The catalog comprises 532 original recordings, including hits such as Love Train, Use Ta Be My Girl, Cry Together, Back Stabbers, For The Love of Money, Forever Mine, Put Your Hands Together, Stairway To Heaven and I Love Music. The catalog acquired includes 100% of The O’Jays master royalty income.
Source: Round Hill Royalty Fund buys The O’Jays recordings catalog
UK firm Lickd is one of the startups trying to make it easier for YouTubers and other online creators to license commercial music to use in their videos. Now it has raised £5.1m of funding from some very interesting investors: Warner Music Group, Fortnite publisher (and Apple nemesis) Epic Games, and the investment firm of Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, which led the round.
Source: WMG and Epic Games invest in music licensing startup Lickd
Speaking during an interview at the Goldman Sachs‘ Communacopia event this afternoon, Cooper confirmed that Warner Music Group’s recorded music operation has a present run-rate of $235 million per year in revenue from “alternative offerings that create new use cases for music”.
Amortized spending on movies and TV shows by Netflix will rise 26% to $13.6 billion in 2021 and will reach $18.92 billion by 2025, according to predictions published Thursday by S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Kagan media research division. Of that $13.6 billion in amortized spending, $5.21 billion is earmarked for original productions, Kagan said.
Source: Netflix Content Spending Predicted to Rise 26% in 2021
It’s worth repeating: the song is the currency of our business. Yet the songwriter — who delivers the most important component to the success of a record company, publisher, promoter, manager, agent, music venue, radio station, broadcaster et al – is the lowest paid person in the economic equation. An equation that has made the modern music industry a juggernaut.
Frontline investment is actually getting more aggressive than it ever did before, and yet if you look at some industry numbers, catalog is heading towards 70% market share on streams. It raises the question: why the hell is so much money being applied to that remaining 30% [i.e. frontline A&R]?
Source: Hartwig Masuch thinks the music industry is putting too much of its money in the wrong places.
French conglomerate Vivendi set an €18.50 ($21.69 at the present exchange rate) reference price for Universal Music Group stock, and shares hiked as much as 43 percent past the figure out of the gate, to a high of €26.45 ($31) apiece. And while trading activity promptly cooled down UMG stock remained well above the aforementioned reference price, finishing the day at €25.10 ($29.42) per share, just beneath the €25.25 ($29.61) opening price.
Source: Universal Music Group Stock Surges On First Day of Public Trading
Universal Music Group, the business behind singers such as Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and The Weeknd, is valued at around 33.5 billion euros ($39.30 billion) ahead of the record label’s stock market debut in Amsterdam on Tuesday. France’s Vivendi is spinning off Universal and on Monday set a reference price for the listing at 18.5 euros per share, according to a statement issued by Euronext.
Source: Universal Music valued around $39 billion ahead of stock market debut
RCRDSHP’s seed round was supported by NFT collectors Metakovan and Twobadour (via PortKey Technologies), and Dapper Labs. Metakovan and Twobadour bought the highest priced NFT in history back in March, a $69 million digital art piece created by Beeple and auctioned at Christies.