According to a new mid-year report from trusted market monitor BuzzAngle, US single track download sales fell by a whopping 24.2% in the first half of 2016 compared to the same period in 2015.
Total digital song sales hit 410.5m in the six months to end of June this year, compared to 541.2m in H1 2015 – a loss of more than 130m downloads.
Source: Download sales have fallen 24% in the past year in the US market – Music Business Worldwide
TuneCore artists earned $42 million in the first quarter of 2016, up 16% from the same quarter last year. Revenue from music streaming services like Spotify, TIDAL, Deezer and Rhaposdy has grown significantly, according to the digital music distributor.
More new TuneCore stats:
Source: TuneCore Artists Earned $42 Million Last Quarter, Up 16% – hypebot
NeuLion believes that the combined synergies derived from adding its experience in delivering live TV channels and live sports to the Saffron assets acquisition can transform the over-the-top (OTT) challenges faced by owners and rights holders of sports, entertainment, films and TV channels.
It adds that the combined entity can now reduce project complexities for all content rights holders of existing and new OTT services by decreasing the number of vendors involved in their projects and ‘significantly’ decrease time to market for new OTT and TV everywhere services in comparison to other technology options.
Source: NeuLion acquires Saffron Digital | OTT | News | Rapid TV News
Yesterday’s news that Warner Music Group has bought X5 Music – with reports in Sweden suggesting the price may have been $25m – is the latest sign of major labels doubling down in their efforts to do more with playlists and streaming curation.
WMG, remember, already bought British startup Playlists.net in October 2014, and has adopted its Topsify brand as the imprint for the label group’s own playlists on Spotify.
Source: WMG buys X5 Music as major labels double down on playlists
As the major labels’ tanks rumble towards YouTube’s lawn, TuneCore CEO Scott Ackerman claims that independently distributed artists are increasingly seeing the video channel as both a goldmine and the greatest marketing weapon in their arsenal.
“Our artists see both YouTube and the streaming channels as a way to get their music out,” he tells Music Ally. “For most of our artists, that is their number one thing – they want their music heard. It’s not about money. They want their music out worldwide so everyone can hear it.”
Source: TuneCore CEO: YouTube is not the enemy – it’s a goldmine
DistroKid, one of the world’s leading digital distribution companies that gets artists and labels’ music into over 90 digital outlets (like Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, Tidal, Deezer, etc) will now directly pay revenue from your releases to anyone you want.
What does this mean? Your producer gets 3% of revenue from your most recent single? Before, you would have to download your sales reports every month, calculate the totals for the designated release and write your producer a check for 3% of that. Every month. You did a YouTube collaboration with 5 other artists? Now, instead of one person having to figure out the splits and paying each collaborator directly, DistroKid will do all the accounting, reporting and payments directly to each collaborator.
Source: DistroKid Will Now Pay Everyone Who Worked On Your Song
Th
e indie music community has embraced Bandcamp and its suite of direct to fan monetization tools. And unlike most music tech startups, Bandcamp, which launched in 2008, has been profitable “in the now-quaint revenues-exceed-expenses sense” since 2012.
Nearly 6 million fans have bought music from hundreds of thousands of artists through Bandcamp. Have of those fans are under 30, according to the company. That’s signification at a time when consumption by younger music lovers is supposedly dominated by streaming.
Source: Bandcamp Grew 35% Last Year, Monthly Transactions Top $4.3M – hypebot
Universal Music Group today adds a 20-plus-year industry veteran to its digital team, announcing that Jonathan Dworkin will join the company as its new senior vice president of digital strategy and business development. Dworkin, most recently the Chief Marketing Officer at MixRadio, will start in his new position May 16.
The hire is the latest move in the restructuring of UMG’s digital department since the surprise departure of its president of digital Rob Wells in February 2015. Dworkin, who held a similar role at Warner Music Group prior to his tenure at MixRadio, will report to UMG’s executive vice president of digital strategy Michael Nash, another former WMG exec who joined in late 2015.
One
of the business challenges that has held back the direct-to-consumer streaming of ticketed events — whether live concerts, Broadway shows, or first-run movies — has been the lack of an effective ticketing mechanism for over-the-top video. As there was no way to know how many people might be gathered around a particular screen rights owners and event producers had little choice but to charge an arbitrary price for the stream, usually high enough to account for the possibility of multiple viewers but at the cost of turning off people viewing alone or perhaps with only one other person.
Sean Parker’s Screening Room, for instance, plans to charge a flat $50 per movie for in-home access to first-run films, which research shows could limit the market for the service.
In-home ticketing may be poised to have its moment, however, due to some recent technological advances.
Over the past few months, YouTube’s Content ID platform has generated a lot of controversy. The digital rights management service, which lets rights holders identify, claim, and monetize unlicensed use of their intellectual property, has drawn criticism from creators who believe it puts too much power in the hands of claimants.
Now, YouTube is responding. The video site has announced a change that will allow uploaders whose videos receive Content ID claims to accrue ad revenue on those videos as they contest the claims against them.
Source: YouTube To Change Content ID Policy To Let Creators Profit From Disputed Videos – Tubefilter