Finance

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

Netflix plans to offer cheaper, ad-supported tiers to consumers within a year or two as it pushes to tap a wider set of potential customers amid stiffer competition from rival firms. The firm, which reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter, will introduce the ad-supported plans to give customers more choice, company co-chief executive Reed Hastings said on an earnings call.

Source: Netflix to introduce ad-supported plans in a major shift

Netflix shares plummeted more than 20% in after-hours trading after the company announced that it actually lost ground in terms of subscribers, falling to 221.64 million around the world. Usually, the question when Netflix reports numbers is about how many new customers it managed to acquire. This time, its global subscriber base declined by 200,000 from where the company ended 2021.

Source: Netflix Stock Takes Another Dive As Streaming Giant Posts Q1 Subscriber Reversal

On the eve of a hearing and vote for the Free Artists From Industry Restrictions (FAIR) Act before the California Assembly’s Committee on Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism and Internet Media, Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) has pulled the bill with plans to move it forward as two bifurcated bills.

Source: FAIR Act Bill to Repeal California’s ‘Seven-Year Statute’ Amendment Pulled the Day Before Hearing