Data

Prior to going exclusive, from December 2019 to November 2020, Rogan’s guests could expect to gain around 4,000 Twitter followers in the week after their episode premiered. After he went exclusive, that number declined by half to around 2,000, suggesting a drop in listeners.

Source: Joe Rogan, confined to Spotify, is losing influence

Spotify is removing exclusive podcast episodes produced by studios it owns from other platforms – further dividing the podcast landscape. Spotify doesn’t get enough data if you listen to its shows via Pocket Casts or another app. The company admits as much in the announcement post to stave off angry emails about the change.

Source: Spotify Removing Exclusive Podcast Episodes From Other Platforms

Streaming has massively complicated the whole royalties process with huge data sets now having to be processed and billions of micro-payments collated. Of course, that’s intimidating and it’s right to spend time making sure the calculations are accurate but the technology now exists to take the pain out of the process.

Source: Why Are (Some) Record Labels and Music Publishers Still Only Reporting Every 6 Months?

The agency is convening “a small advisory group,” which is being assigned to review the ISNI’s current policy and emerging best practices in gender identification. The advisory group will be looking for “shortcomings” in the current approach. This group of advisers is to be drawn from “ISNI sectors” including book publishing, rights organizations, libraries, and the music industry, as well as from “affected groups.”

Source: Studying Gender Representation and the Contemporary ISNI Identifier

Antenna, a company specializing in measurement and analytics for subscription streaming services, released new growth data for the second quarter of 2021 and found that the 10 specialty SVOD services it tracks have a two-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 74% in the U.S.

Source: AMC+ and other niche SVODs growing faster than Netflix, Hulu

The results of a late July poll on moviegoing confidence levels were alarming. The National Research Group survey, closely watched by studios, showed that the overall comfort level had tumbled from a pandemic-era high of 81 percent to 72 percent in the span of just three weeks amid the delta variant.

Source: Delta Variant Disrupts Moviegoing Comfort Levels as Studios Worry

Like it or loathe it, this sound tracking dynamic is likely to play a key role in what the future of music consumption looks like. But it is not all sonic dystopias; personalization, algorithms, user data and programming also have the potential to reinvigorate music passion.

Source: Spotify and music listening 10 years from now

One of the country’s oldest cultural institutions is now writing the book on how to adapt to a brave new world. Only a few years after being labeled a digital laggard, the Library of Congress is bringing its hundreds of millions of documents’ worth of history to citizens across the country in ever more innovative ways. The success story is one that other government agencies, from the federal level to the local, should consider.

Source: Opinion | The Library of Congress is a surprising lesson in digital government. That’s good news for democracy.

This audio-subscription percentage has more than doubled since 2015, when just 23 percent of Americans said that they subscribed to an audio service. Worth mentioning, however, is that the figures —  reported by Edison Research — aren’t solely indicative of subscriptions, given that multiple individuals could (and often do) share entertainment accounts.

Source: Nearly Half of Americans Pay For Audio Entertainment, Study Finds

According to inflation-adjusted data from the Recording Industry Association of American, total recorded music revenues in 2020 were $12.2 billion, which is approximately 46.2% lower than the industry’s 1999 peak-year total of $22.7 billion. That strongly challenges assumptions that the music industry has already completed its return to glory.

Source: U.S. Recorded Music Revenues Are Still 46% Below 1999 Peaks