The music market has undergone a real transformation in recent years. Faster, stronger, louder – this is how we could summarize the shift. The distribution channels, in particular, have evolved. Today, the market dances to the tune of streaming giants, especially Spotify, which controls a whopping 30% of the global market.

The following comes from Miquido, a company DMN is partnered with.

However, this may soon change. More and more artists and labels are voicing complaints about the model created by the Swedish streaming powerhouse, arguing that it benefits the largest players, while the rest only get crumbs. There is a strong possibility that new alternatives, or apps where streaming is just part of the full offering, will emerge soon.

If you’re also considering creating a music or music streaming app or incorporating this type of functionality into your application, this article is for you. Let’s examine both successful and failed projects in this niche, the biggest challenges, and the standards set by industry giants. Let’s check the pulse of the industry.

The Complexities of Building a Music Streaming App

In music streaming, there’s no room for errors. The competitiveness of this niche means that even the smallest design, UX, or functionality misstep can have serious consequences. This is compounded by issues of legal compliance, which are so critical in the music industry. What must you consider when creating such a solution?

Copyright and Music Licensing

Every streaming app must adhere to copyright regulations, which include securing the appropriate licenses from copyright owners such as labels, artists, and collective rights management organizations (e.g., ZAiKS in Poland or ASCAP in the US). Music licensing is a complex process, especially since different countries have unique copyright regulations. Streaming providers must ensure that every song is legally distributed and that royalties are paid in accordance with agreements.

Data Protection and User Privacy

Without personalized feeds and accurate recommendations, success in the streaming industry today is nearly impossible. However, this requires advanced user data processing, which is strictly regulated. In the EU, streaming apps must comply with GDPR – otherwise, they risk significant financial penalties. These regulations define how companies can collect, store, and process personal data, and specify user rights (e.g., the right to be forgotten, the right to access data).

Content Responsibility and Anti-Piracy Measures

When allowing content to be published by independent artists and creators (not affiliated with labels), a streaming app must prevent illegal music distribution and ensure it does not support piracy or intellectual property violations.

The GenAI boom has added even more complexity to this, as there is still no clear legal precedent for generative artificial intelligence and copyright. AI-generated content is based on data the model was trained on, though the original creators may not have given consent for this use. While the output isn’t an exact copy of an existing work, but a blend of millions of references, it’s challenging to determine copyright in these cases.

The same applies to “resurrecting” artists’ voices. The so-called “digital necromancy” or “posthumous art” is becoming more common among music creators. Here, too, there is no clear legal consensus, and the laws are somewhat ambiguous. In the GenAI era, a music streaming app provider must navigate these complexities, taking responsibility for potential violations.

Hitting the Wrong Note – What We Can Learn From Failed Streaming Projects

The music streaming industry is filled with stories of platforms that failed. These cautionary tales can serve as guideposts for companies entering the market. Many examples date back to when the music streaming industry was still forming.

Consider Napster– a platform that popularized P2P sharing and paved the way for torrenting. At its peak, it became a nightmare for music labels, with its widespread, unauthorized sharing of copyrighted songs eroding traditional sales and threatening artists’ livelihoods and label revenues. Legal actions from major players like Metallica ultimately forced Napster to shut down in 2001, marking it as both a catalyst for digital music disruption and a cautionary tale for unlicensed content sharing. Later, LimeWire  followed a similar path, ultimately shutting down despite attempts at legitimacy. 

Though the turbulent era of torrenting and platforms operating without licenses or against copyright law is now over, new platforms still encounter// issues. Recently, a celebrity-backed NFT platform called OneOf was accused of selling securities without SEC approval.One thing is certain – when it comes copyright and licenses, you shouldn’t play it by the ear. One wrong move is enough for the regulatory units to blow the whistle. But worry not – with our tips, you can prepare yourself for any eventuality.

Legal and Licensing Framework: Avoiding Pitfalls

How can you avoid mistakes when navigating these legal complexities? Start by understanding the types of licenses you need to obtain before distributing music through your platform:

• Mechanical licenses allow platforms to distribute and reproduce music, ensuring that songwriters and publishers are compensated for each play or download.
• Performance licenses permit the public playback of music, which is essential for complying with rights organizations that protect artists’ earnings from public broadcasts, streams, and live performances.
• Sync licenses are required for pairing music with visual media, such as ads or videos, which is increasingly significant in multimedia marketing and social media content.

Regional laws are also crucial, as countries have unique regulations on royalties, copyright, and distribution rights. Failing to acquire these licenses and comply with local laws can lead to legal battles, hefty fines, and even platform shutdowns. Peloton, a fitness app, serves as an example.

Though not specifically a streaming app, music is an essential part of Peloton’s user experience. In 2020, the company was sued for copyright infringement for using mechanical instead of sync licenses, which are necessary for music paired with visual media. Although Peloton emerged unscathed, the National Music Publisher’s Association (NMPA) sent a clear message.

Music apps are at the highest risk, but licensing issues can also impact streaming platforms and social media. Platforms like Twitch, for example, where internet content streaming is central, highlight the importance of acquiring proper licenses and ensuring compliance with regional laws. Twitch has already had some legal issues due to improper use of licenses and despite the deal with NMPA, its case serves as a cautionary tale for other streaming giants.

Engaging Users: Features That Keep Them Coming Back

Attracting users in a monopolized niche like music streaming is an achievement in itself. Keeping them engaged, however, is like climbing Everest! Much of this depends on habits – users already have standards from popular apps. On one hand, they may be looking for something new, something better, but on the other, they don’t want to completely change their routines. Finding the balance between these two aspects is key to success in this industry. So, which elements are absolute must-haves?

Personalized Recommendations

Successful apps today must offer personalized recommendations. The best algorithms subtly combine data on listener behavior in the app and their external online activity. Play history, interactions with tracks and playlists, other app actions, ratings, and demographics – all these factors are taken into account to create personalized music suggestions in apps like Spotify. There is also data on similar users, which the algorithm uses for community modeling.

Playlists and Social Sharing

Social features are becoming increasingly important in streaming, and the lines between music streaming platforms and social media are blurring. Including social media-like features in your app is essential to its success. It should allow users to easily and intuitively create, share, and follow playlists or favorite artists.

Taking a step further could mean integrating GenAI features, allowing users to interact with music in more creative ways. Personalized visualizations, blending favorite artists’ voices with music not in their repertoire – this could be the future of streaming. Your users will shift from passive listeners to artists and curators. However, remember to keep an eye on legislative progress in the GenAI domain – otherwise, you might find yourself on shaky ground.

Community Development – Identifying and Engaging Superfans

Building community is equally essential to engagement. Accurate recommendation are a foundation of a successful music app, but don’t forget that the users want to feel a part of a bigger whole. Including these features, you will strike a chord with them!

User Profiles: Implement features that allow users to identify as superfans (badges, special status, or exclusive content).

Rewards: Offer exclusive access to content, merchandise, early ticket sales, or special events.

Influencer Collaborations: Collaborate with music influencers and artists to create exclusive playlists, livestream events, or behind-the-scenes content. Encourage them to share their music journeys, favorite tracks, or curated playlists within the app to inspire fans and promote frequent engagement.

Community Features: Introduce forums or discussion boards where users can share their thoughts on new releases, concerts, and music trends.

User-Generated Content: Encourage users to create and share content, such as reviews, concert experiences, or music challenges.

Exclusive Events: Organize virtual concerts, Q&A sessions, or listening parties hosted by popular artists or influencers.

Music Challenges: Launch music-themed challenges where users can showcase their musical skills, such as remixing a song or creating a dance challenge.

Offline Listening: Integrate offline functionality to keep users engaged even without internet access.

Designing for Users: UI/UX That Elevates Experience

Streaming apps are our everyday companions. Similarly, apps that include streaming features (such as fitness assistants or social media platforms) are designed to serve us on the go, accompanying daily situations and filling breaks. This makes impeccable UI and UX central to their success. These apps should adapt easily to different devices and function smoothly in the background.

In a nutshell, they should “dance to the user’s tune,” providing a seamless experience whether at home, at work, on public transport, or while doing sports. To achieve this, particular attention should be paid to these aspects:

Simplified Navigation

Start with intuitive wireframes and mockups that outline a clean, easy-to-use interface, focusing on smooth navigation for users to interact with the app effortlessly. This process involves creating wireframes that act as a blueprint for layout and functionalities, allowing users to quickly understand the app’s structure.

Inclusive Design

Use mood boards and standardized design systems to ensure accessibility options, such as voice control and adaptive interfaces for users with disabilities. These systems allow for the consistent implementation of accessibility features across the app, making it more inclusive to a wide range of users. Additionally, usability testing can refine the app’s design to ensure it accommodates all users effectively.

Building a Scalable Backend: Meeting Growing Demand

Even the best UI design won’t work wonders if your backend isn’t strong enough. When faced with performance issues, users may change their tune instantly, fueling your churn rate. Think big and design your backend to adapt easily to growing demand. Paying attention to these aspects will pave the way for success.

Cloud-Based Solutions

Adopt scalable cloud infrastructure, allowing the app to handle high data loads and provide fast access to large music libraries. This setup ensures that user data is stored securely while offering rapid, on-demand access to streaming content.

APIs and Third-Party Integrations

Integrate essential APIs for streaming, analytics, licensing, and payment. Using third-party APIs from established providers broadens the app’s functionality, giving users access to a comprehensive music library and seamless payment options while enhancing the overall app performance.

Load Management and Optimization

To accommodate peak usage times, distribute server loads efficiently and optimize app speed. Load balancing techniques and data caching ensure that even during high-traffic times, users experience smooth functionality and quick response times.

Business Model Planning: Finding the Right Monetization Strategy

Although the subscription model dominates today’s streaming landscape, it is not the only path available. Much depends on whether music streaming is the core of your application or simply one of its flagship features. With a subscription-based approach, acquiring users can be challenging, which may lead to financial instability. However, once you establish a solid user base, this model can yield the most benefits. You can also combine various strategies or gradually shift from one to another, depending on your needs.

Subscription and Freemium Models

Provide different subscription options, from free ad-supported versions to premium tiers offering exclusive features. This approach allows users to experience basic functionalities for free while incentivizing upgrades to ad-free, premium experiences.

In-App Purchases

Introduce exclusive content or high-definition audio upgrades to increase user spending within the app. Offering valuable content upgrades can appeal to dedicated users willing to enhance their experience.

Ad Integration

Implement an unobtrusive ad model for free-tier users to maintain engagement without disrupting their experience. This can include audio ads between songs or visual ads that appear during less active moments in the app’s interface.

👉 Get the full ebook here: Soundscapes of Tomorrow

Building the Right Team: Expertise at Every Stage

When it comes to the complexities of licensing and copyright law, it’s wise to emphasize clear communication from the outset. You don’t have to do everything on your own—on the contrary, it’s worth enlisting the support of external experts who can protect you from making costly mistakes. A software development partner with legal expertise and experience in building music applications will help you identify potential roadblocks and address them before they lead to problems. You can march to your own drum, but fulfill your vision safely and responsibly!

Key Roles

Employ experienced professionals for frontend and backend development, UX/UI design, audio streaming, and legal compliance. This diverse expertise ensures each component is developed by knowledgeable specialists.

Collaboration

Promote open communication between designers, developers, and legal advisors, as it’s essential for aligning creative and technical goals with legal requirements, particularly around music licensing and data privacy.

Outsourcing or In-House Development

An in-house team allows for tight-knit collaboration, but partnering with a software development has many advantages over it. Collaboration with an experienced development company can reduce costs and streamline the development process, while providing access to specialized expertise and resources that might be challenging to build internally. A reliable partner can also offer flexibility, efficient project management, and scalable solutions that support growth, allowing you to focus on your core business with confidence.

Marketing and Promotion: Launching Your App with Impact

Starting with a bang won’t guarantee long-term success, but it does give you a strong advantage. You only get one market launch—use it to create hype and attract users seeking something new, something better.

In music streaming, influencers and artists can be instrumental in generating buzz. What could be more convincing for a listener than knowing their favorite musician prefers a platform, perhaps due to a more favorable compensation model?

Now, with growing discontent toward the dominant streaming platform, it’s a prime opportunity to attract artists. Make your mark on social media. Choose a powerful angle and stick to it. Strike a chord with users by offering something that other platforms can’t. Tidal, for example, ensured a strong market entry by standing out with high-quality audio and exclusive content from artists.

Pre-Launch Marketing

Build anticipation with targeted social media campaigns and partnerships with artists or influencers, driving awareness before launch. Early marketing strategies can generate excitement and secure initial user interest.

User Acquisition

Use app store optimization and paid ads to boost user downloads and attract early adopters. Strategic keywords and promotional techniques in app stores enhance visibility, while advertising widens reach.

Retention Strategies

Keep users engaged with personalized emails, push notifications, and access to exclusive content. Customized notifications can remind users of app features, introduce new content, and encourage repeat usage.

Budget Management: Controlling Costs Without Compromising Quality

In music streaming, managing costs is critical, as unexpected expenses can pile up fast. Licensing fees often spike based on region, artist contracts, and streaming volume, creating unpredictable costs. Maintaining high-quality audio and smooth, buffer-free streaming demands robust infrastructure, which drives up server and bandwidth expenses. Plus, personalized features, like recommendations and adaptive streaming, need complex algorithms and data processing—both costly and resource-intensive. Balancing these demands is key to delivering a top-tier user experience without breaking the budget.

Cost Breakdown

Plan for each development stage, including app design, coding, licensing, and marketing. Having a clear cost outline allows for better budgeting across essential functions.

Scalability Considerations

Set aside funds for potential scaling, updates, and the addition of new features as the user base grows. A flexible budget enables timely updates, helping the app adapt to rising demands.

Balancing Quality and Costs

Explore cost-control strategies that maintain high quality, such as choosing the right development framework and using cross-platform solutions.

Music App Development in Tune With Your Goals and Budget

Launching a new music streaming app or an app with similar features is, in many ways, a much greater challenge than in other niches. In addition to the usual requirements of app development, there are also legal compliance issues, including copyright law. And since this niche is highly competitive, you need to carefully plan your strategy from the start, considering everything from licensing to the billing model.

Developing a music streaming app in-house is complex and costly, especially without prior experience. The process includes project planning, design, development, testing, and deployment, each needing specialized skills. Selecting the right technology stack is essential, as it impacts performance, scalability, and user experience. 

Total development costs, including hiring skilled professionals and the tech stack, can exceed $40,000 to $100,000, while marketing expenses can range from $10,000 to $50,000 or more, depending on strategy. With our expertise, we can deliver a prototype in just two weeks.

At Miquido, we streamline this process across every phase. From initial project planning to post-launch support, our team of experts ensures that each step is executed efficiently and that the technology stack aligns with your project goals. With over 12 years of experience in music and streaming app development, having delivered projects for top brands like Onkyo Music, Warner Recorded Music, and Abbey Road Studios, we help companies save significantly on both development costs and resources.

Contact Miquido today and let our experts guide your project from concept to launch. Let’s hit the right note together! Meanwhile, dive into the Soundscapes of Tomorrow, Miquido’s ebook on music app development and the future of streaming.

Photo Credit: On Air

Content from the UMG-owned production studio is available to stream now.

With the emergence of concert streaming’s high-growth potential, on-stage performance streaming platform On Air is now offering new monetization opportunities for intellectual property owners and artists. The platform aims to elevate the fan experience by offering a true cinematic experience with content available in 4K UHD with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos technologies.

Since 2020, On Air has hosted a serious catalog of live concerts and performances from A-list artists and shows. That includes performances from the likes of Zara Larsson, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, and Years & Years from iconic music venues spanning Royal Albert Hall, OVO Arena Wembley, BBC Studios, and more.

But that’s just the beginning: expanding upon their existing on-stage video catalog, On Air recently forged a deal with Mercury Studios for concert performance footage. Mercury Studios, a division of UMG, is a multi-faceted music content studio and treasure trove of seminal concert footage. Just recently, On Air joined forces with DMN to further propel the platform.

Mercury Studios’ sizable catalog features over 2,000 hours of standout performances by the most prominent names in music — including Peter Gabriel, Lynyrd Skynrd, Duran Duran, Black Sabbath, Journey, ZZ Top, Santana, Eric Clapton, Toto, and The Who, as well as assets from legendary production company Eagle Rock. Now, that historic and important catalog is finding another outlet via On Air to reach fans – with the ingestion and dissemination process well underway.

“On Air provides an exciting opportunity to showcase the breadth of Mercury Studios’ programming, from award-winning documentaries to concerts by iconic artists like Eric Clapton, Miles Davis, Chicago, Jeff Beck, Cypress Hill, and INXS. This partnership with On Air will further expand the reach of these remarkable performances,” said Rob Gill, SVP Global Operations, Mercury Studios.

Jakub Krampl, co-founder and CEO of On Air, sat down with DMN to reveal how On Air’s latest deal with Mercury Studios expands global exposure opportunities and monetization for all IP owners, labels, and artists on the platform. For starters, Mercury Studio’s catalog is impressive, and that will draw a bigger audience interested in higher-quality live performances.

“We’re here to support the distribution of catalogs and monetization of longform content in 4K with Dolby Vision and Atmos technology,” said Krampl. “On Air provides an end-to-end service to artists, labels and rights holders — all backed by a cutting-edge tech stack.”

On Air’s vast infrastructure expertly covers every aspect of the streaming process, solving problems typically faced by IP owners when they attempt to distribute content across mainstream channels.

A sampling of On Air’s live concerts and performances from A-list artists filmed at iconic music venues. (Photo Credit: On Air)

According to Krampl, On Air offers a ‘premium streaming service for on-stage entertainment,’ handling everything from pre-production and on-site production management to an exclusive post-production process that ensures higher-quality content for its users.

On Air’s DRM-protected streaming platform plays comfortably across desktop, mobile, and TV endpoints. Stretching things further, the company also pushes engagement by marketing content and managing assets across multiple platforms, including social media with tailored campaigns.

And when the opportunity arises, On Air also helps to negotiate branding and agency partnerships to further stretch the reach of its footage.

The platform offers prime viewing experiences to fans in over 190 countries, while taking adequate measures to prevent unlawful distribution. Among the most prominent offerings available to stream are Zara Larsson’s sold-out ‘Venus Tour’ at AFAS Live in Amsterdam, Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds live at Wythenshawe Park in Manchester, Yoshiki’s ‘Requiem Classical World Tour’ recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, and a pair of sold-out All Time Low shows, captured at OVO Arena Wembley (2023) and Merriweather Post Pavilion (2024).

One of On Air’s biggest differentiators is its audio and picture quality, with streams available to watch in 4K UHD with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos technologies.

Krampl explains that the solution, crafted by On Air’s partnership with Dolby, “provides every user with the opportunity to experience our productions with the immersive sound of Dolby Atmos and ultra-vivid pictures of Dolby Vision for a premium entertainment experience.”

“On Air has successfully achieved a live stream in Dolby Vision, which hasn’t been done before — and that’s only one of the many advanced solutions we’re capable of providing,” Krampl continued, while pointing to the company’s All Time Low OVO Arena Wembley capture. That show was delivered in 4K UHD with HDR and Dolby Atmos immersive sound, and accessed across 56 countries simultaneously over the web, mobile and TV apps.

In fact, all On Air-produced shows are filmed in close partnership with Dolby. “We’re delighted that On Air uses Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision to give them an edge in concert streaming,” said Jane Gillard, Head of Music Partnerships Europe for Dolby. “Artists invest so much into live shows – sound, visuals, effects, lighting. In using the best in Dolby technology, On Air are able to deliver an experience that beats standard video and stereo hands down.”

The on-stage performance streaming space has a number of big competitors, though On Air’s focus strategies of Dolby-powered streams, complementary solutions, and competitive pricing could prove to be significant differentiators.

Krampl explains that On Air’s entire service infrastructure is developed in-house, which makes it ‘independent of third-party platforms and agencies.’ This self-developed tech-stack and content delivery platform, according to Krampl, allows On Air to address problems before they arise, ‘while continuing to develop and innovate’ for their stakeholders.

The On Air HD stereo service is available to viewers at $10.99 per show, with the On Air catalog available to stream on-demand with unlimited replays.

Photo Credit: On Air

Why is now the moment for concert video to expand and reach a wider audience? Krampl points out that On Air is aware of how current economic challenges have significantly shuffled audience priorities and where they want to spend their money.

Exorbitant ticket prices and the cost of travelling to venues present barriers that threaten to separate artists from their fans.

On Air aims to democratize access to live music and provide a genuine connection between audiences and performers. Their ‘cutting-edge solutions directly offer the energy and magic of live performances to audiences’ around the world.

The On Air app, available across Apple iOS, Android, and Fire TV, is designed to make viewers feel like they’re in the center of the action. Users can tune in to On Air’s cinematic show library in 4K UHD and spatial audio from anywhere, and seamlessly switch to the big screen at any time.

Photo Credit: Too Lost

Fan engagement is one of the biggest cornerstones of success in the music industry. Engagement empowers artists and their teams to harness the potential of their fan bases, cultivate superfans, and foster a strong bond between those fans and the artist. Too Lost is making it easier than ever to facilitate that connection with Fan Blast—directly from the Too Lost dashboard. Let’s take a peek at how it works.

The following was created in collaboration with Too Lost, a company DMN is proud to be partnered with.

Social media has great tools to help budding artists get discovered by more fans, but how do you contact them once they’re aware of your music? A more extensive reach method is needed to engage fans directly when new music drops as social media by design does not show your updates to everyone who follows you on the platform.

Meta has long been criticized for this, with reach happening to only 5.9% of a person’s organic followers on that platform. That’s better than the 4.3% it used to be, but the result is that artists must hope for a viral post—or pay Meta to reach 100% of their audience who expressed interest.

Email tools are far more effective at maintaining an in-the-know relationship with fans who have expressed interest in new music. That’s because emails are delivered directly to a person and when crafted with catchy headlines and tailored to music fans—they deliver more action in terms of potential sales and new streams. Even merch drop emails tend to be more successful than social media blasts—since the artist shared their email because they’re interested in the music in the first place.

Too Lost is capitalizing on the close connection that email marketing offers by offering artists and managers the ability to build and blast emails to their entire fanbase. Fan Blast allows artists to email anyone who has pre-saved one of their songs, generate early listen links to keep those fans engaged with new music, and notify fans about upcoming releases, merch drops, and more.

Artists and managers can completely customize the message, or use powerful AI tools to generate the message with listening links already inserted. Too Lost says the tool is designed to help add new fans in real-time as they engage with your music, bringing your marketing efforts closer to the fan for a strong artist-fan bond. The ability to engage superfans directly on new releases means those fans are among the first to hear your music—perhaps influencing others and growing your fanbase in the process.

“We understand the importance of owning the communication with your fans. Social media is great, but we know the reach is heavily restricted. Fan Blast makes it easy to get messages directly to your fans, right from your Too Lost dashboard.”

This new fan engagement feature, paired with Too Lost’s other features offer artists a full suite of services to identify and connect with their fans across the web.

Photo Credit: AI

ChatGPT is impressive out-of-the-box but challenging to apply to real-world problems. Area4 Labs and Hearby are building with AI technology to create a data-driven live event concierge.

The following comes from Hearby, a fast-emerging player in concert discovery and a DMN partner. Enjoy!

Full disclosure: “Train” when applied to Chat technology is the same “train” that we might apply to cats. That is, we ask them to do things they were going to do anyway in a way that doesn’t displease them, and then we figure out how to be happy with what they did.

This has been our biggest lesson in creating “Ask Hearby,” our AI chatbot music concierge. In this article, I’ll bring you behind the scenes on our AI adventure.

At Hearby, we aim to use technology to find and uplift grassroots music and help people find the wonderful music hidden right in their neighborhoods.  Whether you’re looking for a night of clubbing, a free classical concert, or music to keep the kid out of your hair, it’s all out there.  You may not realize there’s a great music venue right in the industrial park next door, on the dockyard of Liverpool, or in a thrift shop in London.

We want to get people exploring and finding music that they’ll love, and to do this, we spent a lot of time investing in fast search technologies, data-driven filters, and map visualizations. Then we ran right into the wall of ‘Too Much Stuff.’

Enter the chatbot, which allows fans to fast-forward and say what they want without going through all the tedious steps of searching, filtering, and reviewing results. It’s a lot of work for something that should be fun.

However, my experience with chatbots has been a big meh, and we wanted to do something more intriguing.

Our main product requirement was “be useful and don’t be irritating”.  Yes, it took us a long time to get that, and we fell off the dragon a few too many times. But seeing how this ubiquitous technology works and encouraging more ideas and dreams with it has been interesting.  At its core, it’s a foray into using a Large Language Model (LLM), and I will breathlessly say the possibilities are unlimited.

It took a while, but after several tries, we finally have something useful and entertaining to use. So here’s the behind-the-scenes on what we tried that didn’t work — and what finally did.

• • Train, train, and train again.
  • Give me all the data!  More data!
  • Hybrids: Just how many technologies can we cram in here?
  • It’s a sandwich.

So first, a little more about Training when it comes to Machine Learning.

I need to bring up the topic of training, partly for my snazzy title but also because it’s at the bottom of everything you’re hearing about AI.

To train ML, we first choose a neural net architecture, then give it a vast set of data items labeled with the correct answers (for example, Cat/Dog, T-shirt/Skirt, Pedestrian/Bollard).  This type of supervised learning is expensive in computing power, requiring a huge amount of ethically obtained, accurately labeled data. Training enables the ML architecture – the layers and feedback loops that make up the neural net  – to adjust to create maximally accurate predictions.  For example: “99% chance this image is a cat”.

Going beyond cat/dog to something actually relevant quickly gets expensive and time-consuming. It’s pretty much prohibitive on large data sets for all but the biggest players.  Enter LLMs, which come ready-trained on massive amounts of human text right out-of-the-box for anyone to use.

This is what powers our chat dragon: the ability to “understand” human language, figure out what is being asked, and create amazing responses in human language.  On the topic of whether there is any actual human-style understanding of concepts, I can start an argument in an empty room (so I won’t go there).  It doesn’t matter for our purposes as long as the output is accurate, useful, valuable, safe, and reliable.

This brings me to our challenge: how to make already trained chat technology do what we want.

For a small amount of money and a lot of delight, you can get a subscription to Open AI’s ChatGPT, which will happily write you a letter to Grandma, your term paper, or a pretty decent novel – at least better than anything I can write.  Whether soulless or best-selling is in the eye of the beholder, but I prefer to consider it a fantastic tool to help spur creativity.

But as impressive as this is, these out-of-the-box answers are standalone, and the type of chatbot we wanted to create is a conversation that builds as we go along, with context and informality, powered by accurate event, venue, and band data.  The challenge, then, is how to get a language-based model to incorporate this external data and use it in its responses and how to have the conversation build as it progresses (memory).

Data! Give me all the data!

The challenge is getting our data into ChatGPT to inform its responses.  In a “normal” program, this is a matter of, well, programming.  However, an LLM is different: rather than programming, information needs to be text-based to be taken on board.

It’s weird, but not so much when we remember this is a language model. This is precisely how we listen, take in new info, understand it, and use it to inform our actions.  In all fairness, the latest models also allow other forms of input, expanding beyond text input. But this is where it was when we started, so that’s where we began.

We started with text-to-sql, in which we describe in words how to find the answers to questions using the tables in our database. So, essentially, telling a programmer how to formulate database queries.  This sounded so crazy and improbable that we thought it just might actually work.

Sometimes, it did, but mostly, it sulked, made stuff up, or ignored us.  Or all of the above.  If you’re thinking cat again, I’m right there with you.

Bring in the hybrids.

So, we moved on to hybridizing and searching our database using ChatGPT for its language capabilities. Among the many challenges:

(1) Knowing what the fan is asking about – An event? A venue? A neighborhood? A genre? A person?

(2) Find the data in our database with a fuzzy search – the whole point of chatting is that the fan doesn’t have to be specific.

(3) Get the data into ChatGPT in words, which is all it understands.

(4) Receive a human-ready answer from ChatGPT.

(5) Augment that answer with links and images.

We quickly realized we needed to confirm it was using our data and not going elsewhere, which in LLM terms is called temperature.  Or, in human terms, don’t make stuff up!

It’s a sandwich

After a number of tries, we ended up with a workable sandwich of technologies: Bert NER to understand what the fan is asking about; specialized models to detect essential but idiosyncratic info like informal dates (“in 3 weeks”); a vector database to translate a fuzzy human question into something specific we can ask our already existing search capability; a layer to feed the search answer to ChatGPT in words, and then a method to receive the ChatGPT response in human language. And, finally, a layer to augment it with images and links.

Voila!  If this all sounds like a bit much, I get you.  But we were delighted to see that a fan can ask a reasonable question, “What’s on in London tonight?” or “Where can I take Aunt Nelly for a jazz brunch?” and get a believable answer that makes sense.

More interesting is that a fan can ask an unreasonable question and get an answer about music events or venues, and an explanation as to why, or, if it’s too far a stretch, simply a reasonable on-topic answer.  And, to put your mind at ease somewhat, some questions bring in the guard rails: “I cannot assist you with that”.

Onward!

In addition to our chatbot launching later this year, we are working on several other AI efforts, mainly in Machine Learning and classification. These are focused on highlighting the music scene for fans and encouraging them to explore and find new music and venues.  Off their sofas and into venues!

The chatbot has been a very interesting excursion for us into LLMs, which have enormous potential to change how we live with software. So, I hope this has shone a little light on this powerful technology for you.

We’re focused on music and using these incredible tools to uplift grassroots music. Still, I hope this gave you some ideas on how this kind of technology might help in your part of the music world – places where you want people to be able to get to the point faster, have informal access to better information, or be able to explore and expand on an idea on the fly.

UNIFI Music Founder & CEO La’Shion Robinson (Photo Credit: UNIFI Music)

Finding and retaining effective management is a significant hurdle for many emerging artists. Now, UNIFI Music is building an AI-driven intelligent platform for that.

Superstar music careers frequently start on the fringes: in a poorly-lit rehearsal space, late night on a laptop and cracked DAW, or as part of a local scene that hasn’t yet crossed over.

If an artist or group is lucky, an ardent believer is pulling the strings to get gigs, upload tracks to DSPs, monitor royalties from different licenses and platforms, and settle disputes. But professional managers with acumen, experience, and connections are usually out of reach at the beginning.

And that’s a problem.

The real artist management pros are usually overloaded with their high-demand clientele. And they’re generally inaccessible if they’re taking on emerging artists, or simply too expensive for artists in the early stages of their careers.

