Analysis News BMG annual revenues jumped 30.6% to over $900m in 2022, as it spent $400m on catalog acquisitions Annual EBITDA expands to top $200 million at Bertelsmann-owned music company
News Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak amongst hundreds of tech and science leaders calling for 6-month pause on ‘training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4’ Other signatories include three researchers from Google/Alphabet's DeepMind
Analysis The major record companies release around 3,900 tracks every day. Their problem? That’s a drop in the ocean. The major music companies release only 4% of the daily deluge of tracks hitting audio and video streaming services, new data shows.
Analysis 38 million tracks on music streaming services were played ZERO times in 2022. (Or: why Spotify should take a leaf out of Elon Musk’s book.) Should Spotify, in a quest to improve its margin, start playing hardball with its least successful artists?
Analysis Goldman Sachs predicted the global recorded music biz would generate $27.9bn in 2022. It didn’t. Here’s why. We're sorry. We're going to talk currency models. It's kinda important.
News Eric Levin, long-time Warner Music Group CFO, to retire later this year Levin, who joined WMG in 2014, will help Robert Kyncl search for his successor
Analysis News Spotify’s mission statement is preposterous. Its latest announcements prove it. Drilling behind the numbers released by Spotify last week, to discover the hard truth
News HYBE pulls out of bid to acquire 40% stake in SM Entertainment: ‘The market has been showing signs of overheating due to our competition with Kakao.’ It's the end of the road for HYBE's ambition to buy up a large stake in one of its biggest K-pop rivals
News Kobalt founder Willard Ahdritz leads seven-figure investment round in artist marketing platform un:hurd Self-serve marketing platform also attracts investment from Musiio founder, amongst others
Analysis News Universal’s music catalog spending has shrunk dramatically over the past two years. Why? A dive into the reasons why Universal's spending on catalog rights has reduced by 61 percent since its 2020 billion-dollar splurge
News Larry Jackson’s $1bn-backed gamma is go: Eldridge and Apple-financed firm acquires Vydia, hires Ike Youssef, Ben Cook Former Apple exec's new company inks deals with Snoop Dogg and other major artists for launch
Interviews Key Songs In The Life Of… Jérémy Erlich Spotify's Global Head of Music on the songs that have soundtracked his existence
Analysis News From Universal’s billions to Deezer’s new Board Director… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-Up The biggest stories on MBW from the past seven days
Analysis News Universal Music Group generated more than $1bn per quarter, on average, from recorded music subscription streaming in 2022 UMG posts double-digit YoY growth (just!) in its recorded music subscription streaming revenues
Analysis News Scooter Braun and HYBE want to build a ‘major’ music label. How will their $300m bet on Quality Control play into that aim? An in-depth look at the biggest music industry deal of 2023 so far