Twitch announced in an email to streamers that the site has added new tools today to help creators see where they stand with takedown requests and copyright strikes. Twitch also added tools to let streamers mass delete their recorded streams. It’s a smart move because it gives streamers better tools to play on the right side of copyright law.
Source: Twitch makes it easier for streamers to wipe out their old videos to avoid copyright strikes
We all know the painful transition of the height of the CD era in 1999 to the lows of the digital, Napster-dominated early 2000s. With the shift from physical to digital the industry, and especially the labels, had to reinvent itself as a licensing business. A key question here revolves around how well-suited the CMOs are to collect and manage these digital rights.
Source: A necessary legal fight: collective rights management and allocation
Los Angeles-based digital rights technology platform Pex has hired Jim Griffin as Vice President of Digital Rights. Griffin, an industry veteran and Pho List founder has previously served as CTO of Geffen Records, CEO of Cherry Lane Digital, and President of Network Licensing at Warner Music Group.
After a year in which most people were stuck indoors, it should come as little surprise that streaming platforms skyrocketed in popularity over the past 12 months. For the first time ever, subscriptions to streaming services surpassed one billion, reaching 1.1 billion globally.
Source: Streaming Service Subscriptions Surpass 1 Billion as Global Box Office Craters
As more and more artists have learned in the nearly 15 years since Spotify first launched, the way that it pays out streaming royalties is very, very complex, based on a dizzying number of factors that add up differently for each artist. On Thursday morning, the company made a welcome step toward demystifying that process by unveiling “Loud and Clear,” a relatively straightforward explanation of the way its payment system and related factors work.
Source: Spotify Unveils ‘Loud and Clear,’ a Detailed Guide to Its Royalty Payment System
Streaming revenues reached $14.2 billion, up 19.6% from 2019, adding $2.3 billion, up from the $2.2 billion added in 2019. So, 2020 was another year of accelerating streaming growth and, given that Spotify’s revenue growth increased by less in 2020 than 2019, this indicates that it is for the first time meaningfully under-performing in the market, due to the rise of local players in emerging markets and strong growth for YouTube.
Source: Recorded music revenues hit $23.1 billion in 2020, with artists direct the winners – again
A number of artists yesterday afternoon gathered outside Spotify offices across the U.S. and Europe to protest the company’s royalty rates. The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) – which, in late October of 2020, rolled out a petition calling on Spotify to pay one cent per stream – organized the multi-city protest, dubbed “Justice at Spotify Day of Action.”
Source: Musicians Protest Per-Stream Royalty Rate Outside Spotify Offices
Amongst the new markets are key territories such as South Africa, Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Senegal, with UMG’s catalog now also widely available across French-speaking territories for first time. In 2018, UMG became the first major global music company to license music to the service, which now has 50 million monthly active users.
Source: Universal and music streaming service Boomplay expand license to cover 47 countries across Africa
The agreement comes more than two years after UC officials walked away from its subscription deal with Elsevier, demanding the publisher negotiate a fair transformative open access deal. No stranger to tough negotiations, Elsevier held its ground, cutting off UC’s access in July 2019. And in turn, some UC researchers publicly announced their refusal to submit articles to Elsevier journals or serve on Elsevier editorial boards.
Source: Elsevier Strikes Historic Open Access Deal With University of California
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