Analysis News From Rod Stewart’s $100m catalog sale to a takeover bid for Believe… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-Up The five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days…
Analysis News Anthropic trained its AI to rip off copyrighted lyrics, music publishers allege in escalating court battle UMG, Concord and ABKCO allege that Anthropic's AI chatbot is still spitting out copyrighted lyrics, despite Anthropic's claim to the contrary
Analysis News Sony generated $2.52bn from recorded music and publishing in calendar Q4 2023, up 14% YoY MBW crunches the numbers from Sony Corp's latest quarterly earnings announcement
Analysis Only 19% of artists on Spotify had over 1,000 monthly listeners in 2023 As MBW has previously pointed out, there will be a minimum number of unique listeners required for a track to become eligible for royalty payouts on Spotify this year
Analysis News The major record companies (and Merlin) saw their Spotify market share fall again in 2023. Yet even before ‘artist-centric’ changes, this decline started slowing. Spotify's annual report reveals an interesting trend around the joint market share of major record companies and Merlin on the platform
Analysis News From Warner’s best-ever quarter to Spotify’s $9bn payout to the music industry… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-Up The five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days…
Analysis As Warner Music Group posts its biggest ever quarter… WMG boss Robert Kyncl says he’s ‘confident’ that Universal and TikTok will resolve their spat Kyncl is planning 'as much automation as possible,' and more lobbying for higher prices at music streaming services
Analysis News Audacy resolves dispute with BMI for $25m, clearing way for BMI’s sale A lawsuit against BMI by Audacy could have caused BMI and New Mountain "to abandon the merger altogether"
Analysis Spotify paid out $9 billion to music rightsholders in 2023 – equivalent to 63% of its annual revenues That's around 24 times what TikTok paid music rightsholders last year (which in itself isn't a fair comparison)
Analysis News Warner Music Group enjoyed its best-ever quarter in calendar Q4, with recorded music streaming revenues up 11.4% YoY WMG’s net income stood at $193 million versus $124 million in the prior-year quarter
Analysis Why indie record labels are backing Universal Music Group’s action on TikTok. Dr Richard James Burgess MBE on why A2IM and its labels are supporting Universal's stance on the matter
Analysis Could HYBE’s Weverse offer a template for Universal Music Group’s courting of ‘superfans’ in 2024? UMG has been experimenting with HYBE and Weverse since back in 2020. What's it learned?
Analysis News Spotify’s spat with Apple, its new deal with Joe Rogan and further cost-cutting: 3 things we learned on the company’s latest earnings call Spotify would be experimenting with a variety of payment models, were it not for the Apple Store’s so-called “app tax,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said.
Analysis The music sync industry is headed for an iceberg. It needs an upgrade. Sync veteran Tom Stingemore on why his industry is operating inefficiently and needs to change
Analysis News Spotify added 10m subscribers in Q4 2023, taking its total global paying subs audience to 236m Spotify's total number of Monthly Active Users grew 23% YoY to 602 million at the end of Q4 2023