks to demonetization as punishment for major creators, but it doesn’t work

The Livepeer infrastructure functions as a “token coordinating network,” incentivizing those with computing power to join and match the needs of those looking to stream. Currently the company has more than 30 providers of compute power on the platform, and more than 100 events have streamed video through Liverpeer.

Source: Decentralized Video Platform Built on Ethereum Raises $8 Million – CoinDesk

The company raised £200m ($265m) for its initial IPO, and has since spent the lot on publishing and songwriter catalog acquisitions. Indeed, it raised another £142m ($185m) for further acquisitions two months ago. Today, we have received an important update on exactly how this money is being spent – and how Hipgnosis is performing as a result – within the firm’s first ever annual results.

Source: Hipgnosis already owns over 5,000 songs – with another $1bn-plus of deals in its sights

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles today (Friday), alleges that Universal Music Group systematically and deceptively misled its artists about massive damages incurred in the fire.  Of course, it also blamed UMG for inadequately protecting and cataloging the masters in the first place.

Source: Universal Music Sued for $100 Million by Tom Petty Estate, Tupac Estate, Soundgarden, Others Over 2008 Fire