Music Business Worldwide

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music. ------- As the years tick by, more and more DIY artists will earn a liveable chunk of annual cash from Spotify. That's an inevitability, right? Wrong. In 2022, according to Spotify's own figures, the number of DIY/self-releasing artists who generated over USD $10,000 in...

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music. ----- Why is Spotify pursuing a new design that borrows heavily from time-sucking short-form video services like TikTok? That's the question on the mind of Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, on the latest Talking Trends podcast. As Ingham explains, Spotify's...

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music. On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham speaks to Ed Newton-Rex, VP of Audio at Stability AI – and one of the world's foremost experts on generative AI in the field of music. An entrepreneur and inventor, Newton-Rex built the pioneering AI-driven music-making platform Jukedeck, before selling it to TikTok in 2019. He then went on to work at TikTok as Product Director of the company's AI Lab – as TikTok looked to...

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music. On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham speaks to AI expert, and the CEO of LyricStudio, Dr. Maya Ackerman. ------ Bloody Elon Musk. Not content with doing beastly things to Twitter (like, erm, marginally improving the user experience), he's also triggered the actual beginning of the actual end of the world. Well, not directly. But Musk was one of the co-founders and funders of San Francisco-headquartered OpenAI,...

Hello and welcome to the first episode of 2023 of Talking Trends – a podcast from Music Business Worldwide, supported by Voly Music. As ever on Talking Trends, we'll be diving behind a major entertainment industry headline to explain what’s really going on. It’s a new year, which means a bucketful of music biz statistics about the prior 12 months – in this case 2022 – are tumbling out of trade bodies in all major markets. The data Ingham focuses on here has just been published by the UK’s...

Lyor Cohen believes that short-form video poses a major threat to the music business. He also thinks it might be the industry's savior. On this MBW Podcast, Cohen – Global Head of Music at YouTube – explains his fears over short-form video platforms that fail to push users into deeper engagement with music and artist content. "Short-form video that doesn't lead anywhere is the most dangerous thing I've seen the music business face in a long time," says Cohen. Cohen believes that, if left...

If you watch the new Netflix dramatization of the Spotify story – 'The Playlist' – you'll come across an entire episode told from the perspective of Per Sundin. That's because Sundin was the CEO of Universal Music Sweden at the time of Spotify's EU launch (2008), and one of the early believers that Daniel Ek's streaming platform could one day rule the global music industry. Yet arguably what Sundin's up to today is even more worthy of some TV drama treatment. As he explains on this MBW...

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music. ---------- According to Spotify, Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) was officially its biggest 'Song Of The Summer' in the United States. In the three months from the end of May to the end of August, it racked up more streams in the States than even Harry...

Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music. ---------- Sony Music Group. Warner Music Group. BMG. Hipgnosis. Concord. Primary Wave. They've all been tipped to be at the negotiating table to acquire a career-spanning catalog from legendary British band Pink Floyd. On this episode of the Talking Trends podcast, Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, reveals what his sources are telling him about the process. Ingham's industry...

Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music. In this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses the recent quarterly results of music industry giants such as Universal Music Group, Sony Corp, Warner Music Group, and Believe. Ingham notes that Q2 2022 saw something of a consistent slowdown in streaming revenue growth for the 'Big Three' major record companies. With macro-advertising spends set to drop in the months ahead, Ingham...

Some people say the modern music business lacks entrepreneurial new independent record companies. Those people haven't met Stef Van Vugt. The 25-year-old Dutchman founded Strange Fruits (now Fruits Music) in 2016 while studying music as an aspiring DJ. The label-cum-playlist company now has millions of followers on Spotify, where it's racked up tens of billions of streams. From Dance Fruits (5.4m followers) to LoFi Fruits (7m followers), Fruits Music's playlists have become a phenomenon...

Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music. In this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses the model under which TikTok currently pays the music industry. Music Business Worldwide sources suggest that TikTok's deals with rightsholders are currently 'buy-outs' – i.e. the platform pays a lump sum upfront, rather than paying a revenue share based on each artist/label's popularity on its platform. With TikTok's revenues expected to...

Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music. In this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses the market share threat that the major record companies currently face on Spotify from DIY distribution platforms – and the millions of independent artists they service. As music from these independent artists swamps streaming services, the majors' refusal to allow the music they distribute to fall under a certain perceived quality threshold...

We've called SK Sharma an 'AI expert' in the headline above, but it hardly does him justice. We could have just as easily called him an expert on theoretical chemical physics, marketing analytics, computational biophysics, or antimicrobial therapeutics. Granted, 'AI expert' was snappier. In his 20s, Sharma graduated with a Ph.D in Chemical Physics and Biophysical Chemistry from Caltech. He went on to create medical pharmaceuticals, before turning his hand to analyzing markets for the...

Imagine being able to tell an app exactly the type of music you'd like to create – the key, the tempo, the genre, the sub-genre – and then that app just... making it for you. Imagine recording yourself singing a verse and a chorus into your phone, uploading this vocal to a platform, and that platform wrapping an entire professional musical production around it, all in the style of your choosing. And the result sounding so polished, it could comfortably sit in the tracklist of Spotify's...

Gunnar Greve believes, with all his heart, that Web3 and decentralized networks are about to turn the music industry upside down. In a good way. Greve is the long-term manager of Alan Walker, the Norwegian-British electronic music sensation whose tracks have been streamed across audio and video no less than 50 billion (!) times... including more than 5 billion times in China. In addition, Greve is a co-composer of Alan Walker's music (including the 2015 global mega-smash, Faded). But all...

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music. On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham analyzes the news the Netflix's global subscriber base fell quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2022 – and ponders whether leading music streaming services like Spotify will soon face similar headwinds. Netflix lost 200,000...

Amy Thomson has pretty much done it all as an artist manager, and is now disrupting the modern music industry from another angle as Chief Catalog Officer of Hipgnosis Song Management. Before joining Hipgnosis in 2020, Amy ran her company ATM artists, and has managed acts including Seal, DJ Snake, and Swedish House Mafia. Most famously, Amy took Swedish House Mafia from being a baby band to kings of the globally dominant EDM scene of the early 2010s. She also worked closely with Kanye West...

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music. This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, responds to a new set of statistics released by Spotify about what artists earn from its platform. Those stats, published on Spotify's Loud & Clear site, reveal that 16,500 artists generated over...

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music. This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, responds to the news that US-based video games giant, Epic Games, has fully acquired online independent music retailer Bandcamp. Following the surprise acquisition earlier this month, some suggested...