News HYBE’s Weverse helped it generate over $50m from fan club activities last year. Now SM Entertainment artists are joining the superfan platform Platform brings together artist-related content such as music videos, teasers, movies and live streams
News Voice AI firm SoundHound secures $100m in strategic financing AI-powered speech and music recognition company secures $100m in strategic financing from Atlas Credit Partners
News Google must go to trial in Sonos patent infringement case, says judge Sonos sued Google for patent infringement in 2020
News TV-based music streaming service Roxi raises $8.7m, plans expansion into the US Company says it offers 90m music videos and 400,000 karaoke tracks
News Spotify to shutter music trivia game Heardle – less than a year after acquiring it Heardle lets players guess a song based on its opening notes
Interviews How independent South African music company The T Effect plans to ‘create a new wave of African Global Superstars’ The T Effect's co-founders Tshiamo Letshwene and Nhlanhla ‘Nivo’ Ndimande tell us about the company's global ambitions
News Fitness app Strava integrates Spotify to let users stream songs, podcasts while tracking workouts Strava's users can now play, pause, resume, skip, and browse Spotify from within its app
News iHeartMedia, The Orchard, and Concord all invested in a seven-figure funding round for Gimme Radio. Now it’s shutting down after ‘being unable to raise the financing needed’ (update) Gimme Radio ran two services – Gimme Metal for heavy metal fans and Gimme Country for country/Americana fans
Analysis Can Apple Solve Classical Music’s Streaming Problem? Ryan Blakeley, a Ph.D. in Musicology candidate at the Eastman School of Music, on whether Apple's brand new app can solve complex issues for the genre
News Personalized music for gaming company Reactional Music closes $2m Pre-Series A funding round Round was led by mobile music games publisher Amanotes and early-stage VC Butterfly Ventures
Analysis Analysts are starting to believe that AI may be an existential threat for the major labels. Is that overly pessimistic? Why the majors' market share is stronger than you might think – just as so-called virtual idols come to prominence in China
News UK-based AEI Music launches investment arm AEI Ventures AEI Ventures plans to invest a seven-figure sum over the next three years
Interviews You’re about to hear a lot more from… Samuel Ademosu MBW interviews Samuel Ademosu, founder of London-based management company The Flight Club
News Cinq Music Group hires ex-UMG exec Amanda Tumulty as VP, Global Marketing Prior to joining Cinq, Tumulty spent over five years at Universal Music Group on the Global Consumer Marketing team specializing in Marketing Strategy & Operations.
Analysis News Why did Universal ask YouTube to take down an AI-generated Eminem ‘cat-rap’ track? On this occasion, UMGs concern was with the music, rather than with the AI vocals, say MBW sources