News Sacem’s revenues jumped 34% to $1.49bn in 2022. How did that compare to other leading PROs? Sacem paid out €1.056 billion ($1.112 billion) to authors, composers and publishers worldwide in the year, marking a 19% YoY jump
News Cinq Music invests in Street Mob Records, fortifying its position in regional Mexican genre Cinq has raised large amounts of money through a series of funding rounds over the past several years, including a $100-million injection from GoDigital in 2022
News Primary Wave acquires portion of ‘The Final Countdown’ singer-songwriter Joey Tempest’s publishing catalog Deal encompasses five albums
News peermusic acquires song catalog of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs and majority of the song catalog of his son, Gary Scruggs Peermusic is the long-time publisher of Earl Scruggs song catalog
Analysis News Microsoft is developing an AI rap generator, DeepRapper – trained on a large set of songs ‘crawled’ from the web DeepRapper is one of a number of projects being developed in China by Microsoft's Muzic AI team
Analysis News AI is an ‘iPhone moment’ for the music biz, and 3 other things we learned from Guy Oseary’s interview at the NMPA’s annual meeting Four things we learned from Oseary’s chat with NMPA President and CEO David Israelite
News Niall Horan signs exclusive worldwide deal with Universal Music Publishing Group Horan has sold over 80 million records and toured the globe multiple times as a member of One Direction
News Iconic Tamla Records label relaunched by Capitol Music Group and Capitol CMG EJ Gaines, current SVP of Marketing for Capitol CMG, has been named to oversee the label’s roster of artists and staff
News Motown Records strikes metaverse partnership with Second Life and music for games platform STYNGR Partnership includes virtual venue and dedicated Motown Records radio station in Second Life curated by Motown and STYNGR
News Spotify to launch more expensive ‘Supremium’ tier that includes HiFi audio (report) Daniel Ek's company is reportedly readying an entirely new, higher-priced subscription tier
News Seat Unique, an online marketplace for exclusive live event tickets, raises $9m in series A fundraising Funding was led by London-based firm Nickleby Capital
News SM Entertainment resolves contract dispute with three EXO members (report) Dispute revolved around the duration of their contracts
News AI music platform that streams fake Drake tracks raises $20m Platform features AI versions of many popular artists
Analysis Hyper space: when A&R overreaches itself The following op/ed comes from long-time music industry journalist Eamonn Forde
News As Latin Music explodes worldwide, Chinese superstar G.E.M plans release of Spanish-language album in partnership with Warner Music Asia Singer claimed to be the first Mandopop artist to release a full-length Spanish language album
Interviews ‘These relationships weren’t made by sending beats, they had to be built. We had to meet and like each other, go through ups and downs.’ MBW’s World’s Greatest Producers series interviews Bryan-Michael Cox
News AI music that contains ‘no human authorship’ won’t be eligible for a Grammy Award Recording Academy updates its rules to include a section on AI for the 2024 Grammy Awards
News Dr Jan Fischer appointed CEO of Warner’s EMP Merchandising Fischer’s appointment as CEO follows the departure of his predecessor, Ernst Trapp, last month