U.S. consumers’ consumption of most media has declined in the last three months, according to Attest surveys. Asked about their daily viewing habits, the number indicating that they generally watch no paid video streaming services increased rose by 2.8 percentage points — from 12.3% in October to 15.1% in January. Attest notes that inflation may be starting to affect paid streaming services.
Source: Video Insider: Most Media Consumption Down in Q4, Including Paid Streaming
Before January 2020, podcasts had been growing at a steady clip each year since their conception in 2007. The period from 2015 to 2019 saw the largest expansion of podcasts, but the pandemic boom that arrived in 2020 dwarfed the previous four years combined. The rapid decline in new show creation appears to be focused on one-off shows, too. According to data from Listen Notes new episodes haven’t declined to the same degree.
Source: Where Did All the Podcasts Go? — New Show Creation Down 80%
Prime minister Anthony Albanese and arts minister Tony Burke were on hand Monday (Jan. 30) for the launch of Revive, a five-year action plan that lays the groundwork for what government and industry hopes will facilitate a robust music space through sorely-needed infrastructure, investment and ideas.
Catalog music eating into frontline music’s market share has become one of the music industry’s bigger talking points these past few years. But is ‘old’ music really getting that much more popular? Or does the definition of catalog need an adjustment in today’s streaming-led music industry – where audiences appear to be playing (and replaying) hit songs for far longer than they might once have done?
The fallout from Penguin Random House’s failure to acquire Simon & Schuster continued today with the news that PRH US CEO Madeline McIntosh will leave the company in the near future. McIntosh’s resignation follows, by about three weeks, the departure of Gina Centrello, the longtime publisher and president of the Random House Publishing Group.
Only four new songs by groups made it into the official Top 100 singles of last year, which was dominated by solo acts and a smattering of classics by the likes of Fleetwood Mac and Arctic Monkeys. So why have bands struggled to find success compared with solo megastars like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift? The obvious culprit is social media, according to Chris Price, head of music for Radio 1 and 1Xtra, and the executive in charge of the stations’ playlists.
Since 2020, the portion of Spotify’s Global Weekly Top Songs represented by catalog has increased by 155%, according to the company. Insights from the study make it abundantly clear that promoting older tracks is working. Almost a third of 2022’s charting songs are catalog, and fans are now searching for and streaming older tracks. Nearly three-quarters of active streams (from listener playlists, album pages, artist profiles, and liked songs) are catalog.
Source: Meet the Company Blowing Up Catalog Tracks on Spotify
The Justice Department and eight states filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging the tech giant has a “monopolistic grip” on digital advertising. Google “has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising,” according to the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Source: DOJ and Eight States Sue Google, Alleging It Holds a ‘Monopolistic Grip’ on Digital Ad Market
Korean storytelling companies want to kindle the popularity of webtoons and web novels in the West on the back of their success in East Asia. Earlier this month, Kakao Entertainment, which operates storytelling platforms and a music streaming service, announced it received $966 million in funding from sovereign wealth funds. The new money will go toward extending its global storytelling content and intellectual properties, around which original series and movies are based, specifically in North America, Kakao pointed out.
Source: Can Korean digital storytelling platforms captivate North American and European audiences?
Spotify has put out a statement with a bit more detail on its metrics in the study by France’s Centre Nationale de la Musique (CNM). “Spotify takes streaming manipulation extremely seriously, and we’ve long had detection measures and resources in place to prevent, detect and mitigate such activity, which have yielded tangible results. This is why it was important for us to take part in the CNM’s study on the matter,” said its spokesperson.
Source: Spotify speaks out about ‘important’ CNM fake-streams study – Music Ally