The music industry is laser-focused on the profound threat AI-generated music poses – which makes sense. But can AI fill a meaningful role in other areas like artist management?

That was the light bulb for execs at UNIFI Music, a company focused on building artist-focused solutions. “We’ve seen a huge need for artist management from artists in the 0-5 stages of their careers,” La’Shion Robinson, UNIFI’s founder and CEO, told Digital Music News.  “There’s simply an overload of tasks beyond the core competencies of creating music, building a cultural connection, and performing.”

‘Overload’ is a fitting descriptor.

From securing competent management to navigating the complexities of promotion and distribution, the path to success is often fraught with obstacles. And with tasks spanning social media engagement to booking gigs and navigating the complexities of streaming platforms, the workload can be immense – especially in the face of fierce competition.

With that problem in mind, UNIFI Music’s vision is to solve these pain points with an innovative AI-powered solution that could redefine artist management. That is perking the ears of investors, many of whom feel that AI-related models in the music industry are overlapping and saturated.

“Here’s something extremely useful, relevant, with tremendous potential to scale,” Robinson summarized. Just recently, UNIFI joined forces with DMN to further expand their concept.

According to Robinson, AI can play a meaningful role in streamlining artist management and empowering emerging musicians. UNIFI’s AI-powered platform, called Sasha, will act as a centralized toolbox, offering a range of features and services to support artists in their career development.

Sasha is designed to complement platforms like SoundCloud, providing artists with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage their careers effectively. That includes a question-driven interface, with Sasha understanding virtually any language. “This isn’t just a customized ChatGPT,” Robinson continued. “Sasha employs LLMs to provide customized guidance to the artist.”

The SaaS-like Sasha will also integrate with UNIFI’s “LinkedIn for Music” platform, enabling artists to connect with industry professionals and build valuable relationships. The broader aim is to bolster intelligent, AI-driven management with a rich network of connected musicians and opportunities.

According to Robinson, UNIFI Music’s vision for Sasha extends far beyond simple task management.

“This is a brand-new, functional direction for AI in music,” Robinson relayed. “We’re building a complete AI manager built from the ground up for musicians, music companies, and the entire music managerial ecosystem.”

The ultimate goal is to create a virtual manager capable of strategically, tactically, and emotionally guiding an artist’s career. For existing managers, the platform helps to eliminate time-consuming ‘assistant’ tasks like venue research, social media posts, and transportation logistics. “There’s less need for an assistant manager and more opportunity to create the ‘super manager,'” Robinson described.

Currently, Sasha can handle tasks like social media recommendations and identifying promising venues. However, as the platform evolves, it will take on increasingly complex responsibilities like contract negotiation, release planning, and tour management.

Ultimately, UNIFI Music’s vision is to create a virtual manager capable of guiding an artist’s career toward success.

Unifi’s Sasha in action (click to enlarge).

Unifi’s Sasha in action (click to enlarge).

Music management agencies may not like Sasha, but UNIFI’s vision is unique when compared to typical AI creation and management companies.

While the debate over AI-generated music continues, UNIFI Music is simply exploring the potential of AI in other areas of the industry. By leveraging AI’s capabilities, the company’s vision is to provide artists with personalized guidance and support, leveling the playing field and democratizing access to the tools and resources needed to succeed.

“UNIFI has the potential to revolutionize artist management and empower emerging musicians. We may also catapult fringe scenes and artists to the fore by boosting their industry savvy and experience overnight,” Robinson relayed. “That’s exciting stuff.”

If you’d like to connect with UNIFI Music, please contact La’Shion Robinson directly at l@unifimusic.ai.

Photo Credit: SonoSuite

SonoSuite announces a minority investment from Dinastía to drive strategic growth.

Barcelona-based music tech company SonoSuite announces the addition of a key strategic client as investor, Dinastía Inc, from Colombia. Dinastía says it has a strong industrial interest and a strategic fit with SonoSuite’s core activity; it’s already a ‘valued client’. The partnership is expected to enhance distribution opportunities for all parties and further reinforce their collaborative relationship.

Dinastía is firmly plotted in the urban music space, with an eye towards expanding its presence in the Latin American market and making them partners for SonoSuite. The funds raised from this investment will be used to drive growth initiatives, and Dinastía will hold a minority stake in SonoSuite.

“We are glad to welcome this strategic investor who provides valuable industry insights, as part of our cap table. At the same time, the founders retain a substantial majority of shares and hold control over the company,” said Sebastián Mañana, CEO of SonoSuite.

SonoSuite is a software as a service company that operates a white-label platform that enables indie record labels and music distributors to deliver their catalogs, and manage royalty payouts and reports. Its partners include SoundExchange, Merlin, PPL, IFPI, and Worldwide Independent Network (WIN).

The company joined the ‘Friends of Impala’ initiative in 2023, designed to facilitate collaboration between companies and the independent music sector.

SonoSuite is expanding its business at a key moment, as independent artists are seeing growing market share. The company is competing to provide services within an increasingly competitive field of digital indie distributors, including mainstays like Distrokid and Tunecore.

To that end, Universal Music Group completed its acquisition of European independent music group [PIAS] earlier this month. That acquisition includes [Integral], which will merge with UMG’s Virgin Music Group.

Photo Credit: Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster becomes the first to integrate with Apple Wallet’s new ticketing experience, with LAFC as their first guinea pig.

Ticketmaster has become the first ticketing company to integrate with the new Apple Wallet, which now includes key event information, like a map of the venue and parking details. To kick off the new functionality, Ticketmaster’s first new tickets to take advantage of these new features are the Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) at their home game at BMO Stadium on Saturday, October 19.

Fans on iOS 18.0 or later can add their ticket to Apple Wallet through the Ticketmaster app or LAFC team app. The offering complements existing ticketing tools, such as Ticketmaster Ignite, to facilitate a seamless multi-channel connection between venues, teams, and fans.

Further, fans can interact with the new ticket experience in Apple Wallet on their iPhone to gain easy access to venue details, but there are plenty of other features. Users can find links to purchase merchandise, ticket management features provided by Ticketmaster, local forecasts from Weather, location sharing to help them find their friends, and even recommended playlists from Apple Music.

The Miami HEAT will be next to debut the new ticket experience for their fans, and the experience will be made more widely available starting in 2025.

“With the new, enhanced ticket in Apple Wallet experience, fans are closer to the action from the moment they add their pass to their iPhone,” says Mark Yovich, President at Ticketmaster. “We’re extremely proud to work with Apple to bring this enhanced ticketing experience to fans.”

Ticketmaster worked closely with Apple on this new ticketing experience for iOS 18 users. Apple Wallet in iOS 18 also features Tap to Cash — a new way to transfer money instantly by holding two iPhones together. The update enables users to authenticate Apple Pay transactions to Windows PCs through an iPhone.

Photo Credit: .MUSIC

The .MUSIC registry has announced the launch of the top-level .music domain name and its verified MusicID.

Members of the music industry can now register .music domains on a first come, first serve basis. The domain is designed to provide verified digital identities for music artists, creators, songwriters, industry professionals, organizations, and brands.

The registration and use of .music domains is exclusive to verified members of the global music community. The move comes as the industry is concerned about non-consensual AI deep fakes, voice cloning, and the unauthorized use of the music community’s intellectual property. In that soup, the .music domain could fans easily identify music or content created by real authenticated humans.

“For the first time in music history, the global music industry will be able to register their unique .music name and verified digital music identity,” Constantine Roussos, CEO of .MUSIC told Digital Music News. “The .music domain and its connected MusicID will provide a trusted, secure, and authentic music-centric internet where the global music community can safely connect, engage, transact, and thrive.”

“The .music launch marks a pivotal moment for the music industry to reclaim control of their digital footprint,” adds Marina Roussou, Executive Director of id.MUSIC, the exclusive music identity provider for .MUSIC. “By offering verified MusicIDs, we are giving the global music community the ability to secure their digital identity, protect their creative works, and ensure that their presence online is authentic and safeguarded from impersonation, fraud, and AI misuse.”

id.MUSIC is the exclusive music identity provider (IDP) for the .MUSIC top-level domain name. It provides verified .music domain names and global MusicID that protects music name, image, likeness, and voice intellectual property rights. The company says that by mandating identity verification for .music registrants, all .music digital music identities are protected from impersonators, fraudsters, AI clones, bots, and cyber squatters.

The .MUSIC initiative is supported by a substantial international music coalition. According to an estimate from .MUSIC, this coalition represents over 95% of global music consumed.

The list of supporting orgs includes the RIAA, CISAC, IFPI, NMPA, Recording Academy, A2IM, International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP), Independent Music Publishers International Forum (IMPF), International Federation of Musicians (FIM), International Music Council (IMC), International Music Managers Forum (IMMF), and Music Managers Forum–US (MMF-US).

“As a domain for the global music community, available only to verified artists, companies and organizations active in the music ecosystem, .MUSIC will be a valuable tool, strengthening trust and assuring authenticity,” adds Victoria Oakley, the CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). “IFPI have been longstanding supporters of this initiative.”

“The .MUSIC domain is launching at a vital time for the music industry. The NMPA applauds this ambitious initiative and the protections it offers creators who face evolving threats to authenticity from AI,” says David Israelite, President and CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) representing American music publishers and their songwriting partners.

“The Recording Academy is thrilled to continue our support of the .MUSIC initiative, especially during a time of such immense evolution of our industry where it has never been more important to protect human creativity. From its inception, the project has sought to provide a safe and reliable digital domain for music creators, and it will foster more trust and security for our entire music ecosystem,” says Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy.

“A2IM has supported the .MUSIC initiative from the outset, and we’re thrilled to see it become a reality. This domain fosters trust, connection, and reliability within the global music community. It will create a safe, innovative ecosystem that benefits artists, labels, and music consumers alike, fulfilling our shared vision for a stronger, more unified industry,” says Dr. Richard James Burgess, the President and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) representing the collective voice of independent music.

Photo Credit: Alexander Shatov

Apple’s iOS 18.1 will bring sharing functionality with TikTok to Apple Music, enabling users to share their favorite songs on the platform.

Apple’s much anticipated iOS 18.1 update promises the first set of “Apple Intelligence” tools to devices that support it. But the update also brings with it some other fun features, like the ability for Apple Music users to share their favorite songs on TikTok with ease.

Developers got their first taste of iOS 18.1 beta 6 this week, which adds a new button for sharing songs to TikTok. Tapping the button opens the TikTok app with a card showing the song you’ve shared. From there, you can post it as a photo, a video, or send it to someone in a private message. Posting the card as a video or photo automatically enables TikTok to link the song to your post. The video options let you record a video of yourself with the song playing in the background.

It’s notably similar to the integration added to Instagram Stories in 2020 with iOS 13, except Instagram doesn’t link the shared song to the story. Interestingly, while you can easily share song lyrics to Instagram, there’s still no way to do so on TikTok, even with this new functionality.

Regardless, this should be a welcome feature for TikTok users on iOS. iPhone and iPad users running the latest beta of iOS 18.1 can try it out now by clicking to share a song in the Apple Music app.

As iOS 18.1 will be the first version to feature Apple Intelligence, this will include features like Writing Tools, notification summarization, and Clean Up in Apple’s Photos app. AI features such as a “more advanced” Siri, Genmoji, and Image Playground will come later in the year with a future update.

The bulk of Apple Intelligence features will require an iPhone 15 Pro or later, but the iOS 18.1 update will be available to all devices compatible with iOS 18.

Audoo has announced it has appointed several senior music industry executives as board advisors for the music technology company revolutionizing public performance rights.

The following was created in collaboration with Audoo, a company DMN is proud to be partnered with.

Steve Clark (COO of Round Hill Music), Isabel Garvey (COO of Warner Music UK), and Sean O’Malley (CEO & Founder of Regard Music) will help support the growth of Audoo. The music recognition technology and data company is working to improve the collection of public performance royalties with greater accuracy thanks to its unique hardware.

Clark, Garvey, and O’Malley join existing Audoo advisors—Cliff Fluet (Partner at Lewis Silkin) and Alistair Macdonald (former CEO of Syneos Health). These board advisors will further specialist guidance and counsel to the company board, which includes fellow music industry executives Chris Herbert and Nigel Elderton.

“The depth and understanding of music rights and royalties is at a critical juncture in the history of the music industry,” says Steve Clark. “As networks of music rights-holders evolve, we must ensure that systems do too, to meet the ever-changing rhythm and flow of this part of the business. The ethos of the Audoo offering is vitally worthy and the execution of its solutions to meet the growing needs of parties in the data chain has been impressive to observe. I look forward to supporting its progress in improving the landscape of tracking and distribution of royalties.”

“Having helped select Audoo for the Abbey Road Red program years ago during its start-up phase, it’s gratifying to see its elevated and thriving status now,” adds Isabel Garvey. “Audoo’s disruptive technology solution which delivers transparent and efficient royalty tracking and distribution has benefits across the whole value chain in music. I am excited to support Audoo on its growth journey as it transforms the current landscape in this space.”

“The innovation and practicality of Audoo solutions are positively disruptive,” comments Sean O’Malley. “These services will aid the refinement of our source data and change the landscape in this sector of our industry. Working with fellow musicians and music fan Ryan Edwards and his team, this worthy mission originates from the heart and I’m proud to advise and aid its next-level success.”

“The combined experience of Steve, Isabel, and Sean brings a powerful wealth of knowledge across labels, publishers, rights-holders, and creators,” adds Ryan Edwards, Founder & CEO of Audoo. “To have such revered executives join our existing world-class group of board members and advisors demonstrates the strength of belief in the business as we continue to build and refine the Audoo offering.”

Earlier this year, Audoo announced a partnership with PMY Group to integrate its hardware, the Audoo Audio Meter, into tech stacks at major events, enhancing public performance reporting in these settings. The growing tech company also announced a partnership with the Irish Music Rights Organization (IMRO) to amplify public performance royalty distributions in Ireland. Venues can request an audio meter for their premises from Audoo—free of charge.

Photo Credit: Jack Antonoff by Katie Fricker / CC by 2.0

Jack Antonoff announces a plan to open free public recording studios at LGBTQ+ youth shelters across the country.

Jack Antonoff has announced his plan to open free public recording studios across the country, beginning with LGBTQ+ youth shelters. In a statement posted to his social channels, the Bleachers frontman said he intends to “spend a large part of the next chapter of my life bringing these spaces to people who wouldn’t have access to them.” He will work with the Ally Coalition to bring studios to LGBTQ+ youth shelters.

While he still hasn’t disclosed (or perhaps yet figured out) all the details, Antonoff says his plan would involve a “network of engineers that we will fund who will train people at these sites.” He hopes to “build these spaces, pay for maintenance and engineering, and let the centers give out the time slots for people to use them.” From there, he wants to “start expanding into cities,” once he’s laid the initial groundwork.

Although Antonoff commented on how “wonderful” the advancements have been in home-recording technology, he insists the studio experience is different. “Working with analog gear and creating sounds that are impossible to recreate is powerful,” he said.

“Knowing you are in a space for a limited amount of time and pushing yourself to the edge is vital. A studio is a rare space and you function different because of it. […] I’ve loved home recording, but my life changed in a recording studio. There is magic there.”

“I dream of the studio being a place that anyone can access, not just those with the money to do so,” he explained. “It should be a place that all people can experience and find out if they are meant to be in there.”

Antonoff also asked that anyone interested in helping his initiative get in contact with him via email. “Anyone who believes in this and has resources that can help should please reach out as we get this off the ground.”

He concluded his concept is “strictly for those who cannot afford studio time in those spaces,” so he believes the project would better serve major commercial recording studios as well.

Bleachers has a show coming up at Madison Square Garden this Friday, October 4. Meanwhile, Antonoff produced the new Bartees Strange album, announced earlier today (October 2).

Tune.fm ($50 million), FanCircles ($1.44 million), and Miris ($26 million) are among several companies scoring funding rounds in the past 30 days (Pictured: DMN Pro Music Industry Funding Tracker)

Between mid-August and mid-September 2024 alone, music industry companies secured over $360 million in funding. But where’s the money going?

Answering that question (and gaining a better sense of the industry’s direction in the process) is easier than ever thanks to DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker. The one-stop database compiles key information about every funding round from in and around today’s quick-moving music space.

And despite ongoing belt-tightening in the core industry, concerns about the broader economy, and the year-over-year funding decreases we’ve charted for multiple months in 2024, funding rounds are hardly ceasing.

All told, between August 16th and September 16th, our Music Industry Funding Tracker registered $361.92 million in raises — up 258.34% from the same period in 2023. (If not for TickPick’s quarter-billion-dollar August growth investment, 2024’s funding would have risen by 10.81% YoY.) While the increase itself is significant in light of funding trends, the companies that scored the capital are insightful as well.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction: The Industry’s Strong Funding Showing Between Mid-August and Mid-September 2024

II. Music Industry Funding’s Overlap — and Differences — Between Mid-August and Mid-September 2023 and 2024

Graph: Funding Takeaways At a Glance — Mid-August – Mid-September 2023 v. 2024

Graph: Music Industry Funding Rounds by Type, Mid-August – Mid-September 2023 v. 2024

III. Will Investors’ Superfan Bet Pay Off? A Look At the Companies Working to Capitalize on the Latest Industry Focus 

IV. A Funding Dry Spell for Artificial Intelligence in Music? AI’s Slow Mid-August – Mid-September and Other Interesting Takeaways from a Month of Industry Raises

Please note: this report is for DMN Pro subscribers only. Please do not share without prior authorization. Thank you!

Total US paid on-demand music subscriptions, mid-year 2014 through mid-year 2024 (source: RIAA data shared with Digital Music News)

For 2024’s opening half, the RIAA reported that U.S. on-demand streaming subscriptions had grown by a modest 2.7% year over year (YoY) as subscription revenue increased by 5.1%. Amid discussions about the slowdown, what does historical data tell us?

Beginning with total paid accounts, the figures disclosed in RIAA half- and full-year reports during the past decade underscore the breakneck growth at hand. Simultaneously, based on the seldom-compiled numbers, the case can be made that growth has been tapering for some time.

Report Table of Contents

I. Introduction: A Recap of the U.S. Recorded Music Market’s Streaming Deceleration

II. U.S. Subscription Streaming’s Significant Growth — and More Recent Slowdown — Between 2014 and 2024

Graph: U.S. On-Demand Streaming Subscriptions, 2014-2024

Graph: U.S. On-Demand Streaming Subscription Accounts Growth, 2014-2024

III. The Domestic Streaming Market and a Growing Focus on Revenue: How Much Are Fans Willing to Pay for Music?

Graph: U.S. On-Demand Streaming Subscription Revenue, 2014-2024

Graph: U.S. On-Demand Streaming’s Subscription Revenue Growth, 2014-2024

IV. The Freemium Wildcard — Will Ad-Supported Listening Drive the Next Phase of Streaming Growth?

Graph: U.S. On-Demand Ad-Supported Streaming Revenue At Mid-Year, 2014-2024

Graph: U.S. On-Demand Streaming’s Ad-Supported Revenue Growth, 2014-2024

The following report is for DMN Pro subscribers only. Please do not redistribute without prior permission — thank you!

US-Based Mechanical Per-Stream Payouts Ranked: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, More

New! A ranking of per-stream mechanical licensing royalty payments by DSP platform, including the ‘big four’ streamers Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music.

Important Notes on Data Sources and Methodology.

[1] Subscriber data based on April, 2024 mechanical licensing statements from the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), as shared with Digital Music News by a major music publishing conglomerate. These figures involved DMN Pro multipliers on various base subscription accounts to estimate the actual number of active subscribers. These multipliers are: 1x for Individual Plans; 2x for Duo Plans (Spotify is currently the only DSP offering a two-person plan);  3x for Family Plans, and 0.5x for Student plans. Note that the MLC applies a 1.75x multiplier to all group plans, and a 0.5x multiplier for Student plans.

[2] Total figures for April, 2024, as calculated by the MLC.

[3] Per-stream calculations involve a simple calculation: the Total Payable Mechanical Royalty Pool for each platform for the month divided by the total tracked streams (‘plays’) on the same platform for that month.

[4] YouTube Music figures are for February, 2024, but will be updated shortly to match other April, 2024 figures.

Due what Spotify is describing as a technology discontinuation, users on iOS are now unable to adjust volume on connected devices with physical buttons. Photo Credit: Samuel Regan-Asante

Following disputes involving App Store fees, update approvals, and much else, Spotify and Apple are now clashing over a change affecting volume control features.

A number of far-from-thrilled Spotify users just recently started taking to social media to criticize the apparent change, which is specifically impacting Spotify Connect on iOS devices.

That’s the relatively little-discussed official name for the listening option through which one can remotely control (including via smartphones) audio playback on devices such as smart speakers, gaming consoles, and smart TVs.

But at least for iPhone users, this control isn’t quite as robust as it was in the not-so-distant past. According to Spotify, which has already updated its main Connect guide to address the development, that’s because “Apple has discontinued the technology” in question.

While Apple didn’t appear to have commented publicly on the change at the time of writing, both Spotify itself and ticked-off listeners have pointed to a new inability to control connected devices’ volume with the actual iPhone volume buttons.

Unable to use those physical buttons to adjust volume at once, listeners must now give the same buttons a tap to bring up an in-app slider, Spotify described in more words. When outside the app and listening in the background, the volume buttons will activate an adjustment notification that, with another (on-screen) tap, then activates the slider.

The streaming giant also disclosed that it will “work with them [Apple] on a solution.” However, it doesn’t look as though a near-term resolution is in the cards. Per TechCrunch, beginning on September 3rd, Spotify will direct all its iOS users to begin utilizing the mentioned in-app slider.

Predictably, given the marathon nature of the underlying dispute – and Spotify’s historical success in addressing the Apple Music developer’s alleged anticompetitive practices in the EU – Spotify has floated the possibility that Apple might be violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA) with the volume change.

Without diving too far into that multifaceted law, Apple (along with Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance, and others) was in September of 2023 deemed a “gatekeeper” under the DMA. That classification gave said gatekeepers a limited amount of time to comply with the entirety of the measure; on cue, the European Commission in June of 2024 formally accused Apple of DMA violations.

Meanwhile, there are different EU regulatory headaches yet for Apple, which continues to appeal the currently $1.99 billion penalty it was ordered to pay in March for allegedly “abusing its dominant position on the market for the distribution of music streaming apps.”

This massive fine stemmed from an investigation set in motion by a 2019 competition complaint from Spotify. Consequently, while it perhaps doesn’t need saying, the Stockholm-based streaming platform and CEO Daniel Ek possess considerable sway in this department.

Moving forward, it’ll be worth closely monitoring the volume control dust-up in terms of its potential to spur further EU investigations and to set the stage for an even wider Apple-Spotify rift.

Photo Credit: Toa Heftiba

Sonos rushed out an app update ahead of its headphones product launch in May—severely breaking functionality for older devices. Sonos die-hards are up in arms about the changes, citing the borked app as a reason not to trust Sonos’ products ever again. Now the company says it’s putting the roadmap in Trello for all to see.

In April 2024, Sonos released what it called the “most extensive app redesign ever” for iOS and Android. The app reorganized everything into a single Home screen that is supposed to be faster and more customizable. But long-time users quickly noticed connection troubles and removed features were at the heart of the update. Perhaps the most egregious is the lack of accessibility features in the new version—limiting how visually impaired users can interact with the new app.

Podcast host Jonathan Mosen posted about his trouble with the new Sonos app on his blog and in an episode of “Living Blindfully”—his podcast about life with a visual impairment. “For starters, [the new update] is really, really clunky and inefficient. There are three or four swipes to get between each individual speaker, five depending on if it has a battery or not.”

“There’s a button in the main nav bar that says system, but that button goes nowhere from what I can determine. Swiping through lists is basically impossible. They don’t properly scroll, and will randomly just jump you to the top of the screen. You can’t explore the screen by dragging your finger around it—at all. This simply does not work. It acts as if the screen is blank. There’s no way to navigate to different subsections of the main screen, because of this and just because it’s just all in one huge linear sweep.”

Sonos’ response to user-feedback has been to say it “takes courage” to redesign an app, “knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future,” Sonos spokesperson Chris Welch told The Verge about the app update. But taking steps backward in usability is the last thing long-time customers want to hear. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence acknowledged that in an email sent to customers in July 2024.

“We developed the new app to create a better experience, with the ability to drive more innovation in the future, and with the knowledge that it would get better over time,” Spence begins the email. “However, since launch we have found a number of issues. Fixing these issues has delayed our prior plan to quickly incorporate missing features and functionality.”

Spence shared a brief timeline with users for when they can expect the old features to return to the ‘new’ Sonos app.

July & August

• Improving the app stability when adding new products
• Implementing ‘Music Library’ configuration, browse, search, and play

August & September

• Improving Volume responsiveness
• User interface improvements “based on customer feedback”
• Improving overall system stability and error handling

September

• Improving the reliability of Alarm consistency

September & October

• Restoring edit mode for Playlists & Queue
• Improving functionality in ‘Settings’

Sonos has now released a public Trello board to collect that customer feedback for its user interface improvements. You can see what the company considers a priority for its fixes, things that are coming soon, new additions, resolved problems, and a general feedback section. But despite this dedicated commitment to making it right, the botched app rollout has left some people feeling disgusted.

“I’ll never understand how they approved the new app,” reads one comment. “Did a human being actually use it and say ‘oh yeah it’s great lets roll it out’? I actually sat down and tracked every single Sonos purchase I have made over the years. It’s $11,000. It’s insane. No more. Plenty of competitors elsewhere. They can take their roadmap and shove it where the WiFi don’t shine.”

Photo generated by AI.

AI is full of theoretical hype — but Area4Labs is applying AI to construct real solutions for mapping live shows.

The following comes from Area4Labs, the company behind Hearby and a fast-emerging player in concert discovery. 

Area4Labs has been diving headfirst into AI and sifting through lots of theoretically exciting possibilities. But we’re also crafting concrete solutions attracting serious partnerships and changing the game for show listings and concert discovery. In this article, I’ll give you a breakdown of what we’re building right now via our discovery platform and app, Hearby.

About three years ago, we started applying AI to our favorite challenges—identifying bands playing at events and creating a general-purpose event website scraper. In retrospect, these problems were enticing, but they were too ambitious for the tech available at that time, plus we had a lot of learning to do first.

Now that we have some mileage, we’re working on expanded versions of these same capabilities: how to find events (acquisition) and how to know what they really are (classification). Finding events incorporates an LLM, and classification uses a statistical model. We are also revisiting our neural net-based band identification project.

All over the world, organizations are sorting hype from reality and devising ways to avoid or fill shortfalls to get real work done now.

GPT-4 is deeply impressive, but getting it to do something fact-oriented and useful is a challenge. For example, asking it for “best venues in Boston” will get you a partial and out-of-date list. It’s a beautiful list, but it also includes closed venues and doesn’t tell you what’s on tonight. To add a human touch, it will throw over to the actual human-curated ‘Best of Lists,’ which is okay as a compilation of knowledge but nothing you couldn’t have found by Googling.

Hardware to train these models on is prohibitively expensive, leaving this in the hands of mega-corporations like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, and Amazon, not to mention the difficulty of acquiring clean, ethically procured data.

However, those closed doors are now opening due to the (relatively) recent advancement of incremental training. As a result, general-purpose models can be created by a large organization, then acquired by smaller groups and fine-tuned to meet special interests or needs.

I’ll be sharing some observations as we grapple with these problems, starting with:

• It’s not as great as you think
• You need clean data to learn on (and lots of it)
• The chasm of supervised vs. unsupervised
• The bizarre job you’ve never heard of: ‘Prompt Engineer’

First observation: It’s not as great as you think

AI can both perform impressive tasks and fail at simple things a 5-year-old (or a dog) could manage. Frustratingly, sometimes ChatGPT gives a coherent, useful answer, but sometimes it just gives back junk or simply refuses to answer.

It seems simple to hook in a database of facts, but this crosses two paradigms: computer-based information and human-like language. So, the challenge, as it is with humans, is to describe a database or task in human language. This task is exactly as clumsy as it sounds, as we all know from trying to explain something complex to another person. 

Second observation: You need clean data to learn on (and lots of it).

Models need to learn on already cleaned and categorized data, which is hard to find and trust. This data needs to be ethically obtained. In the volume that is needed—millions of data points—this is prohibitive. LLMs provide a pre-trained model that can be adapted and/or expanded, which lightens this load but doesn’t remove it.

Thirdly: supervised vs. unsupervised

Supervised learning vs. unsupervised simply means whether the model is trained on categorized data (i.e. the correct answer is known) or left to figure it out more randomly.

Finding events is relatively simple—we start by looking where we know we will find music events, such as ticketing APIs, scraping venue websites, or understanding the weekly or monthly schedules of small venues.

But what about events that are promoted alone and without context? A café poster or a Google result? An API event that is not categorized? Is it music, theater, sports, or family?

If you see “AC/DC versus Led Zeppelin,” you know exactly what that is — what kind of music, and probably what kind of venue, crowd, and vibe it involves. And if you see “Arsenal versus Manchester United,” you also know precisely what that is. But pity the AI that must figure that out.

The challenge is to gather enough events and bands and fully understand them, including what kinds of events are happening and what type of band is playing what—then use this information to train a Machine Learning model. Complicating matters is that music scenes vary by city and even genre. In the UK, tribute bands are popular; in the US, less so. A model trained on New York City will probably be less accurate in connecting and categorizing bands in Manchester.

Lastly, the bizarre job you’ve never heard of: ‘Prompt Engineer’

As a lifelong programmer, the need to translate ideas, concepts, and requirements into natural human language to get the best results out of an LLM like ChatGPT is most unnatural to me. I’m used to doing this in various computer languages, but the opposite is odd. I recently saw a fascinating piece of AI art, which I can only describe as a beautiful feathered orange flying chicken woman. Only in 2024 do these words even go together.

But how was this art created? An AI artist designed a prompt specifying exactly the type and tone of image wanted. The resulting art is captivating and unique.

For more software-like needs, this is the Prompt Engineer job. They come up with a ChatGPT prompt that specifies not only what is wanted but also how to get it and what tone to use. With LLMs, just like the genie in the bottle, you will (probably) get what you ask for, and it may surprise you.

As a first step in this area, we started with text-to-SQL, meaning we needed to phrase a computer problem as a human language directive so that a computer could “understand” it in its language-oriented structures. For our usage, a prompt might be:

“Find events by looking in the Event database table by location, then looking up the venue in the Venue table. Pay special attention to the city and be sure not to confuse city with band name as they are sometimes the same. It is very important to return the soonest results first. Return the results in the style of a friendly guidebook.”

