News Spotify to buy podcast ad platform Megaphone for $235m, bringing its total podcast acquisition spend to over $800m in the past 2 years Megaphone provides hosting and ad-insertion capabilities for podcast publishers
News Nick Woollard joins Songtradr as SVP Of Global Platform Sales Exec brings over a decade of music licensing experience and will lead Songtradr’s growing subscription business
Analysis News Refunds, revenues and redundancies: Behind the numbers of Live Nation’s Q3 earnings What we learned from Michael Rapino and co. during firm's quarterly fiscal update last week
Interviews ‘There needs to be a more sustainable way for artists to earn money.’ WeTransfer's Head of Music, Tiff Yu, chats working with Frank Ocean, transparency in the business, and lessons learned across her career.
News SOCAN revenues grew 8.2% in 2019 – but payments to songwriters and publishers shrunk by 6% Distributions to members in 2019 totalled CAD $296m, compared with CAD $315m distributed in 2018
News Did Ya Know? podcast launches from music industry veterans Danny D and Adrian Sykes MBW and Music Business UK to support new project
News Spotify is letting record labels influence personalized recommendations… so long as they pay for it in royalties "As we learn from this experiment, we’ll carefully test expanding to other personalized areas of Spotify."
News TikTok and Sony Music ink licensing deal for major’s ‘roster of global superstars and exciting emerging artists’ "TikTok is a leader in this space and we are pleased to be partnering with them to drive music discovery, expand opportunities for creativity and support artist careers.”
Interviews News How Splice, which paid out $11m in royalties to musicians in the first 9 months of 2020, wants to help a ‘million more people to make music’ Chief Music Officer Maria Egan discusses Splice and the DIY musician sector
Analysis Spotify is testing price rises and paying labels billions – but, in alarming news for investors, it appears to have a subscriber problem in emerging markets (update) MBW digs into the numbers behind Spotify's newly-announced Q3 results – and discovers a surprising failure in the company's mission to grow everywhere
News TikTok sues rival Triller over patent infringement 'This is a David and Goliath story,' says Triller CEO Mike Lu
News Spotify subs grew by 6m in Q3, but Daniel Ek’s company has posted a net loss of over $500m so far this year ARPU down (again) but firm's total revenues jump above $2bn in the quarter
News Publishers and songwriters to lose out on up to $3.5bn in 2020 due to the pandemic, says CISAC CISAC report paints painful picture for global music publishing landscape due to the pandemic
News Tracy Maddux named Chief Commercial Officer at Downtown, alongside new hires and organizational changes Joel Andrew has been appointed President of CD Baby
Analysis News Sony ups its annual Music revenue forecast by over $500m… during a pandemic Firm's recorded music streaming revenues grew by over $120m in the three months to end of September