Music Business Analysis

The top 1,000 songs on YouTube’s TikTok rival Shorts saw more than 280bn combined views in January 2023

YouTube publishes new set of stats for its short-form video platform

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

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.

‘It takes time to deliver this level of change and not everyone is able to move at the same pace’.

In this op/ed, PPL CIO Mark Douglas looks at the evolution and benefits of the Virtual Recordings Database

Believe has cash ‘firepower’ for acquisitions in 2023. What’s it going to buy?

Company published its full-year financial results on March 15

What impact will Metallica’s pressing plant acquisition have on the vinyl industry?

This op/ed comes from long-time music industry journalist Eamonn Forde

From $26.2 billion to TikTok defending itself… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-Up

The biggest stories on MBW from the past seven days

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?

‘Yes, AI is the future of music – but not in the way you’d think.’

The following op-ed comes from Oleg Stavitsky, CEO of AI-powered sound app Endel

By royal disappointment: Why the coronation will present British pop at its most anaemic

This op/ed comes from long-time music industry journalist Eamonn Forde.

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.

gamma, Downtown, Utopia, and the rise of the ‘Inside-Out Majors’

The following op/ed comes from UK-based Hunter Giles (pictured inset), who co-founded and leads Infinite Catalog, a royalty accounting software + service company.

Fewer DIY artists generated over $10k on Spotify in 2022 than they did in 2021 (according to Spotify’s own figures – update).

MBW founder Tim Ingham takes a hard look at Spotify's latest figures regarding independent artists and what they're paid on the platform

There were 589m paid streaming users in 2022, driving a 9% rise in global recorded music revenues to $26.2bn

Global recorded music body IFPI published its Global Music Report 2023 on Tuesday (March 21)

‘Fake streams are nothing new, but the recordings business is only just waking up to the scale of the practice.’

The following op-ed comes from Pascal Bittard, founder of France-based independent distributor IDOL