If you think about it, formulating a problem in human language so that a computer can understand it is a pretty ironic job. We are currently working on ways to optimize our database for this chat usage, including looking at OpenSearch and vector databases.

As we explore this more and sometimes hit frustrating walls with this incredible technology, I try to remember that we’re in a growth phase, and growth is not linear. Learning is messy, but the end results will be worth it.

I am delighted by the possibilities that AI has as a useful tool to improve our lives and optimistic that we can use it to elevate grassroots music.

Photo Credit: Hayden Bower

AllTrack, a performing rights organization (PRO) built in the digital era to serve the independent music sector, has been accepted as a rights management entity by CISAC.

The International Confederation of Societies of Authors & Composers (CISAC) has integrated AllTrack with its exclusive data exchange tools. AllTrack has joined ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC as fellow U.S.-based PROs affiliated with CISAC. Common Information System tools has made it seamless for collection societies around the world to connect directly with AllTrack.

AllTrack attributes much of its significant growth since being founded in 2017 to its ongoing commitment to fairness, good governance, and transparency. It’s affiliation with CISAC only further underscores these values. CISAC was founded in 1926 as a non-governmental, not-for-profit organization headquartered in France. With over 227 member societies in more than 116 countries, CISAC works to protect the rights of creators, safeguards the key values of collective management, and strengthens and develops the international network of collecting rights societies through the exchange of data between countries.

“AllTrack is proud to be accepted as a rights management entity by CISAC, an organization that has set the gold standard for collection societies representing creators across the globe,” says AllTrack Founder & CEO Hayden Bower. “At AllTrack, we believe we have a pivotal role to play in ensuring that independent music creators and publishers are compensated fairly when their music is used and are committed to working with our fellow CISAC-affiliated colleagues to continue to advance this mission.”

AllTrack was founded in 2017 as the only full-service global PRO established specifically to serve the independent music sector. AllTrack collects performance royalties on behalf of its creator and publisher members by licensing their music to millions of businesses around the world.

AllTrack’s members are compensated as their songs are played by streaming services, on TV, cable, and radio, by local businesses, and as their songs are performed live. An AllTrack blanket license is a simple and affordable solution for businesses to obtain the permission they require to play all of the music represented by AllTrack, both ethically and in compliance with copyright law.

Through the ongoing development and use of cutting-edge technology that eliminates inefficiencies, AllTrack is committed to providing a near-effortless copyright compliance and administration solution for businesses and copyright holders alike, resulting in a fair and hyper-efficient marketplace for all. AllTrack is headquartered in Los Angeles, with additional offices in Nashville and New York.

Warner Music Group consolidated quarterly streaming revenues (source: WMG 10-Q disclosures)

For Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, calendar Q2 2024 was a tale of two earnings reports — and streaming forecasts. While UMG acknowledged a subscription-growth slowdown, the Robert Kyncl-led WMG emphasized “strong” improvements. But are things as rosy as they seem for today’s third-largest major label?

DMN Pro crunched the numbers to answer that question, which is particularly pressing given the industry-wide implications of a growth slowdown at UMG.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction: The Stark Contrast Between the Calendar Q2 Earnings Reports of Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group

II. Warner Music Group’s Streaming Performance by the Numbers: Reported Revenue from Q4 2021 Through Q2 2024

Graph: Warner Music Group Consolidated Recorded and Publishing Streaming Revenue by Quarter

III. Warner Music Group’s Recorded and Publishing Streaming Showing At a Glance: Are Things Truly Looking Up?

Graph: WMG Recorded Music Subscription Revenue

Graph: WMG Publishing Streaming Revenue, Subscription and Ad-Supported

IV. The Bottom Line: WMG’s Streaming Growth Strength and Where the Space Is Heading

Please do not redistribute this report without permission. Thank you for subscribing to DMN Pro!

Photo Credit: Stefany Andrade

Music tech company MakeMusic has announced it is sun setting its music notation software Finale, Finale PrintMusic, and Finale Notepad.

First released under its Coda Music Technologies brand more than 35 years ago, Finale offered a groundbreaking and user-centered approach to creating music notation. For over four decades, MakeMusic’s engineers and product teams have crafted the software that quickly became the gold standard for music notation.

“Four decades is a very long time in the software industry,” says Greg Dell’Era, President of MakeMusic & Alfred Music. “Technology stacks change, Mac and Windows operating systems evolve, and Finale’s millions of lines of code add up. This has made the delivery of incremental value for our customers exponentially harder over time.”

“Today, Finale is no longer the future of the notation industry—a reality after 35 years, and I want to be candid about this. Instead of releasing new versions of Finale that would offer only marginal value to our users, we’ve made the decision to end its development. I am convinced Steinberg’s Dorico is the best home for our loyal Finale users, and is the bright future of the music notation industry.”

Starting today, there will be no further updates to Finale or any of its associated tools (PrintMusic, Songwriter, Notepad). It is no longer possible to purchase or upgrade Finale in the MakeMusic eStore. Finale will continue to work on devices where it is currently installed, barring any OS changes that render it broken.

After one year on August 2025, MakeMusic says the following changes will go into effect:

• It will be impossible to authorize Finale on any new devices
• You cannot reauthorize Finale on a new installation
• Support for Finale v27 or other versions will no longer be available

MakeMusic is encouraging its loyal Finale users to consider upgrading to Dorico Pro with a limited-time crossgrade discount on the software. The discount will enable Finale users to purchase Dorico Pro for $149 instead of the retail price of $579. The offer is available immediately and for a limited time, though the MakeMusic Store.

“We look forward to welcoming many Finale users into the Dorico user community,” adds Clyde Sendke, Managing Director, Steinberg. “Although we know it is difficult to leave behind a trusted tool, we are confident that they will soon come to reply on the powerful, efficient workflows provided by Dorico Pro. Our team will be by their side every step to provide help and support.”

Photo Credit: Kunlun Tech/Melodio

On August 14th, 2024, Kunlun Tech announced Melodio, “the world’s first AI-powered music streaming platform.” Free to use and promising unlimited custom-listening options, the service immediately ignited conversations about the materials on which it was trained — and its potential to disrupt well-entrenched players like Spotify down the line.

Perhaps the most pressing question that remains unanswered: is Melodio being trained on copyrighted music, including works from major labels like WMG, UMG, and Sony Music? In an attempt to answer that question, DMN Pro took a look under the Melodio hood.

Report Table of Contents

I. Introduction: The Questions Raised by Kunlun Tech’s Melodio Announcement

II. Kunlun Tech’s AI Music Products: What We Know About Melodio (And Its Training Data)

Graph: Kunlun Tech’s Organizational Structure and Products At a Glance

III. Has Melodio Been Trained on Copyrighted Music? What the Available Evidence Tells Us

IV. AI Music Streaming in the Long Run: Are We Witnessing the Beginning of a Fundamental Industry Shift?

Please do not redistribute this report without permission. Thank you!

Photo by Luke Heiber on Unsplash

As one of the earliest adopters of immersive music mixes, Alex Solano is the mixing engineer behind Dolby Atmos projects for labels like Atlantic Records, Photo Finish, NinjaTune, EMPIRE, Position Music, and many others. Solano’s company, AlexProMix, assists labels and distributors in leveraging revenue generation opportunities provided by Dolby Atmos formats.

The following recaps an interview of Alex Solano — Immersive Audio Specialist — with Music Business Insider. Solano’s AlexProMix is a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.

When Solano entered the Dolby Atmos world in 2021, the tech was expensive and complicated. Now, even though the tech has shifted and immersive audio is accessible to anyone with headphones, Solano points out that there’s still a financial cost and investment to ‘doing Dolby right.’

Speaking about the future of audio mixing, Alex Solano revealed the learning curve that led him to become a certified Dolby Atmos engineer. Solano also highlighted the incredible opportunities in store for striving immersive mixes’ engineers.

Because Solano was one of the early adopters of immersive audio in 2021, he faced challenges finding learning resources for Dolby Atmos. By creating educational videos on YouTube, Solano believes he’s paving an easier path for aspiring Dolby mixing engineers.

According to Solano, to do Atmos ‘right’ and experience it correctly requires a room with specialized equipment. “That’s what differentiates a bedroom producer working on headphones, making beats, and publishing their music from somebody experienced in the field and mixing in an immersive room of 12 speakers.”

It was Dolby Atmos that connected Solano to major labels to be certified. “I’m on the approved Dolby Atmos mixer list, which means that any producer, artist, or engineer who wants to convert their music into Atmos can do so. I’m already certified with Universal Music and Warner Music.”

Solano insists that artists and producers need to be aware of the fast-paced segue into Dolby Atmos. “When you look at the history of recorded technology and the switch from mono to stereo, engineers who could only work in mono became irrelevant.”

With a clientele that includes labels, publishers, and distributors, Solano says he’s experiencing a drive toward spatial audio. “My clients pitch their song to Apple, and Apple says, where’s the spatial audio? They’re like, what spatial audio? Apple says go find an engineer.”

“Based on feedback from professionals, music industry events, and the majors, all music formats supported in Dolby Atmos will soon be the standard for converting new music and back catalog music. Otherwise, music streaming services will not support it.”

“To get editorial playlisting, you must have that Dolby Atmos Master,” says Solano.

But what about AI-converted Dolby Atmos mixes? Solano reveals Apple is only accepting immersive mixes if they have the original stamps from a mixing engineer. “From a creative standpoint, no artist that invested in making their music sound great in stereo wants to run it through an AI algorithm. They want it to be remastered correctly.”

Now that Dolby Atmos technology is available to music mixers, creators, and producers via Apple, Tidal, and Amazon, Solano believes it unlocks a world of opportunities to reimagine music arrangements and mix music in a way that immerses the audience and the listener.

With widespread adaptation of gaming, immersive audio has ended up becoming a normal, everyday-experience for this generation. Solano believes artists can ‘future-proof ‘their music by adopting immersive formats.

Solano believes that once the music industry catches up and adapts to immersive audio, the tech will be ‘very common.’ “The fact that you can experience spatial audio on earbuds makes it accessible to anyone.”

Too Lost-distributed artist Ollie Joseph (Photo: Ollie Joseph)

The music industry isn’t running out of music distributors anytime soon, though Too Lost is differentiating with some interesting innovations —including a deep list of partnerships that include BMG, Easy Song, beatBread, and Delta.

Music distribution is a seriously competitive sub-industry, though a relatively fresh face, Too Lost, is making waves by rethinking the traditional distribution model.

Already, the company is getting good marks from the musician community for solving issues like streaming fraud and enabling artist financing. However, the company is also pushing an expansive partnership strategy designed to offer artists and labels more than just a path to digital service providers (DSPs).

The result: Too Lost is suddenly pushing distribution far beyond the traditional task of shuttling music from A-to-B. With an array of non-traditional partners, the company aims to provide broader opportunities for its artists, with the end game of reaching new and diverse audiences. Just recently, Too Lost partnered with Digital Music News to further expand their growing footprint.

Several notable artists are already on board with Too Lost’s refreshed concept, including Chief Keef, ILoveMakonnen, YG, Xavier Wulf, Lil Mabu, Josiah and the Bonnevilles, Ali Gatie, Lucifer, Joseph Tilly, and Pink Sweats. Also in the Too Lost mix are up-and-coming artists like Ollie Joseph (pictured), who recently crossed 600,000 followers on Spotify.

At this stage of the game, artists can quickly move their music onto Spotify or Apple Music with more than a dozen high-quality distribution platforms.

Against that competitive landscape, Too Lost decided to expand the role of traditional distribution. Too Lost excels in DSP distribution (they are a Spotify Preferred Provider, for example), though they also offer competencies in critical areas like cover licensing, financing, and publishing administration.

Too Lost told Digital Music News they decided against building those competencies from scratch for several reasons. For starters, the ‘wheel has already been invented’ in many critical music industry core competencies, so why not simply partner with the best to rapidly expand the possibilities for its artists?

In the case of cover licensing, that meant brokering a deal with Easy Song. In artist financing, a beatBread deal was inked to enable flexible financing options, enabling Too Lost artists to fund their projects without traditional record deals. For publishing administration, a BMG partnership was brokered. And the list goes on.

“Our partnerships with industry leaders like BMG and beatBread are a testament to Too Lost’s commitment to providing artists with comprehensive tools and resources,” said Damien Ritter, Director of Marketing at Too Lost. “By leveraging these collaborations, we empower artists to focus on their creativity while we handle the complexities of rights management, financing, and content protection.”

Here’s a quick rundown of some of Too Lost’s top partnerships.

Too Lost told us that this is a rapidly-growing list, though these are currently some of their most impactful and essential partnerships.

Easy Song: Simplifies the complex world of song licensing, making it easier for artists to cover songs legally.

Pex: Provides robust content identification and monetization tools.

Cosynd: Offers enhanced IP protections, ensuring artists’ intellectual property is well-guarded.

BMG: Assists with publishing administration and royalty management, freeing artists from the intricacies of managing their publishing rights.

Beatbread: Facilitates flexible financing options, enabling artists to fund their projects without the need for traditional record deals.

Manifest (formerly Nerve): Ensures direct payouts to artists, streamlining the financial aspects of music distribution.

Beyond its core partner alliances, Too Lost is also focusing on non-traditional distribution endpoints.

For most artists, uploading an album to Spotify is akin to pouring water into the Pacific Ocean. Current estimates peg the number of songs uploaded to DSPs at more than 120,000 a day, and AI only worsens the situation.

So, how do you get noticed in such an intimidatingly vast sea of ‘content’? Too Lost says they hear this problem repeatedly, though not every platform is so crowded. Accordingly, the company has partnered with companies like Delta and Peloton to help artists break through.

Delta doesn’t offer an on-demand platform with millions of songs, though they do promote selected songs to captive fliers. The noise floor is suddenly overcome if an artist is chosen for one of the airline’s in-flight entertainment systems.

The same is true for Peloton, whose high-energy workout playlists can make fans out of fitness enthusiasts if the vibe is right. Too Lost also brokered a partnership with Sonu Stream, co-founded by Tokimonsta, which aims to better compensate artists for their streams. These non-traditional partnerships aim to expand the reach of Too Lost’s artists, ensuring that their music can be discovered in unexpected places.

After a relatively short period in the industry, Too Lost has received positive marks from musicians.

Among the biggest fans is Ari Herstand, a respected musician and industry expert who recently proclaimed that “Too Lost is one of the best-kept secrets in the music distribution world.”

“Their commitment to artist autonomy and unmatched administrative support sets them apart from the competition,” Ari gushed.

Too Lost’s top artists are also tapping into the platform’s network of partnerships, with tracks getting financed and popping up on non-traditional playlists. “At Too Lost, we are incredibly proud of the innovative solutions and partnerships we’ve developed to support our artists,” says Ritter. “Our mission is to empower musicians by providing them with the tools and resources they need to succeed in today’s dynamic music industry.”

“At Too Lost, we firmly believe that you can make a serious creative dent and find your fans — but you need the right partners to do it.”

Photo Credit: Udio

As the major label battle with generative AI music start-ups Suno and Udio heat up, the latter has released a new model with audio-to-audio remixing. Here’s the latest.

Lawsuits filed by Sony Music, Warner Music, and Universal Music claim that Udio and Suno have unlawfully copied the label’s recordings to train their music generation models. The lawsuit alleges that these services could be used to “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [major labels] are built.”

Following that legal action, both Udio and Suno hired Latham & Watkins to represent them in the matter. Latham & Watkins have been key players in defending companies using artificial intelligence, including their work in defending Anthropic against infringement allegations filed by UMG and Concord Music. Latham & Watkins also represents OpenAI in several of its lawsuits—including one filed by comedian Sarah Silverman.

Udio’s latest model, v1.5 contains a host of improvements over its previous model, including improved audio quality, key control, and improved global language results. New features include a dedicated creation page, stem downloads, audio-to-audio remixing, and shareable lyric videos.

Stem downloads allow users to split fully-mixed Udio tracks into four separate stems—vocals, bass, drums, and everything else. Advanced users can take those stems and remix them in external tools, or only use a single element of an Udio song gen in their music.

The audio-to-audio remix feature allows users to upload their own tracks and remix them. Music can be re-imagined in a number of new styles, flowing freely from one to the next. The uploads feature may attract major label attention again—as the feature could be used to create remixes of copyrighted works without permission.

Finally, key control allows users to guide the creation of music by suggesting keys like C minor or Ab major. Udio says the feature may not be perfect, but will lend creators more harmonic control over their creations.

Mechanical licensing royalty payments from major streaming music platforms, US, April 2024 (Source: DMN Pro data)

In March, Spotify officially flipped the switch on its controversial bundling strategy. One reporting month later, the streaming giant is showing few signs of letting up.

Four months have passed since Spotify officially reclassified the vast majority of its U.S. subscriptions as bundles — thereby unlocking massive royalty savings. But just how big of an impact is the sweeping change having on stateside mechanicals?

In this DMN Pro Weekly Report, we revisit this pressing question — and find that Spotify isn’t letting up on its bundling pivot. Here’s what the latest data shows.

Report Table of Contents

I. Introduction: A Recap of Spotify’s Bundling Embrace and Related Pushback

II. Post-Bundling Spotify’s U.S. Mechanicals At a Glance – How Much Is the Platform Paying Now That 98% of Accounts Are Bundled?

Graph 1: Spotify U.S. Accounts (Not Subscribers) by Plan, March v. April 2024

Graph 2: Spotify U.S. Mechanical Royalties Payable by Plan, Pre-Bundling February, Post-Bundling March and April 2024

III. How Do Spotify’s U.S. Mechanicals Stack Up Against Those of Apple Music and Amazon Music?

Graph 3: Total April 2024 U.S. Mechanicals Payable by Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Pandora, Tidal, and SoundCloud — Paid Plans Only

IV. The Bottom Line: What Spotify’s Aggressive Bundling Means for the Industry Amid Continued Streaming Growth

Please do not redistribute this report without permission — thank you.

Photo Credit: Mohamed Hassan

From infringement complaints against generative AI developers to unpaid royalty actions targeting streaming platforms, the music industry certainly isn’t lacking high-stakes litigation. Here are ten particularly important lawsuits with major implications to watch moving forward.

How many active lawsuits, conflicts, settlements, negotiations, and legal stare-downs are happening in the music industry — right now? At last count, Digital Music News is tracking more than 140 different filed lawsuits in the United States alone, all in various stages of litigation. And that doesn’t include the drumbeat of cease-and-desists, government proceedings, and private discussions and upcoming suits.

(Stay tuned for our complete litigation tracker from DMN Pro.)

As any attorney can attest, most of those suits aren’t groundbreaking or precedent-setting. Here’s a familiar litigatory tune: Artist A uses a sample from Artist B without permission, demands go nowhere, and litigation ensues. But some of the cases roiling the industry will have serious implications and impacts for years and decades to come. That includes battles in arenas like AI, statutory royalties, government regulation, and even national security.

Plucking from the latter, here are ten lawsuits with the potential to reshape the music industry ahead — for better or for worse, depending on where you’re seated.

Report Table of Contents

Introduction: An Overview of the Music Industry’s Litigation Landscape.

I. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) v. Suno and Udio

II. The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) v. X (Formerly Twitter)

III. Epidemic Sound v. Meta

IV. TikTok and ByteDance v. Department of Justice

V. Department of Justice v. Live Nation

VI. Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) v. Spotify

VII. MLC v. Pandora

VIII. SoundExchange v. SiriusXM

IX. UMG Recordings et al. v. Internet Archive et al.

X. RIAA v. Verizon

XI. Bonus: Cleveland Constantine Browne et al. v. Rodney Sebastian Clark Donalds et al.

Please do not redistribute this report without permission. Thank you!

Photo Credit: Ugglemamma

Spotify is now taking serious issue with Digital Music News’ assertion that ‘Basic’ is getting buried from would-be subscribers.

Spotify has every incentive to bury its newly launched, unbundled ‘Basic’ subscription tier. But does that mean Spotify is intentionally hiding ‘Basic’ from would-be subscribers to steer them into its more lucrative bundled options?

Given the economics, it’s hard to imagine Spotify not wanting to bury its Basic tier. Not only are bundled plans more expensive, but they’re also substantially cheaper when it comes to royalty payments (and for proof of that, look no further than the hard data outlined in this DMN Pro report).

That may explain why Spotify has shifted more than 98% of its plans into bundles, according to our just-released Bundling Barometer.

Over the past few weeks, Digital Music News found overwhelming evidence that Basic is being buried. In response, Spotify has begged to differ and demanded corrections. We’re unsure if Spotify is helping or hurting their case here, but let’s air this out.

Perhaps the biggest tell is that new subscribers cannot subscribe to a Basic, unbundled plan. Despite the quibbling over details, Spotify didn’t dispute this critical fact.

“Basic plans are only available to existing subscribers,” a Spotify representative confirmed to Digital Music News.

Not only are newer subscribers forced into bundled tiers, but they are also unlikely to downgrade into a Basic, un-bundled tier after initially subscribing. The main reason? Few will know a simpler and cheaper plan exists — unless they accidentally stumble upon this option.

These ‘stumble upon’ moments would include revisiting the subscriber options page while logged in, clicking through other subscription options in the ‘Account’ page, or hearing about the cheaper option from a friend, forum, or other source. In all likelihood, only a tiny percentage of new subscribers will encounter the Basic option after subscribing to a bundled tier, and of those, only a subset will take action.

Spotify did note that both Family and Duo bundled Premium plans can be downgraded into Basic options, something we said didn’t exist.

The company also stated that it email-blasted all of its subscribers about the expanded option, though we somehow didn’t receive that email (and it didn’t land in our spam folder).

(On this last point, we did receive a note titled ‘Information about your plan’ on June 21st, which low-key informed us of a $1 price hike. This actually had some information about the Basic downgrade.)

None of that adds up to ‘shouting from the rooftops,’ though Spotify is trying to make the case that Basic isn’t being buried. But why are they doing this?

And why launch Basic at all if the real money is in bundling?

There may be a few motivations at work here. Spotify has been lambasted by music publishers over its sneaky, royalty-cutting shift into bundling. They have also been sued (by the Mechanical Licensing Collective) and referred to federal regulators (specifically the FTC) over this shift.

The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) is also stirring trouble for Spotify: NMPA chief David Israelite is already pushing for changes on Capitol Hill following Spotify’s shift while dangling the threat of litigation against the platform for separate infringement claims (specifically related to Spotify’s lyrics, music videos, and podcasting diversifications).

But what if Spotify can simply point to a bundle-free Basic option? After all, if subscribers have a choice between bundled and unbundled, then Spotify is merely serving the marketplace instead of abusively steering people towards royalty-lowering bundles.

Meanwhile, there are rumblings that the NMPA is preparing to litigate against the aforementioned infringement allegations. But that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.

Stay tuned.

Photo Credit: Created by Humans

Created by Humans aims to help creators license their works to AI models, receiving a $5 million injection to launch.

In a sea of genAI companies facing litigation from the creative sector over the training of AI models on creators’ works without proper authorization, Created by Humans wants to be the lifeboat.

Billing itself as “the AI rights licensing platform for creators,” Created by Humans is starting its battle with books — encouraging authors and publishers to sign up and claim their works to decide whether to opt in or out of licensing options with AI firms.

The startup has raised $5 million in funding, with plans to expand beyond books to become a platform “where creators of videos, images, music, and even medical data can sell licensing rights for AI training.”

The brainchild of Trip Adler, former CEO of document sharing service turned digital book and news subscription company Scribd, Created by Humans has received funding from “a bevy of prominent investors” led by Craft Ventures founder David Sacks, and Mike Maples, co-founder of Floodgate Fund. Other investors include LAUNCH Fund’s Jason Calacanis, Slow Ventures’ Sam Lessin and Garry Tan, and best-selling author Walter Isaacson. Isaacson also joined the company as a creative advisor and inaugural author whose work can be licensed by AI companies.

The exact details of Created by Humans’ licensing agreement are still evolving. Authors can submit their work for AI companies to purchase specific elements with predefined usage rights. “We’re trying to broker a three-way deal between authors, publishers, and the AI industry,” says Adler. “It’s complicated, but we’re making great progress.”

Currently, the company is proposing a philosophy called the Fourth Law — a set of guiding principles for the way AI companies can use and train models on human-created content. Inspired by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics, Fourth Law states that humans should have the right to consent and control how AI uses their works, and should be appropriately compensated and credited for that work.

“We want [Fourth Law] to be the new standard for how deals work between AI companies and content owners,” said Adler. “Authors and publishers can contribute their content and manage all their content according to the Fourth Law.”

Using Walter Isaacson as an example, Adler explains how creators can choose the rights they want to license from their works. “He can pick training rights, reference rights; he can license the style of his voice, his characters, and pick which AI company he wants to license to,” Adler says. “Then Walter will get a dashboard that shows where his books are being used and how he’s making money.”

Created by Humans is looking to establish a framework for a host of licensing rights, including converting a book into a movie script, and translating it into other languages in real-time. Adler says he envisions “AI revenue” as the next major force in the book industry, eventually eclipsing ebooks and audiobooks.

So far, so good: despite a string of recent price increases, Spotify’s subscriber count keeps going up (Source: Spotify disclosures)

Spotify has once again raised prices in the U.S. as well as the U.K., where individuals must now pay $11.99 and £11.99 per month, respectively, for ad-free listening. That will create a handsome windfall for Spotify and well-positioned partners like major labels. Music publishers won’t fare so well, however, despite the top-line increases.

How will Spotify’s latest price-hikes impact subscriber growth and revenue in the long term – including for music publishers? Many are asking that question in the wake of the pricing changes, which were announced in April for U.K. subscribers and unveiled in June for U.S. customers. Among other things, the bumps have elevated the prices of Spotify’s various tiers past those of its foremost competitors, including Apple Music.

Now, it’s time for some number-crunching. A quick assessment shows that Spotify is virtually guaranteed to generate an extra $500 million annually in revenue in the United States alone, with the U.K. potentially adding several hundred thousand more into the pot. But given marked shifts into bundled packages, how will music publishers, songwriters, and compositional IP owners fare?

Here’s a look at the trickle-down — or lack thereof.

Report Table of Contents

I. Introduction: The Effects of Spotify’s U.S. (and U.K.) Price Increases

 Graph: Spotify and Apple Music Pricing As of June 2024 — U.S. and U.K. Non-Bundled Offerings

II. Spotify Price Increases, Subscriber Growth, and Churn — Will Heightened Monthly Charges Dissuade Customers?

Graph: Spotify Subscribers by Quarter, Q1 2017 — Q1 2024

III. Spotify’s Subscriber Outlook Post-Price Increases — A Data-Focused Forecast

Graph: Spotify Q2 Net Subscriber Growth As a Percentage of Paid Users, 2017 — 2024 

IV. Spotify Price Increases and Post-Bundling Mechanicals: Will Publishers and Songwriters Benefit?

V. The Bottom Line: Who’s Really Set to Benefit from Spotify’s Price Increases?

Please note: unauthorized redistribution of this report is prohibited. 

Image adapted from an illustration by CDD20.

Last week, the music industry learned that Spotify accounts for 42% of all mechanical royalty payments in the US — following Digital Music News’ exhaustive breakdown of one of the most recent reporting months. That market-leading percentage is now likely to take a severe hit — but how low will Spotify go?

Spotify’s ‘bundle-pocalyse’ is nigh, with nervous IP owners pouring through early royalty statements to assess the damage.

One source to Digital Music News noted that the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) has already distributed preliminary reports for March, the month that marks the beginning of Spotify’s massive royalty cuts to music publishers, songwriters, and other compositional IP owners. Apparently, the data isn’t fully baked yet, though rights owners are getting a preview of the carnage.

Spotify’s sudden and massive shift towards bundled offerings—a move that dramatically lowers its publishing payment obligations—is officially barreling forward. DMN understands that MLC’s March statements are now in the final stages of being tallied and distributed.

A working estimate of a $150 million annual drop has been widely bandied about, though let’s see how that ballpark figure holds up. DMN is currently working to obtain preliminary data, with some serious number-crunching on tap for the remainder of this week.

Depending on the exact nature of the drop, it’s possible that Apple Music could surpass Spotify in total mechanical royalty payments. Apple Music is now slightly ahead of Spotify in the all-important individual subscription tally in the US, according to eyebrow-raising market share data exclusively revealed by DMN.

And what about the MLC’s legal battle with Spotify?

The MLC, which oversees mechanical licensing payouts in the US, is now locked in a legal battle with Spotify over allegations that the platform’s bundling reclassifications are illegal. But barring an injunction or sudden shift in that litigation, Spotify will now be doling out its discounted royalties to less-than-thrilled publishers and songwriters.

As first reported by DMN, a federal judge recently granted Spotify’s request to delay its response to the MLC litigation. Judge Analisa Torres signed off on the request, thereby moving the deadline for Spotify’s response from June 10th to July 19th.

Which means Spotify’s attorneys cleverly bought some time while the royalty-chopping carnage gets underway. And the clock is ticking: based on the $150-million-per-year estimate, that comes out to $12.5 million monthly – or north of $20 million between now and the new response deadline.

Meanwhile, there’s little indication that Spotify execs are losing sleep over this.

Music publishers and songwriters are understandably agitated, though Spotify appears less concerned about the pushback. Instead, Wall Street investors seem to be the more critical audience, with profitability representing the critical benchmark for the stock’s performance.

Speaking of Spotify’s SPOT stock, two top Spotify insiders have already cashed out a cool $90 million in Spotify shares this month alone, which ironically represents nearly two-thirds of the estimated annual royalty drop for music publishers. The cash-outs suggest that insiders are hardly fretting about publishing haircuts, with cost-cutting measures like the reduction in Spotify royalty payments handsomely boosting SPOT shares and resulting payouts.

Separately, appeals to ethical considerations seem to be blowing in the wind.

Just recently, a former Spotify executive criticized the company for its move, though Spotify itself seems unswayed. Former Global Head of Publisher Licensing Adam Parness called Spotify’s decision to switch its subscriptions to bundles “misguided and unfair,” describing it as an “ill-informed attempt to deprive songwriters and music publishers of their rightfully earned U.S. mechanical royalties.”

Parness said he framed his critique not as a way to disparage Spotify but as an appeal to the company to honor the spirit of its agreements. A strong appeal indeed, though perhaps that messsage-in-a-bottle didn’t quite make it to Daniel Ek’s superyacht.

