Asked why ICE was making the hire and what its challenges are currently, CEO Peter de Mönnink told The Stack: “Solving the music industry’s data puzzle is vital for songwriters to secure a living from their artform. The explosion in music creation and omnipresence of digital music have rocketed the scale of the industry’s data challenge.”
Source: ICE ICE BABY: Music copyright firm hires new CTO amid digital overhaul
Spotify paid $7 billion in royalties to rights holders — primarily labels and publishers, but also distributors, performing rights organizations and others — in 2021, the company announced on Thursday in its annual “Loud and Clear” report. That total is more than any other service and sets the record for the highest annual payment from any single retailer in history, according to the announcement.
Source: Spotify Paid Out $7 Billion to the Music Industry — Labels, Publishers and Others — in 2021
The future in which linear TV is driven almost exclusively by live sports, news and events has arrived, according to MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson after crunching numbers from Nielsen. “Time spent on cable networks built on movies, syndicated TV and kids content has collapsed… as consumers and media companies adopted a streaming first mind-set,” said Nathanson in a report Thursday.
Source: Bleak Future for Linear TV Has Arrived, Analyst Finds
Chartmetric is aiming to upend music marketing by giving artists direct access to a trove of their own data with Artist Plan. Currently, Chartmetric is offering its Artist Plan tier for the artist-friendly price of $10 per month, which includes access to artist-specific data, everything in the free tier, and even competitive artist information.
Source: Chartmetric Introduces ‘Artist Plan’ for Direct Data Access
IFPI, which unveiled its new report at a press conference in London today, cites paid subscription streaming as a key driver behind the 18.5% growth, with paid subscription streaming revenues having increased by 21.9% YoY to $12.3 billion in 2021. There were 523 million users of paid subscription accounts at the end of 2021.
Source: Global recorded music revenues hit $25.9bn in 2021, up 18.5% YoY
While nosebleed catalog acquisitions, billion-dollar IPOs, and high-flying NFTs hog the music industry’s headlines, performance rights organizations are quietly retreading their operations to better count the songs being played in public. One company zealously pushing this ‘revolution’ is Audoo, a London-based company investing heavily in the hardware and software required to better track what’s playing in the background.
Source: How Audoo Is Quietly Revolutionizing Performance Rights Monitoring
To address the issue of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of royalties landing in the industry’s so-called ‘black box’, rather than in the bank accounts of rightsholders, ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus launched the ‘Credits Due’ campaign in 2021 to get creators paid for their work.
Looking at the volume of e-books released each year since 2008, many titles are published directly on self-publishing platforms such as Smashwords or Kindle Direct Publishing. This has created a plethora of new information for traditional publishers—not only about which books are released but also about how individual titles, authors, and entire genres are perceived by readers.
Source: Digitization Can Support Publishers with Decision-Making
Last Thursday (January 6), MBW published a jaw-dropping statistic about the US music market in 2021: 82.1% of music consumption in the second half of the year, we calculated, was of ‘catalog’ music, as opposed to ‘current’ music. Now, though, we have a problem: Today (January 11) MRC Data has issued a correction to its annual 2021 report, significantly altering its numbers when it comes to both ‘catalog’ and ‘current’ music consumption in 2021.
Source: About that catalog music stat we published the other day…
A new survey by Morgan Stanley reveals that Spotify is the fastest-growing music service in the United States. It is also now the most popular platform for podcast listening. From 2019 to 2021, the streaming giant’s share of the average American’s listening hours increased from 7 per cent to 10 per cent, well behind AM/FM radio and YouTube, but strong among younger consumers who will make up the bulk of listeners over the next decade.