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Netflix’s Clark: Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt Composes Soundtrack, Ghost’s Tobias Forge Makes Cameo
Clark is a new Netflix Swedish-language series based on infamous Swedish criminal Clark Olofsson. Directed by ex-Bathory drummer and Lords of Chaos director Jonas Åkerlund, the six-part series boasts a serious metal pedigree. To start, Åkerlund tapped Opeth mastermind Mikael Åkerfeldt to compose the score for the series. Åkerfeldt recently announced a physical release of the 34-track soundtrack, which spans genres and features four vocal performances from the Opeth frontman. The soundtrack drops on July 22nd, 2022 via InsideOutMusic. On writing the soundtrack to Clark, Åkerfeldt commented in a press release: “Writing the music for Clark is probably one of the most rewarding things I’ve done musically. It was so fun. Challenging, but fun. I wanted to do a good job of course, and provide mus...
Spotify to Host First-Ever Investor Day on June 8
Spotify will host an investor day at the company’s New York City office on June 8 at 10 a.m. EST, the company announced Monday (May 9). This will be streamers’ first investor day since going public in 2018. The event will feature a series of presentations from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, CFO Paul Vogel and other members of the leadership team, followed by a live Q&A focused on the progress Spotify has made since its direct listing in April 2018 along with its current roadmap and future growth opportunities. A live webcast of the investor day will be available at investors.spotify.com, while in-person attendance is by invitation only due to limited capacity. Additional details will be sent out in advance of the event. The investor day was announced as Spotify stock reached an all-time low of...
Bad Bunny Tops Spotify Records for Most-Streamed Album in 2022, Most-Streamed Artist Globally in a Day
Bad Bunny‘s new album Un Verano Sin Ti is already making a splash on streaming services. In its first day of release, Friday (May 6), the Puerto Rican star broke two records, Spotify announced. Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti became the most-streamed album in 2022 so far. The artist also reached the milestone of becoming the most-streamed artist globally in one day, with 183 million streams. Drake previously held this record, with 176.8 million streams. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news On Friday, all 23 songs on Bad Bunny’s new album ranked in the top 30 of Spotify’s Daily Top Songs Global chart, with nine of those tracks finding their way to the top 10. Bad Bunny, who was Spotify’s most-streamed artist worldwide in both 2020 and 2021,...
The Ledger: How Much Will Music Subscriptions Grow in 2022?
The Ledger is a weekly newsletter about the economics of the music business sent to Billboard Pro subscribers. An abbreviated version of the newsletter is published online. Earnings season is a great time to read the tea leaves about the future of the streaming and subscription businesses. How much growth is ahead? Where will that growth come from? Is pricing headed up or down? The answers are vital for investors but are also important to labels, publishers and creators. In the last two weeks, three companies — Spotify, Universal Music Group and Believe — provided some outlook on the streaming market during their earnings calls with analysts. Their earnings reports appeared in the wake of Netflix’s warning of subscription growth slowdown and the abrupt demise of CNN’s subscription platform...
Anchor Co-Founder Michael Mignano Resigns From Spotify
Michael Mignano, co-founder of the popular podcast creation platform Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify in 2019, submitted his resignation last week, a company spokesperson confirmed with Billboard. Mignano’s departure was first reported by The Verge. It is the latest shake-up on the podcasting side of Spotify. In April, a pair of top executives — Courtney Holt, head of talk partnerships, editorial and global markets, and Lydia Polgreen, managing director of Gimlet, which Spotify also acquired in 2019 — both announced plans to leave the company. Mignano founded Anchor with Nir Zicherman eight years ago. “We tried to start podcasts of our own… only to become discouraged by the complicated process and expensive hardware we found ourselves endlessly researching,” the two wrote in 2019...
Electronic Music Industry Tops $6 Billion In 2021, Makes Key Strides In Web3: IMS Business Report
According to the newly published annual IMS Business Report 2022, electronic music continues to have an optimistic growth trajectory in a variety of key areas. As a sector, electronic music was valued at $6 billion in 2021, which is up 71% from 2020, but down 20% from 2019. Throughout the report, encouraging signs of the industry bouncing back in the aftermath of the pandemic continue to be apparent. Metrics including the number of festivals that book electronic artists and the quantity of search results for flights to Ibiza are up significantly year-over-year, but there’s still ground to cover when it comes to achieving the pre-pandemic levels of 2019. While the world was in a variable state of lockdown over the last two years, dance music made key strides in the digital arena. In 1...
