Marketplace

Collecting society GEMA has commissioned a report from consultancy firm Goldmedia on music streaming in Germany, and it draws some punchy conclusions. One of the pointed graphs in the report compares the unchanged price of Spotify’s subscription tiers to the increases for Netflix’s Premium (from €11.99 a month in 2015 to €17.99 in 2022) and Standard (from €9.99 to €12.99 in the same period) tiers. It’s a clear nudge for streaming services to explore price hikes in Germany.

Source: GEMA-commissioned study explores Germany’s music-streaming economy – Music Ally

On August 28, OpenSea processed $9.34 million in NFT (non-fungible token) transactions, well below its May 1 peak of $2.7 billion, according to data from decentralized applications tracker DappRadar. The number of OpenSea users also plummeted to just 22,140 on Sunday (September 5) from nearly 60,000 in January, DappRadar data showed.

Source: NFT marketplace OpenSea’s trading volume nosedives 99%. Is the bubble bursting?

On Sept. 13, the David Bowie Estate will launch “Bowie on the Blockchain,” a sale of NFTs created by multiple artists, the estate announced today. The sale will take place on the online NFT marketplace OpenSea, with the estate’s proceeds going to CARE, the humanitarian nonprofit for which Bowie’s widow Iman serves as global advocate. The NFT sale was developed in partnership with We Love the Arts and film producer Joaquin Acrich.

Source: David Bowie Comes to Blockchain With Tribute NFTs Benefiting CARE

As houses across the industry start recalling staff to their offices, publishing professionals are pushing back against low pay, heavy workloads, and an increasingly stifled corporate environment. While complaints from junior staffers have begun to creep into some industry reporting, publishing veterans are also unhappy. Some say that decades of corporate consolidation and two-plus years of working from home have exposed widening cracks.

Source: Is the Publishing Industry Broken?

In a quiet bow over the summer, a new player entered the crowded field of digital music distribution with a globally-focused model. The concept is slightly different than the incumbent class: instead of focusing exclusively on higher-tier markets like North America and Western Europe, Sound Legends wants to ’empower deserving, talented artists in all parts of the world,’ which includes tailoring price points to meet global affordability levels.

Source: Sound Legends Is Shaking Up the US-Centric Distributor Model

The rise of subscription streaming services was supposed to mark the end of the bundle — the pay TV bundle at least. But now that every major entertainment company has a couple of years in the streaming game under their belts, it has increasingly become a battle of the bundles, with each service seeking out its own unique value proposition or partner to make the most compelling pitch to consumers with a limited streaming budget.

Source: Streaming’s Battle of the Bundles Era Begins

According to data compiled for The Wall Street Journal by the subscriber-measurement firm Antenna, about 19% of streaming subscribers now qualify as “serial churners”—meaning they canceled three or more subscriptions in the two-year period ended in June. That compares with 4% fitting that definition three years earlier.

Source: One Stream Won’t Rule Them All

At least one in two music listeners in the Asia Pacific region discover new music through social media platforms like TikTok. Music listeners in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, for example, are nearly twice as likely than US listeners to use short video clip sites and apps like TikTok to discover new music, according to Luminate’s study.

Source: Half of APAC listeners use social media for music discovery, a win for TikTok and its music-streaming foray

Netflix is looking at a price point as low as $7 per month for its forthcoming ad-supported streaming plan, set to bow in early 2023, according to a new report — less than half its standard two-stream HD package without advertising, which costs $15.49/month in the U.S.  An ad-supported version of Disney+ is set to debut in December at $7.99/month, also with four minutes of ads per hour.

Source: Netflix With Ads Could Be Priced as Low as $7 per Month

The power of content-to-commerce is the ability to use the data to monetize both the content itself (through advertising or subscriptions) and use the content as a distribution channel to sell other products and services. Recently, the most effective content for commerce companies has been podcast networks, email newsletters, film production, or paid membership models that create community.

Source: Music’s Best Strategy for Content-to-Commerce – Trapital