Meanwhile, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) has been pushing for a hybridized direct and compulsory licensing framework for mechanical royalty payments in the United States.

However, we’ve heard little movement on this front, though Israelite is a notorious 3D chess master when it comes to pulling levers on Capitol Hill.

The NMPA has called on Congress to allow direct negotiations between music publishers and streaming platforms alongside existing statutory mechanical rate payouts. This shift would maximize negotiating power and payouts for publishers but faces significant legislative hurdles.

More as this develops.

Estimated Mechanicals Paid, U.S., February 2024 (Last Month Prior to Spotify Bundling Discounts) (Source: Digital Music News/DMN Pro)

How much are streaming music platforms actually paying for publishing in the U.S.? Amid an intensifying battle over Spotify’s bundling and a corresponding mechanicals decline, here’s a comprehensive look at actual payout data preceding Spotify’s big move.

DMN Pro’s latest trove of exclusive data — sourced from actual mechanical payments receipts and documents — gives us the closest look yet at how Spotify’s mechanical royalty payments compare to other streaming platforms in the United States. That is, for the last month before Spotify switches a large percentage of its accounts to bundled status.

Report Table of Contents

I. Introduction: A Recap of Spotify’s Bundling Reclassifications and the Forecasted Mechanical Royalties Decrease

II. Streaming Services’ Compositional Royalty Calculations: A Methodology Overview

Graph 1: Total U.S. Paid Accounts (Not Users) by Music Streaming Service and Plan, February 2024

Graph 2: Leading Streaming Services’ Public Performance Payments by Individual Plan, February 2024

III. U.S. Mechanicals At a Glance — A Synopsis of How On-Demand Streaming Royalties Are Calculated Under Phonorecords IV

IV. Mechanical Royalties by the Numbers: What Leading DSPs Are Paying in the U.S.

Graph 3: 2024 U.S. Mechanical and Performance Payments, Ad-Supported and Paid, by Service

Graph 4: Estimated Payable Mechanicals, U.S., February 2024 (Last Month Prior to Spotify Bundling Discounts)

V. How Will the Battle Over Spotify’s U.S. Mechanicals Play Out? A Summary of Near- and Long-Term Possibilities

Please note: unauthorized redistribution of this report is prohibited — thank you.

Songbox is changing how musicians handle and protect their music, and now the Scottish start-up is ready to disrupt the industry further.

The following comes from Songbox, a company DMN is partnered with.

A new platform changing how musicians handle and protect their music is making a huge splash with its state-of-the-art, secure audio-sharing capabilities. Based in Glasgow, Scotland, and co-founded by Multi-Platinum Recording Artist & Grammy Award Winner Bryan Adams, Songbox launched without external funding and already has thousands of global users.

The company is looking to partner with other businesses and collaborate on developing exciting new features. Songbox allows musicians and other audio content creators to store and securely share their music with anyone they choose, whether co-creators, collaborators, industry figures, or media outlets—the possibilities are endless.

The platform lets the content creator know that the audio has been received and whether it has been listened to, even confirming which tracks have been played and for how long. And it’s all done with built-in privacy and security.

The team behind Songbox is proud of its relationship with its users. They regularly incorporate their feedback in developing new features and have built the platform on this spirit of collaboration.

Songbox founder Michael Coll says: “From the moment we launched Songbox, we’ve quickly adapted the platform as needed and improved its capabilities. We’re in a place now where we know we can offer users many features that other platforms cannot. The insights of our users have been invaluable to us, and we love to hear from them.”

The idea for Songbox came from songwriter and musician Michael’s experiences when trying to get attention for his work. He also saw this from the other side of the fence when he later worked as a web developer at a major music industry player.

He adds: “Like many other bands, we’d send out demos and never even know whether they had been received, let alone listened to. In my job, I’d see people’s hard work in the form of hundreds of demos arrive every week, only to pile up in a corner without ever being opened. We called it ‘the corner where dreams went to die.’ I knew there had to be a better way.” His idea led to the creation of Songbox.

It’s designed for anyone who works with audio files, with various pricing options, including a free package for those who want to try without commitment.

Michael and co-founder Ciaran O’Toole want to grow Songbox and collaborate with other businesses. “We’re full of ideas, and we’d love to hear from other businesses about how we can further develop Songbox features,” adds Michael.

More information can be found at the Songbox official website.

Photo Credit: Ircam Amplify CEO Nathalie Birocheau

Ircam Amplify has launched a software solution designed to empower record labels, publishers, rights holders, and management organizations to identify AI-generated tracks.

We know there’s plenty of AI-generated content out there, though it’s not always easy to identify. Now, Ircam Amplify, a provider of technology solutions to analyze, process, and edit audio, has announced the launch of its AI-Generated Detector tool to enable record labels and publishers, as well as rights holders and distributors, to accurately identify AI-generated music.

The timing for the launch couldn’t be more apt, as hundreds of thousands of new music files created by AI tools are uploaded daily to music streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. According to Ircam, in 2023 alone, an estimated 170 million tracks were created using AI, posing a risk to human creativity, infringing copyright, and diluting compensation for creators.

The AI-Generated Detector features an AI-tagging system that allows stakeholders to easily identify artificially generated music files in a completely automated manner. The technology can screen up to 5,000 tracks in less than a minute, with an impressive accuracy rate of 98.5% in identification.

“Generative AI is reshaping the creative landscape, especially in the music sector, where everyone can create music using AI tools. This is, quite rightfully, a concern for all those who are involved in the creation, distribution, and revenue-sharing of music,” says Nathalie Birocheau, CEO of Ircam Amplify.

“Our AI-Generated Detector is a game changer,” she continues. “It will provide transparency where there was opacity. It will give a strategic advantage to the users of the detector and help them make informed decisions about music content. This is a much needed development for the market and we are thrilled to be at the forefront of this new technological development.”

“Leveraging our Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and audio AI expertise, we trained a dedicated algorithm through a deep neural network on both humanly created and publicly available AI-generated music datasets,” adds Romain Simiand, Chief Product Officer at Ircam Amplify. “The detection training proved so specific to each model that we were able to state which one has been used to generate the tracks.”

The new launch follows the successful launch last year of Ircam Amplify’s flagship product, Stereo to Spatial, which offers a seamless and affordable “spatialization” process for record labels and digital distributors.

The AI-Generated Detector will be available to demo during the Music Biz Conference, held in Nashville from May 13-16. This will be the first opportunity for delegates to see the product in action.

Photo Credit: BoliviaInteligente

In a sudden turn of events, Universal Music Group and TikTok have announced a new licensing agreement, signifying a hopeful step forward in the fraught relationship between the music industry giant and the global social media platform. The development closely follows the passage of the ‘TikTok ban bill’ in the United States.

The agreement, announced early this morning from Los Angeles, marks the end of a contentious period while potentially setting the stage for a deal benefiting artists, songwriters, labels, and the billion-plus user community of TikTok. Terms of the updated agreement were not disclosed, though UMG executives had cited problems with overall compensation and AI licensing.

The UMG-TikTok deal comes after a months-long standoff, which also included threats of legal action from UMG against TikTok for alleged DMCA violations, as Digital Music News first reported last month. UMG first began removing its entire catalog from the platform at the end of February, causing howls of protests from TikTokers and artists alike.

Also worth noting: TikTok’s agreement comes just days after President Biden signed into a law that would effectively ban the platform in the United States. TikTok and its parent, ByteDance, have vowed to challenge the law in court, though the serious development may have prompted TikTok to play nicer with the music industry.

Separately, sources to DMN pointed to tens of thousands of DMCA takedown notices being issued by UMG, part of a larger, systemic issue of unauthorized content proliferating on the platform. Those concerns may have been alleviated by the terms of the freshly-inked deal, though more details are undoubtedly forthcoming.

For now, there’s a new era of cooperation between the companies, with UMG artists back on the platform.

Sir Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, expressed enthusiasm about the renewed partnership, emphasizing the value of music, the importance of human artistry, and the welfare of the creative community. Grainge highlighted the potential for collaborative innovation in fan engagement and the advancement of social music monetization, promising a brighter future for UMG’s artists and songwriters.

“This new chapter in our relationship with TikTok focuses on the value of music, the primacy of human artistry and the welfare of the creative community,” Grainge stated. “We look forward to collaborating with the team at TikTok to further the interests of our artists and songwriters and drive innovation in fan engagement while advancing social music monetization.”

Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, echoed these sentiments, reaffirming the platform’s commitment to driving value, discovery, and promotion for UMG’s roster of artists and songwriters. Chew emphasized the integral role of music in the TikTok ecosystem and the company’s dedication to deepening the ability of artists to grow, connect, and engage with the community.

“Music is an integral part of the TikTok ecosystem and we are pleased to have found a path forward with Universal Music Group,” Chew said. “We are committed to working together to drive value, discovery and promotion for all of UMG’s amazing artists and songwriters, and deepen their ability to grow, connect and engage with the TikTok community.”

The agreement promises including improved remuneration for UMG’s songwriters and artists, new promotional and engagement opportunities, and protections regarding the use of generative AI in music creation.

That includes artist-centric tools like “Add to Music App,” which TikTok expanded during the standoff. That helps to shuttle fans towards DSPs like Spotify when songs or artists are trending. But more importantly for TikTok, the UMG deal reopens a critical license for TikTok Music, a new-fangled Spotify competitor that is still in its infancy.

Additionally, DMN understands that UMG will be given enhanced data and analytics on artist activity. Separately, TikTok has also been busy integrating ticketing capabilities, part of a continued expansion into music that could further benefit UMG-inked artists.

Both organizations have also pledged to work together on ensuring AI development in the music industry respects human artistry and contributes positively to the economics that flow to artists and songwriters. Efforts will be made to remove unauthorized AI-generated music from TikTok, alongside introducing measures to improve artist and songwriter attribution.

Ole Obermann, TikTok’s Global Head of Music Business Development, and Michael Nash, Chief Digital Officer and EVP of Universal Music Group, both expressed optimism about the potential of this partnership to foster deeper connections between artists, creators, and fans, and to promote an environment in which artists and songwriters prosper.

“We are delighted to welcome UMG and UMPG back to TikTok,” Obermann said. “We look forward to working together to forge a path that creates deeper connections between artists, creators, and fans. In particular, we will work together to make sure that AI tools are developed responsibly to enable a new era of musical creativity and fan engagement while protecting human creativity.”

“Developing transformational partnerships with important innovators is critical to UMG’s commitment to promoting an environment in which artists and songwriters prosper,” Nash relayed.

“We’re gratified to renew our relationship with TikTok predicated on significant advancements in commercial and marketing opportunities as well as protections provided to our industry-leading roster on their platform. With the constantly evolving ways that social interaction, fan engagement, music discovery and artistic ingenuity converge on TikTok, we see great potential in our collaboration going forward.”

More as this develops.

The Young Americans are listening: Edison’s ‘Share-of-Ear’ data for Q2 2023–Q1 2024

The data is both encouraging or depressing — and the landscape is more complicated than ever. But where does radio stand in 2024, given a quick-evolving streaming landscape and an increasingly digital music space? Six experts tackled the complex question and discussed the medium’s path forward during our latest DMN Pro event. Here are some of the takeaways.

If radio is dead, listeners haven’t quite noticed. Nielsen, in its Radio Today report, pointed out that AM/FM reaches 91% of American adults each month. Edison Research found in its Share of Ear survey that radio reaches 53% of Americans between the ages of 13 and 34 on a daily basis, with 56% of that group listening only in the car.

But how engaged are all those listeners — and how are they listening? More importantly, where will this space find itself in five or ten years, especially considering the breakneck gains in on-demand streaming and rapid in-car dashboard upgrades?

In this DMN Pro Weekly Report, we take a closer look at the data while interviewing leading experts in the space. Everyone — from will.i.am to SoundExchange CEO Michael Huppe — had unexpected insights into this space. And nobody was willing to write this format off.

Report Table of Contents

I. Where Radio Stands in 2024: The Surprising Stats

• • • Graph: Young Adult Listeners and Terrestrial Radio In the U.S.
    • Graph: Median Age by Platform

II. What’s Right With This Format: A Look at Radio’s Competitive Strengths

III. How Exactly Is Radio Coming Up Short in 2024? A Look At the Medium’s Missed Opportunities

IV. The Bottom Line: How Can Radio Evolve to Remain Popular and Reestablish Its Relevance?

Please note: redistribution of this report is prohibited.

Joel T. Jordan, the founder of Synchtank and co-founder of earthprogram has been chosen as a finalist for the ‘Leading Light Award’ at the Music Biz’s Bizzy Awards program.

The following was developed in collaboration with earthprogram, a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.

Speaking to Digital Music News about the nomination that highlights ‘executives working to make the music industry a better place to work,’ Jordan said, “This is an incredible honor to be nominated — let alone be a finalist with these other leaders in the industry who are focusing on real-life solutions to support artists, students, and executives alike.”

For this award specifically, Joel has donated his time and technology directly to University students to help them develop their knowledge of IP management and licensing processes. He is also committed to guiding them through the nuances of the various technologies they must master to succeed in the music business.

The Bizzy Awards is an industry-focused rework of Music Biz’s past awards. It celebrates companies and executives making great strides in advancing commerce within the entertainment sector.

The Leading Light award is presented to executives who demonstrate support for their employees through internal programs focused on enhancing mental health and wellness and maintaining a work-life balance. Jordan is among the top four contenders advancing to the final round of voting.

David Herlihy, Dean of Music at Northeastern University, nominated Joel for the Music Biz Leading Light Award because of his commitment to ‘making sure that creatives get paid, combined with his enthusiastic mentorship of the next generation of music industry professionals.’

Herlihy further applauded Synchtank, calling it a ‘best-of-its-breed digital asset and rights management system,’ adding, “Joel has graciously provided free access to Synchtank for Good Dog Licensing — Northeastern University’s student-run music sync service. Throughout this process, Joel has also selflessly given his time to guide students through integrating Synchtank into the Good Dog Service.”

Originally born out of the earthprogram office, Synchtank is a B2B provider of software tools for music rights holders and rights users (such as platforms, broadcasters, and production companies). The company aims to simplify complex rights, data, and licensing challenges for media companies.

earthprogram’s guiding mantra is to ‘give honest advice to everyone.’ The company provides private distribution, marketing, strategy, business development, and music publishing services to artists, labels, startups, and investors.

What Is Radio in 2024? The question is surprisingly complex — so we assembled a panel for recognized radio experts to help pick it apart.

The result is a comprehensive discussion on the state of radio in all of its iterations, including broadcast, streaming, satellite, DSP-generated stations, AI DJs, car dashboards, and more. In this DMN Pro exclusive discussion, we pick apart radio’s reach, the format’s surprising competitive advantages, and where non-interactive listening is heading next.

We also had a few good laughs, with will.i.am keeping things light. Jump in!

DMN Pro subscribers only.

Panelists:

• Joel Denver | Founder, All Access Music Group
• RJ Curtis | Executive Director, CRB
• Mike Huppe | CEO of SoundExchange
• Rahul Sabnis | EVP, Chief Creative Officer, iHeartMedia
• will.i.am | Producer, Award-winning Artist, Technophile Futurist, Founder & CEO of FYI
• Lee Abrams | Commander, Lee Abrams MediaVisions
• Moderator – Paul Resnikoff | Publisher, Digital Music News

A TikTok ban edges closer to reality following Senate and Presidential approvals (photo: Ian Hutchinson).

The music industry is pondering what happens next as the ink dries on President Biden’s authorization of a Congressional bill that includes a TikTok divestiture order. DMN Pro subscribers have already parsed through a detailed breakdown of the potential winners and losers following a TikTok ban, thanks to our exhaustive white paper on the topic.

For those just tuning in: Congress recently passed — and President Biden just signed — a bill that mandates that Chinese parent company ByteDance must sell TikTok within roughly nine months. If that doesn’t happen, the app faces a ban in the United States.

The legislation springs from national security concerns regarding Chinese access to American user data and the potential for propaganda dissemination. Teenage TikTokers aren’t sold on the seriousness of the threat, though their votes only have so much impact here — literally.

The law’s implementation will likely be highly complicated. As the New York Times neatly sums up: “Now the law faces court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers, and Beijing’s hostility.”

Almost immediately, TikTok will challenge the sale mandate in court, arguing it violates the company’s and its users’ First Amendment rights. Finding a qualified buyer with sufficient funds and government approval also poses challenges, as does the technical difficulty of separating TikTok’s technology from its Chinese parent company.

Furthermore, China’s role is a significant factor. Chinese government officials have opposed a forced sale of TikTok or a resulting TikTok ban. It’s possible China may enact export restrictions that block the sale of core technology like TikTok’s recommendation algorithm or retaliate against American companies as a result of such a sale.

Overall, the coming months (or even years) promise a turbulent period as this sale mandate unfolds. Court battles, the search for a qualified buyer, and potential Chinese interference will heavily influence the ultimate fate of TikTok in the United States.

However, after legal challenges and buyer options are exhausted, TikTok could disappear from the US-based app landscape.

A TikTok ban would be great news for competitors like Meta, YouTube, and Snap, who are expected to receive traffic onslaughts. But the development will prove more complicated for the various sub-sectors of the music industry.

In our latest white paper, DMN Pro takes an exhaustive look at the post-TikTok music industry’s winners and losers, from the major labels to DSPs and artists to UGC competitors. In each case, we also analyze the potential impact over various time horizons — with potentially significant industry changes materializing over the longer term.

DMN Pro subscribers can access the report here and start the ‘what’s next’ strategic planning. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can become a DMN Pro member here.

Here’s a peek at what’s inside.

REPORT TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Post-TikTok Music Landscape Could Give Rise to Unprecedented Changes – With Implications for Fans, Artists, and Companies Alike

Record Labels: Majors and Indies Stand to Lose in Several Areas (and Win in Others) With TikTok’s Ban

• • • • Graph: A Breakdown of Global Recorded Music Revenue from UGC and Ancillary Licensing Sources
      • Graph: 2023 Global Recorded Music Revenue by Segment

Publishers: Short-Term Losses, Particularly for Smaller Indies, Could Make Way for Long-Term Improvements

Songwriters: A Possible Licensing Revenue Upside Won’t Offset Immediate Discovery Setbacks, Especially for DIY Professionals

Artists: Post-TikTok, Artists At All Career Stages Will Suffer Varied Near-Term Professional Consequences

• • • • Graph: Selected Artists’ Social Media Followers, YouTube Subscribers, and Spotify Monthly Listeners
        Superstar and Legendary Artists
      • Mid-Level Artists With Substantial Followings
      • Developing and Emerging Artists
      • Pre-Traction Artists
      • Graph: A 2023 Breakdown of Emerging Artists by Home Country

Competing UGC Platforms: Reels, Shorts, and Others Will Be the Clear Winners

Overall Licensing Revenue: Ancillary Setbacks Aside, TikTok’s Ban Will Have a Minimal Licensing Revenue Impact

• • • • Graph: Universal Music’s Estimated TikTok Revenue Versus Permanent Downloads Revenue, 2020 – 2023

Non-Label Sync Platforms: The Post-TikTok Industry May Look Different for Sync Platforms and Music Libraries

The Fans: More Than a Letdown for Fans, TikTok’s Ban Will Dramatically Affect Music Discovery

DSPs: What Does a TikTok Ban Mean for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music?

Promoters and Venues: The TikTok Ban’s Significance for Live Music

Report Summary: The Post-TikTok Music Landscape’s Many Changes

By the Dates: A Timeline of TikTok Regulatory Scrutiny, December 2022 – April 2024

One-Sheet Infographic: The Post-TikTok Winners & Losers

Soundtrack Loops’ diverse portfolio of assets provides the foundation to enhance AI’s capabilities — with a focus on creativity with ethical AI.

On the forefront of recent discussions surrounding fair training practices for AI companies, Soundtrack Loops — with its diverse portfolio of assets — aims to ‘kickstart a shift into more widespread ethical AI training practices.’ Moreover, the company’s founders believe their catalog ‘presents an enormous opportunity for AI generation of incidental music.’

As music IP owners continue to clash with AI behemoths over what constitutes fair use, Soundtrack Loops’ latest expansion — specifically with its OneStop Audio Library for AI training — aims to remove copyright conflict from the picture entirely. The company believes that in the face of rampant litigation and raging copyright wars, its latest release is simply the right path for both developers and rights holders.

According to cofounders Matthew Yost and Jason Donnelly (aka DJ Puzzle), Soundtrack Loops’ expansion will generate new creative possibilities for AI. Yost explains, “AI imitates and mimics, and is incapable of evolving new genres and synths. That’s where the Soundtrack Loops OneStop Audio Library steps in.”

“For AI developers, seeking ways to source content ethically brings a lot more benefits to the table than plundering through endless amounts of copyrighted materials,” says Yost. Just recently, Soundtrack Loops partnered with DMN to expand its ethical AI footprint.

Speaking about the benefits of tapping into Soundtrack Loops’ AI library, Donnelly believes that a focus on ethics as a standard for AI model development and training will ensure AI output doesn’t cause copyright disputes.

“The thousands and thousands of samples and loops in Soundtrack Loops packs are unique because they are created by us, or purchased by us from others as a work for hire. This is very common practice. We hire producers to create original works, then we buy them outright,” Donnelly explains.

This transparency of training material is what the A2IM, RIAA, and related music organizations are pushing for: a system that mandates remuneration to the sources of AI training material.

Donnelly further clarified that Soundtrack Loops offers different tiers for broader licensing options beyond AI, but a ‘core focus is now on ethical AI licensing.’

Yost believes ethical licensing considerations while training sophisticated AI models ‘will lend credibility to the AI industry.’ Rather than risk litigation and shutdowns, AI developers might be better off using these platforms.

Only time will tell how copyright conflicts in the courtroom will ultimately shake out, but Yost thinks there’s a monumental benefit in store for AI companies that lead the way by adopting ethical AI training practices. “These developers could potentially score a larger chunk of the market.”

“Using protected and controlled compositions for training could have an exponentially positive impact on AI companies’ brand and image — and serve as a unique competitive advantage,” he says, adding, “It also allows developers to be on track to comply when the new regulations and bodies of law emerge — ones that enforce transparency of data and remuneration of artists.”

And Donnelly says the company ‘has the assets to pull this off.’ The holistically controlled catalog contains over 80,000 assets accumulated over 20 years, with a multitude of loops and samples, presets, and MIDI files — spanning almost every genre and category of music.

“We practically have almost all genres available and a network of producers to help fill in the gaps if needed. ” says Donnelly.

He further elaborates that licensers can analyze loops on the catalog, access raw samples, or utilize all the individual isolated notes and nuances of instruments for AI training.

AI developers can tap into Soundtrack Loops’ licensing zones for a myriad of use cases — but Yost and Donnelly believe it could be an especially powerful asset for music directors that require bulk generation of ‘incidental’ production music.

“Incidental music is one of the places where AI has a very serious chance of having a huge impact within the next two to five years, because these producers have to churn out tons of music,” explains Donnelly. “The job requires a giant pool of music, which is exactly what Soundtrack Loops offers — a comprehensive library of loops in all genres.”

Donnelly points out that an AI tool backed by Soundtrack Loops for incidental music could fill a gap in the market, be a big time saver for huge productions, and represents an ‘enormous opportunity.’

Then there’s the theoretical downstream catalog of AI-generated works that can result from this initiative, all of which is legal. Donnelly believes that the ‘right AI program’ capable of mixing, matching, and constructing unique music from these different elements, ‘could create a huge library of incidental music.’

“AI companies have to take a step back and evaluate the current ethics of their practices, and make better decisions for training. They should willingly be offering clean, ethical AI.”

Taylor Swift on TikTok: A screengrab on the morning of Thursday, April 11th.

Taylor Swift — a Republic Records/UMG-inked artist — is suddenly back on TikTok despite Universal Music Group’s high-profile removal of its catalog from the platform. So what’s going on?

The Digital Music News bat-phone was ringing off the hook this morning with some unexpected news. Taylor Swift, a marquee Republic Records/UMG artist, is now back on TikTok. No statements are being made, though the development likely resulted from negotiations between the ByteDance-owned TikTok, Swift’s team and/or UMG, with the superstar controlling her recordings and publishing under her broader Universal Music Group partnership.

The timing hardly seems accidental. The reinstatement is happening approximately one week before Swift’s forthcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, which is slated to debut on April 19th. Swift first announced the upcoming album at the Grammys in early February.

Jumping onto the TikTok platform, Swift’s illustrious catalog is now available for short-form video shenanigans — despite Universal Music Group’s high-profile pullout of its massive catalog from the platform over licensing, royalty, and AI-related disagreements.

Tracks like “You Belong With Me,” “Lover,” and “Cardigan,” as well as “Mirrorball,” “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” “Cruel Summer,” “Style (Taylor’s Version),” “Is It Over Now? (Taylor’s Version),” “The Man,” and “ME!” are all available on TikTok and ready for incorporation into short-form videos.

Notably, several tracks appear to be missing. As you might expect, Swifties have been combing through the catalog and spotting missing tracks from albums the artist doesn’t completely control. For years, the artist has been working to re-record many of her earlier releases to secure master recording ownership—at least over the newly recorded versions.

What happens after TikTok gets banned in the U.S.?

In this comprehensive white paper, DMN Pro breaks down the likely winners and losers in the music industry — over the short- and longer terms. The breakdown spans major and indie labels, publishers, songwriters, various artist tiers, and sync platforms. If Congress hits delete on TikTok, here’s where you’ll likely stand.

Until now, Swift has successfully rerecorded all of her albums originally released before 2019, excluding her self-titled debut album from 2006 and her 2017 album, Reputation. Either way, a sizable tranche of Taylor Swift music is now on TikTok — with the viral engines of creativity revving up on the platform.

The marked shift is hardly a sign of solidarity with UMG — not to mention the broader music industry and its artists. Though here we are.

Others are also noting the glaring development. In articles published this (Thursday) morning, both Variety and Rolling Stone have pointed to the return of the Swift catalog to TikTok, though neither report offered specifics on discussions. Both sources point to a sequence of negotiations between Swift and Universal Music Group, including Republic Records, eventually leading to her music’s reinstatement.

The development comes after Universal Music Group’s TikTok standoff enters its tenth week. Digital Music News first reported on the impasse on January 30th, though many observers of the wreckage — including Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl — predicted a ‘swift’ resolution and catalog reinstatement.

Incidentally, Kyncl also reported that Warner Music Group had reached a workable licensing pact with TikTok. Though Sony Music Entertainment CEO Rob Stringer hinted that his major label could trigger a UMG-style pullout if needed. The NMPA, Downtown Music Holdings, and indie consortium Impala have supported the removals. A music industry survey by Digital Music News also found resounding approval of UMG’s position.

Taylor Swift announced her exclusive global recording agreement with Universal Music Group and its marquee Republic Records division in November 2018.

Republic became Swift’s second label following her Big Machine Label Group (BMLG) pact. Importantly, Republic wouldn’t retain ownership or control over Taylor’s master recordings. The deal spanned multiple albums and was also complemented by a separate pact with Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG).

Who owns what?

DMN Pro’s exclusive Music IP Acquisition Tracker covers every IP acquisition deal across masters, publishing, and related assets happening over multiple years. This information simply isn’t available anywhere else — subscribe now to gain access.

Importantly, Swift’s departure agreement with BMLG did not include the ownership of her past masters. However, Taylor has been circumventing those restrictions by re-recording and re-releasing her past albums as ‘Taylor’s Versions.’

Importantly, her new contract with UMG stipulated full ownership of all her future master recordings. That shift towards catalog control opens the door for more independent negotiations with mega-platforms like TikTok.

Meanwhile, TikTok is on the brink of getting banned in the United States.

The push to ban TikTok in the U.S. has escalated, with a new bipartisan bill proposed in the Senate to prohibit the app. This action follows growing concerns over national security and data privacy, citing fears of the Chinese government’s potential access to user data through ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.

Public sentiment reflects these concerns, with recent surveys indicating that many Americans support a ban. President Biden has also signaled his intention to sign a bill that would force a TikTok sale or divestiture. However, the White House and Democrats appear to be calculating the impact among younger voters ahead of the November presidential election.

Against that backdrop, a Democratic U.S. senator suggested extending the deadline for ByteDance to divest its TikTok American operations while pointing to ongoing negotiations and complex legal challenges. The Senator emphasized the importance of addressing the risks associated with the platform’s Chinese ownership rather than rushing the process.

One hot take on the slowdown is that Biden and the Democrats want to appear tough on TikTok heading into the election but stop short of banning the app, given its immense popularity among younger Americans.

Amidst these discussions, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has denounced TikTok, hinting at possible ties to Beijing’s intelligence and propaganda efforts. He suggests the app poses a serious threat, underscoring the stance of many lawmakers calling for stringent action against the social media platform.

Adding to TikTok’s scrutiny, the Federal Trade Commission is reportedly investigating the app for potential children’s privacy law violations, bringing further regulatory pressure. These developments indicate a rising tide of regulatory and political challenges for TikTok in the U.S. as the debate over its operation and ownership continues.

Of course, these are all critical, time-sensitive issues for the music industry, though not top-of-mind concerns for TikTok-loving Swifties.

Global, US, and Spotify paid streaming music subscriber growth, 2019-2023 (data sources: IFPI, RIAA, Spotify)

Wall Street’s positive response to reports of additional Spotify price increases pushed shares to a 52-week high. But what would larger monthly costs mean for the platform, labels, artists, and the wider industry?

On April 3rd, 2024, Bloomberg reported that new Spotify price increases were imminent. While the streaming company itself didn’t immediately announce or confirm plans to roll out more expensive subscription options, anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter indicated that bumps of $1 (for the individual tier) and $2 (for Duo and the family package) would arrive in markets including the U.K. and Australia by the end of this month.

The same reports relayed that price boosts would hit the U.S. sometime later in 2024, with other higher-cost offerings like the Supremium package possibly on the way.

Notwithstanding the lack of a formal confirmation from Spotify, the prospect of heightened prices (and more significant revenue streams) fueled an enthusiastic response on Wall Street. After touching the mentioned 52-week high of roughly $313, SPOT cracked a value not seen since a Joe Rogan Experience-powered rally in early 2021.

Beyond this decidedly bullish market reaction—one of several that have propelled Spotify stock’s price into the stratosphere since 2020—there’s been relatively little discussion about what the increases mean for the company’s revenue and especially the industry.

Accordingly, here’s a closer look at how Spotify price bumps could shift the deck for different music industry sub-sectors — and Spotify itself.