The Ledger: Tencent Music Highlights Risks of Doing Business in China
Doing business in China got tougher in 2021 after government agencies handed down new rules and levied fines against some well-known companies. For evidence this has made investing in Chinese companies more complicated, look no further than Tencent Music Entertainment’s annual report released Tuesday. All publicly traded companies’ financial statements include risk factors mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission to help investors understand companies’ unique challenges and possible negative outcomes if things go south. TME’s previous annual reports have listed numerous risk factors, ranging from licensing third-party content to its corporate structure. It’s a long list that just got longer. The new risk factors in TME’s 2022 annual report are further evidence of the challenges f...
Joe Rogan Claims Massive Subscriber Boost Due to Recent Controversies
Joe Rogan says his recent controversy has given his Spotify podcast even more horsepower. The podcaster claims the media frenzy over anti-vax conspiracy theorist guests and his past use of the N-word has netted him two million additional subscribers. In Friday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comic and UFC commentator was asked by his guest, British political commentator Douglas Murray, about the uproar. “You have been put through the wringer since we last met,” Murray says. “They did a number on you. Wow.” Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “It’s interesting, my subscriptions went up massively — that’s what’s crazy,” Rogan replies. “During the height of it all, I gained two million subscribers … Yeah, [the media] went for it. It...
CNN+ Announces It’s Shutting Down Three Weeks After Launch
CNN+, the billion-dollar bet that CNN’s future depended on digital streaming, will be shutting down at the end of the month, The New York Times and CNN report. The news comes scarcely three weeks after CNN+ launched on March 29th. The streaming offshoot of the cable news titan was championed by former CEO Jeff Zucker, who had planned to spend $1 billion on CNN+ over four years. But Zucker departed in February after failing to disclose a relationship with CNN’s marketing chief, and the future of the platform fell further into doubt last month, when CNN’s parent company WarnerMedia finalized a merger with Discovery to become Warner Bros. Discovery. Its fate may have been sealed when Warner Bros. Discovery announced that HBO Max and Discovery+ would be combined into one streaming platfor...
Which Cities Listen to Bob Marley the Most?
I was almost not going to write this, because it felt a little too much like trying to force the cliché, but then I got an email from the Bob Marley online shop promoting its exclusive 4/20 merch with the subject line, “When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself,” so I decided we weren’t forcing anything after all. But I digress. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news It is 4/20 after all, the universally agreed-upon day where a bunch of people make jokes about stoners and stoners just continue going about their lives as normal. But where are those stoners — and, more specifically, where are those stoners in the U.S. who are listening to Bob Marley? In 2022 so far, Luminate, formerly MRC Data, has logged more than 308 billion on-deman...
Spotify Scraps Greenroom Creator Fund Amid Live Audio Rebrand
Spotify has shuttered its fund for live audio creators less than a year after the funding program was first unveiled, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. Originally, live audio creators using Spotify Greenroom — which has since been renamed Spotify Live — would have been able to participate in the fund to receive payouts for their work. Spotify never disclosed how exactly the funding would be determined, but the company said in its initial announcement last June that a creator’s audience size and how their content was consumed would factor into the payments. But the creator fund never ultimately launched last summer, as Spotify said it would at the time, and a Spotify spokesperson said on Tuesday that the funding will be shifted to...
Netflix Loses 200,000 Subscribers, First Loss in Over Ten Years
Netflix has reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers so far this year — the first time the customer base has declined in 11 years. As Bloomberg reports, the bleeding may have only begun. In an earnings report, Netflix said it expects to lose an additional two million subscribers in the second quarter of 2022. This is despite the fact that Netflix signed up an additional one million new users in Africa during the first quarter. Those gains were offset by losses across the rest of the globe, especially in the US and Canada, where 600,000 people cut their service after a price hike, and in Russia, where the company lost another 700,000 subscribers after ceasing operations in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Advertisement Related Video The Big Red N boasts a total of abou...
