Analysis TikTok vs. Universal Music Group: The Cremation of Once-Cuddlesome Relations Surveying the landscape of a battle between music's biggest rightsholder and ByteDance's video juggernaut
Analysis 3 observations on… Universal Music Group’s $240m bet on Chord Music (and the real story, Dundee Partners) Looking underneath the hood of today's big story in the music business
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 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 TikTok’s biggest headache in its fight with Universal Music Group is UMG’s publishing catalog (and 2 other observations on the feud the whole music industry is talking about) What's really going on behind the scenes of music's big Grammy Week fall-out
Analysis As ‘artist-centric’ nobbles DIY aggregators, is a big-money ‘middle class’ distribution acquisition inevitable in 2024? Could any of the three majors, looking for a swift market share boost, execute a humdinger of an acquisition in the rest of 2024?
Analysis Primary Wave could buy a ‘music platform’. Here’s 4 ideas about what it might acquire… Company teased that it was targeting a music platform last week. Which areas will it be considering?
Analysis Observations on Universal Music Group’s 2024 restructuring program The 'why', the 'where', and the 'how many' of the music biz's biggest story of the moment under the microscope
Analysis News 158 million tracks had 1,000 plays or fewer on music streaming services last year. 45 million had no plays at all. The number of tracks with no plays on audio streaming platforms jumped by 7.7 million over the past year, according to a new Luminate report
Analysis News Andreessen Horowitz’s thoughts on AI shows what the music industry will be up against in 2024 The company's views place it squarely on the opposite side of the issue from much of the music industry
Analysis Here’s exactly how Spotify’s new 1,000 annual streams royalty policy works… Spotify is introducing a significant update to the way it calculates recorded royalties next year
Analysis Spotify has laid off 2,300 employees this year. That’s a shock – but also kind of inevitable. On: Promises made at Investor Days, Christmas Walks, and Daniel Ek's long-term aim for his shareholders
Analysis News NMPA: Generative AI is ‘the greatest risk to the human creative class that has ever existed’ Everything we learned from the National Music Publishers Association's US Copyright Office submission
Analysis 3 observations on… the sale of BMI (and Google’s entrance into music rights management) On BMI's fraternizing with CapitalG (aka Alphabet's fund), plus a windfall for radio broadcasters, and $100 million of money going to songwriters and publishers
Analysis News What Universal Music Group really thinks about generative AI and copyright law… MBW has digested UMG's revelatory 99-page submission to the US Copyright Office on generative AI. Here's what we've discovered.