Music

European Lawmakers Urge Tightening of Safe Harbor Exemptions

Fifty-eight members of European Parliament have signed on to a letter urging the European Commission to protect rights holders by clarifying the status of YouTube and other services that operate under safe harbor laws.

“Despite the fact that more creative content is being consumed today than ever before, on services such as user-uploaded content platforms and content aggregation services, the creative sectors have not seen a comparable increase in revenues from this increase in consumption,” the EMP’s letter reads. “One of the main reasons is being referred to as a transfer of value that has emerged due to the lack of clarity regarding the status of these online services under copyright and e-commerce law.”

Source: European Lawmakers Urge Tightening of Safe Harbor Exemptions | Billboard

To Brexit, or Not to Brexit: For the British Music Industry, There’s Little Question

For the music industry, the outcome of the national vote — which polls suggest remains tightly split between those for and against a British exit, dubbed Brexit — carries huge consequences and has the potential to impact on everything from touring to record sales to copyright legislation.

“A victory for Brexit would be economically, politically, socially and culturally disastrous — for all of us,” reads a joint letter from Beggars Group founder Martin Mills and Universal Music U.K. chairman and Chief Executive David Joseph, urging staff and colleagues to vote for staying in the E.U..

Source: To Brexit, or Not to Brexit: For the British Music Industry, There’s Little Question | Billboard

Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney Petition Digital Copyright Reform 

For the last three months, the music industry has been fighting — or at least negotiating in public — with YouTube. Now, artists are adding their voices.

In an ad that will run Tuesday through Thursday in the Washington DC magazines Politico, The Hill, and Roll Call, 180 performers and songwriters are calling for reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which regulates copyright online. A range of big names from every genre signed the ad — from Taylor Swift to Sir Paul McCartney, Vince Gill to Vince Staples, Carole King to the Kings of Leon — as did 19 organizations and companies, including the major labels.

Source: Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney Petition Digital Copyright Reform | Billboard

Merlin hails 73% rise in streaming revenues for indie labels

PrintThe survey offers a positive picture of the indie market, with 65% of surveyed labels saying their businesses grew in the last year, and 79% saying they are optimistic about their future prospects.

Digital is key to this, as you’d expect: 62% of Merlin’s members say digital is now more than 50% of their revenues – for a third, it’s over 75% – with 39% of labels saying that more than half of their digital income came from outside their home market.

Source: Merlin hails 73% rise in streaming revenues for indie labels

Twitter invests $70m in SoundCloud two years after walking away from $1bn deal 

There’s no inklings on what the new investment will be used for, but Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey confirmed the news, saying: “Earlier this year we made an investment in SoundCloud through Twitter Ventures to help support some of our efforts with creators.”

The two companies have worked together on streaming Audio Cards, which allows users discover and listen to audio directly within their Twitter timelines.

Source: Twitter invests $70m in SoundCloud two years after walking away from $1bn deal – Music Business Worldwide

In Open Music Initiative, a Possible Rights-Tech Blueprint

headshot-final-200x300With this week’s announcement of the Open Music Initiative (OMI), the music industry is once again embarking on an effort to solve a problem that has long-vexed the business, but particularly since the rise of streaming services: the lack of a shared, secure and trusted way of knowing who owns what and what they’re owed for the use of their music.

Spearheaded by the Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE), along with the MIT Media Lab, brings together a wide range of music industry stakeholders, including the major record companies, music publishers, streaming services, rights organizations, artists representatives and technology developers, among others, to develop a technical framework for data exchange that will enable interoperability of systems and services throughout the music rights ecosystem.

“It’s not a secret that the infrastructure of the music industry, especially the one around creative rights, has not evolved to accommodate for the ways that music is being created and consumed today,” BerkleeICE founding managing director Panos Panay said in a statement. “We want to use the brainpower, neutrality and convening ability of our collective academic institutions, along with broad industry collaboration, to create a shared digital architecture for the modern music business. We believe an open sourced platform around creative rights can yield an innovation dividend for creators and rights holders alike.”

Another key objective of OMI is to avoid the mistakes and pitfalls that have sank previous industry efforts to establish a standardized rights-management infrastructure, such as the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) and the Global Repertoire Database (GRD).

“There are a couple of words that a verboten around here,” Context Labs CEO and Berklee Trustee Dan Harple told RightsTech.com. “One of them is ‘database.’ We are not building a database. A ledger is not a database. There may be databases that interoperate with OMI, but we’re not building a database.”

TuneCore Artists Earned $42 Million Last Quarter, Up 16% 

tunecore_logoTuneCore 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:

  • TuneCore artists’ earnings have grown by 730% from YouTube Art Tracks
  • Gross revenue has increased by 126% from YouTube Sound Recordings.
  • The Publishing Administration arm of TuneCore has seen a 188% increase in sync revenue.
  • Placements in popular TV shows include Empire, Grey’s Anatomy, The Goldbergs and Shameless.

Source: TuneCore Artists Earned $42 Million Last Quarter, Up 16% – hypebot

Canadian Performance Rights Org SOCAN Collects $307.8 Million 

The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) has topped $300 million (CAD) in total revenues from its membership for the first time since forming in 1990 after a merger between two PROs, CAPAC and PROCAN.

The performance rights organization collected CAD $307.8 million ($240.04 USD) in domestic and international royalties for the fiscal year ending Dec. 31, 2015, from the performance of music from more than 135,000 songwriters, composers and music publisher members. (A preliminary financial report released in January put the figure at $310 million).

Source: Canadian Performance Rights Org SOCAN Collects $307.8 Million | Billboard

Open Music Initiative: Majors Labels and Top Music Streamers Sign On 

Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE) today announced an ambitious Open Music Initiative (OMI) designed to simplify the way that music creators and rights owners are identified and compensated. It will combine BerkleeICE’s expertise in the music industry with the MIT Media Lab’s expertise in decentralized platforms to to develop an open source framework for music rights and their associated uses in all media forms.

In layman’s terms, OMI doesn’t want to create a centralized database of music; but rather a standardized way of tagging and identifying music and rightsholders so that various databases can communicate with each other and verify information.  Better tracking means more money for artists, labels and publishers.

Source: Berklee Launches Ambitious Open Music Initiative, Majors Labels and Top Music Streamers Sign On – hypebot

Music Industry and Technology Leaders Join Leading Academic Institutions to Launch Open Music Initiative

Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE) announced today a groundbreaking initiative called The Open Music Initiative (OMI) to dramatically simplify the way that music creators and rights owners are identified and compensated – a thorny issue that has challenged the music industry and stifled creator incomes and industry revenues since the dawn of the digital era. The effort will combine BerkleeICE’s expertise in the music industry with the MIT Media Lab’s expertise in decentralized platforms to help advance the development of open source frameworks and innovation related to music rights and their associated uses in all media forms.

In addition to BerkleeICE and researchers from the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative, the OMI working group also includes researchers and faculty from University College London and other leading academic institutions. Operational and strategic guidance will be provided by IDEO, the global design and innovation company, and Context Labs, a media tech company that is leading and coordinating the technical platform for the project.

Source: Press — Open Music Initiative

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