Finance

For Q1, the company reported a gain of 3.98 million in net global streaming subscribers. That was below its previous guidance of 6 million. Meanwhile, Netflix predicted even lower gains for the current quarter: It expects to add just 1 million members in Q2, with roughly zero growth in the U.S./Canada and Latin America regions. As of the end of March, Netflix had 207.4 million paid streaming customers worldwide, up 13.6%.

Source: Netflix Falls Short of Q1 Subscriber Targets as COVID-Driven Growth Slows

On Friday, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), which officially launched Jan. 1, made its first distribution of mechanical royalties to rights holders for the month of January, paying out $24 million out of about $40 million collected from digital services.

Source: MLC Collects $40M for January, Makes First Rights Holders Payments

Last month, New York-based music and entertainment investment firm Influence Media Partners launched a fund to invest in what it described as “award-winning catalogs of some of music’s most influential female music creators”. Today, Influence Media has announced its first acquisition as part of the partnership with MERS.

Source: After launching $100m fund, Influence Media buys catalog from Grammy-nominated songwriter Ali Tamposi

Rebalancing the Song Economy shows that we live in an era where the song fuels everything: whereas albums used to be the go-to consumption format, the dominant currency in streaming is individual songs; data shows that when people use a streaming platform such as Spotify, they search more for songs than they do for artists. That means songwriters are more important than ever – but, if you are a songwriter, the system is dysfunctional.

Source: Today’s pop industry cheats songwriters | Björn Ulvaeus

Amazon spent a cool $11 billion on TV series, movies and music for Prime last year, an increase of 41% from $7.8 billion in 2019. The megabucks that the company is plowing into Prime Video and Amazon Music underscores Amazon’s goal of becoming the global digital entertainment leader.

Source: Amazon Spent $11 Billion on Prime Video and Music Content in 2020, up 41% From Year Prior

Apple Music’s payment rate for artists and labels is fundamentally a penny per stream, according to a letter from the company posted on its artist dashboard and first reported by the Wall Street Journal. That payment rate is higher than Spotify, which has a confusing variable rate scheme that basically tops out at a half-penny per stream.

Source: Apple Music pays a penny per stream

Reservoir has today (April 14) announced that it has signed a a definitive agreement for a business combination with Roth CH Acquisition Co. II. The business combination is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021. The result of the deal is that Reservoir – via the new combined company, Reservoir Media Inc – will go public on the NASDAQ under the ticker “RSVR.”

Source: Reservoir to list on the NASDAQ via SPAC merger with $788m valuation

Sound Royalties, according to founder and CEO, Alex Heiche, is now “the largest private financial service company” in the music industry – with 50 full-time employees and continued global expansion on the horizon. Heiche can’t say how many advances the company has paid out so far, but does say that it works with hundreds of thousands of songs with thousands of individual streams.

Source: ‘Creators are starting to see the true value in retaining ownership of their work.’

Cooking Vinyl says the new department will demonstrate both “an increased focus on the long-term sales” of artists presently signed to the CV label, as well as “an aggressive acquisition policy to bolster the roster”. The new division will be headed up by catalog industry veteran Steve Bunyan.

Source: Cooking Vinyl launches catalog division with ‘aggressive acquisition policy’, headed by Steve Bunyan

Sony has just invested another $200 million in Epic Games as part of a $1 billion funding round, Epic announced today. Over a dozen investors contributed toward the funding round, which valued the Fortnite developer at $28.7 billion. That’s over $10 billion more than Epic Games’ estimated value at the time of Sony’s major investment last July.

Source: Sony invests another $200 million in Epic Games