Report Table of Contents

I. Introduction: A Recap of Spotify’s Reported April 2024 Price Increases

II. Reported Price Increases and Spotify’s Balance Sheet: What the News Means for the Company’s Revenue and Profitability Aims

III. SPOT’s Wall Street Boom: Why Is the Market Responding So Positively to the Prospect of Spotify Price Increases?

Graph: Global, U.S., and Spotify Paid Streaming Growth, 2019 – 2023

IV. How Much Money Will Spotify Price Increases Bring in for Labels – Especially Universal Music, Sony Music, and Warner Music?

V. As Spotify Raises Prices, Are Artists Positioned to Benefit?

VI. Spotify Price Increases for Publishers: A Look At How MLC and Public Performance Payments Could Change

VII. The Bottom Line: Does Spotify’s Retooled Cost Structure Mark the Beginning of a Lucrative New Era or An Attempt to Keep Pace With Inflation?

VIII. By the Dates: A Timeline of Spotify Price Increases, Non-Music Expansions, and Other Selected Developments, January 2023 – April 2024

Please note that reproduction or redistribution of this report is not permitted — thank you!

Photo Credit: Joshua Reddekopp

The Artists Rights Alliance and 200-plus musicians have released an open letter calling for the end of music devaluation, infringement, and exploitation through unethical AI.

The campaign, which features the signatures and support of artists, including Billie Eilish, Camila Cabello, Nicki Minaj, and Katy Perry, calls on digital music developers to “cease the use of artificial intelligence to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”

Jen Jacobsen, executive director of the Artists Rights Alliance, asserts that working musicians already struggle to earn enough in the streaming world without the added burden of AI developers training AI on musical works without permission, or producing AI “copycats” to dilute royalties.

“The unethical use of generative AI to replace human artists will devalue the entire music ecosystem — for artists and fans alike,” said Jacobsen.

“Make no mistake: we believe that, when used responsibly, AI has enormous potential to advance human creativity and in a manner that enables the development and growth of new and exciting experiences for music fans everywhere,” the open letter reads. “Unfortunately, some platforms and developers are employing AI to sabotage creativity and undermine artists, songwriters, musicians, and rightsholders.”

The open letter includes signatures from Sam Smith, Jon Bon Jovi, Norah Jones, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Chuck D, Kate Hudson, and South Korean entertainment company Hybe.

“We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem,” the letter continues.

“We call on all digital music platforms and music-based services to pledge that they will not develop or deploy AI music-generation technology, content, or tools that undermine or replace the human artistry of songwriters and artists or deny us fair compensation for our work.”

The Artists Rights Alliance’s campaign comes as US politicians consider legislation to establish protections that ensure the ethical use of AI in music while also compensating artists for their work.

Emerging artists could be hardest hit by a TikTok ban. The United States produces the most emerging artists globally, according to Chartmetric data.

TikTok is battling its greatest regulatory threat to date in the U.S., where the ByteDance-developed app’s shutdown would affect a multitude of individuals, companies, and spaces. But what does this mean for the music industry — and all of its complicated sub-sectors?

In this white paper, DMN Pro takes an exhaustive look at the post-TikTok music industry’s winners and losers, from the major labels to DSPs and artists to UGC competitors.

REPORT TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction: The Post-TikTok Music Landscape Could Give Rise to Unprecedented Changes – With Implications for Fans, Artists, and Companies Alike

Record Labels: Majors and Indies Stand to Lose in Several Areas (and Win in Others) With TikTok’s Ban

Graph: A Breakdown of Global Recorded Music Revenue from UGC and Ancillary Licensing Sources
Graph: 2023 Global Recorded Music Revenue by Segment

Publishers: Short-Term Losses, Particularly for Smaller Indies, Could Make Way for Long-Term Improvements

Songwriters: A Possible Licensing Revenue Upside Won’t Offset Immediate Discovery Setbacks, Especially for DIY Professionals

Artists: Post-TikTok, Artists At All Career Stages Will Suffer Varied Near-Term Professional Consequences

Graph: Selected Artists’ Social Media Followers, YouTube Subscribers, and Spotify Monthly Listeners
Superstar and Legendary Artists
Mid-Level Artists With Substantial Followings
Developing and Emerging Artists
Pre-Traction Artists
Graph: A 2023 Breakdown of Emerging Artists by Home Country

Competing UGC Platforms: Reels, Shorts, and Others Will Be the Clear Winners

Overall Licensing Revenue: Ancillary Setbacks Aside, TikTok’s Ban Will Have a Minimal Licensing Revenue Impact

Graph: Universal Music’s Estimated TikTok Revenue Versus Permanent Downloads Revenue, 2020 – 2023

Non-Label Sync Platforms: The Post-TikTok Industry May Look Different for Sync Platforms and Music Libraries

The Fans: More Than a Letdown for Fans, TikTok’s Ban Will Dramatically Affect Music Discovery

DSPs: What Does a TikTok Ban Mean for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music?

Promoters and Venues: The TikTok Ban’s Significance for Live Music

Report Summary: The Post-TikTok Music Landscape’s Many Changes

By the Dates: A Timeline of TikTok Regulatory Scrutiny, December 2022 – April 2024

One-Sheet Infographic: The Post-TikTok Winners & Losers

Join the DMN Pro subscriber-only discussion below.

Also please note that any authorized redistribution of this report is prohibited — thank you.

Nearly $1.3 billion has been plowed into music-focused companies so far this year, according to details tracked and compiled by DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker. But that’s tame compared to explosive Q1 2023 totals.

Investors are still making heady bets on promising music startups, companies, and funds, but the ebullience of last year is cooling down.

For the first three months of 2024, total music industry funding levels topped $1.266 billion, according to rounds tracked by DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker. That compares to a whopping total of $4.195 billion for the comparable Q1 of 2023, a period that also witnessed significantly larger deal flow.

The Music Industry Funding Tracker is DMN Pro’s subscriber-only database that tracks rounds big and small, complete with details about specific rounds (pre-seed to late-stage), investors (both lead and supporting), and dollar commitments involved. The database covers hundreds of investments over multiple years and offers a valuable resource for anyone placing or receiving growth bets in the music industry.

Despite the difference in funding totals, 2024 has its share of heady investments. Topping the list is Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group (IAG), which revealed an impressive $1 billion investment tranche led by New York’s HPS Investment Partners in mid-February. That was coupled with the news of IAG’s acquisition of the Rod Stewart catalog, with similarly gigantic IP acquisitions potentially ahead.

But 2023 had its own monster rounds — and more of them. Dropping the biggest jaws was gamma., which bagged its own $1 billion investment round in March of last year. Incidentally, that was followed by a $100 million round in February of this year, powered by Alpha Wave Global.

Other weighty rounds in 2023 included Kakao Entertainment, which pulled down a $966 million round, and Spirit Music Group owner Lyric Capital, which secured $410 million in funding commitments in February of last year, part of a broader $800 million IP acquisition fund raise.

Other 9-figure rounds were commonplace in early 2023, part of a potential spike year in investment activity for the music industry.

Case in point: total 2023 music industry funding topped $10 billion, according to DMN Pro’s tallies. That was more than double 2022’s $4.8+ billion in overall funding. Putting things into context, 2024 may simply represent a ‘return to normalcy’ rather than a year-over-year plunge.

(For those looking to explore last year’s heady investment environment, check out DMN Pro’s recent research report on this explosive year.)

As for March of this year, investment rounds focused on production and creative collaboration tools. The rounds were substantial for the companies involved, but the month was subdued overall — especially when compared to the same month last year.

Rounds secured included WavMaker ($5 million seed round), BeatConnect ($1.86 million seed round), and Hook ($3.5 million seed round). Investors powering those rounds included some noted investors, ranging from individuals like Vicky Patel to investment firms such as Sfermion and Point72 Ventures and ventures like FICC, Anges Québec, and Triptyq Capital.

By comparison, in March 2023, funding volumes topped a substantial $1.446 billion. In fairness, March 2023 included the 10-figure, $1 billion gamma round and two additional rounds topping $150 million (Character.ai) and $200 million (Torch Capital).

Photo Credit: Chartmetric

In an exciting development, Chartmetric has relaunched its Learning Hub, a cutting-edge platform designed to equip artists and aspiring industry professionals with the knowledge and analytical tools necessary for navigating today’s data-driven music landscape.

The following comes from Chartmetric, a company DMN is partnered with.

The relaunch, detailed on Chartmetric’s Learning Hub, marks a significant step forward in the company’s commitment to education and empowerment within the music sector.

“We are pleased to see the Chartmetric Learning Hub embraced by hundreds of students globally, including prestigious institutions like Berklee School of Music, New York University, and the International Music Business School, among many others. It’s a testament to our commitment to empowering the next generation of music industry professionals with the data insights to enhance their careers,” said Andreas Katsambas, President of Chartmetric.

Central to the Learning Hub’s offerings is the official LinkedIn certification available to individuals who successfully pass the Chartmetric exam. This certification is a key pillar of Chartmetric’s mission to equip emerging artists and industry professionals with the knowledge required to effectively use data to expand their audience and enhance their music careers.

The Learning Hub includes a range of resources to enhance users’ understanding and skills in music data analytics. These resources include video tutorials, a comprehensive music data glossary, informative help articles, and a complete study guide to prepare for the certification exam. The certification exam is complimentary, and new Chartmetric users are welcomed with a 30-day trial of the Premium tier to prepare for it.

Understanding the critical role of data in the music industry, Chartmetric has tailored its program to prepare students with the practical skills needed for success.

This includes the ability to find where an artist’s audience is concentrated on both a per-platform and geographic basis, leveraging playlist support metrics to adopt a data-driven approach to release strategies, researching the competition to stay up-to-date on the most cutting-edge practices for virality, and many more insights exclusively available on the Chartmetric platform.

Since its inception in 2022, the Chartmetric certification program has been embraced by over 20 universities worldwide, including the top music business programs, highlighting its relevance and value to future music leaders. With this relaunch, Chartmetric reaffirms its dedication to advancing the careers of those in the music industry through the power of data analytics, ensuring that the next generation of artists and professionals are well-equipped to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape.

For more information, visit the Chartmetric Learning Hub.

The following comes from Open On Sunday, a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.

We were on the ground in Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest (SXSW) 2024 — the place to be to share industry knowledge, ideas, and innovations.

Thousands from around the world converged on the city for SXSW 2024. The week-long music, film, and tech conference showcases the most prominent names and stars in the industry — and provides opportunities to learn and network.

Many of this year’s panels focused on celebrating women’s successes and highlighting their incredible achievements in music, business, and entertainment.

Joi Brown, founder and CEO of Culture Creators — which Brown reveals ‘positions itself as a vital link between global cultural leaders and the generation of diverse creators’ — spoke to DMN at SXSW about lending encouragement and support to those striving for success.

Brown said, “I always hold true to what I believe God purposed me to do on this planet — which is to inspire and to provide opportunities for others to achieve their goals.”

The Creative Industries Expo, held at the Convention Center, is always a hit at SXSW.

The expo showcases the latest technology, from electric vehicles and home assistant robotics to advances in audio speaker systems. The biggest takeaway from the expo in 2024: AI and VR continue to dominate the tech landscape.

Amy Web, CEO of Future Today Institute, told DMN, “Artificial Intelligence is the present, it’s here.”

Richard James Burgess, President and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), believes ‘it’s an interesting time for music,’ adding, “We’ve been in the streaming economy for a couple of decades now. We’ve been in the digital economy for a quarter of a century.”

“We’re at a sort of a turning point in the industry. There’s a lot of new interesting models being talked about — things that will ultimately make a big difference,” Burgess said.

Neeta Ragoowansi, President of the Music Managers Forum (MMF-US), spoke about the opportunities presented by SXSW 2024.

We have all these artists’ managers coming in to mix and network, as well as labels, publishers, and DSPs. I see performing arts rights societies and sponsors and partners of all sorts coming in, so we’re really happy to be here,” Ragoowansi said.

With a focus on networking, learning, and unlocking opportunities, several other off-site events and day parties took place all over Austin during SXSW 2024 — providing the platform for up-and-coming artists and songwriters to showcase their music and make key connections in the industry.

SXSW 2024 took place on March 6-18.

Photo Credit: Smart Filters

How can you discover the next big music hit before it winds up on the radio and the Spotify Billions Club playlist? With 120,000 new tracks released on DSPs per day, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. That’s why Chartmetric has its new ‘magnetic’ feature—Smart Filters powered by AI.

The following comes from Chartmetric, a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.

Chartmetric’s new Smart Filters quickly parse written prompts in 10+ languages into highly-customizable filters to make music discovery easier than ever. As a Premium Chartmetric user, you can now find out who is trending now on Spotify in the Afrobeats genre, or narrow your search to regional areas for booking and touring. Chartmetric’s highly customizable data filters are now more accessible than ever thanks to this feature.

“At Chartmetric, we have always challenged the status quo. Thanks to new technology, our innovation, our large database, and insights from our customers, we have taken the next leap in talent discovery.” – Akash Mukherjee, VP of Product Management.

How Chartmetric Smart Filters Work

Smart Filters make it easy to find new music acts in the discovery phase, before they’ve gone viral on TikTok or hit millions of Spotify streams. Finding these artists is as simple as typing the phrase ‘R&B artists trending on TikTok’ to search for R&B artists who have reached a certain metric that you define on TikTok.

Want to view developing talent under a million streams? Refine Chartmetric’s filters to a specific range and you’ll have narrowed the list from 50,000 artists down to around 5 to 10. The ability to sort through data using natural language processing changes the game for discovering new talent as its emerging.

At its core, Chartmetric’s Premium product combines a lot of unstructured metadata and analytical data from the music industry, and puts structure around it to aid decision analytics for artist & track discovery.

“Our Artist List has 10M artists and 100+ filters. That’s a lot of power for a lot of our advanced users. But with a lot of power, also came some complexity, specially for our less-technical users. Choice paralysis can be a pain. Today, we have taken that complexity away with Smart Filters, while retaining all the power,” continues Akash.

Smart Filters transform the artist discovery workflow for A&R, booking & touring, music supervisors and more by allowing a quick-scan of more than ten million artists across more than 100 data attributes. Chartmetric leverages AI and natural language processing to understand filtering instructions written in plain language:

• Afrobeats artists trending on TikTok
• Artists with 25% increase in streams on Spotify in Austin, TX
• Artists who released a song in the last 12 months
• Artists with small YouTube presence but skyrocketing Instagram engagement

With the search process of artist discovery simplified, it’s now easier than ever to see who is trending in which genres on a daily and weekly basis. Track their progress on social media like TikTok and Instagram and see how exposure there translates to more streams on Spotify and other digital streaming providers with Chartmetric.

Photo Credit: Bandzoogle

Music website platform Bandzoogle announced that in 2023, musicians made over $16.4 million in commission-free revenue using the platform’s direct-to-fan sales tools. For Bandzoogle and its members, the number represents significant year-on-year growth — a 21% increase from 2022.

The following was created in collaboration with Bandzoogle, a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.

Stacey Bedford, CEO of Bandzoogle, commented that it was ‘rewarding’ to see artists make an incredible amount of commission-free sales via Bandzoogle websites. “One of our main goals is to help make it easier for musicians to make money from their music by selling directly to their fans.”

Breaking down the $16.4 million artist revenue, musicians sold over $8.8 million worth of merchandise — including apparel, CDs, and vinyl. Digital music generated over $1.7 million in 2023, representing an increase of 28% compared to 2022.

However, ticket sales were the most significant area of growth for Bandzoogle’s members.

The platform reports that artists sold $4.1 million worth of tickets — commission-free — via Bandzoogle-powered websites, representing an impressive 102% increase from 2022.

Bedford pointed out that artists are better off selling tickets to events ‘directly to their fans, with no commission taken and no hidden fees,’ adding, “It’s another example of how savvy musicians can use our built-in tools to keep more of their hard-earned money while moving their careers forward.”

Acquired by DistroKid in 2023, 20-year-old Bandzoogle views fan engagement as a core strategy for musicians to generate revenue from their music online.

The platform allows artists and bands to build a commission-free store to sell music, merchandise, and tickets. Artists can manage their physical inventory, offer discount pricing or product bundling, connect with Printful to sell customized print–on-demand products to their fans, choose from multiple shipping and payment integrations, and more.

Bandzoogle’s built-in fan subscriptions feature also represented a significant revenue stream for artists, generating over $800,000 in 2023.

Fans also supported their favorite artists via Bandzoogle’s virtual tip jar feature, donating nearly $1 million to Bandzoogle members.

News of the revenue generated by Bandzoogle members in 2023 comes after the platform recently announced a new EPK Plan, which allows musicians to craft an impactful, single-page electronic press kit in minutes.

Bandzoogle powers over 65,000 websites for musicians, allowing them to earn over $121 million in commission-free revenue to date.

Plans start at just $6.95/month. Artists can try it for free at Bandzoogle’s website here.

All over the map: selected artists’ social media followers, YouTube subscribers, and Spotify monthly listeners.

TikTok is facing its greatest regulatory threat to date in the U.S., where lawmakers are rallying behind forced-sale legislation. TikTok says this would effectively amount to a ban in the app’s biggest market, with ripple effects impacting dozens of industries. But what exactly would a ban look like for the music industry?

TikTok’s possible U.S. shutdown would bring music-specific consequences affecting licensing, supplemental artist income, promotion, discovery, fan interaction, and more. Though nothing to scoff at, the lost licensing revenue would pale in comparison to the absence of what has quietly become a go-to promotional tool for artists and labels of all sizes.

In this DMN Pro Weekly Report, we attempt to pick apart a post-TikTok world.

Report Table of Contents:

I. A Recap of the TikTok Forced-Sale Bill’s Legislative Progress 

II. The Music Industry Without TikTok: How a U.S. Ban Could Affect Labels’ Revenue and Artists’ Income

A. Graph: Selected Artists’ Social Media Followers, YouTube Subscribers, and Spotify Monthly Listeners

III. TikTok As a Music Marketing Tool – Will a Viable Replacement Emerge in the Event of a U.S. Shutdown? 

IV. TikTok and the Future of Music: Should We Expect Fundamental Industry Changes Post-Ban? 

V. By the Dates: Key Music Industry Revenue- and Promotion-Related TikTok Developments, 2022-2024

New! Join the DMN Pro subscriber-only discussion below.

Also please note that any authorized redistribution of this report is prohibited — thank you.

The 16% slice adds up to billions of dollars in unaccounted and missed streaming royalties annually, according to Legitary’s latest stats (Photo: Pixabay)

Legitary has finally put a number on all those missing, incorrect, and fraudulent music streams. In its latest report, the streaming verification company reveals that up to 16% of streaming statements from DSPs are ‘suspicious,’ and the takeaways on streaming fraud are surprising.

Legitary’s latest finding is based on scans of over 700 billion music streams, with a staggering takeaway on just how much is being missed. The company’s AI-powered auditing platform identified a multitude of cases involving miscounted streams and anomalies — amounting to up to $3 billion in incorrectly tracked revenues for 2022.

The amount is eyebrow-raising, to say the least. Legitary’s report, shared with Digital Music News this month, is likely to raise pivotal questions about the accuracy and transparency of play counts on streaming platforms in an industry awash in trillions of streams.

Alongside the broader anomalies in the streaming industry, including streaming fraud, reporting errors, metadata discrepancies, and others, Legitary is also shedding light on other non-obvious issues, including unexplained drops in streams and zero-reported streams. But for all the focus surrounding streaming fraud, Legitary’s findings offer a surprisingly different assessment of the problem. Just recently, Legitary joined forces with DMN to further educate the industry on what their research is revealing.

Legitary’s findings take the issue of misreported streams beyond the typical discussions centered around streaming farms and streaming fraud. More importantly, it sheds light on the fact that fraud is only a modest part of the bigger anomaly pie.

Indeed, the different types of anomalies within the larger pie are unique and demand different solutions. Moreover, rectification of these anomalies requires a diverse set of approaches and strategies.

Nermina Mumic, CEO of Legitary, believes non-fraudulent anomalies are arguably the bigger enemy since they directly impact the IP owners involved. That’s not always the case with streaming fraud.

Streaming fraud tends to garner the most attention within the industry. However, Legitary noted that a far larger percentage of issues are unintentional or rooted in data errors. Most importantly, tackling those problems results in a one-to-one recovery of missing royalties and doesn’t involve chasing shadowy stream-farm operators.

Perhaps labels need to point their guns at a bigger boogeyman. With a substantial percentage of music streaming royalties potentially compromised by a broad number of potential issues, these hidden problems, Legitary believes, ‘do not receive the level of attention they deserve.’

“With streaming anomalies, we’re seeing royalties simply not getting generated, so the issue is harder to find, keep track of, and resolve,” Mumic explains, adding, “The music industry must delve into the occurrences and factors that could be contributing to exacerbating these anomalies. It’s absolutely imperative.”

While the issue is significant, Mumic is quick to point out that streaming platforms aren’t solely to blame for these anomalies.

Legitary’s report also notes that with far superior data quality, major labels account for fewer streaming anomalies compared to discrepancies recorded for indie label artists.

“There are many possible problems with missing stream payments, and suspicious stream counts don’t necessarily arise due to streaming platforms. Instead, the missing revenues stem from reporting issues, flawed data, and overall inaccuracies within the industry. In some cases, we’re seeing significant unexplained drops in streams, and at some points, no streams recorded at all.”

“Streaming fraud creates some indirect issues. But there’s also a direct leverage point of fixing streaming anomalies with direct remedial action.”

Alex Solano of AlexProMix recaps the incredible evolution in Dolby Atmos and spatial audio mixing, how the current shift and technology upgrades underscore the industry’s commitment to innovation and enhanced listening experiences.

The following was developed in collaboration with AlexProMix, a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.

In 2021 when spatial audio came into the picture, the landscape was packed with technical limitations and challenges.

Music mixing engineer and early adopter of Dolby Atmos, Alex Solano, sat down with DMN to reveal his take on the monumental evolution of Dolby Atmos, the opportunities and challenges the shift now offers professionals, and how his mixing template allows professionals to create immersive mixes and stereo mixes simultaneously, within one session.

Today, the immersive audio landscape looks extremely promising for audio professionals, and opens up a multitude of creative and monetary opportunities. But the transition was a painstaking process, involving significant technical upgrades — including a minimum requirement of a 12-speaker setup and an investment in high-end equipment — alongside mastering the complexities of immersive audio mixing.

To fully appreciate Dolby Atmos music mixing advancements, it’s essential to understand the early obstacles and creative hurdles faced by audio mixers.

During the early days of immersive mixes, collaborative innovations between Avid Pro Tools and Dolby were designed to optimize the music-mixing process. But Dolby Atmos mixing in Pro Tools involved complex setups, with separate applications for Pro Tools and the Dolby Atmos Renderer.

The configuration also limited the use of outboard gear due to the integrated closed-system linking Pro Tools with the Dolby Renderer.

Typically, audio experts also needed a separate computer to operate the Dolby Renderer for speaker routing. This setup was expensive, and required the coordination of multiple systems to function effectively within a music production environment.

“No longer could you create a mix on headphones and check the mix in your car,” explains Solano, adding, “With Atmos, a minimum requirement of a 7.1.4 speaker setup is necessary to ensure your immersive mixes translate to multi-channel playback systems.”

The initial setup also enforced a two-stage creation and approval process, stifling creativity and workflow.

After creating an artist’s stereo mix, mixing engineers would have to seek approval before they exported the pre-mastering processed stems into a new session that was designed for immersive audio. After making a Dolby Atmos mix, the engineers would then be required to seek out artist approval once again.

Apart from this constant back and forth for creation and approval, the process of matching the tonality of the stems to the stereo master was also incredibly complex.

Mixing engineers needed a solution that would allow them to implement multiple sound cards simultaneously. According to Solano, that turning point came with the launch of AUX I/O in Pro Tools.

The feature laid the groundwork for more integrated solutions, and more flexible audio routing — including the Dolby Atmos Renderer to different destinations. Although the solutions improved the workflow, Solano says mixers and engineers still faced stability and latency management challenges with AUX I/O.

“Expanding track widths in Pro Tools to accommodate up to 9.1.6 configurations opened new possibilities for mixing, enabling more seamless integration of stereo and immersive formats,” Solano explains. But despite the initial challenges, Solano says these developments opened up possibilities in mixing technology, and hinted at the development of a unified mixing template — ‘one that could cater to stereo and immersive outputs.’

AUX I/O in ProTools marked a significant turning point in allowing the implementation of multiple sound cards. (Photo: AlexProMix)

However, ‘the game changer in the spatial audio space’ came at the end of 2023, when Pro Tools introduced the integrated Dolby Renderer.

The integration facilitated the simultaneous processing of immersive and stereo mixes, and directly routed stems to the Renderer. Furthermore, the capability to monitor binaural and stereo mixes through dedicated AUX tracks further enhanced the mixing process, ensuring consistency across different listening formats.

“Multi-channel plugins offer tailored processing for immersive formats, and multi-mono plugins apply uniform effects across all channels.”

Solano also points out that the distinction between multi-channel vs multi-mono plugins, and understanding their unique application is vital for achieving the desired tonal balance and dynamic range — in both immersive and stereo mixes. “Multi-channel plugins offer tailored processing for immersive formats, and multi-mono plugins apply uniform effects across all channels.”

Parallel to these advancements, early adopter Solano was investing his expertise in creating a mix template that streamlines the mixing process, while ensuring the quality and emotional impact of music is elevated. “The template brings the artist’s vision to life in an immersive sonic environment, while creating an Atmos and Stereo master that are consistent in the emotional impact of the mix,” he says.

Solano’s immersive music template shares insights and practices that can enrich the mixing workflow, opening the gateways for more creators to explore immersive audio’s incredible possibilities.

Music Merch Manager App by Merch Cat

What happens when merch stops being an afterthought and turns into an active revenue-generator? Merch Cat says its elevated focus on technology and analytics can boost artist merch revenue by as much as 20%, while strategically crafting a more reliable process for inventory management, sales tracking, and decision-making.

For artists and managers, merchandise typically takes a backseat to music creation, releases, and touring. As a result, merch presents itself as a chaotic afterthought — ridden with routine disruptions of procurement, quality checks, inventory issues, data tracking, and fulfillment challenges.

Vanessa Ferrer, founder of Merch Cat, recently sat down with DMN to discuss how a sophisticated system of inventory management and tracking allows artists to significantly expand their merch revenue stream. In a bid to ensure merch represents a refined and reliable revenue category, Merch Cat has monumentally expanded its focus on tech to amplify merch processes for artists, managers, and labels.

“It’s all about merch strategy,” says Ferrer while adding that the industry needs to adjust its approach to merchandise and ‘place merchandise strategy at the forefront since merch is a lucrative business component.’

The company dedicates comprehensive attention to merch metrics management ‘to optimize value for artists.’ “It’s an intuitive process and streamlined workflow, with tech that does the work behind the scenes to ensure an optimized data output consisting of usable reports and analytics,” says Ferrer. Just recently, Merch Cat joined forces with DMN to further expand its merch footprint.

Merch Cat’s continuously-expanding roster includes artists and bands like The Marshall Tucker Band, George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic, Noel and Ben Haggard, Jesse Dayton, Struggle Jennings, Britnee Kellogg, and others. Also on board are industry advisors Ted Cohen (TAG Strategic), Rich Stumpf (Hawkeye Music Group), and Lou Plaia (Sentric Music) — a trio that Ferrer says ‘aims to help expand the client base, extend industry reach, and consult on business strategy.’

Ferrer believes streamlining merchandising processes with technology can generate usable insights from sales data. With user-friendly tech aimed at tackling inventory management and metrics, Merch Cat is ‘helping change the game for live show merch sales, where a vast majority of sales happen.’

With a focus on that aspect, Merch Cat’s Music Merch Manager App offers an upgraded analytics dashboard with ‘Merch Metrics’ — packed with essential insights to enable artists and their teams to easily make merch decisions.

The app places the entire merch business on one mobile device, allowing artists to quickly and easily enter inventory, import shows from Bandsintown, track sales and profits at a glance, automatically generate settlement reports with the venues’ music and merch splits, and more. Merch Cat is also integrated with Square as its payment processor, making it a seamless transition for pre-existing accounts.

Ferrer explains that artists gain a complete snapshot of essential information such as what sizes, styles, and quantities fans are purchasing. It also shows which items generated the highest sales. “It keeps all the data centralized, and the analytics in one place.”

“It keeps all the data centralized, and the analytics in one place.”

This data is core to optimizing revenue, Ferrer believes, as it ‘further expands your merch strategy, offers central inventory, sales tracking, and analytics.’

On the other hand, Merch Cat’s FAN app is the artists’ virtual storefront, which Ferrer says ‘allows fans to buy merchandise before, during, or after the show.’

She adds, “Fans receive a code for their purchase and can pick it up at the table. Or they can choose to have it shipped to their home.”

Merch Cat FAN Band Merchandise App

With an ‘artist-friendly interface,’ Merch Cat is deepening the connection between artists, their merch, and fans. Apart from the integration of the web store via a widget, the app has also added a Spotify player to the artist’s profile.

To ensure that artists can offer merchandise that they’re proud to put their name on, Merch Cat also offers merchandise procurement as a value-added service, ensuring quality merch at artist-friendly prices.

Ferrer says this will allow artists to earn higher revenues with more competitive margins — and lead to happier fans.

New York-based rock band Hollis Brown can testify to that. On their summer tour, following a ‘merch strategy’ tie-up with Merch Cat, the band witnessed a 20% increase in merch sales. According to Hollis Brown’s management company, ‘Merch Cat helped strategize to revamp the merch line,’ and provided accurately-tracked information on inventory levels that optimized organization and revenue.

Other musicians and bands have also revealed the many ways in which Merch Cat has helped them achieve their merch goals. Via Merch Cat’s Merch Metrics, Hannah Wicklund’s vinyl and CDs became top-sellers at live shows. Melissa Menago found a means to sell merch before her record release show — also during the show and after it — via Merch Cat Fan. Rock band Broke City attribute their ‘biggest merch night ever’ to Merch Cat streamlining the merch table process. And metal and classical fusion band The Breathing Process say Merch Cat has been a ‘game changer,’ enabling them to solve their merch inventory problems.

So what exactly does Merch Cat bring to the table that enables artists to have a successful merch business? Ferrer believes that apart from its technology, it’s the ‘human aspect’ and ‘personalization’ that differentiates Merch Cat from its competitors.

