Streaming
Tencent Music Ekes Out 3% Revenue Gain After Tough Quarter
At the end of the quarter, QQ Music’s daily video views and viewers reached 100mm and 18mm respectively, representing triple-digit annual growth. Music streaming services may bear the name “music” but are increasingly “pan-entertainment,” a term TME used to describe competitors that lured away its “casual users” and caused monthly average users to drop from the second quarter. (Music users’ average revenue per user slid to 8.9 RMB ($1.39) from 9.4 RMB ($1.47) in the prior-year period.) In addition to focusing on videos, TME is building its live-streaming business, used by 10,000 musicians by the end of the third quarter, and long-form audio — audiobooks, podcasts — that reach 140 million users monthly, up 89% increase year over year...
Judge Rules LiveXLive Investor Fraud Lawsuit Can Move Forward
Iser conceded in a July court filing that some of the representations made by Ellin were false, writing “had LXL obtained the rights to stream any major music festivals, such festivals not only would have been listed on LXL’s website so its subscribers could pay LXL to view the festivals, but there would have been press releases and/or disclosures of such streaming rights in LXL’s public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.” In court Thursday, Iser argued that Schnaeir was an accredited investor who had worked as a licensed securities broker for over 20 years and should have done a more thorough job conducting due diligence. If Ellin’s statements about the IPO or representations about his plans to merge LiveXLive with SFX and Quello had been true...
AC/DC Joins Billion Views Club on YouTube – But Not With the Song You’d Expect
Hard rock trailblazers and mainstays AC/DC are one of the most enduring classic rock bands of the 20th century, so it’s no huge surprise that the Australian rockers just entered YouTube’s ‘billion views club’ (an unofficial group of artists who can boast that at least one of their music videos has crossed the one-billion views mark on the video streaming platform). But which AC/DC classic crossed the threshold into that rarified company? Well, it’s probably not the song you’d expect. While their blockbuster Back to Black album contains two top 40 Billboard Hot 100 hits in “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Back In Black,” those aren’t the first AC/DC tracks to hit one billion views on YouTube; although they notched five...
Travis Scott’s ‘Astroworld: Live’ Is Coming to Apple Music
The Houston star caps his hometown event by headlining a two-day concert which, according to a statement from Apple, will stream in 167 countries and regions. Astroworld the album was an astronomical success, pushing its way to more than half-a-million equivalent album units in week one. All 17 tracks from it debuted on the Billboard Hot 100, including two in the Top 10 (“Sicko Mode” and “Stargazing”), making Scott just the fourth act to debut multiple songs in the tier simultaneously. Along the way, he has collected eight Grammy Award nominations and launched a limited-edition partnership with McDonalds, becoming just the second-ever celebrity to team with the burger chain for a personalized meal, after Michael Jordan in 1992. Read more here and watch the Astr...
Utopia Music Acquires Lyric Financial Amid Surge of Investment in Independent Music
Utopia Music’s strengths play well with Lyric Financial’s data analysis to determine the amount of financing it can provide an artist. Its core product is an online platform for creators, rights holders and collection societies that tracks global usage data and maximizes a catalog’s revenues — its tagline is “fair pay for every play.” A separate service for investors helps them value and assess risk when acquiring a recording or publishing catalog. In September, Utopia acquired artificial intelligence startup Musimap to improve recordings’ metadata — information about performers, songwriters and rights owners that requires accuracy for the parties to be paid properly. Investors and the companies they back are increasingly funding artists who look to Chance the Rapper, who put three a...
Tim Sweeney’s ‘Beats In Space’ Radio Show Moves to Apple Music
Both Sweeney and the guest’s DJ mixes will then be available on the Beats In Space show page, along with on-demand guest interviews. Sweeney’s debut guest is English electronic artist Planningtorock, with their mix featuring music from their 2021 EP Gay Dreams Do Come True, along with edits they’ve done for Romy and Lady Gaga and favorite tracks by Jimmy Somerville, Arca and more. Influenced by the UK’s pirate radio culture, Sweeney began Beats in Space in 1999 while a student at NYU, with his program giving a platform to the then almost entirely underground world of techno, house, ambient and more. He’s done more than 1,000 episodes of Beats In Space since the show’s launch, with guests throughout the years including stars like Gerd Janson, Carl Cra...
