Finance

The latest funding round was announced just a day after Soundstripe, which helps creators dodge copyright claims with royalty-free music, unveiled its first mobile app for creators to access royalty-free music on the go. The Series B fundraising announced today comes two years after the startup raised $2 million from Craft Ventures, a company led by David Sacks, founding COO of PayPal and co-founder/former CEO of Yammer.

Source: Music startup Soundstripe attracts $9m in fresh funding shortly after launching mobile app

How will streaming services consistently identify, acquire and develop projects that resonate? Unfortunately for creators, Moneyball is definitely the future for streaming services, as CEOs, investors and others start looking at those new stats to see how well money is being spent in the Streaming Wars. Average revenue per user is starting to matter, but so too is a useful questioning of one of the internet’s long-held beliefs, in the Long Tail.

Source: Is It Time for Streaming Video to Play Moneyball?

This week, Opulous has launched a new business venture, one it says that will see it “take on companies like Hipgnosis” by buying full catalogs from artists and songwriters. It’s planning to bankroll these acquisitions via a new music acquisition project accessible to the masses. The project – or ‘Opulous Royalty Vault’ – operates via a new set of tokens called OVAULT.

Source: Blockchain music platform Opulous launches fund to buy copyrights

Blackstone-powered Hipgnosis Song Management (HSM) is reportedly vying to strike a roughly $500 million deal for the catalog of Pink Floyd. Neither Hipgnosis nor Blackstone has commented publicly on the curiously timed reports of their pursuing the Pink Floyd catalog, but a Reuters account cautioned that the entities are “not close to striking a deal” for the song rights.

Source: Pink Floyd Catalog Draws Hipgnosis Bid, Price Tag Still At $500MM

Senior MBW sources tell us that US-headquartered Francisco Partners is currently in advanced talks to acquire a majority stake in Kobalt Music Group, with the possibility of a deal being signed over the next week or two. Francisco Partners is no stranger to the music business. The San Francisco-based, tech-focused investment firm acquired a majority stake in music creation platform Native Instruments earlier this year, for an undisclosed fee.

Source: Kobalt Music Group in talks to sell majority stake to Francisco Partners, say MBW sources

Improving service levels, better aligning the interests of music companies with the artists and songwriters they serve is the single most important transformational opportunity offered by streaming. The first phase of that transformation focused on fairness and transparency, a recognition that the historic relationship of music companies to musicians was unbalanced and often unfair.

Source: How best to spend the fruits of the music streaming boom?

The ICM Crescendo Music Royalty Fund has acquired manager Albert Grossman’s commission stake in works from Janis Joplin and Gordon Lightfoot. Higher-ups at the ICM Crescendo Music Royalty Fund, which arrived on the scene in 2020 and is based out of Calgary, just recently unveiled the purchase. Strategically, ICM CMRF has made clear its objective of “acquiring entertainment rights that generate revenue generated from streaming platforms such as YouTube, Spotify and Pandora.”

Source: Gordon Lightfoot, Janis Joplin ‘Commission Rights’ Sold to ICM

BMI’s cuts came just a few days after Bloomberg reported that the company stopped exploring the possibility of a sale. A sale “is no longer an avenue we are considering,” the company said in a statement earlier this month. “We’ve been clear from the start that as we explored strategic opportunities for BMI, we were going to evaluate all options that would support our affiliates and grow the value of their music.”

Source: BMI Layoffs Hit ‘Just Under 10%’ of Workforce

Tencent Music Entertainment, which operates China’s biggest music streaming platforms, ended the second quarter of 2022 with 82.7 million paying music users. Online music streaming subscribers paid RMB 2.11 billion (USD $315 million) for TME’s music streaming services including QQ Music, Kugou Music and Kuwo Music in the quarter to end of June.

Source: Tencent Music rakes in $315m from music streaming subs in Q2, adds 2.5m paying users

MetaSing, a ‘decentralized music platform,’ has revealed the completion of a $3 million seed round. In terms of the funding’s uses, MetaSing unveiled a far-reaching roadmap earlier this month, communicating therein that it intends to debut an app on the Play Store and the App Store (besides pursuing a “record label collaboration”) in Q4 2022 before launching a music NFT marketplace as well as a series of “in real life” concerts in 2023.

Source: MetaSing Raises $3MM, Plans ‘Fairer Redistribution’ For Artists