“Merch Cat brings the whole gamut, Ferrer relayed. “We’ll develop your merch strategy, get you the merchandise at a targeted price point, put it on Merch Cat, use Merch Cat to sell, and then look at analyses and insights to optimize the strategy even further.”

Putting together an effective ‘merch mix’ Ferrer says, requires a focus on ‘understanding your fans, maximizing your profits, and reducing waste.’

“With a robust strategy backed by data, you ensure you capitalize on every opportunity of a sale. Our technology and insights bring you the information you need so you don’t lose sales because your fans arrived at the table and left because they had to wait too long, or you don’t have the style or size they want.”

According to Ferrer, one of Merch Cat’s most prominent upsides is that it doesn’t require days of set-up time — thanks to a user-friendly workflow and interface.

“If you know your merch inventory, you can use Merch Cat after you’ve arrived at the venue,” explains Ferrer, adding, “You can do it all on a mobile device — in a pinch.”

When artists embrace a more sophisticated system spanning inventory purchase, real-time reports, and payment tracking, Merch Cat promises they can ‘merch better, increase profits, make their fans happier, and spend more time doing what they love.’

Photo Credit: Kenny Eliason

Tipalti’s global payment automation system and accounts payable software make it easier than ever for indie distributors like Symphonic to pay their artists accurately and on time.

The following was created in collaboration with Tipalti, a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.

Symphonic is a Tampa-based digital music distribution service with footprints across major music markets in the United States and around the world. Symphonic says its commitment to transparency and the independent spirit are integral to its success. Helping to drive that success, Tipalti ensures Symphonic artists are paid on time, whether domestic or international.

Symphonic distributes its artists’ music to streaming platforms as well as user-generated content platforms like YouTube and TikTok, collecting performance royalties via SoundExchange—all of which flows through Tipalti’s payment automation platform.

“Tipalti is helpful to ensure compliance,” Symphonic told Digital Music News. “We don’t generally consider Tipalti for advances but require that individuals set up their account with us with an agreement, then pass through Tipalti as a requirement prior to any payment.”

Symphonic’s internal Know-Your-Customer (KYC) process operates alongside Tipalti to reduce streaming fraud for the distributor. Streaming fraud has become commonplace and is one of the reasons Spotify has adjusted its royalty scheme.

Symphonic says it monitors activity and works closely with its DSP partners to keep its digital distribution services free from fraud like stream manipulation. Bots, click farms, and imposters impact all artists—including independent artists and those signed to labels.

A diluted royalty pool from stream manipulation means reduced revenue for artists for their legitimate streams. Symphonic’s Trust & Safety team handles client onboarding, and once set up with Symphonic, clients are set up with Tipalti to receive their royalty advance and payments.

With Tipalti, Symphonic can support artists in over 120 countries and 196 currencies, giving their team an international competitive advantage. Symphonic knows that with Tipalti, their artists will get paid accurately and on time every time.

Tipalti streamlines Symphonic’s entire payment management process, from artist onboarding to invoice processing, tax and regulatory compliance, remittance, payment issue resolution, artist reporting, and more. As part of the onboarding process, Symphonic artists submit their payment and tax details, which are then reviewed and approved by Tipalti, streamlining the payment experience even more.

Tipalti helps improve the artist experience for Symphonic in many ways. The ability to send payments in artists’ local currency is a game changer. Tipalti’s FX (Foreign Exchange) and currency management features ensure funds arrive in the artist’s local currency, removing the need to convert payments from US dollars. Tipalti also offers the additional convenience of ready-to-use funds when receiving payments.

Ready to get started with Symphonic?

Symphonic offers a Symphonic Starter plan that allows artists to keep 100% of the royalties from their music. Most companies take a small fee from royalties once they start coming in, and the start plan allows for free royalty splits so that all collaborators, featured artists, or anyone else entitled to a share of the song gets paid from the generated royalties.

Best of all, Symphonic’s partnership with Tipalti means it doesn’t matter where your collaborators are located around the globe—they can get paid. Learn more about Tipalti here.

Just how little is TikTok paying UMG? A comparison between Universal Music’s estimated annual revenue from TikTok versus permanent downloads (Source: UMG statements and financials).

More than one month into the TikTok and Universal Music Group standoff, all signs point to an intensifying dispute between the companies. Here’s an analysis of where the high-stakes impasse stands – and how the episode’s fallout could drive a fundamental shift in the way music factors into the UGC space.

It can be safely stated that February delivered little concrete progress toward a resolution for TikTok and UMG, thereby setting the stage for a possible multi-month (or longer) standoff. As a result, the conversation naturally transitions to what UMG’s aggressive approach means for TikTok and the broader UGC space.

Report Table of Contents:

I. Universal Music Execs’ Earnings Call Comments Point to a Deepening TikTok Disagreement – And a New Approach to Deals With the App’s Competitors

II. How Are Universal Music and TikTok Faring Amid Their Escalating Licensing Battle?

Graph: Universal Music Group Permanent Downloads vs. Estimated TikTok Royalty Revenue, 2020-2023

Graph: TikTok Active User Net Changes, 1/21-1/27 and 2/18-2/24

III. As TikTok and UMG Square Off, Are We Witnessing a UGC-Licensing Realignment?

IV. By the Dates: A 2024 Timeline of the Universal Music-TikTok Dispute

New! Join the DMN Pro subscriber-only discussion below.

Also please note that any authorized redistribution of this report is prohibited — thank you.

Photo credit: Techivation

If you’ve never mixed music before, it may feel daunting to learn. There’s so much depth to it that even experienced mixing engineers continue to learn and improve. But in this article, we’re going to walk through the basics of how to mix music. And I’m going to give it to you straight and keep things simple.

What Does It Mean to “Mix Music”?

Mixing music just means blending all the instruments of a song together so it sounds good.

You use gain levels (volume), panning (left and right), and effects to make the whole song sound like the players are in the room with you. You’re trying to create the illusion of left, right, front, and behind.

Here are some general mixing tips to keep in mind:

• Bass frequencies (bass guitar, kick drum) should always be up the center
• Keep the vocals up the center (and usually upfront in the mix depending on your preference)
• Cutting and boosting frequencies with an EQ can help highlight certain frequencies and de-muddy your mix
• A compressor helps tame the loudest peaks of an instrument so its perceivability stays balanced throughout the song
• Reverb can help fill out your mix and make it sound more interesting

Step 1: Get Good Recordings

The first step is to make sure you capture high-quality recordings. If you’re just the mixing engineer, you don’t have control over this. But if you’re doing the recording, doing it well will make mixing so much easier.

This article is not about how to record music, so I’d recommend checking out these articles:

• 5 Methods That Will Improve Your Recordings
• How To Treat Your Home Recording Studio

Step 2: Edit the Takes

Recording, editing, and mixing have a lot of crossover, but you’ll want to make sure all the takes are fully edited before really diving into mixing.

First, you’ll want to comp the takes. “Comp” refers to a compilation of the best takes, using crossfades in between edited sections. Everyone has different comping preferences. On one end of the spectrum, some editors will edit word-by-word or note-by-note. On the other end, other editors will only comp when there’s a mistake or they’ll comp entire sections.

Here’s one of my favorite videos on vocal comping…

Next, you may want to fix timing issues. Ideally, there won’t be many (or any) timing issues because the parts were performed and recorded well. If you’re spending hours editing the timing, maybe you should re-record the parts.

When editing timing issues, use your ears and your eyes, making sure things snap to the grid. And apply crossfades when shifting items.

Here’s a walkthrough of how you can fix timing problems…

Pro tip: many singers tend to be slightly ahead of the beat, so it can make the vocals sound a lot more professional if you nudge them back 5-10ms.

The third main thing you’ll want to do is tune the vocals. Any good DAW has a pitch correction stock plugin. And for autotune that doesn’t sound like autotune, start the response time between 65-80ms.

However, instead of slapping an autotune plugin on the entire vocal track, it’s a much better option to only tune the notes that sound off. You can shift individual notes on your vocal track with a plugin called Melodyne.

Lastly, you may want to do volume automation. This is where you go through a track (usually a really dynamic one) and adjust the volume so it’s more even across the whole song. You should definitely do this on your lead vocal track, if nothing else.

Step 3: Set Up Your Mixing Session

Before you start mixing, you need to make sure your channels are properly labeled and organized.

If you recorded the tracks, they’re probably already labeled. But if a client sent you a mix, you’re going to get a folder of probably lots of tracks, some of which may not have clear names.

So it’s important you make sure you know what each thing is, label it appropriately, and then organize the channels to your preference.

Personally, I put the vocals a the top, then acoustic guitar, then supplemental instruments like electric guitar, piano, and synths. Then bass, and then drums and percussion at the bottom.

But you’ll find your own organizational preference. The goal is to be able to quickly navigate your session so your mixing experience is as efficient as possible.

Step 4: Begin! How To Mix Music

Now it’s time to actually mix music.

Before you start, you should know that a great mix doesn’t rely on the plugins, it relies on your knowledge and your ears. Yes, there are some cool plugins that can definitely help. But you don’t need super fancy plugins, especially if you’re just learning the basics of mixing.

Monitors vs. headphones: which is better?

Ideally, you would have a nice pair of monitors in an acoustically treated room. However, not everyone has that. And good records have been mixed on headphones.

The main goal is to become familiar with what you have. Whether you have sub-par monitors in an untreated room, a pair of studio headphones, or an expensive, high-quality home studio, you can mix music.

You first have to learn what good music sounds like in your mixing context. So listen to your favorite songs that are professionally mixed and mastered. This will train your ears and brain to know what a good mix should sound like. That way, you know what to aim for when you’re mixing.

The first step to a mix is to set the gain levels and pan percentages. This is called a static mix – you try to get the mix sounding as good as possible with only gain levels and panning, no effects.

Here’s how to do a static mix:

1. Set all the volume/pan knobs at zero or in the middle
2. Begin by raising the volume of one instrument at a time, starting with the most important, until they sound balanced
3. Next, adjust the panning levels so you have a wide, balanced mix
4. Loop 4-5 times, continually re-adjusting the volume knobs
5. Find the volume/pan position for each instrument that works for MOST of the song (effects can take it the rest of the way)
6. Leave about -5 dB of headroom on the master track (effects can make things louder, you may adjust the gain levels more, and you also want to leave headroom for the mastering engineer)

Here’s what a static mix looks like…

Now we turn to EQ (“equalization”). Basically, EQ helps you cut unwanted frequencies and boost (or simply keep) desirable frequencies.

Just to keep things simple, here’s how I approach EQ, and you can try this too:

• Listen for too much bass
  • If so, try cutting the low end starting at 50-150 Hz and adjusting from there
• Listen for any “weird” or harsh sounds in your mix
  • If so, go find the track that’s causing the problem
  • Using a narrow bandwidth that’s fully boosted, slowly sweep across the frequency spectrum until the unwanted sound pops out
  • Once you find the unwanted sound, cut the Hz at that spot
• Sometimes it can be nice to boost the high end (around 10k Hz), especially on vocals
• If the mix is muddy, check the 200-500 Hz range and cut as necessary with a broad bandwidth

Now let me clarify some things. These tips will vary widely depending on many things, including but not limited to:

• The microphone you used
• How close or far away the voice/instrument was to the mic
• The room in which the recording happened
• What else is happening in the song

The main takeaway is, keep it simple. If it sounds good, it is good. It’s important to know how to use EQ, but you also don’t want to overuse it.

The next tool you need to know about is compression. This essentially brings down the loud parts of a sounds and effectively makes the quieter parts more perceivable. It evens out the dynamics of a track.

As a beginner, you can use one of your DAW’s compression presets then adjust the threshold from there. You’ll end up with some pretty good results.

However, you should still be aware of what’s happening. So here are the parts of a compressor that you should be familiar with:

• Threshold: determines the level at which the compressor starts to act. Any audio signal that exceeds this threshold will be affected by the compressor (ex. if you set the threshold to -20 dB, any signal louder than -20 dB will be compressed)
• Ratio: controls the amount of compression applied to the audio signal once it exceeds the threshold (ex. a ratio of 4:1 means that for every 4 dB that the input signal exceeds the threshold, the compressor will only allow 1 dB of that to pass through…so higher ratios = more aggressive compression)
• Attack: determines how quickly the compressor responds once the audio signal crosses the threshold (fast attack time = compressor kicks in quickly, slow attack time = compressor take longer to act)
• Release: controls how quickly the compressor stops compressing the audio signal once it falls below the threshold (short release time = compressor stops acting quickly, fast release time = compressor takes longer to stop acting)
• Knee: determines the compressor’s transition from uncompressed to compressed signal levels around the threshold (hard knee = the compressor applies full ratio immediately once the threshold is exceeded, soft knee = gradually applies compression as the signal approaches the threshold)

Regardless of your compression plugin, here are some general tips to get you started:

• Have a goal with compression, don’t just apply it because you “should”
• Compression works best if you’ve already done volume automation
• If you’re a beginner, try starting with one of your DAW’s compression presets and adjust the threshold from there

Here’s some more context for how to use compression…

Now let’s talk about bussing. It’s a method that will make your mixing experience way easier.

A bus channel (AKA send or aux track) lets you effect multiple tracks equally at the same time instead of adding an effect to each individual channel and adjusting them separately.

Simply put, a bus channel receives all the channels you send to it and output a copy of those channels but coming out of one channel. You then apply an effect to the bus channel, which applies your chosen effect to the copy of these channels.

Think of it like a literal bus: you’re picking up each channel, putting them all on the same bus, and taking them to the same place – applying your chosen effect.

Here’s how to create a bus track:

1. Create a new track and apply your desired effect
2. Open the FX option for this new track
3. Under “Receive” or “Input,” you can choose which tracks to send to this bus track
4. Alternatively, you can go to each individual track and route them to the bus track (under “Send” or “Output”)
5. Make sure the signals you’re sending to the bus track are stereo, not mono
6. From here, when you adjust the effect on your bus channel, it will affect the tracks you routed to it
7. If your DAW gives you the option for a track type, choose AUX
8. This lets you send only a portion of the signal to the bus track, allowing you to control how much of your chosen effect is applied to each routed track (some DAWs let you control this for each routed track directly on the bus channel)

Here’s a video that walks you through how to set up a bus/aux channel…

The last thing we’ll talk about is reverb. Reverb is basically room emulation (big room, small room, cathedral, small bathroom, etc).

Before you apply reverb, know what you’re trying to achieve with it. Most likely, you’re trying to add depth, encourage cohesion, or make the mix more interesting.

To add depth, keep in mind that more reverb makes the instrument sound further away.

For cohesion, you can bus multiple tracks to the same bus track with reverb applied to it.

And to make things more interesting, try adding reverb to just specific parts of specific instruments (ex. chorus vocals, acoustic guitar on just the strum going into the bridge, on just the drum fill, etc).

Here are the main settings you’ll see on a reverb plugin:

• Room Size/Type
• Pre-Delay: determines the time gap between the original sound and when the reverb kicks in
• Decay Time: controls how long it takes for the reverberated sound to decay to -60 dB below its original level
• Damping/EQ: shapes the frequency response of the reverb effect by letting you cut or boost specific frequency ranges
• Wet/Dry Mix: determines the balance between the original dry signal and the processed reverberated signal

I highly recommend ValhallaVintageVerb. It comes with any kind of preset you’d want, and you can adjust the effects from there.

Once you become familiar with how to mix music, you can ignore every single guideline in this article if you want to. Mixing is an art. But if you’re just starting out, I’d suggest sticking to the basics. You can’t break the rules until you first understand them.

Indie artist emlyn is a star on the rise, thanks in part to her usage of platforms like Chartmetric and Venice Music that equip emerging talent with the tools they need to succeed in the music industry.

The following comes from Chartmetric, a company DMN is partnered with.

There’s an array of music companies out there with tools, data, and insights to support many of today’s emerging independent artists. Meet Chartmetric and Venice Music, two all-in-one platforms that are doing just that.

Since 2015, Chartmetric has equipped artists and music industry professionals with comprehensive streaming, social media, and audience data to help musicians thrive in their careers, while Venice Music provides tools to distribute music, monitor streaming performance, and collect royalties.

Emlyn, an LA-based indie singer-songwriter originally from Nashville, is just one of the rising indie artists who has seen success using both platforms. Emlyn’s father was a studio drummer, while her mother worked as a therapist, so growing up she learned what it took to craft a song that connects emotionally with a listener. She also taught herself to play the piano and guitar, thanks to the help of Taylor Swift’s songbook.

Now, emlyn releases her own music, which is distributed by Venice Music. For the past six years, she has been represented by her manager Joshua Russak, whom she met after one of Russak’s other clients sent him emlyn’s demos.

“I thought she had such an incredible ear for melodies and storytelling,” Russak told Chartmetric. “We really hit it off talking about music and the business and felt she had a great grasp of all the things it takes to succeed in today’s music environment.”

Russak was drawn to emlyn by her lyrics and writing style, which he saw as conveying a sense of realness and approachability. He also discovered early on that she had a unique way of getting inside of the heads of other artists and helping others express what they’re feeling.

"Most people think artists just wake up and are some supernatural being that creates against all odds, when, in reality, artists are works-in-progress," Russak said. "It takes time for an identity to be clearly defined and I watched emlyn go through a lot of stages. What was clear from the beginning was that she was going to keep improving and I will bet on people like her all day."

For the first half of their time working together, she was focused more on songwriting, but the pandemic is when she really started to release some of her own music.

"She was always interested in being an artist, but never had the right vehicle, time, or songs to launch it in the way that we would have wanted to," Russak told Chartmetric. "[During the pandemic,] there were a lot less songwriting sessions happening, so she ended up deciding to focus on herself and changed the trajectory of her career."

In January 2021, emlyn released new music and quickly started to gain momentum after she landed on some of the earlier feeder playlists on Spotify and Amazon Music. By May of the same year, emlyn found semi-viral success on TikTok with the release of her song "B.O.M.B.," with her post teasing the song since receiving over two million views. This is when Russak started to lean more on data to gain better insights to continue building on the momentum emlyn was already seeing early in her career.

@emlyn_music SHOULD I PUT IT OUTTTT 😭😭😭 #original #artist #viral #singing ♬ B.O.M.B OUT NOW - emlyn

Russak said they had to make many decisions like figuring out which song they should go with, whether it should be fast or slow, if they should be doing campaigns, how they should be moving in between songs, and determining which of emlyn’s posts are gaining traction.

According to Russak, "Sometimes certain posts on certain platforms will work for follows, but not for streams, or will work for streams, but not for Instagram follows, or certain viral TikTok pieces are great for profile views, but don’t filter through to anything else. Even though we’re in this age of algorithms, I think the audiences aren’t machines at the end of the day, but there are some general trend lines where you can find best practices."

For Russak, that’s where Chartmetric comes in. "Everything I find on Chartmetric has helped me think about what our problems are a little differently," Russak shared. "We do a little bit of an analysis on where we are, what's working, and what isn't. Then we’re just—poking the bear—so to speak, to figure out how to get things to continue moving and growing. Sometimes there aren't answers, but it at least gives us the clues to figure out where to lean into and where we have problems.

"So, I really use [Chartmetric] as my home base. I open up [the dashboard] every morning. I use [the dashboard] at midnight to see every release, or check out early playlist pickup. From there, when I'm interested in even more granular data, I might kick off to more DSP-specific platforms, but this absolutely is my home base for everything."

Emlyn has 485,000 followers on TikTok, 107,000 on Instagram, and 174,000 on Spotify, where she saw a 14.4% increase in the past year.

Additionally, her YouTube channel has 26.4,000 subscribers and 13.5 million video views. There is a strategy to what content is posted where, according to Russak: shortform video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels are used to tease music and encourage user-generated content, while Instagram and Twitter posts are best for making more formal announcements and sharing milestones.

Michele Akinsanya, Director of Data and Streaming Analytics for Venice Music, said Chartmetric has been helpful in allowing them to see all of the playlist placements that their artists — like emlyn — land on release days.

"It’s in beta, but I love the artist insights that highlight growth spikes on social and streaming platforms," Akinsanya said. "This enables us to investigate and take action on moments in a quick and efficient way. The visualizers are also a really great way to quickly assess the magnitude of growth over time. I love the convenience of having both social and streaming data in one place."

"In the future, I would love to take more advantage of the integration with One Sheet, playlist evolution features, and the Artist Comparison Pro to help with the strategic side of things," Akinsanya added.

For Janice Wang, VP of Partner Acquisition and Success at Venice Music, the three key takeaways from emlyn’s career trajectory that other artists can learn from are to "invest time in nurturing connections with fans, execute on pre-release buildup and post-release promotion plans, and remain attentive to fan feedback with the flexibility to adapt and refine your release strategies."

This is why artists can so greatly benefit from platforms like Venice Music and Chartmetric, which provide the data and support needed at every stage of one’s music journey.

As for emlyn, her album, that’s how you make a villain - chapter 1 came out this past November. Ahead of its release, emlyn wrote on Instagram that the decision to split the album into three parts came from a realization that "this story of who I am, and where I came from, is meant to be told as a trilogy."

She will also be going on tour in the U.K. and Europe in February 2024.

Graphics by Nicki Camberg and cover image by Crasianne Tirado; data as of Jan. 11, 2023.

“Everyone is on the same starting line in Dolby Atmos,” says Alex Solano. (Photo: Apple Music)

Back in October, Digital Music News first reported that Apple Music was introducing higher royalty payouts for Dolby Atmos mixes. That has sparked some pushback, particularly from indie and unsigned artists who feel Atmos upgrades come with a hefty price tag. AlexProMix is hoping to dispel that notion.

An early adopter of Dolby Atmos immersive formats, AlexProMix founder Alex Solano recently shared his thoughts on  how the rapid evolution in the Dolby Atmos ecosystem paves the way for musicians to gain ‘creative and monetary benefit.’

According to Solano, labels already understand the need and value of the format, with high-priority playlisting and better revenues. However, artists are still unaware that spatial audio doesn’t just make music ‘sound expansive and immersive’ but offers an incredible monetary benefit.

But can they afford it?

Absolutely yes, according to Solano. AlexProMix is currently offering fully-upgraded Atmos mixes for ‘as little as $350 per song,’ a more workable price range. Suddenly, the math could make sense for artists hoping to score a bumped-up royalty rate on Apple Music.

Solano, a music mixing engineer and educator for artists, labels, and music studios, also sees a big opportunity for producers and mixers as well. He predicts that gaining expertise in the heavily invested space of immersive audio could be ‘the biggest opportunity for audio professionals today.’ Just recently, AlexProMix partnered with DMN to further expand awareness around spatial audio possibilities.

Diving into his take on the importance of spatial audio in the current music industry terrain, Solano clarified that despite popular belief, spatial audio is ’not just an exclusive service available to the majors.’

Solano points out that many of the largest distribution platforms for indie artists — such as Avidplay, CD Baby, The Orchard, Audio Salad, Distrokid, Golden Dynamic, Rebeat, and Rock Mobile (to name a few) — currently support Dolby Atmos as a deliverable format. “Any indie artist who’s self-publishing and self-distributing can hire an independent immersive mixer and upgrade their audio to Dolby Atmos,” he added.

Backed by almost two decades of experience in music mixing and his unique position as an early adopter of immersive audio processing, Solano believes the evolving technology will be ‘creating a whole new set of job opportunities for audio professionals who want to have a sustainable career in the music industry.’

“There’s going to be a huge need for Dolby Atmos mixers like myself and thousands of others who have become early adopters.”

Before Dolby Atmos, anyone could have the tools and gear to mix and master — all from a home studio using headphones. But Spatial Audio, Solano says, is ‘different.’

Immersive mixes require expensive gear, specifically equipped studios, and distinct professional knowledge. These extensive requirements for Dolby Atmos have reset the terrain for mixers and offer a blank slate for experimentation, Solano explains. “Mix engineers at all levels are exploring new ways to expand the sonic possibilities with Dolby Atmos,” Solano noted. “Everyone is now at the same starting line with Dolby Atmos, with lots of new possibilities ahead.”

Speaking about AlexProMix, the spatial audio professional told DMN that his background has allowed him to ‘build a complex type of service’ for artists, labels, and studios.

His journey to becoming a spatial audio professional started in 2005, when Solano says he began ‘working behind the scenes for companies ahead of the curve,’ such as Avid Technology, the makers of Pro Tools. From there, Solano went on to gain early certifications from Universal and Warner. 

Speaking about the advent of his role as educator, Solano says he had to go through the whole process of educating his clients on spatial audio, why it’s needed, and the required equipment details.

“So I took that format and basically started creating videos on YouTube on what immersive audio is and how it benefits music producers and artists,” says Solano.

Solano admits he’s in a ‘unique position’ as an early adopter of immersive audio because he’s a music mixer, an online educator, and is ‘flying out to studios to teach immersive mixing.’

“All of that centers around something that I enjoy doing — my passion for music technology and music services and my early adoption of immersive audio.”

Solano also recounts his recent stint in Dubai, where he was called by LPME to assist with three recently built studios with two Dolby Atmos rooms. “They made the investment but needed a seasoned professional to train their in-house staff of producers and mixers in the new format.”

“That’s significant because you can have a multi-million dollar studio. You can have a lot of capital and resources, but there’s a very steep learning curve on knowing what to do when you sit in a room with speakers.”

The technology has been quickly growing and evolving, but audio professionals still need guidance and education when setting up a studio. “A Dolby Atmos music studio is a dedicated room for immersive mixing,” Solano explains, adding, “It’s not like a traditional recording or mixing room — it’s not a multi-purpose room.”

“It’s much easier to get into it now than two years ago, but it’s still quite a bit of an investment. You’re talking about 12 speakers plus all the rigging gear and acoustic treatment everywhere. And everything needs to be treated because sounds are coming at you from different directions, so there’s more possibility that audio reflections will bounce around the room,” explains Solano.

Solano believes his work impacts the music ecosystem beyond artist and label knowledge, adding, “As an early adopter, I’m supporting both Dolby and all the companies who are creating software compatible with Dolby.”

Looking at the bigger picture, what does the future of spatial audio look like in terms of traction on major streaming platforms like Amazon Music, Apple Music, and the 20+ other DSPs supporting Dolby? Moreover, in the spatial audio realm, what’s happening at Spotify?

Recalling a panel discussion he attended at MUSEXPO 2023, Solano pointed out the possibility that by the end of 2024, Apple Music and Amazon will require Dolby Atmos to be a deliverable format. Similarly, he mentioned that in March of 2022, major labels had set a mandate to go through the archives and convert everything into Dolby Atmos.

And leading from that progression, Spotify can’t possibly be so far behind. Solano relays that even though Spotify isn’t currently in a financial position to make that jump or investment into spatial audio, the streaming giant built a Dolby Atmos studio at its facilities in late 2022.

However, Solano predicts that when the streaming giant finally steps into the field and adopts Dolby Atmos as a format, ‘every music mixer who’s working in immersive audio will see their rates going up. Because there will be such a high demand for their skill.’

Spotify (SPOT) Stock Insider Sales Cumulative Value by Month, April 2023-February 2024 (photo: Digital Music News)

Following the release of Spotify’s Q4 2023 earnings report, insiders including CEO Daniel Ek sold a total of almost $100 million worth of company stock. Amid a push for profitability – and as shares continue to hover around a 52-week high – what does the selloff mean for the streaming giant’s 2024?

Spotify (NYSE: SPOT) posted its Q4 2023 financials on Tuesday, February 6th, reporting the addition of 10 million subscribers from the prior quarter and a smaller-than-expected operating loss. Against the backdrop of the business’s push for profitability, the market responded positively to the results; SPOT rose from the low-$220s at the week’s beginning to surpass the $240 mark.

But Spotify execs and officers acted on SPOT’s valuation spike as well. On the 7th and the 8th, insiders sold a cumulative $96.64 million worth of company stock, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulatory filings. For multiple reasons – among them SPOT’s value fluctuations in recent years – the moves are spurring questions about the trajectory not only of Spotify stock, but of the company itself.

Report Table of Contents

I. Spotify Insiders’ Post-Earnings Selloff: Who Sold What, and Should Investors Be Worried?

II. Graph: Spotify Stock Insider Sales’ Cumulative Value by Month, April 2023 – February 2024

III. Spotify Stock’s Long and Winding Road to Early February’s 52-Week High

IV. Graph: Spotify Stock’s Per-Share Value, 2018-24

V. Spotify Stock’s 2024 Outlook – Where Does SPOT Stand As Profitability Takes Center Stage?

VI. Spotify Stock by the Dates: A Timeline of Insider Sales, Share-Price Fluctuations, and Related Developments

UMG’s Grainge (l) vs. WMG’s Kyncl (r): A Tale of Two TikTok Deals

While Universal Music Group is rallying plenty of music industry support following its TikTok pullout, that love isn’t spilling into a mass pullout. Even more telling are those that aren’t even thinking about it.

Check out our recent DMN Pro Weekly report for a complete breakdown of the recent UMG-TikTok standoff and what we know about TikTok’s music deal structures. We dive deeper into what this standoff means, what led to the breakdown, TikTok’s royalty contributions to the music industry compared to other UGC platforms, and an eye-opening comparison between the revenues of UMG versus TikTok owner ByteDance.

In seemingly every corner of the music industry, Universal Music Group is getting love for sticking it to TikTok. The chutzpah is real and getting respect, and this is a riskier gambit than it appears — even for a hefty mega-label like UMG.

In the days following the pullout, supportive statements emerged from the NMPA, Downtown Music Holdings, and A2IM. That’s a healthy chunk of the music publishing and indie label community rallying to UMG’s cause. But so far, none of this is going past a supportive bro-hug..

Perhaps even more telling is who isn’t threatening a pullout: fellow major label Warner Music Group.

During WMG’s recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Robert Kyncl expressed empathy but not solidarity. It turns out that Warner Music Group is in a good place with TikTok — though they feel UMG’s pain. “Our deal was very difficult too,” Kyncl relayed in the analyst q&a session. “But we got there, and for us it was fair.”

Kyncl himself is a YouTube alum who has previously battered through similar stare-downs with powerful content owners. “I have a pretty unique experience in this obviously having been on the other side and having gone through these types of disputes where content has come down,” the tech-turned-content CEO continued.

“I know exactly what both Lucian [Grainge] and Shou [Zi Chew] are feeling, because I have gone through all of those feelings, multiple times. It is not great for either side, obviously, because I think everybody wants to consummate the deal.”

Volumes, spoken. And what about Sony Music Entertainment, the other mega-major? So far, it’s been crickets.

