music streaming
Following Union Protests, Spotify Denies Demand for Penny-Per-Stream Payment
After months of campaigning for major changes to Spotify’s streaming model, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) recently announced the streaming platform’s denial of their cornerstone demand: a penny per stream royalty agreement for all artists. According to Digital Music News, the update follows a series of worldwide protests on March 15th, hosted outside the Spotify offices in 15 cities. In addition to increased royalty payments, UMAW is also fighting for transparency in the company’s practices, especially for algorithms for playlist placement. “Spotify is the most dominant platform on the music streaming market,” UMAW’s website reads. The company’s premium subscription numbers topped 150 million in Fe...
Spotify’s 10 Highest-Earning Artists Have Raked in a Combined $337 Million
An analysis published by financial publication Top Dollar has revealed Spotify‘s top earners and assets—and the numbers are eye-popping. Perhaps not surprising, Drake is the current king of Spotify with a take of $52.5 million in earnings generated from his 21.5 billion streams. His haul is unmatched, even by J Balvin, who took the #2 spot on the outlet’s “Spotify Rich List” by netting $37.9M. The first sighting of dance music producers comes at #16 with The Chainsmokers, who’ve generated an impressive 7.2 billion streams and $17.7 million. Calvin Harris has taken home a cool $14 million so far, landing him at #25. Drake, Post Malone, Ariana Grande, Bad Bunny, and more landed on Top Dollar’s “Spotify Rich List.” c/o Top Dollar ...
Audius’ $AUDIO Token Reaches All-Time High, But Payouts are Still to Come
Music streaming service Audius has seen a recent surge of popularity since its beta phase in October 2019 and ensuing public launch a year later. The controversial blockchain-powered platform’s cryptocurrency token, $AUDIO, has hit a new all-time high after Audius surpassed 3 million active users, according to Cointelegraph. The report claims that the beginning of March 2021 saw the price of $AUDIO go from a low of $0.38 to a new all-time high of $0.79 on March 4th, and spike from $3 million to a record $55 million trading volume. While that’s certainly good news for the project and its decentralized approach to music streaming, Audius still hasn’t publicly shared information on how or when its users will obtain $AUDIO. According to an&...
SoundCloud’s New Fan-Powered Royalty Model Could Shake Up Music Streaming Forever
After years of platform reformation and corporate restructuring, audio distribution platform SoundCloud has announced a new fan-powered royalty model, which the company touts as a “game-changing” innovation to empower independent artists. The new model is predicated on fan bases, whose streaming activity will drive and dictate payout rates to the artists they listen to. With the ambitious move, SoundCloud will distribute a portion of its users’ subscription payments and accrued advertising revenue to the musicians they listen to on the platform, with the objective of supporting independent artists with loyal fans. The model could serve as a harbinger for the future of music streaming. “SoundCloud is uniquely positioned to offer this transformativ...
Tidal 2.0?: Meek Mill Teaming Up With Lil Durk, Lil Baby & 21 Savage To Start Their Own Music Platform
Source: Bernard Smalls / @PhotosByBeanz Hmmmmm, where have we heard this idea before? Meek Mill’s Twitter fingers have been active during the Christmas holiday weekend, but this time it hasn’t gotten the Philly rapper in trouble. In a series of tweets, he raised his 10.5 million followers’ eyebrows. After one particular announcement, he made via his Twitter account. The Dreams & Nightmares and crafter revealed that he is teaming up with Lil Baby, Lil Durk, and 21 Savage to start their own music platform and essentially put out the bat signal for some help from Silicon Valley. “Me lil baby Durkio tryna get somebody in Silicon Valley to build us our own music platform we can be majority owner in! We will pay!! We need top Silicon Valley steppers please!” “21 gone link in too we need some...
On To The Next One?: Square Is Reportedly Trying To Cop Tidal From JAY-Z
Source: Kevin Mazur / Getty Is JAY-Z’s time as the owner of Tidal coming to an end? Bloomberg reports that Square, the payments company ran by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is reportedly trying to buy Tidal from JAY-Z, who acquired the music streaming service from Aspiro, a Norwegian-based company, back in 2015 for $56 million. According to a source who requested not to be named because the talks have been private and that the deal has not been guaranteed, Dorsey has been discussing with Jigga to purchase Tidal to diversify Square’s business. This news is intriguing because Tidal has been “struggling” to compete with direct competitors like Spotify and Apple Music. The company hasn’t been forthright when it comes to sharing subscription numbers, so it remains a mystery about exactly how w...
