Music

Pan-European Licensing Hub ICE Strikes Deal With Google Play

Designed to enable faster, more cost efficient and simplified rights negotiations for digital music services operating in Europe, the licensing and royalty processing service collectively represents over 250,000 songwriters.

The organization bills itself as the world’s first integrated licensing and processing hub and claims to have the most comprehensive copyright database in Europe. It says it will process online music usage through a single matching engine that will eliminate “unnecessary processing” and significantly reduce disputed claims.

Source: Pan-European Licensing Hub ICE Strikes Deal With Google Play | Billboard

Spotify financials raise questions about streaming economics

The concerning thing here is the margins involved: sales and marketing costs alone sucked up more than three quarters of Spotify’s €321.7m gross profit. In a market where Spotify’s key rivals are now Apple, Google/YouTube and Amazon – tech giants with hefty cash reserves and built-in marketing platforms to take advantage of – Spotify’s marketing costs are only going to increase.

Bright spots? Spotify’s subscription income grew by 78% in 2015 to €1.74bn, as it ended the year with 28 million subscribers. Its advertising revenues grew faster though: up 98.2% to €195.8m, although ads remain just over 10% of Spotify’s overall turnover compared to nearly 90% for subscriptions. That 10-90 ratio of ads-to-subscriptions hasn’t changed since 2013.

Source: Spotify financials raise questions about streaming economics

Spotify lost more money than ever last year — which is great news for Spotify 

Filings show that Spotify, based in Sweden and the U.K., generated revenue of $2.12 billion last year, up about 80 percent from the $1.18 billion it brought in the prior year (all prices in the story converted from euros to dollars at the exchange rate from December 31, 2015). Losses, meanwhile, hit $188.7 million — but that number was only up 6.7 percent from the previous year’s total of $176.9 million.

That’s a much, much better performance than 2014, when Spotify’s losses ballooned by 289 percent, and its revenue was only up 45 percent.

Source: Spotify lost more money than ever last year — which is great news for Spotify – Recode

DistroKid Will Now Pay Everyone Who Worked On Your Song

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

Bandcamp Grew 35% Last Year, Monthly Transactions Top $4.3M 

Thbandcamp_logoe 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

Kobalt: New app is a ‘giant step’ towards transparency for songwriters 

Kobalt has today launched a new app for publishing clients which allows them to view their income in real time, broken down by individual works, type of rights or country. The launch translates Kobalt’s celebrated online portal to a mobile-friendly format, launching on iOS with an Android version set to arrive in the near future.

Kobalt founder and CEO Willard Ahdritz calls the new tech a “giant step” towards “the same transparent, on-demand access to their data that most other industries already have”.

Source: Kobalt: New app is a ‘giant step’ towards transparency for songwriters – Music Business Worldwide

Dubset signs deal for indie publisher rights with NMPA

Independent publisher and songwriter members of the National Music Publishers’ Association can now sign up to be paid royalties each time their compositions are used in mix content that’s distributed to digital music services by Dubset. The new deal is the result of a rights agreement between Dubset Media Holdings and the NMPA.

NMPA members who opt-in to the agreement will have access to Dubset’s MixBANK platform where they can set terms and rules around how and where their catalogue may be used in mix content.

Source: Dubset signs deal for indie publisher rights with NMPA – Music Business Worldwide

Rightscorp Revenue Plummets, Has ‘Substantial Doubts’ About Its Future

Anti-piracy firm Rightscorp is questioning its own viability after releasing some dismal first-quarter financial results. The company, which monitors and targets repeated copyright infringers with extralegal payment notices, reported an operating loss of $784,180 during the three months ended March 31, a slight improvement from the $930,000 loss a year earlier. Rightscorp only generated revenues of $68,283, a 78 percent drop from 2015 Q1’s $307,904, and its services accrued only $49,142 due to copyright holders — a third of the $153,952 gathered during the first three months of 2015.

“These and other factors raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” the company said in its 10-Q report, which later listed possible reasons for the sharp drop in revenue. “Management believes that the decrease in revenues was due to: a) changes in the filesharing software intended to defeat detection of copyrights being illegally distributed, b) less forwarding of the Company’s notices by ISPs and c) the shutting down of some filesharing network infrastructure.”

Source: Rightscorp Revenue Plummets, Has ‘Substantial Doubts’ About Its Future | Billboard

Medianet, SOCAN, YouTube And The Kobalt Effect 

Sinscreen-shot-2016-03-22-at-16-56-17ce the demise of the long-running-but-never-launched Global Repertoire Database (GRD) there has been a lot of debate over what comes next for digital rights reporting. The songwriter class action suits in the US against Spotify are the natural outcome of more than one and a half decades of failing to deal with the forsaken mess that is compositional rights in the digital era.

The music industry needs a solution and now just like busses that never come, two arrive at once: Google’s Open Source Validation Tool for DDEX Standard (doesn’t sound too sexy I know, but bear with me on this one) and Canadian PRO (Performing Rights Organization) SOCAN has acquired Medianet essentially as a digital rights reporting play. So just what is going on in the world of digital rights reporting?

Source: Medianet, SOCAN, YouTube And The Kobalt Effect | Music Industry Blog

Revelator launches playlist analytics app 

Revelator_logoRevelator has developed a data management platform, with a dashboard to monitor individual or multiple tracks and artist playlist performance over time and across countries and cities.

The new Playlist Analytics function is available on Revelator’s web interface and is designed to track playlist activity on both Spotify and Apple Music, with other digital music services to follow.

“We are delighted to deliver another first to market with our Playlist Analytics offering, and honoured to be among the twenty finalists at this year’s MidemLab,” said Bruno Guez, Founder and CEO of Revelator. “Playlists are without doubt an essential marketing tool for rightsholders and successful playlist performance has become one of the key influencers of a track’s chart position and revenue-earning potential.”

Source: Revelator launches playlist analytics app | Music Week

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