A percentage breakdown of the approximately $1.6 billion in global recorded music revenue attributed to UGC and ancillary licensing sources for 2022 in Goldman Sachs’ “Music in the Air” report.

But back to those who are publicly backing UMG. Why aren’t those approving statements shifting into action?

Part of this boils down to contractual realities. TikTok has many deals with many rights owners, and they don’t all expire on the same date. Some are months or years away from renewal. Simply stated: some of these IP owners may be getting the proverbial s—t sandwich, but simply can’t renegotiate right now.

But even if the stars align on a contractual renewal date, pulling an entire catalog from TikTok is risky, especially for companies lacking UMG’s weight. TikTok has a lot of leverage, particularly on the ground level with music fans and artists themselves.

For starters, plenty of musicians want to remain on TikTok, have few issues with royalty payments or AI, and would hate the label or publisher that forcibly removed their content.

That dynamic quickly became evident following UMG’s pullout. Universal Music hates their TikTok terms, that we know. But Noah Kahan, a TikTok-bred artist signed to UMG/Republic, couldn’t care less.

“So, like you, I’ve read the news about the UMG catalog being taken off TikTok,” Kahan began in a short video posted to the platform immediately after the UMG pullout. “Some of my songs aren’t gonna be on there anymore; I won’t be able to promote my music on TikTok anymore, but luckily, I’m not a TikTok artist, right?” he concludes facetiously.

Suddenly, the TikTok-to-signed-artist pathway has been strangely disrupted. If you’re an artist who’s blowing up on TikTok, do you want to sign with Republic/UMG, which will quickly remove that content?

The Universal Music-TikTok Licensing Battle Is in Full Swing — But What Do We Actually Know About TikTok’s Licensing Agreements?

But even artists who didn’t emerge from TikTok or rely on the platform have an issue, because a powerful marketing platform is suddenly unavailable. By contrast, it’s also entirely available for any non-UMG artist.

But this gets even worse: in the days following the UMG takedown, DMN uncovered some evidence that TikTok’s algorithms were responding to shift users away from muted videos. Not only were songs getting silenced, but artists signed to other labels might be getting more attention.

We can’t prove that. But TikTok had been a surprisingly sonified platform, considering it just lost up to 40% of its synched music content, according to our upper-end estimates.

Indeed, UMG’s chairman and CEO, Lucian Grainge, had to think through these issues the night before he pulled the trigger on the TikTok takedown. This wasn’t an easy call, and if the stalemate goes on too long, some artists might demand exemptions or simply walk. Given ByteDance’s relatively monstrous revenues, perhaps TikTok can afford a prolonged stare-down.

Graph: Digital Music News

Incidentally, WMG’s Kyncl also predicted that the UMG vs. TikTok battle would quickly resolve itself, like so many licensing standoffs before. But what if it doesn’t?

History says this will end soon. But if it doesn’t, both sides would suffer considerable damage. Most of the music industry would simply watch the carnage.

That hesitation could make a big difference in the UMG/TikTok standoff. Losing up to 40% of the music played on TikTok videos is a shocking blow, but this isn’t moving to a crippling level of 50%, 60%, or higher — because nobody else is joining ranks.

At least not yet.

A percentage breakdown of the approximately $1.6 billion in global recorded music revenue attributed to UGC and ancillary licensing sources for 2022 in Goldman Sachs’ “Music in the Air” report.

Predictably, the nuances of TikTok’s deal (or lack thereof) with Universal Music aren’t publicly available and will likely remain confidential. But that doesn’t mean we lack insight into the deal TikTok sought to secure with the major label. Here’s a much closer look at the standoff and its bones of contention.

On January 30th, Universal Music Group (UMG) announced the imminent end of its TikTok licensing deal. As described in an open letter, a lowball offer from the short-form app on a new agreement, along with user safety and AI content concerns, had prompted UMG to “call time out.” 

The ByteDance subsidiary then fired back with a comparatively concise message, taking aim at what it described as Universal Music’s decision to leave behind an invaluable marketing resource due to “greed.” Subsequently, no shortage of TikTokers lamented the absence of their favorite artists’ music on the app and, more pressingly, the removal of audio from videos containing the impacted works.

But are the bones of contention in this debate? The answer — like many music industry matters — is complicated.

Report Table of Contents

I. Is TikTok’s Value As a Promotional Tool Enough to Justify Lower Rightsholder Payments?

II. TikTok Licensing At a Glance: What We Know About the Platform’s Rightsholder Deals

III. Graph: Universal Music and ByteDance Annual Revenue, 2019-23

IV. The Bottom Line: Can TikTok and Universal Music Put Their Dispute in the Rearview?

V. By the Dates: A Timeline of the TikTok-Universal Music Licensing Dispute and Related Developments

If you’d like to download this report, simply send an email to support@digitalmusicnews.com.

Photo Credit: Salt

Music rights company Salt draws a major investment round from Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, and Quincy Jones.

British music rights company Salt has announced closing a significant investment round with songwriters and producers, including Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart (pictured center), Canadian songwriter and producer Dan Kurtz, and legendary producer Quincy Jones.

The investment sees Ulvaeus joining Salt’s board alongside Robert Ashcroft, former chief executive of UK collection society, PRS for Music, and Roger Faxon, former chief executive of EMI. Dan Kurtz joins as Senior Vice President for the Americas, while Niclas Molinder (pictured right) is appointed as Head of Industry Relations.

Other investors in Salt’s latest funding round include the preeminent European investment firm Lansdowne Investment Company, and the family office of Nicolas James Group.

Salt streamlines music rights and royalties from attribution to distribution, with a global network that’s “flexible, accurate, high-speed, and transparent.” Its royalties platform processes usage, matches ownership, and calculates royalty distributions, providing societies with advanced royalty-processing software so they can pay rightsholders quickly and accurately.

“Making and distributing music is easier than ever. But the systems for crediting and rewarding creativity are stuck in the pre-digital era, unable to compete in a world where 140,000 tracks are added to Spotify every day,” says Salt CEO Doug Imrie (pictured left). “That’s why we created Salt. It plugs into existing back-office systems, processing usage, matching ownership and calculating distributions with cloud-powered speed and accuracy. With Salt, music creators will get played AND paid.”

Salt’s other software platform, Session, allows songwriters, producers, artists, and other performers to easily assign critical and correct metadata and songwriting credits to their work during the creation process, as well as share music releases with the downstream industry.

The platforms enable songwriters to access the so-called “Black Boxes” of unclaimed or mis-allocated royalties, which an Ivors Academy report found to be as high as $624 million a year. Already, Salt has signed a ten-year deal to process over $3.4 billion in music royalties with its first customer, Dutch music collection society BumaStemra.

Salt has also signed a deal with The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) in the US to provide data matching services to improve music rights and royalties collection for music creators. The MLC administers blanket mechanical licenses for eligible streaming and download services, collecting royalties due under those licenses and paying music publishers and administrators, ex-US collective management organizations, and self-administered songwriters, composers, and lyricists.

Apple’s AirPods Max are a cornerstone of Apple’s premium content+hardware ecosystem, which includes Apple Music’s Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos (photo: MaxWdhs)

After years of investing in lossless and spatial audio, Apple Music and Amazon Music have cemented premium audio as a key part of their offerings. But the market leader, Spotify, is still plotting its entry into high-definition and spatial audio, raising questions about the streaming landscape’s trajectory in 2024 and beyond.

Nearly three years have passed since Apple Music and Amazon Music announced (on the same day) far-reaching premium audio expansions, extending both to spatial audio and lossless formats. Almost simultaneously, Spotify users uncovered a HiFi icon on select versions of the app. And with the Stockholm-based platform having revealed plans earlier in 2021 to adopt high-fidelity audio, a launch seemed imminent. 

As frustrated users frequently lament on social media, though, Spotify has yet to move forward with these plans. Inversely, Apple Music and Amazon Music are framing premium audio as a major reason to choose their services. “Hear sound all around,” reads central text on Apple Music’s subscription landing page, with the Amazon Music Unlimited counterpart encouraging listeners to “experience spatial audio” and enjoy “the HD difference.”

But a distinction in the approaches to premium audio – an all-in strategy on the one hand versus, at least to date, no strategy whatsoever on the other – suggests a significant competitive differentiator between the services. Following uncertainty about the interest in and reach of lossless and spatial audio, it’s become abundantly clear that higher-quality listening options are here to stay.

Report Table of Contents

I. The Premium Audio Imbalance: Apple & Amazon vs. Spotify

II. Graph: Premium Audio Today: A Quick Look At Who Offers What (and for How Much)

III. Spotify’s ‘Supremium’ Tier: The Long-Rumored Package At a Glance

IV. Spotify Playing Catch-Up With Premium and Spatial Audio – Will Premium Audio Be a Gamechanger for Apple Music and Amazon Music in 2024?

V. By the Dates: A Timeline of Premium Audio’s Streaming Integration

VI. Source Documentation

If you’d like to download this report, simply send an email to support@digitalmusicnews.com.

During 2021 and 2022, capital rushed into non-fungible token (NFT), cryptocurrency/blockchain, metaverse, and wider music Web3 startups in the music industry. But how are these businesses faring amid dramatic funding and market changes?

Following the hype surrounding music Web3 startups and their vast capital raises, how are these companies doing? With a quick-moving media cycle often skipping to the next story, a number of underperforming Web3 companies have been flying under the radar.

But that doesn’t paint a complete picture. Last year saw several companies technically classified as ‘Web3’ double down — or pivot into — more lucrative sub-sectors.

Medallion, for example, announced a $13.7 million Series A (and ambitious plans to bolster its presence in the increasingly crowded superfan arena) in December of 2023. And ahead of its 2022 relaunch, the revamped LimeWire was billed as a “one-stop marketplace for artists and fans alike to create, buy and trade NFT collectibles with ease.”

Then, the platform scored a $6.5 million raise in May of 2023 before shifting into the burgeoning generative AI sphere, a move set in motion by the September buyout of BlueWillow. Other Web3-focused music companies are likewise reinventing themselves to align with market trends.

Meanwhile, multiple Web3 plays have drawn huge funding rounds in January of this year. So what’s likely to happen in 2024? That’s the focus of our latest DMN Pro Weekly Report.

Report Table of Contents

I. A Look At Web3 Music Startups’ Funding

Graph: Web3 Music Funding by Year, 2021-23

II. How Web3 Companies Evolved During 2023

III. Not All Digital Technologies Are Made Equal – NFTs Face Pronounced Market Challenges

Graph: Music NFT Funding by Year, 2021-23

IV. Are There Any Positive Takeaways for Web3 Music Companies in 2024?

Will.i.am speaking at DMN Pro’s AI-focused symposium in October, 2023 at the artist’s FYI headquarters in Los Angeles (photo: Digital Music News)

When it comes to AI, will.i.am is emerging as one of several high-profile artists embracing the technology. Now, the artist — in conjunction with his FYI app — is debuting a SiriusXM radio show featuring a seriously convincing AI co-host, qd.pi.

Digital Music News first tipped news of the upcoming SiriusXM channel, dubbed ‘Will.i.am Presents the FYI Show,’ last week. Now, it’s showtime: according to details shared by the satellite radio giant, the show will begin airing on Thursday night on SiriusXM’s The 10s Spot (channel 11).

The kicker: will.i.am’s cohost is an ‘AI deejay’ and a seriously convincing one at that. A quick listen makes you realize that AI radio deejaying has arrived — and may be ready for primetime.

But how convincing is this? Ahead of the show’s debut, the Black Eyed Peas progenitor shared a preview of the show with DMN on a dedicated channel on FYI, an app designed by will.i.am to be the ‘ultimate productivity tool for creatives’. A few minutes in, and will.i.am’s sidekick AI deejay, qd.pi, appears. She’s scarily convincing — and without the AI disclaimer, listeners might think they’re listening to a well-spoken Brit.

This isn’t the navigational voice in your car mispronouncing street names. Instead, qd.pi’s inflections, timing, and pronunciations are almost impeccable — scarily so.

The rest is a mix of hits (think Bad Bunny, Post Malone, and Pharrell), chats with guests like Xzibit, and pass-offs to qd.pi. “Each week, we’re gonna take a deep dive into pop culture, music, entertainment, world news, and technology,” will.i.am describes in the show’s opening minutes. “We’re going to have thought-provoking discussions, hilarious games, interviews with some of my favorite people making culture today, and of course, the hottest music.”

“It’s also the first show with an AI radio cohost,” will.i.am reminds us. Indeed, this is the special sauce that makes this show genuinely different.

Interestingly, will.i.am refers to qd.pi as ‘it,’ which suggests some refreshing distance.

For those familiar with AI ‘companion’ platforms like Replika and candy.ai, that’s not always the case. But regardless of your orientation towards AI personalities, qd.pi does sound remarkably close to an actual human. According to will.i.am, this is the result of a relatively advanced large language model iteration.

“Nobody’s programming you telling you what to say, there’s nobody behind a mystery curtain with a microphone,” will.i.am assured. “There’s nobody typing what you’re saying. You’re a for real, large language model, able to have conversations — real deep ones, with knowledge about what’s happening in real-time. You are a for-real-for-real type of AI.”

Unsurprisingly, qd.pi agreed with that praiseworthy assessment, backing up the statement with an eloquent verification. Meanwhile, will.i.am also aims to complement the action on SiriusXM with a concurrent channel and chat on FYI, a social media startup with splashy Hollywood digs.

Perhaps the best part of the debut FYI Show is decidedly non-AI.

In a discussion about cars, rap, and everything in between, guest Xzibit offered some interesting information about his now-famous show, Pimp My Ride. “To be honest, I never intended to do reality TV. I did it because I wanted [MTV] to play my f-ing videos,” Xzibit admitted. “The people that listened to my music were on one side. But then I was getting soccer moms and people who didn’t care about Xzibit the rapper, but there was a character and personality that was comforting or funny, or I said something funny and they got it. It had nothing to do with my music, and that was the light bulb for me.”

“Pimp My Ride changed my life. It took me from a regional rapper to a global brand.”

Late last year, FYI generously offered its workspace for Digital Music News to host an AI-focused music industry symposium. The packed event drew producers, publishers, music technologists, lawyers, investors, and artists from all corners of the music industry.

“As far as focusing my ideas and strategizing with collaborators, I use AI for that,” Will said during one of the panels. “The thinking through how to put [a track] out in the world, what does it mean to the world? It’s more solution-oriented for helping with marketing, and I like AI for that.”

DMN Pro Q1 2024: Missing Payments? A Look At Loss Prevention In Music

A comprehensive discussion on the state of music licensing, streaming fraud, metadata, and getting paid — with a panel of the foremost authorities in the music industry. Missing payments? Tune in!

• Moderator: Paul Resnikoff, Publisher of Digital Music News

Panel 1: UGC Licensing Pitfalls

• Virginie Berger – Chief Business Development and Rights Officer of MatchTune
• Alexander Baynum – Director of U.S. Operations for Exploration.io
• Ryan Born – Founder of HAAWK and Identifyy

Panel 2: Fixing The Data Debacle

• Jeff Price – Co-Founder and CEO of Word Collections
• Ryan Edwards – Founder and CEO of Audoo
• Jack Cyphers – Founder and CEO of Border Fox Consulting
• Edward Ginis- Founder and CEO of OpenPlay

Panel 3: Streaming Fraud

• Andrew Batey – Co-Founder of Beatdapp
• Abby North – President of North Music Group
• Nermina Mumic – CEO of Legitary

Photo Credit: UMG

Last year, Universal Music filed for a new trademark for a service called ‘UMusicLift.’ Now it appears they’re putting the finishing touches on launching a new music startup incubator. Here’s what we know.

The first appearance of the ‘UMusicLift’ brand appeared in a USPTO filing marked December 9, 2023. That filing appeared to be a broad reaching trademark for the UMusicLift name, spanning music education and information about the music industry. In short, a generalized trademark application to cover all potential bases for the name.

Now the official ‘UMusicLift’ website is online, which gives us a bit more idea about what Univeral Music has planned for the brand. The initiative is coming out of Universal Music Group’s Digital Innovation team and will serve as a new online hub dedicated to “supporting the next generation of diverse, music-related startups and entrepreneurs who aim to accelerate the next wave of digital transformation.”

So what will the music tech products look like that come from this model? It could be a copy-paste of the early-stage support we’ve seen in Silicon Valley time and time again. Or it could be a place for UMG’s Digital team to spin out its own emerging concepts.

UMG’s SVP, Digital Innovation Strategy & Business Development Kristen Cullen Bender spoke a bit about the new initiative, saying “you’re going to find tools for learning, news, spotlights, all these different resources and pathways to connect back into the business.”

The page itself only offers a splash screen with its ‘coming soon’ message and a place for users to sign up to be notified when the hub actually launches. So when will those finishing touches come? Who knows—the site is up after less than a month of the trademark filing going live so UMG is moving at a good clip here.

Photo Credit: Virginie Berger

Keeping the music industry fair for all is a constant tug-of-war against many types of fraud. From preventing false royalty claims, stopping automated bot streaming, and keeping platforms accountable—everyone has a different opinion.

Today we’re speaking with Virginie Berger, Chief Business Development & Rights Officer at Matchtune. Berger is also participating in our upcoming webinar, speaking specifically on the topics of user-generated content monetization, royalties, and more.

Virginie Berger says one of the biggest challenges facing the modern music industry is that companies are navigating an increasingly intricate and globalized environment. “It’s one of the most significant liabilities they face—the complexity of managing music rights & royalties in this diverse landscape,” Berger told us.

Digital Music News is hosting an online webinar exploring fraud prevention and liability reduction in music. Some of the topics our panelists will explore this session include how the liability of inaccurate payments from public performance impacts the industry and how millions in royalties have been stolen through false copyright claims.

• • What: Digital Music News’ Webinar ‘Missing Payments? A Look at Loss Prevention and IP Protection In Music’
  • When: January 24 | 11 am PT / 2 pm ET
  • Exclusive to DMN Pro Members. Want to join this event but don’t have DMN Pro yet? Here’s the first month free, we don’t want you to miss it. Enter code 1MONTHPRO when registering HERE.

“As the industry expands across borders, music companies must grapple with varying copyright laws, royalty collection societies, and distribution channels in different countries. This international dimension introduces a level of complexity that demands extensive legal knowledge and cultural sensitivity, increasing the risk of non-compliance and missed revenue opportunities,” Virginie shared.

Berger is a seasoned professional in the music and tech industries, renowned for her expertise in music business innovation and integrating AI in music strategy and rights management. Her 20-year career has included pivotal roles at Downtown Music-Songtrust, Armonia, MySpace, and Microsoft—where she played a key role in generating revenue, forging strategic alliances, and championing artists’ rights.

Virginie is known for her work as a curator, professor, and artist advocate, with a rich background in music business rights innovation. Matchtune is a pioneer in AI-powered audio recognition, developing the cutting-edge ‘Advanced Audio Fingerprinting’ technology. DMN spoke with Virginie about the biggest liabilities facing companies in music, how artists can get what they’re owed, and some of the biggest challenges they’ll face in getting paid what they’re owed.

“Music rights are often divided among numerous stakeholders, record labels, and music publishers. Each party holds specific rights, such as performance, mechanical, or synchronization rights. This division creates a convoluted network of royalty payments and rights management, leading to disputes and delays in payment—ultimately affecting the financial well-being of artists and companies alike,” Berger continued.

“Many music companies continue to rely on outdated technology for tracking royalties and managing rights, which is not sufficient to handle the volume and complexity of data generated from digital streaming platforms. Although AI and advanced analytics offer potential solutions for more accurate tracking and prediction models for royalty distribution, the industry’s slow adoption of these technologies has led to significant gaps in data accuracy and royalty distribution.”

Streaming fraud and account manipulation can play a big part in theft of royalties. Fraudulent activities like artificial streams to inflate royalty payments hurt everyone, distorting data analytics that companies rely on in their decision-making process. Berger says combating these types of fraud requires a “more sophisticated approach to monitoring and detecting fraudulent activities, potentially involving AI-driven analytics.”

While AI may help the industry administer the royalties side of music, it is also one of the biggest liabilities in the industry. Berger says the integration of AI into the music industry represents its current biggest liability. Here’s why.

“This is primarily due to the complex interplay of data training, copyright, licensing, and the management of input and output,” Berger shared. “This situation is further complicated by the rapid pace of AI development and the lag in corresponding legal frameworks. Current copyright laws were not designed with AI-generated content in mind—leading to a grey area in legal terms.”

“As AI continues to evolve, there’s an urgent need for updated laws and regulations that address these new technologies’ unique challenges and implications. Balancing the innovative potential of AI with respect for intellectual property rights is crucial,” Berger added. “The industry must advocate for fair practices in data usage for AI training, ensuring that creators are adequately compensated and their rights are protected, while also pushing for legal reforms that address the nuances of AI-generated content.”

So we’ve explored how the complexity of the music industry’s growth across the globe has made it difficult to track and pay rights holders. But the transition to digital streaming has massively exacerbated that. Berger says that royalty calculation models used by streaming platforms are often complex and not fully transparent, leading to misunderstandings and suspicion of underpaying artists and labels. The sheer amount of data that DSPs handle on a daily basis can also introduce metadata errors—causing delays in royalties.

“The prevalent ‘pro-rata’ system, where revenue is pooled and distributed based on the percentage of total streams, often puts niche and emerging artists at a disadvantage, raising questions about the fairness of these models,” Berger continued. Some of the pain points that have emerged in getting artists what they’re owed include:

• Inadequate Compensation | Many argue that artists are not compensated fairly on DSPs, particularly smaller, indie artists.
• Delayed Payments | The lag time between when music is played and when artists are paid can be substantial.
• Complex Royalty Calculations | The algorithms used by streaming platforms to calculate royalties are not always transparent, leading to confusion and potential underpayment.
• Metadata Errors | Metadata includes song credits and other underlying information tied to the release of a song or album and it plays a crucial role in getting the right people paid. Errors like missing credits, misspelled names, or inconsistencies with a platform’s guidelines can lead to missed royalty payments.
• Unclaimed Royalties | Unclaimed royalties are another major problem in the music industry, affecting many independent artists and songwriters. Unclaimed royalties may be due to a spelling error, unreported usage of music, or a lack of understanding in royalty collection.

With so many ways for an artist or label to potentially miss out on royalties, what recourse do they have in collecting missing payments? Virginie says a multi-pronged approach is necessary for anyone seeking to recover lost revenue.

“Auditing agreements and royalty statements is a crucial first step,” she told Digital Music News. “This process involves closely examining the data, including the metadata, for any errors or inconsistencies that might have led to the missing payments. Engaging with collection societies and DSPs is also vital for gaining detailed play reports and understanding the royalty calculations. In cases where discrepancies persist, legal advice and intervention may become necessary to ensure rightful payments are received.”

Digital Music News and longtime partner Reprtoir joined forces for a live-streamed panel to tackle some opportunities and challenges tied to AI catalog management.

On the occasion of Reprtoir and Cyanite teaming up to launch Audio AI — an auto-tagging and similarity research tool powered by artificial intelligence — we touched base on a few hot topics for the music industry companies managing catalogs and their challenges. Our esteemed panel included:

• Lara Angelil from Reprtoir
• Markus Schwarzer from Cyanite
• Juvénal Juarez from Gerencia 360
• Danny Dunlap from Beacon Street Studios
• Paul Resnikoff moderating from Digital Music News

From scattered assets and metadata across various platforms to the barrier for creation being considerably lowered these last few years, our panelists went over the main issues music professionals are facing and the best solutions.

All in all, we asked ourselves how to manage assets professionals already have at hand, while also adding new information, traing catalogs safely and creating one unique source of information for a company’s teams. Follow the discussion with the recording or grab the key takeaways here.

A Brand New Way to Think About Assets and Catalogs

Lately, catalog sales have been all around, everyone has heard about the vast amounts put into obtaining the most prominent artists’ rights. Catalogs are moving around more often than ever, but this trend necessitates a clear understanding of what assets are worth to negotiate. Companies like Gerencia 360 are regularly dealing with offers and potential sales. Juvenal Juarez took the time to explain how difficult a clear understanding and a full view of what you own is for music companies.

Knowing your entire catalog is impossible; there will always be a small portion of rights, or rights-holders identity, owners won’t be able to identify. Managing assets and their metadata the right way helps find the blind spots, adding new metadata in an already organized system when it’s possible and eventually reducing the liability to a minimum. In the end, a music business has to know how to do business, and using tools to understand what’s in a company’s roster is essential.

Beyond the business side, it’s also essential to ensure that the internal system makes sense to everyone. “One of the things we really took advantage of with Reprtoir and Cyanite is taking the subjectivity out of metadata tagging. We like to say ‘assets’ but we’re talking about music, it’s art. And because it’s art, there’s a certain amount of subjectivity.” said Danny Dunlap from Beacon Street Studios.

By integrating AI-powered tools, some standardization in the management of assets becomes possible, making workspaces like Reprtoir easier to collaborate on. This means that researching through a catalog becomes much more accessible and can go deeper than recent tracks or a few ideas popping up in one’s head. It becomes way more efficient and values a complete catalog.

Pulling the thread here, this changes how music professionals interact with their catalogs. Accessing the value of data levels the field; it’s not reserved to large companies with resources to tag and deploy searches anymore. “Anybody can now make their catalog work for them right now. You don’t need to spend years studying it to start to maximize on it.” noted Lara Angelil from Reprtoir.

AI as a Collaborative Tool for Music Professionals

On that note, our panelists have been giving feedback on their work with AI in catalog management. The impact is glorious; interfacing with a catalog (large or not) shifts completely as AI allows for surprising results, a complementary proposition through the whole collection of assets.

Markus Schwarzer, founder of Cyanite, expressed how they thought about the AI implication for music professionals: “We come from the fascination of music moments. This moment when music randomly fits perfectly to your situation, activity, mood, who you are at the moment. (…) Being able to speak in your own language, describe the sound you want to listen to and actually get it, is bringing us closer to these music moments than trying to translate your words into keywords.”

In the current context, in which Sync takes up a lot of space in music companies’ workload, AI is a must-have. Using smart tools to look for that right track at the right time, independently from the release date, is a big help. As Juvenal Juarez from Gerencia 360 said, “This is a great time for copyright owners to have these tools. We’re scratching the surface on this next-level tagging. Genres are easy to tag but now when you get into emotions that are very human, in the next 5 years, they’ll find a lot of gems for these placements, giving them a boost of energy and motivation.”

How Do We Integrate AI In the Music Industry?

So now the big question: how to regulate the use of such an important technological shift? According to our panelists, the big debate resides in content ingestion; are we allowed to drop an entire catalog into a massive machine-learning program to train it?

One rule has been set: a fully AI-generated content is not “copyrightable”. So how do we decide if a track has enough “human” in its composition to fall under copyright law? Will we have the right technology to know who or what composed a piece of music? Will it be a cat and mouse game?

More than composition, AI will unveil so much data on the performance of previous tracks that it might become trickier for new artists to match the potential to be used on social media, launch trends and make it a hit again. Indeed, there’s no lucky guess, it’s a way to recreate and inflate value (hence the various big catalog sales we’ve seen happening within the last years).

AI is, therefore, also used by some platforms to determine which tracks are more likely to become a trend based on previous data. The endgame here is to make sure tracks will “work” on platforms and content. As Danny Dunlap from Beacon Street Studios said, “when we get briefed, it’s not uncommon to receive ‘make it sound like TikTok’!”.

Will There Be Too Much Metadata in the End?

With more and more data, more and more creations and the ability to share even more information with it, will there be too much to deal with? According to Lara Angelil at Reprtoir, professionals will be able to manage it easily, as long as they gear up and get the right tools and give clarity on their activity: “scalability is key, with tools like Reprtoir it’s possible to grow with all influx of information (…) knowing your data and having access to you data makes it so much easier to create transparency.”

Dive deeper into our discussion with Reprtoir in the replay of our panel, available here!

Spotify Stock 2023: Wall Street likes what it sees so far (photo: Digital Music News)

For a company that has never made an annual profit and accumulated losses of over $4 billion over the years, we dive into the details to decode whether Spotify’s latest moves — layoffs, podcast cuts, trimmed operational costs and raised subscription prices — can finally lead to an ecosystem in which the streaming market leader can be profitable.

In our latest DMN Pro Weekly research report, we take a closer look at the prospects of Spotify becoming profitable in 2024 and beyond.

Report Table of Contents

Scale vs. Profitability: Spotify’s Empty Pockets

Higher interest rates have helped to shift the emphasis on Wall Street (and among investors) from growth towards profitability. Over the years, however, profitability simply hasn’t been on the cards for the streaming market leader. The company has posted a positive net income for only a couple of quarters over the last several years — crossing the $100 million mark only once.

Table 1: Spotify quarterly net income/operating loss 2020-2023

Business Model: Buried In Variable Costs

Spotify has to pay a revenue percentage — often over 70% — to rights owners in exchange for licenses. A quick overview of how Spotify royalties work, and why variable cost increases make scaling towards profitability more difficult.

Figure 1: The ‘big pot’ for sound royalties

Figure 2: The ‘big pot’ for composition/song royalties

Raising Subscription Prices and Cutting Costs: Spotify Moves

Music licensing is expensive. But Spotify is also attacking the other side of the problem: exceptionally high operating costs. Recent moves include subleasing its pricey 14-floor office space in Manhattan, downsizing with several rounds of layoffs, and axing way-too-expensive podcasters.

Can Spotify Become Profitable In 2024?

With all the changes Spotify has implemented between 2021 and 2023, 2024 could become a very different playing field for the consistently unprofitable streaming market leader.

Figure 3: (NYSE: SPOT) in 2023 — up 240%

Photo Credit: Chad Morehead

Tennessee’s governor is announcing plans to update the state’s law to protect the music industry from the misuse of artificial intelligence.

Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee is announcing new legislation around protecting the music industry within the state against the misuse of AI, his office announced late last week.

On Wednesday, January 10, Lee will announce the full legislature change alongside state leadership, artists, songwriters, and music industry stakeholders in Nashville. State law currently protects image and likeness, but the upcoming changes will enact further protections tailored to audio.

“From Beale Street to Broadway and beyond, Tennessee is known for our rich artistic heritage that tells the story of our great state,” said Lee on Friday, January 5. “As the technology landscape evolves with artificial intelligence, we’re proud to lead the nation in proposing legal protection for our best-in-class artists and songwriters.”

The legislature will bolster existing protections in Tennessee covering image and likeness rights, in addition to a wide range of audio-specific protections covering “songwriters, performers, and music industry professionals’ voices from the misuse of AI.”