Spotify’s Annual Wrapped Returns But With A New Stories-Like Twist & Other Features
Source: Spotify / Spotify Wrapped 2020 It’s that time again when Spotify users flood your timelines, letting you know what songs, artists, and podcasts they have been listening to religiously all year long thanks to its annual Wrapped installment, but this time it comes with some new twists. Following the reveal of the year’s top music and podcasts on the service, today Spotify announced a more personal experience for users around the globe. This year’s wrapped experience will deliver the insights on artists, songs, genres, and podcasts that you enjoyed throughout the year, but this time in a stories-like feature. The new Wrapped 2020 experience can be viewed via the Spotify app on iOS and Android devices. Per a press release, this is what Spotify users can look forward to from Wrapped 202...
SoundCloud Is Now Verifying Popular Creatives Pages , Struggle Rappers This Doesn’t Apply To You
Source: MARTIN BUREAU / Getty When you stop by your favorite artist’s SoundCloud page, you will now notice a blue check next to their profile image. In a blog post, SoundCloud announced that it decided to go the blue check route to help users easily identify if the creator is legit or not. “We’re doing this to help well-known artists stand out and maintain their authenticity and to help listeners identify these artists more easily,” the company stated. SoundCloud shared the criteria you will have to meet to have your page verified, and it’s very clear. An artist applying for verification would have to be frequently searched for or a well-known DJ, musician, podcaster, curator, or collective to qualify for a blue check. Their profiles also cannot contain any misleading informati...
Spotify Rolls Out RapCaviar Day 1 Club For Fans Who’ve Been Rolling Since Day One
Source: Spotify / Spotify Hip-Hop fans who use Spotify should already be well aware of RapCaviar, the leading playlist of its kind on the streaming service. To help celebrate the five years since its inception, the playlist has rolled out the RapCaviar Day 1 Club for fans to highlight and share which artists they’ve been rolling with since, ahem, day one. Spotify’s latest digital experience, the RapCaviar Day 1 Club, will give fans an opportunity to show and prove how long they’ve been in support of their favorites and give the artists hard-earned bragging rights to showcase who has been streaming them the most. The interactive experience will apply Spotify personal listener data via a separate microsite, not unlike the service’s past offering of year-end most-liste...
Elon Musk Says People Will Eventually Consume Music Through Brain Chip
Headphones may soon be a thing of the past if Elon Musk has his way. The tech bro and Kanye loyalist believes his latest product, a brain chip implant, will be able to stream music directly into our brains. Neuralink, a startup recently co-founded by Musk, has been developing “computer-brain interfaces” with the intention of “helping humans keep pace with advanced artificial intelligence.” As TechCrunch further explains, the idea is to “implant gossamer-thin wires” — supposedly thinner than human hair — into a person’s brain. These would be connected to an external computer machine, but the aim is to one day make the connection between these two completely wireless. Musk first announced Neuralink last year, including details on “successful” experiments on mice and apes. He plans to reveal ...
Apple Music Slashes Subscription Prices for Kenyan Users
Sourced from the South Africa. Apple Music has reduced its prices by almost half of the original price and increased its trial period by double the initial period in Kenya. The subscription-based music streaming service offers access to over 50-million songs. Initially, individual users would have to pay about KES 1,066 ($9.99), however, this is about to change. According to Apple, the new prices will be as follows: Individuals will now pay KES 319.17 ($2.99) Family package, with up to six members, will cost KES 532.66 ($4.99) University Students in Kenya will now pay KES 159.05 ($1.49) What isn’t clear from the price reduction is whether or not the library of content has also been slashed. It is yet not known whether or not users will have the amount of music available to them also ...
Spotify Removes its 10,000-Song Library Limit
Sourced from Forbes. Spotify has finally removed its 10,000-song cap on library sizes, now allowing users to add as much music as they’d like to their personal libraries. Fixing an issue that has irritated music-lovers on the service for years. With more than 50-million songs available to customers to stream at any time, until today, there was a hard limit of 10,000 songs that users could save to their own “Your Music” collections on Spotify for easy access. This is no more. After today, you can add as many songs as you like to your Liked Songs on @Spotify I’ve been working with a small team on the refactoring necessary to pull this off for a while now. Very happy to see this finally out. https://t.co/1nSExF5o3V — Felipe O. Carvalho (@_Felipe) May 26, 2020 Users have been requesting ...
