Startups raised the curtain for online concerts during the pandemic. Now Live Nation and other corporate giants want in. What started as mostly free virtual bedroom performances early on in the touring shutdown have evolved into costly, ticketed productions that keep growing bigger and bolder. Dua Lipa’s futuristic Studio 2054 in November had a budget of $1.5 million-plus and drew an estimated 5 million global viewers to its premiere.
Source: As Livestreaming Goes Mainstream, It Could Be Survival of the Biggest
As previously announced, the Tencent consortium has acquired the shares in UMG for €3 billion based on a €30 billion enterprise valuation of the music company. The acquisition takes the Tencent consortium’s holding in UMG from 10% to 20%, and reduces UMG parent Vivendi’s ownership stake in the music firm to 80%.
The Authors Guild, along with five other writers’ groups and the nonprofit Open Markets Institute, has sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking the government to block Penguin Random House’s pending acquisition of Simon & Schuster. “The time has also come to recognize that simply blocking takeovers is no longer sufficient,” the letter states. “The Department of Justice must begin today to proactively restructure the entire U.S market for books in ways that also deal with the danger posed by Amazon.”
PaymentHub allows studios, unions, guilds, payroll companies, music publishers, record labels, distributors and marketplaces to provide direct deposit payments, tax document management and online reporting to rights-holders, performers, managers, service providers and independent contractors worldwide.
The HBO Max premiere of ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ racked up huge viewing numbers, according to Nielsen. For the week of Dec. 21-27, HBO Max users spent 2.25 billion minutes watching Wonder Woman 1984 (it was released Christmas Day). That’s equivalent to about 14.9 million complete plays of the 151-minute movie.
According to DistroKid Founder and CEO Philip Kaplan, this new service, Upstream, is meeting a need for both artists and labels. Writing in a blog post today (January 28), Kaplan suggests that many independent artists using DistroKid today want help “getting noticed by labels”.