Finance

Twitch is considering upping its own cut to 50%, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. That would bring Partner streamers down to the 50/50 split Twitch currently has with Affiliate streamers. But that change isn’t set in stone. Twitch is also considering another option: a tier-based system, where some Partners would continue making 70% from channel subs while some would make the new, lower 50%.

Source: Twitch reportedly wants a bigger cut of streamers’ revenue. Also, it thinks they should try running more ads. – Tubefilter

A bevy of legacy acts, including Shakira, Neil Young, and Barry Manilow, all covered the same hot new investor song — “Music Is A Dependable Asset Class” — and traded catalogs for cash from funds, investors, and other financial outfits. Now, an intriguing question — and its potentially lucrative answer — has me and many others up late: Can smaller artists cash out, too? Can investors apply the same equation, and capture equally dependable returns, from the little guys?

Source: Could the Music Catalog Rights Boom Generate Windfalls for Non-Superstars?

Spotify added just 2 million premium subscribers in the first quarter of 2022 and wrapped up March with a total of 182 million paid users and 252 million ad-supported listeners. While that paid subscriber tally was a million under guidance, the company was quick to note that its wind-down in Russia, following its invasion of Ukraine, resulted in an “involuntary churn” of roughly 1.5 million subscribers there.

Source: Spotify Subscribers Crawl to 182M as Quarterly Revenue Grows 24%

Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is expected to post its slowest revenue growth on record as the company navigates growing competition for users and privacy headwinds in its advertising business. Meta’s stock price was battered in February when it posted quarterly results that showed a sharper-than-expected decline in profit, a gloomy revenue outlook and a drop in its daily active users.

Source: Facebook Parent Meta Expected to Post Slowest Revenue Growth Since IPO

Google parent Alphabet Inc on Tuesday reported its first quarterly revenue miss of the pandemic after the war in Ukraine hurt YouTube ad sales, leaving investors rattled as the global economy sputters. Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said it was too early to predict when sales slowed by the war may pick up and warned that the strengthening U.S. dollar would hurt sales even more in the current quarter.

Source: Alphabet misses on revenue as YouTube ad business slowed by Ukraine war

The investment round was led by Vulcan Capital, the multi-billion-dollar investment arm of Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, with participation from Caldecott Music Group and K3 Ventures, a venture capital firm that was an early backer of super app Grab and tech giant Bytedance. BandLab says the funds will allow it to expand its team and continue “to refine and grow its offerings to music creators and aspiring artists worldwide”.

Source: Social music creation platform BandLab closes Series B funding round at $65m

PRS for Music, which posted an almost 20 percent downturn in collections for 2020, revealed its 2021 financials today. As highlighted, the London-headquartered entity said that revenue jumped by 22.4 percent in 2021, to £777.1 million ($990.3 million at the present exchange rate). Predictably, online plays (and especially streaming) drove PRS for Music’s 2021 revenue growth, with the category having hiked by 45.6 percent YoY to $341.2 million (£267.8 million), or about 34.5 percent of total collections.

Source: PRS For Music Posts 22.4% 2021 Growth As Live’s Struggles Continue

In the wake of big content spender Netflix’s shocking Q1 subscriber loss, David Zaslav made a point to say Warner Bros. Discovery “will not overspend to drive subscriber growth” during Discovery’s first-quarter earnings call Tuesday. “As you’ve heard me say, we are not trying to win the direct-to-consumer spending war,” the WBD CEO said, instead promising that the newly combined WarnerMedia-Discovery company would “invest in scale smartly.”

Source: David Zaslav Vows Warner Bros. Discovery ‘Will Not Overspend to Drive Subscriber Growth’

Snapchat achieved an 18 percent year-over-year jump in daily active users during Q1 2022 – the first full quarter in which it’s had licensing deals in place with each of the Big Three labels – as an average of 332 million individuals utilized the app. Snap Inc. revealed this and a number of other interesting performance specifics in a breakdown of its results for January, February, and March of 2022.

Source: Snapchat Records 18% Daily Active User Growth As Revenue Jumps 38%

Soundful claims to “democratize music production” by giving its users access to what it says is music theory-trained algorithms and one “of the biggest original sound libraries ever assembled” to make music. Users can create a new track from scratch using a variety of templates and genres and all tracks are fully licensed for use in videos, advertisements and social media campaigns.

Source: AI-powered music creation platform Soundful raises $3.8m funding round