Blog: Music Industry - Page 18

Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.

Will direct distribution result in the YouTube-ification of Spotify?

Zach Fuller

21 Sep 2018

Spotify YouTube music industry

Spotify until now has been chiefly about, for want of a better word, the ‘professional musician’. True, many artists on the platform may not be making a living exclusively through their art, but many are still going through some form of label services and distribution deal.

Spotify’s Tencent risk

Mark Mulligan

21 Sep 2018

emerging markets global competition Music streaming

NOTE: a previous version of this post referred to a non-compete clause with Spotify detailed in this SEC filing. I have been advised that the scope of this clause is narrower than I had originally interpreted.

Mid-year 2018 streaming market shares

Mark Mulligan

13 Sep 2018

Market share music subscriber market shares streaming services

Music subscribers grew by 16% in the first half of 2018 to reach 229.5 million, up from 198.6 million at the end of 2017. Year-on-year the global subscriber base increased by 38%, adding 62.8 million subscribers.

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How streaming is changing the shape of music – Part I

Mark Mulligan

6 Sep 2018

music industry Music Music streaming

[This is the first of two thought pieces on how streaming is reshaping music from creation to consumption] The streaming era has arrived in the music business, but the music business has not yet fully arrived in the streaming era.

Emerging Music Markets: Streaming’s Third Wave

Mark Mulligan

10 Aug 2018

baidu music China emerging markets

MIDiA has just published a new report that deep dives into how streaming is, or in some cases is not, lifting off in emerging markets. The regions we focused on were Russia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, China and India.

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Why Vivendi is selling 50% of Universal Music Group

Zach Fuller

31 Jul 2018

Critical Developments Vivendi Universal Music

This really sets the cat amongst the pigeons. Following months of rumours that suggested French media giant Vivendi would spin off UMG into a separate entity via an IPO, the Bollore owned company have instead announced they will be selling off 50% of the company within the next 18 months.

Are record labels facing an A&R crisis?

Mark Mulligan

30 Jul 2018

a+r crisis ar Labels

A succession of conversations with record labels over the last couple of months has made me start to ponder whether we are approaching a tipping point in streaming era A&R. At the heart of the conversations is whether the growing role of playlists and the increased use of streaming analytics is ...

Culture bubbles: Is trap the disco of the 2010s?

Zach Fuller

27 Jul 2018

cultura bubbles disco disco bubble

The tipping point in the 2015 film The Big Short, based on Michael Lewis’s book on the 2008 financial crisis, is when it dawns on Steve Carrell’s character upon traveling down from New York City to Florida, that a plethora of unstable loans had been granted to people with very little prospects o...

Streaming and the news cycle: The posthumous success of XXXTentacion

Zach Fuller

9 Jul 2018

soundcloud rap Streaming xxxtentacion

Three weeks after his death and XXXTentacion remains a strong presence within the higher echelonsof the Billboard chart in the US. The late Florida rapper is far from the first artist to enjoy posthumous success and, although his death plays into the well-trodden narrative of the talented artists go...

Subscriptions put premium consumers as well as premium content behind paywalls

Georgia Meyer

5 Jul 2018

Amazon Prime Apple Music Innovation

There are now 436 million paying subscribers across five of the largest distributors of digital music and video content globally (Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Tencent). This has very different implications depending on which part of the ecosystem your business sits in.

The outlook for music catalogue: Streaming changes everything

Mark Mulligan

29 Jun 2018

catalogue catalogue valuations catalogue value

Friday’s news that catalogue acquisition business Hipgnosis Songs Fund is set to float on the London Stock Exchange, having already raised around $260 million, reflects a booming market for music catalogues.

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Could article 13 kill off music on YouTube?

Mark Mulligan

21 Jun 2018

article 13 European parliament fair use

It was a day of two halves for YouTube. On one side a big press release went out championing a host of impressive new stats – including hitting 1.9 billion logged in users, following an official launch of YouTube Music the day before.

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Midem 2018 – definitive disruption: streaming opportunities in Africa

Georgia Meyer

13 Jun 2018

advertising Africa disruption

The Africa focus at this year’s Midem began in April, with four local forums in South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Congo. This culminated in a focused set of talks, seminars and a keynote on the main conference stage from Tencent Africa.

Spotify’s new rules of engagement

Mark Mulligan

12 Jun 2018

investors Spotify spotify as a label

It is easy to feel that the pervasive obsession with Spotify overplays its importance to the recorded music industry. On the one hand it may only represent 27% of global recorded music revenues, but this compares to a peak of around 10% that Apple enjoyed at the peak of the iTunes Music Store.

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