Streaming services led by Netflix are helping to push total global content spend past $220 billion in 2021, up 14% year over year, according to Ampere Analysis. | Streaming services led by Netflix are helping to push total global content spend past $220 billion in 2021, up 14% year over year, according to Ampere Analysis.
Source: Streaming services help push content spending past $220B in 2021
If you’re confounded by the numerous stories floating around the web regarding the matter of musicians offering NFTs to fans, you’re not the only one. It turns out Brian Eno isn’t too thrilled about the new craze either. Speaking to The Crypto Syllabus, Eno has explained his belief that NFTs are merely a way for artists to become “little capitalist assholes”.
Source: Brian Eno weighs in on NFT craze: “Now artists can become capitalist a**holes as well”
In the past six months alone, New York-headquartered Primary Wave has acquired rights to music by the likes of (deep breath): Prince, Bing Crosby, Luther Vandross, Chris Isaak, Teddy Pendergrass, Gerry Goffin, and, most recently, James Brown. All icons in their own right; all adding weight to Primary Wave’s claim to be the “Home of Legends”.
Source: Primary Wave has over $1 billion to spend on music rights… and it’s not wasting any time
UK-based song-investment fund Hipgnosis dropped $260 million on song catalogs from April 1st through September 30th of this year, but with net debt having surpassed a staggering $550 million, the company doesn’t “intend to offer further shares for cash consideration” before March 30th, 2022. Hipgnosis revealed these and other noteworthy points in its newly released interim report.
Source: Hipgnosis Pauses Plans For Issuing Further Shares as Net Debt Cracks $550M
A never-before-heard Whitney Houston recording has broken NFT(Non-Fungible Token) sales after it was auctioned for $999,999 on the Tezos blockchain. According to the New York Daily News, the song was reportedly “uncovered” last year, and the late singer allegedly recorded the track at age 17. The title of the song has not been disclosed and the winning bidder has not been identified.
Hipgnosis’s bi-annual reports to investors provide the best snapshots of the new business model in an industry short on publicly available details. Not quite a traditional music publisher, not a passive investor, Hipgnosis Songs Fund is a shell company incorporated in Guernsey and listed on the London Stock Exchange. To raise equity on the LSE, Hipgnosis became the first company to create a new asset class in music, the royalty fund.
According to Tarantino, selling NFTs representing screenplay pages for particular scenes falls under his right to “screenplay publication,” one of the rights he reserved in his 1993 assignment to Miramax. Miramax argues that since the sale is a one-time transaction, it does not constitute publication (i.e., the distribution of copies to the public) and thus is a right belonging to Miramax, not Tarantino.
Source: Miramax/Tarantino Suit Highlights NFT Difficulties in Mysterious Suitcase of Copyrights Rights
It’s like the rerun from hell, as we’re once again seeing overwhelmed emergency rooms, widespread event and travel cancellations, and people desperately trying to get tested, vaccinated or boosted in time for the holidays. Dismaying as those realities are, it also should give Hollywood executives further pause in their halting segue to a post-pandemic release strategy.
Source: Spider-Man’s Massive Theater Debut, Omicron Explosion Complicate 2022 Streaming Calculations
Elsevier and other academic publishers see ‘pirate’ site Sci-Hub as a major threat to science and their own multi-billion-dollar industry. Through a lawsuit in India, the companies hope to have the site blocked but Sci-Hub is actively fighting this request in court. According to the site’s founder, the publishers are the real threat to the progress of science.
Source: Sci-Hub Founder: Academic Publishers Are the Real Threat to Science, Not Sci-Hub * TorrentFreak
Despite the popularity of young acts like Drake and Dua Lipa, older material dominates online. According to MRC Data, a tracking service that powers the Billboard charts, about 66 percent of all music consumption — of which streaming is by far the largest part — is for material that is older than 18 months, and that number has been growing rapidly.
Source: A $550 Million Springsteen Deal? It’s Glory Days for Catalog Sales.