Zach Fuller

Seven Developments in Recorded Music in the 2010s (and the Songs that Defined them)

Zach Fuller
Decade retrospectives are almost doomed to fail. Assess the 60s in 1969 and you would have likely overweighed the influence of Grand Funk Railroad compared to The Velvet Underground. When it comes to the 70s, proto Hip-Hop pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash or the Post-Punk of Joy Division would have been a mere footnote in favour of David Naughton or Melissa Manchester.
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Recession Impact
How an Economic Downturn Could Reshape Digital Media

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Alistair Taylor, Amanda Stears, Karol Severin, Keith Jopling, Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan and Zach Fuller
Ten years on from the credit crunch, the global economy could be poised to enter another economic recession. Many of the underlying causes of the credit crunch remain in place, due to governments lacking the appetite for the structural reform required to right the faults in the global financial system that catalysed the slowdown.
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The Playlist Revolution
Streaming’s Battleground

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Zach Fuller
Playlists are swiftly becoming the lingua franca of the music streaming economy. While most closely associated with Spotify, playlists are now central to streaming as an entire sector. While playlists may not yet have become the dominant use case for streaming music in the way that binge watching is for video, they are transforming how audiences consume music and are becoming the key tool by which streaming services can differentiate in a commodified and highly-competitive market.
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Amazon Launches HD Streaming: Is Quality Still Enough to Escape Commodification?

Zach Fuller
This week, Amazon will launch Amazon Music HD in the US, UK, Germany and Japan, offering 50 million lossless HD songs with a sample rate of 44.1kHz described by Amazon as ‘CD quality’. It is an interesting move for the company and arguably the first to meaningfully push HD music streaming back into the music streaming conversation since TIDAL’s launch back in 2016.
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What Happens When Tencent Owns 10% of UMG?

Zach Fuller
To sound like a broken record, things are about to get difficult for Spotify. To the company’s credit, since its launch a decade ago rumours of its demise have always been greatly exaggerated, with the company regularly proving sceptics wrong through its ability to consistently retain the largest market share of the music streaming industry despite competing against the deep pockets of its tech major rivals.
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The Global Music Publishing Market
Streaming Shifts the Conversation

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Zach Fuller
The effects of music streaming having supplanted both the download and the CD as the mainstream format for recorded music (accounting for 50% of total recorded revenue in 2018) are being keenly felt across the music publishing industry. The DNA of streaming consumption (playlists, lower mechanical royalties, less revenue on average for superstar catalogue) has firmly shifted the goal posts in market influence, meaning the position to drive the overall publishing market is increasingly up for grabs.
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