Try using some of your favorite songs on the short-form video app Triller, and you’ll be hard pressed to find what you’re looking for. On Thursday, the music catalogs for Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music and Merlin — which provides digital licensing to many top independent labels and distributors — were removed from the platform. A Triller spokesperson says the platform is “reassessing each of our label deals as they come due as our catalogue music usage is a small fraction of our overall business with creators. “Some labels are more used than others and if we can make financial arrangements which make sense for the platform, on a label by label basis, we will. In other cases the usage does not justify the cost.” The news follows a lawsuit filed by Sony Music Entertain...
Since its debut in 2018, HBO’s high school drama Euphoria has been a sensation, but when the show came back for its long awaited second season on Jan. 9, 2022, it reached new heights — and helped a handful of hits experience a second spike of popularity along the way. With a viewership doubling over the first three episodes, as Variety reported in February, Euphoria‘s new season quickly became an important vehicle for massive streaming bumps of older tracks. For the show’s music — which pivots from Thelonius Monk or Judy Garland to Lil Xan and 100 Gecs’ Laura Les within a single hour-long episode, all curated by music supervisor Jen Malone and featuring an original score by producer-artist Labrinth — there was a measurable spike in listenership after each episode aired for nearly every s...
In the last few years, many cult-favorite hip-hop mixtapes from the 1990s and 2000s have made their way to streaming platforms, including Apple Music, Tidal and Spotify. Fan demand helped, but the hard work was done by sample clearance experts like Deborah Mannis-Gardner, who negotiated with copyright owners and labels whose songs and recordings were sampled on the tapes, to secure the necessary licenses. In 2021 alone, streaming services started offering Mac Miller’s critically acclaimed 2014 mixtape Faces, A$AP Rocky’s 2011 debut Live. Love. A$AP; Megan Thee Stallion’s compilation project Something For Thee Hotties which includes a handful of her standalone freestyles from the last few years, and Nicki Minaj’s breakout 2009 project, Beam Me Up Scotty. “This all started during COVID last ...