Blog: Billie Eilish

If you were not familiar with the Stanley cup a month ago, you likely are now. Over the holiday season, the 40-ounce tumbler rocketed from being a relatively niche item favourited by moms to the Gen Z stocking stuffer sold-out at Targets everywhere, and now it is seemingly inescapable.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was as hot a topic as ever at last week’s SXSW conference, where debate swirled around how human artists will compete with AI-generated music. As more parts of music-making involve AI assistance, this distinction between “AI” and “human” music may soon become as irrelevant as music created on a laptop versus recorded in a studio.

Less than a week into the new decade and we already have the first indications that the streaming rulebook continues to be rewritten faster than the ink can dry on its last entry. Three separate articles, on the surface unrelated, when stitched together create the outline of a new streaming narrative that while firmly rooted in recent developments represents an entirely new chapter for the music industry: Ellie Goulding’s ‘River’ was the UK Christmas number one despite being an Amazon exclusive Jimmy Iovine claims Drake and Billie Eilish each have more streams than the entirety of the 1980s UK streaming revenue growth slowed, adding £191 million in 2019 compared to £210 million in 2019 Fusing consumption and retail Streaming’s impact is both commercial and cultural, in large part because it fuses what used to be retail and radio.

Half a century after it first after it first topped the charts, the Beatles’ Abbey Road is back at the summit of the UK charts. With the anniversary editions retailing for between $20 and $100, the impact on Universal Music’s revenue will be even more pronounced than the chart position, as we saw with the deluxe editions of the White Album (which had editions priced up to $145) helping the Beatles become the fourth-biggest UMG artist in revenue terms in 2018.

User-centric licensing (i.e. stream pay-outs based on sharing the royalty income of an individual user split across the music they listen to) has stimulated a lot of debate.  I first explored the concept of user-centric licensing back in 2015 and stirred up a hornet nest, with a lot of very mixed feedback.