Marketplace

Merlin, the global rights agency for the independent label sector, has teamed up with fitness app Supernatural, allowing Meta Quest VR headset users to work out to tracks by thousands of indie artists. Through the alliance, Meta Quest users using the Supernatural app on their smartphones will be able to listen to indie songs by artists signed with Merlin partners as they work out, box or meditate

Source: Merlin partners with fitness app Supernatural to bring indie music to Meta Quest virtual workouts

As the world edges towards a recession, the music streaming market continues to stand strong. Despite indications of slowdown in some markets, the global music subscriber market remains buoyant. Growth, though, is uneven, with a number of leading streaming services outpacing the rest, especially the Chinese ones, which are now setting the global pace. In previous recessions, lipstick sales boomed, reflecting their role as an affordable luxury that consumers turn to when they can no longer afford the more expensive luxuries. Music subscriptions have a good chance of playing a similar role in the coming recession.

Source: Music subscriber market shares 2022

The piece is currently in the archives of the Moravian Museum, in the Czech city of Brno to keep it from being stolen by Nazis. The original owners–the Petscheks family–were once the richest family in pre-WWII Czechoslovakia and fled the country to escape the Holocaust. The 4th movement of the string quartet in B-flat Major, op. 130 has been at the museum for over 80 years.

Source: Beethoven Manuscript Saved from Nazis Returned by Museum

The new FAST channels come from WMX, the division WMG formed a year ago that houses the company’s content, ecommerce, fan experience and commercial services businesses. Each of the three music and entertainment linear channels will feature music videos and concerts from WMG’s global catalog of artists as well as original programming from WMG’s media brands including Uproxx, HipHopDX, Songkick, Cover Nation, The Pit and Lasso Nation.

Source: Warner Music Launches First Free FAST Channels, Exclusively on Roku Channel

There will be multiple business casualties in the paid streaming wars and a few business victors. Digital markets for industries that have high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs have tended toward a few, unusually large winners, and I believe such will be the case in entertainment. In this scenario, no more than three global entertainment companies are likely to attain the streaming-service scale required.

Source: Jason Kilar on the Chaotic Streaming Wars—and How This Hollywood Story May End

CEO Andy Jassy used last week’s Dealbook Summit to declare that Amazon’s entertainment venture is actually about more than just getting folks to buy things online.  “I do think over time we have opportunities to make our Prime Video business a standalone business with very attractive economics,” Jassy said. An Amazon Prime that can pay its own way must be scary for competitors financing their streaming transition from their declining broadcast and cable operations.

Source: Is Powerful Amazon About to Overrun the Entertainment Sector? (Bloom)

Streamers and movie theaters recalibrating to address their challenges are among the trends his team foresees. For example, EY expects streamers will “bundle up to brave the elements,” the firm says. “Streaming companies that lack content scale today and choose not to engage in a bundling strategy risk being marginalized in a market where the consumer holds the power to cancel at any time and is being trained by the industry to seek out a good deal.”

Source: Box Office Prospects and Streaming Bundle Predictions: A Chat With a Hollywood Biz Consultant

That’s according to US market monitor Luminate, which revealed that the 1 trillion mark was crossed in the US on Saturday. That 1 trillion figure grew by 11.9 billion compared to 2021, when the full-year tally for music audio streams in the US was 988.1 billion, according to Luminate data. That 1 trillion figure is also 7x larger than the number of music audio streams achieved in the US in 2015, when 142.9 billion were recorded in the world’s largest recorded music market.

Source: Music audio streams just crossed the 1 trillion mark for the first time ever in a single year in the US

On Nov. 21, Universal Music Group’s Deutsche Grammophon launched Stage+, which for $14.90 a month offers music from the label’s archive and that of sibling Decca Records. In terms of popularity, Stage+ can’t compete with mainstream platforms, but it’s not meant to – and it doesn’t even need to. It could make money with a number of subscribers in the low six figures, partly because it costs more than other services, and it gives Deutsch Grammophon a way to market other products directly to consumers.

Source: For the Record: What If a Label Ran a Streaming Platform?

The music industry is accustomed to leveraging marketing tools, but it’s finding TikTok increasingly tough to control. “TikTok is eating itself,” declares Max Bernstein, who founded the marketing agency Muuser. “It still drives consumption if you get it right, but it’s much harder to maneuver now. Trends are siloed when they used to be community-wide, and influencer media is becoming prohibitively expensive.”

Source: Is the Music Industry’s Love Affair With TikTok ‘Dead’?