‘Easy’ Money: Adele’s Return Lifts Her Entire Streaming Catalog
Yet Adele’s blockbuster return has been different than her peers’ major debuts in one significant way: her one new song is causing all her older songs — yes, all of them — to dramatically surge on streaming platforms as well. As “Easy On Me” crowns the Hot 100 in its first full week of release (the single debuted at No. 68 on last week’s chart based solely on its first five hours of availability), listeners have also flocked to her old albums. For the week ending Oct. 21, the total U.S. on-demand streams for Adele’s 2008 album 19, 2011’s 21 and 2015’s 25 increased a whopping 93% to 11.34 million streams, 79% to 25.86 million and 93% to 33.39 million, respectively, compared to the prior week, according to MRC Data. Multiple songs earned even greater streaming i...
South Park: Post-Covid Movie Coming to Paramount+ in November
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are opening up about the iconic cartoon’s expansion to Paramount+. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the duo talked about their plans to release a total of 14 “made-for-TV movies” over the next seven years on the streaming service as part of the $900 million deal they’ve inked with ViacomCBS. “With Viacom, we realized we could make them as long or as short as we needed,” Parker stated, while Stone added, “We’re trying to make what’s on Paramount+ different from anywhere else, so hourlong made-for-TV movies is where our head is at. We’ll do two made-for-TV movies every year. They will be big, but they are not quite movie scale.” Advertisement Related Video The first film, South Park: Post Covid, will premiere on November 25th; a second as-yet...
Spotify Stock Soars on Promising Q3 Earnings: What to Expect for Q4
Spotify landed within prior guidance for the third quarter and reached the high end of expectations for revenue and monthly active users. In other words, the company met expectations and didn’t unveil the kinds of surprises investors hate. What’s more, the company raised its expectations for fourth quarter revenue and gross margin. That’s good news for both investors and anybody due to receive royalties. The fourth quarter is peak season for subscription services and no time to disappoint. Spotify added 11 million subscribers in each of the last two fourth quarters, almost double its average for the first through third quarters of both years. Appropriately, CEO Daniel Ek said during Wednesday’s earnings call, “We’re all hands on deck to make sure the positive trend continues.” What t...
New Bill in Congress Would Empower Indie Artists to Negotiate for Better Streaming Rates
“Through the pandemic, streaming services became even more indispensable, allowing us to enjoy the music we love, even when live performances were shut down. But with the exponentially increasing market power of a few tech platforms, the voices of independent musicians are getting harder to hear,” said Deutch in a statement. “By empowering a more diverse chorus of voices to negotiate fair terms and rates for their music, the Protecting Working Musicians Act recognizes the fundamental value of music and gives working artists a fair shot.” “The power imbalance must be addressed by Congress so that creators and independent labels can band together to fight for fair compensation and against anti-competitive schemes that devalue music,” said A2IM president/CEO Richard Bur...
Spotify, Amazon, and Pandora Propose Even Lower Streaming Royalty Rates
Like a twisted game of limbo, songwriters and artists are constantly asked to go lower and lower, and only the streaming companies win. As Billboard reports, on October 21st, several major streamers filed to the US Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) proposing royalty rates for 2023-2027. Three of the biggest platforms — Spotify, Amazon, and Pandora — are recommending a significant reduction in royalty rates over the 2018–2022 period. These upcoming four years, 2023-2027, are known as CRB Phonorecords IV, denoting the fourth period of rate determination. It follows Phonorecords I for 2008–2012, Phonorecords II from 2013–2017, and Phonorecords III from 2018-2022. Phonorecords III represented an increase over the previous two periods, escalating over time and culminating in a r...
Google Play Cuts Fees for Subscription-Based Apps, Including Streaming Services
Music streaming services like Spotify — which has been a vocal critic of the service fees charged by Apple’s App Store specifically — will now be “eligible” for a service fee as low as 10%, Samat writes, though he refrained from laying out eligibility requirements in the post. That benefit will extend to ebooks, which was folded into Google Play’s “Media Experience program” earlier this year alongside on-demand music streamers. Samat adds that the fee cut was being implemented “to better accommodate differences in these categories,” for which “content costs account for the majority of sales.” “The new rates recognize industry economics of media content verticals and make Google Play work better for developers and the communities of artists, musicians and authors they represent,...