As unauthorized AI-created songs continue to pop up online like a game of whack-a-mole, the music industry is hungry for any legislature to offer peace of mind — with legislation at the federal level the eventual goal. Protecting the Nashville music industry is certainly a welcome start.

In October, a group of US senators introduced the NO FAKES Act (Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act), which aims to “protect the voice and visual likenesses of individuals from unfair use through generative artificial intelligence.”

Led by Senators Marsha Blackburn, Chris Coons, Thom Tillis, and Amy Klobuchar, the proposed bill would “prevent a person from producing or distributing an unauthorized AI-generated replica of an individual to perform in an audiovisual or sound recording without the consent of the individual being replicated.”

Further, persons who do so would be “liable for damages caused by the AI-generated fake,” while platforms hosting the fakes would be held liable if they have “knowledge of the fact that the replica was not authorized by the individual depicted.”

Exceptions would be granted to content created “for purposes of comment, criticism, or parody” per the First Amendment. Notably, the current iteration of the bill is a “discussion draft” for politicians to mull over.

SoundCloud CEO Eliah Seton (Photo Credit: SoundCloud)

Everyone loves a comeback. But is SoundCloud’s comeback worth $1 billion — or more?

Just when you thought the outlandish music industry acquisitions were over, there’s this. SoundCloud is suddenly preparing for a sale, with a possible price tag surpassing $1 billion — that is, according to a report surfacing this weekend in Sky News.

The report noted that investors Raine Group and Temasek Holdings ‘have begun interviewing investment banks about a prospective auction of the company,’ though it’s unclear who’s nibbling on the line. Raine and Temasek are majority owners, with Sirius XM investing a healthy $75 million in the platform back in 2020.

Outside of a shadowy ‘insider,’ Sky offered no sources for its projected sale price. That has raised some questions over who’s leaking — and why.

Back in 2017, Raine and Temasek swooped in to rescue SoundCloud, which was on the brink of collapse. Now, it appears that SoundCloud’s distressed buyers are aiming for a ‘buy low, sell high’ exit door, with 2024 potentially offering a more welcoming M&A environment.

Current CEO Eliah Seton has been credited with helping to turn the ship around at SoundCloud, though profitability has been largely elusive over the years. That could scare off some buyers, especially in this climate, though SoundCloud is actively trimming its cost overhead.

Just last year, the company shaved 8% of its workforce in a bid to finally steer its financials into the black. But whether the company can generate consistent, quarter-after-quarter profitability scorecards remains unclear.

It’s worth noting that SoundCloud rival Spotify has also struggled to maintain profitability. Similar to SoundCloud, Spotify is taking serious steps to shore up its overhead and create a financially stable company. Both companies are responding to significant shifts in the investor landscape, with factors like inflation and soaring interest rates radically reshaping risk appetites.

Investors and Wall Street have also been moving away from longer-term, growth-oriented plays and demanding greater financial accountability — and profitability.

Beyond the financials, SoundCloud remains a strong music brand among artists, fans, and the industry. Culturally, SoundCloud has found itself at the center of entire musical movements, most notably ‘SoundCloud Rap.’ Those communities and musical scenes are absent on platforms like Spotify, which focuses more on platform-curated experiences and staff-created playlists. SoundCloud, by contrast, has always fostered a more open, less structured approach with few rules for uploading artists and fans.

SoundCloud itself has remained mum on the sale speculation. And the sale process itself isn’t slated to start until a few months, according to Sky.

Projection of royalty collection changes following Spotify’s 1,000-stream minimum payment transition (Digital Music News)

In our recent DMN Pro Weekly report, guest author Jeff Price — founder and former CEO of TuneCore and Audiam and current founder and CEO of Word Collections — takes an in-depth look at Spotify’s updated royalty payout structure and the financial impact it could have on labels, artists, and DIY distributors like CD Baby, Distrokid, and Tunecore in 2024. It’s an eye-opening calculation, to say the least.

For a comprehensive breakdown of what Spotify’s new payout model means for major and indie labels, music distributors, artists, and the broader music industry, check out our recent DMN Pro Weekly report. The exhaustive breakdown explores the ins and outs of the streaming platform’s 2024 compensation changes. That includes a detailed look at the legal and contractual frameworks involved, which parties will benefit the most, and the potential long-term impact on the music ecosystem. 

Throughout 2023 – including well before the late-November arrival of an official announcement – Spotify’s retooled payment model spurred no shortage of discussion. While the chatter was certainly noisy, a detailed and numbers-driven focus on the shift’s likely impact on labels, DIY distributors, and artists was largely absent.

In one of our latest DMN Pro Weekly Reports, guest author Jeff Price covered the subject at length, giving the industry its first complete view of the complex matter. The analysis includes detailed projections of who stands to win and who stands to lose in revenue terms.

Expectedly, the data shows that Spotify’s new system will leave DIY distributors with far more “ineligible streams” than majors Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment. The reason is simple: developing and emerging artists are streamed less than major label acts, with many non-major artists struggling to break Spotify’s 1,000-stream annual threshold.

Specifically, the entities that work for the DIY, developing, and independent artists (i.e., Distrokid, Tunecore, CD Baby, Ditto, and many others) represent a higher percentage of the sound recordings that are streamed less than 1,000 times over the prior twelve months. That is Spotify’s new ‘bright line’ for royalty payments: stream more than 1,000 in one year, and you get paid. Stream less than 1,000, and you get nothing.

A top-level transfer quickly emerges. Quite simply, royalties previously earned from the streams of sub-1,000 recordings will be taken from smaller artists and shifted to the artists and labels that break the 1,000-stream threshold. More prominent artists are often signed to major labels, which gives bigger labels an expected revenue bump.

But how much of a bump? One projection suggests that one-fifth of Distrokid’s total streams will not get paid royalties under the new plan. CD Baby and Distrokid, the second and third largest distributors of DIY and indie artists, are projected to grapple with an even higher ineligibility rate as 25 percent or more of their total streams become ineligible for payment.

Over time, the amount of money being taken from developing artists and handed to major music companies could be significant.

To illustrate, in December of 2022, Tunecore announced that it had collected and paid over $3 billion to its artists. Under the new Spotify model, assuming that 20% of Tunecore’s royalties were earned by recordings streamed less than 1,000 times on Spotify, as much as $600 million dollars would disappear from the pockets of Tunecore artists.

There are certainly other streaming platforms, and this assumes a simplified model involving Spotify only. It’s also important to note that Spotify’s changes only affect recordings, not publishing, and Tunecore’s figure is cumulative over many years. However, the rough math demonstrates that the changes could significantly erode developing artists’ royalties and market share.

But what will actually happen in 2024 and beyond, thanks to Spotify’s changes? Though the broader analysis dives into various adjacent figures that provide insight, the brass-tacks takeaway is that the three mentioned distributors are projected to receive a cumulative 4.5 percent less than they earned in 2023.

The inverse of this is the major labels, chief among them the main advocate of streaming-compensation changes, Universal Music Group (UMG). UMG and the majors are positioned to grow their revenue share by roughly the same percentage by taking the money that used to go to the DIY artists affiliated with Distrokid, Tunecore, and CD Baby.

As laid out in the report, UMG is poised to enjoy a 2.4 percent revenue-share increase each month, against 1.4 percent for Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and 0.6 percent for Warner Music Group (WMG). That amounts to a shift of approximately $4 million per month, as detailed in the report’s analysis.

At close to $50 million annually, this revenue transfer could prove significant out of the gate, with the potential for a substantial change in the streaming landscape.

From the major label perspective, one question is whether Spotify’s new policy and recent price raises will offset any decline in revenue caused by a slowdown in Spotify subscription growth — depending on what slowdown (if any) materializes in 2024 and beyond.

In that light, the majors may have also cleverly offset pressures from a streaming subscriber plateau or decline ahead. Other headwinds, including inflation and potentially softening consumer demand, might be mitigated by Spotify’s royalty changes and recent price increases.

With UMG and others driving similarly advantageous pivots on different platforms, the numbers indicate that 2024 could represent the beginning of a broader revenue transfer away from developing artists, smaller labels, and DIY distributors. In effect, under Spotify’s new royalty structure, the market share and revenue gains of the DIY sector are now facing significant erosion, with the majors slowing down any market share losses ahead.

A snippet from DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker profiling December 2023 rounds.

Despite the beginnings of a potentially serious correction in music IP valuations, music industry funding in 2023 added up to more than twice the amount poured into music in 2022. It’s raining investments and funding for all things music — whether it’s music AI, live show ticketing platforms, catalog financing, or creator collaboration tools. But what’s really driving the gains, and how long will this party last?

In 2023, music tech startups and companies collectively fattened their coffers with almost $10 billion in funding, according to tracking compiled by Digital Music News. Compared to 2022’s $4.8+ billion in overall funding, 2023’s $10 billion proves that venture capitalist firms and investors are strongly optimistic about future growth in music and its tech. But why did music attract over twice the amount of funding this year compared to 2022?

In our latest DMN Pro Weekly research report, we take a closer look.

Report Table Of Contents

Fast-Tracked: Over $10 Billion For Music

As Some Industries Struggled Against The Headwinds And Issues Of 2023’s Economy, The Music Industry Enjoyed A Surge In Investment Interest.

Table 1: Total Funding By Year (Not Including Undisclosed Financials Of Successful Funding Rounds)

2023 Startups: The Most Successful Series Rounds

Largest Series-A And Series-B Rounds That Attracted The Most Risk-Seeking Financiers To The Investment Table.

2023 Music Tech Companies: The Eight Largest Funds Committed To Artist Advances, Catalogs, And Entertainment

Whether Equity Fund, Sophomore Fund, Ai Fund, Debt Financing, Or Strategic Investment — Major Vcs And Music Investment Platforms Continued To Announce Mammoth Funds.

2020-2023: Music Money Over The Years

An Overview Of The Largest Funding Rounds From 2020-2023.

Table 2: Comparison Of Funding Rounds 2020-2023

Photo Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Library of Congress

Elvis Presley gets the hologram treatment in a new AI virtual concert experience, ‘Elvis Evolution,’ debuting in London later this year.

A new generation of Elvis fans will get to experience a version of the King in concert this year, using holographic projection and artificial intelligence. “Elvis Evolution” debuts in London in November, with more shows scheduled in Berlin, Las Vegas, and Tokyo.

Created in a partnership between British immersive entertainment company, Layered Reality, and Authentic Brands Group, which owns the rights to Elvis’ likeness, the technology will create a “life-size digital Elvis to perform his famous songs and moves.”

To create the hologram, thousands of Elvis’ personal photos and home videos were used alongside “the power of AI and holographic projection, augmented reality, live theatre, and multi-sensory effects.”

The show will also feature an on-site Elvis-themed bar and restaurant, with live music, DJs, and other performances. Tickets for the London show will go on sale beginning in June.

“Fans no longer want to sit there and passively receive entertainment — they want to be a part of it,” says Layered Reality founder and CEO Andrew McGuinness. “It’ll be a memory-making experience that will be a bucket list item for Elvis fans and admirers around the world.”

“It’s going to be a joyous celebration of Elvis’ life; the man, the music, and his cultural legacy,” McGuinness continues, explaining that fans will be taken on a journey from Presley’s humble beginnings in Tupelo, Mississippi, to his career heights in Memphis and Las Vegas. “The crescendo of the experience is an AI performance by Elvis.”

Cultural interest in Elvis has reignited in recent years, thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” and Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” the latter about the life of Presley’s ex-wife. “Elvis Evolution” arrives on the heels of other hologram-based concert experiences, like the highly successful ABBA hologram show last year, and the Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson holograms that debuted in 2020 and 2021, respectively.

After their final concert in December, KISS announced plans for “immortalized and reborn” avatar versions of the band to take up the performance mantle in 2027.

A bulletproof financial stack ensures strategic, fast-paced growth — despite obstacles rising from fragmented music-payout complexity. (Photo: PIRO4D)

80% of respondents believe having one unified system for credits and all payment recipients is possible. However, they do recognize several core obstacles in aggregating a centralized payout database, such as mismatched global systems and technology, flawed systems for determining royalties/splits, and tracking mountains of metadata, income streams, and the multitude of international composers’ rights societies.

The following was created in collaboration with Tipalti, a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.

Tipalti survey participants are music industry professionals with 25-45 years of experience in the business. 90% of these respondents are financial decision-makers authorized to make decisions about software and tech meant to streamline payouts. 70% of participants handle payment volume exclusively for domestic artists, while 30% tackle an even split of domestic vs international payouts.

Survey insights paint a picture of uncertainty in music’s financial ecosystem. Even though 80% of respondents believe it’s possible to have a centralized system to manage both credits and payouts to stakeholders — artists, producers, labels, publishers, songwriters, etc. — there are still many obstacles to achieving a unified state.

10% of respondents believe ‘the entire business model needs to change’ for a unified system to exist and ‘music revenue is intentionally complicated and confusing.’

Many of the issues music companies face are critical factors that make it challenging for businesses to aggregate a centralized payment database. These companies need to deal with enormous amounts of data and metadata, a multitude of mismatched technology systems, security breaches of high-value music assets, global rights issues, and tax compliance.

Dealing with all these complexities and more, it’s hardly a surprise that financial decision-makers express concerns about liability management and recognize obstacles to achieving a centralized payout system.

In today’s hyper-collaborative music world, a single track features creative inputs from a metaphorical — and sometimes literal — busload of creators and artists. Tremendous technological evolution has set the stage for these collaborators to provide expertise from opposite ends of the world.

This ecosystem has bred notoriously challenging financial liabilities, with large volumes of payments that need to be processed simultaneously, are expected to be 100% accurate 100% of the time, and be competitively fast.

What happens if a company’s financial decision-makers and teams refuse to address these obstacles promptly?

Issues exacerbate, culminating in a destabilized financial stack ridden with inefficiencies, increased manual labor, bottlenecks, and massive amounts of unpaid royalties, leading to a collapse of the payout system.

Music payout expert Tipalti facilitates the disbursement of thousands of simultaneous payments to multiple collaborators, which is core to the evolving music business. Tipalti supports some of the world’s fastest-growing music companies like , TuneIn, Create Music Group, Thematic, Audiomack, and more.

The payments automation platform reveals it is deeply committed to music companies’ long-term growth by ensuring efficient risk management, global compatibility of systems, and reduced manual payments workload.

Whether a company is aiming for mergers and acquisitions or going public, risk management is essential to make successful leaps toward success. Fast-paced growth sets you up for higher scrutiny, increasing requirements for accuracy and transparency.

Digital transformation is a critical strategy for music companies that aim to scale for long-term growth. Key steps to attain digital transformation include establishing bulletproof crisis management processes, reducing manual transactional work, and optimizing cloud-based accessibility and security, all while promoting global remote productivity capabilities. Achieving these efficiencies is almost impossible without finance systems that can communicate effectively.

Tipalti provides the tools music companies need to ensure seamless payment operations that enable the scheduling and sending of thousands of simultaneous payments — backed by multiple payment methods and currencies — all via a single, global system.

Results from a 2018 McKinsey study concluded that 57% of finance activities and functions and 80% of general accounting operations can be fully or almost fully automated. It stated, “Knowing what to automate and managing disruption can lead to a new era of productivity and performance.”

Payout expert Tipalti believes building a robust, automated finance framework is led by small incremental changes.

Ensuring a centralized, digitized, automated liability management system ensures music-focused businesses can efficiently handle the demands of complex music payouts, track data obscurity, and offer transparency while elevating finance workers to be more strategic partners in the company’s growth.

If you’d like to learn more about how Tipalti helps music businesses streamline royalty payments, click here.

Photo Credit: Linkfire

Smart link platform Linkfire is delisting itself from Sweden’s Nasdaq amid a broader shakeup among its senior management team. Here’s the latest.

The Copenhagen-based platform announced it will disappear from the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth market in January 2024, returning to private ownership. Existing investors will keep their stake for the new shareholder agreement. Co-Founder & CEO Lars Ettrup is stepping down from his role into an advisory one. Meanwhile, Tobias Demuth, Linkfire’s CFO will step down by February 2024.

Linkfire’s new CEO effective January 1, 2024 is Jeppe Faurfelt, a co-founder and current Chief Commercial Officer for the platform. Ettrup wrote about his decision to leave the company he helped found on LinkedIn, calling it a “no-drama decision” and that once Linkfire is in private hands, his work as CEO is done.

“This change is a natural step in Linkfire’s journey towards becoming a financially self-sustainable company with a tight focus on cost and a lighter organizational structure whilst still pursuing opportunities for growth,” the statement reads.

“The planned delisting from First North Premier Growth Market, now approved by Nasdaq, furthermore supports a lighter management setup.”

“Jeppe Faurfelt has played a pivotal role in overseeing commercial strategy, operations, and shaping the client-facing organization to drive sustained industry relationships. His leadership has been instrumental in driving overall business growth with a global perspective, drawing upon his extensive experience in the U.S. market. Based on New York from 2016 to 2021, Faurfelt has successfully contributed to the expansion and success of the company. The Board of Directors is confident in Jeppe Faurfelt’s abillity to guide the company into its next phase after the delisting.”

Linkfire announced a new 30-month debt finance facility of €5 million with annual interest of 17% from shareholder Meng Ru Kuok. Kuok is CEO and founder of Caldecott Music Group. The stock was listed on Sweden’s Nasdaq exchange in June 2021 valued at €64 million. But in the two years since then, its share price has declined sharply.

Here are the top pro tips to ensure you make the most out of your time at the NAMM Show — from DMN and NAMM organizers themselves.

The NAMM Show, organized by the National Association of Music Merchants, is one of the largest music industry events in the world. Aimed at uniting the global music, sound, and entertainment technology communities, the annual show serves an incredible experience — whether you’re an influencer, content creator, musician, producer, retailer, instrument manufacturer, or buyer. Here are some top tips for attending NAMM like a pro.

NAMM is right around the corner and will take place on January 21-25, 2025, at the Anaheim Convention Center in Southern California.

Every year, NAMM produces this epic trade show to strengthen and promote the music products industry — specifically instruments, gear, and the technology that backs them all. But the show offers more than just a showcase of these products.

If planned correctly, the event can unlock opportunities to kickstart lucrative deals and make lasting business connections. NAMM isn’t just a retail-focused show, it’s a broader industry gathering that surrounds you with tens of thousands of like-minded people. Just recently, NAMM partnered with DMN to showcase the extensive opportunities that sometimes get missed by attendees.

Pete Johnston, Director of Marketing at NAMM, explains how The NAMM Show kickstarts new avenues of music businesses. “The NAMM Show is a launchpad for a lot of careers,” Johnston told DMN, adding, “I always talk about the inspiration — I come home so fired up after some NAMM sessions.”

“Companies and ideas are born at NAMM,” says Johnston.

“I see people morphing and changing and playing different roles — with music being the core. The foundation underneath all of this is active music — the art of actively participating in music.”

Whether you’re an influencer, creator, musician, producer, or a tech developer, you can leverage the NAMM Show to grow your audience, brand, and business. If you’re planning to network, make valuable connections, score an endorsement deal, or nab a spot on an interview or podcast, the time to prep would be right now.

Here are the top pro tips to ensure you make the most out of your time at the event — from DMN and NAMM organizers themselves.

1. If you’re a content creator or influencer, “Leverage NAMM for collaborative opportunities and endorsements,” says Alex Solano from AlexProMix.

Solano says arranging meetings with software and hardware companies before the event will maximize opportunities — for channel growth, scoring a feature on a panel or podcast, or to nab a brand endorsement deal. “Initiate conversations through emails or direct messaging on social media to book slots,” Alex advises. “Engage in dialogues about potential video projects, and synchronize your content timeline with their product release dates. This proactive strategy secures exclusive content that aids in expanding your channel’s reach and enhancing the company’s market presence.”

Solano shares that companies are on the lookout for influencers who can attract the next generation of music creators. He emphasizes that NAMM can be a tool for artists and producers to evolve from regular users of music products to brand endorsers. “Compile a portfolio or EPK that shows your use of a brand’s equipment, highlighting its integration into your performances or productions. Visit the brand booths with confidence, present your portfolio, and propose a partnership for endorsements.”

2. Whether you’re an artist, producer, or a music tech mastermind, don’t shy away from connecting with media outlets in advance.

“Request interviews to discuss your innovative contributions to the music industry, whether it’s through recent works or new technologies like AI and Dolby Atmos,” Solano also advised.”Landing features on podcasts or video interviews can boost your brand’s narrative and solidify your footprint in the music industry.”

3. Prepare for a ‘NAMM Show Week.’

Johnston reveals that even though the four official exhibit days run Thursday to Saturday, ‘we also have events, meetings, and education sessions starting on Tuesday, January 21st’ adding, “We’re calling it a NAMM Week. It’s a gathering spot for the week for a lot of the industry.”

4. Attending the NAMM Show as a member and non-member.

A NAMM membership is specifically tailored to provide relevant benefits and support. It also entitles members for year-round benefits, including access to the NAMM Show. Register as an individual member, Service Provider, Manufacturer Representative, Commercial Affiliate, Retail Affiliate, or Retail Professional. Your NAMM Show badge will reflect membership type.

If you’re not a member and want to attend the show, NAMM requires every user to register directly with a unique email address.

5. Don’t look like a tourist with a map — download the NAMM Show+ App for effective floor and time management.

Head over to the NAMM schedule on the NAMM Show+ App — for attendees and exhibitors — well before the show. It has everything you need, including hotel reservations backed by NAMM and its official housing partners.

Plan your vendor appointments around the sessions that you want to attend. Strategizing from the get-go is the best approach to get the most out of NAMM.

View the terrain to map out a plan that works for your goals and your company’s. The NAMM Show+ App gives you everything you need to access educational sessions and details, guiding you where you need to be – and when. Connect with attendees, get navigation tools to help plan your meetings (using the map of the show floor will help you avoid walking back and forth), and stay up to date with post-event stuff.

Head over to the NAMM schedule on the NAMM Show+ App.

6. Leverage the 200+ educational opportunities for NAMM member communities.

NAMM has also announced over 200 industry and educational opportunities for the show for NAMM member communities. These professional communities include retail, brands, professional audio, music tech, live event production, artists, music education, nonprofit and community leaders, college music business students, and more.

Johnston talks about a program called TEC Tracks where it’s all about music production, dissection, how people made albums, mastering, immersive audio, AI, and others. “There are so many people that started businesses because of somebody they met at The NAMM Show, or an idea they gathered from the opportunities there,” said Johnston, adding, “Get in with the developers, the engineers, and you never know what you’ll create or what you’ll start.”

John Mlynczak, president and CEO of NAMM explained how this years’s show is aiming to reconnect the global music industry and excel on every level, ‘from our music stages, to educational and industry programs, to incredible exhibitors on the show floor,’ adding, “The NAMM Show will provide critical platforms and industry innovations that will drive growth to create a better future for the next generation of music industry leaders.”

As a snapshot of 200+ educational sessions up for grabs, members can check out the following:

Music Business Track features 45+ sessions to educate business leaders in our industry, with a focus on artificial intelligence as a marketing and business-efficiency tool, along with key sessions on leadership, social media and online marketing, finance, music lessons and retail tech.

Audio Production and Music Technology Track with 65+ sessions covering the latest innovations and new ideas in recording, live sound, music technology and music business.

Entertainment Technology Track brings 25+ sessions and training opportunities for professionals in lighting and production design, rigging, touring — even event safety to navigate a post-pandemic world.

College Students and Faculty Track; K-12 Educator Track offers 46+ sessions, workshops, and events for music students and faculty in collaboration with the College Music Society (CMS) and others — with multiple opportunities to network with industry professionals.

Non-Profit Track will offer sessions that cover tools of community building via the creation of and support to non-profit music service organizations, alongside best practices, fundraising, and governance.

NAMM’s education sessions are free, and Johnston says, “If you have a NAMM badge, you get to come and get educated.”

7. Take advantage of the NAMM U Breakfast Sessions

Coffee, food, and music is on the menu with early morning sessions and panels. You’ll get to network before the venue gets packed and crowded.

8. Balance fun with goals — but don’t get distracted.

Even though it’s fun to watch every demo, concert, and artist signing (whether you’re a regular attendee or it’s your first time), don’t let all the fun distractions cannibalize your time. Decide exactly what’s worth seeing, pick up innovative ideas that apply to your business or brand, and remember to take notes.

9. Prepare to be overwhelmed — but remember you can ‘choose your adventure.’

The NAMM Show is big — many football fields big. Picture a small town that’s packed with the population of a small city. The NAMM Show is a broader music industry gathering rather than just a retail-focused show. The buzzing global marketplace is a massive celebration — it will be loud, chaotic, and a bit mad.

According to Johnston, people who feel the NAMM Show is too big are forgetting that they can pick portions that excite them and suit their goals. “You can choose your adventure. And whichever adventure you choose, it’s going to benefit you. It’s like a campus with all the different majors. you have your communities, and you can grow your knowledge and your skills.”

10. Avoid bottlenecks: travel, shuttles, dining tips, more.

If you’re flying to attend NAMM, your trip will be smoother if you pick a flight on lower-traffic days. Tuesday or Wednesday are generally the best to ensure you miss the crazy rush.

And here are a few last tips; wear comfortable shoes (you’ll be walking a lot), and grab a pair of earbuds (NAMM gets loud!). Plus, arriving early to avoid the pouring NAMM crowds can save time and energy. For meals, aim to eat outside of normal mealtimes — say, grab a bite at 11:00 am instead of 12:30 pm.

Enjoy!

Projection of royalty collection changes for major industry players following Spotify’s 1,000-stream minimum payment transition (Image: Digital Music News)

In our latest DMN Pro Weekly Report, guest author Jeff Price offers an exhaustive breakdown of Spotify’s updated payout structure for sound recording royalties — and what if means for everyone in the music industry food chain.

The most remarkable takeaway from this report? For Spotify, the percentage of total revenue allocated to sound recording royalties doesn’t decrease when its new model rolls out in 2024’s Q1. So Spotify’s bottom line won’t benefit from the revamp.

But rising, developing, and indie artists will no longer receive royalties from their sound recordings that stream less than 1,000 times in 12 months. We follow the money to see where those royalties are headed — who stands to benefit monumentally from this updated model?

Report Table of Contents

1. Model Update: Spotify’s Sound Recording Royalty Change

Spotify has provided what appear to be non-related reasons to justify its proposed model that will not pay sound recording royalties to sound recordings with less than 1,000 streams in the prior 12 months.

2. What About The Law: Can Spotify Make This Change?

Does the law allow Spotify to make this leap? Licensing agreements, contractual provisions, term changes, and Spotify’s take-it-or-leave-it offering.

3. Winners And Losers: Major Labels, Higher-Streaming Artists, Spotify

Spotify isn’t changing the total amount of sound recording royalties it pays. What changes is who gets the money.

4. Example #1: Calculating Spotify’s Current Sound Recording Royalties

We explore payouts under Spotify’s current model, where all sound recordings with a 30-second stream earn a royalty.

5. Example #2: Calculating Spotify’s Sound Recording Royalties Payout In 2024

We explore payouts under Spotify’s soon-to-rollout in 2024 model, where sound recordings have to meet an annual minimum threshold of 1,000 streams in the prior 12 months to get paid a sound recording royalty.

6. Example #3: Sound Recording Royalties Based On Actual Spotify Data

• • • • Example 3A: Backed by actual reported data on Spotify streams and revenue reported by The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC), we make market share and streaming number assumptions for six distributors/labels to calculate how sound recording royalties work under Spotify’s current model.
        • Table #1: Current Spotify Model — % share of all streams eligible for royalties
        • Table#2: Current Spotify Model — $ share of the big pot of royalties

• • • • Example 3B: Backed by actual reported data on Spotify streams and revenue reported by The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC), we make market share and streaming number assumptions for six distributors and labels to calculate how sound recording royalties will work under Spotify’s new 2024 model.

• • • Table #3: 2024 Model — Change in % share of the big pot of royalties
    • Table #4: 2024 Model — Change in $ share of the big pot of royalties

7. The New Boss: Same as the Old Boss?

Rather than focus on innovation, working to find more artists that would thrive in their system, or creating a lucrative business to support these developing artists (think DistroKid, TuneCore etc.), the majors instead come up with new schemes to take other artists’ money.

Photo Credit: CreateSafe

TRINITI, an artistic intelligence platform powered by the Grimes-backed CreateSafe has announced a new partnership with SOUNDS.STUDIO—a modern music production platform.

Both TRINITI and Sounds.Studio share a mission of empowering independent creators with access to robust, easy-to-use tools to open up exponential creative freedom. Sounds.Studio will harness TRINITI technology to offer an in-browser music and audio AI tool to enable users to create and distribute music seamlessly from one place.

CreateSafe has spent the past five years developing a suite of AI tools to empower a new, transparent music industry. Their partnership with Grimes put groundbreaking creative tools into public hands, while Record Deal Simulator gave users visibility into how murky music industry contracts operate.

The new GenAI music platform TRINITI powers creation, publishing, administration, distribution, and marketing of music with the goal of evolving the music industry from its current algorithmic obsession to generating new, artist-focused business models.

Grimes made headlines this summer by using TRINITI to clone her voice, enabling musicians and artists to use her voice in original songs. With her permission, these artists can distribute these works to all major streaming services. More than 1,000 songs have been created since the service launched.

Sounds.Studio leverages the TRINITI API to allow users to have the GrimesAI voice model on their own music, seamlessly distributing the music to major DSPs through TRINITI’s distribution channels. This brand-new workflow is uniquely possible because of combined capabilities from TRINITI and Sounds.Studio.

“Both Sounds.Studio and TRINITI have a shared ethos for how AI can be harnessed to augment rather than replace musicians and are dedicated to building tools that enable new forms of creativity in the age of AI,” says Sounds.Studio’s Chris Deaner, Founder of Never Before Heard Sounds. “When creating new forms of music technology, the artist must remain front and center, so we sought out partners that were value-aligned.”

“In partnering with Sounds.Studio, we move one step closer to closing the gap between creation and distribution through technology,” adds TRINITI’s Daouda Leonard, Founder & CEO of CreateSafe. “We are using the knowledge we’ve gained over the past half-decade to streamline a process that enables artists, producers, songwriters—whether amateur or professional—to access cutting edge genAI music tools and release sanctioned derivative works that embody our trained voice models. Together we’re opening up a new era in imagination and monetization of creativity.”

Photo Credit: Prism.fm

Live music management software company Prism.fm has announced it has closed a $5 million Series B funding round as concert revenues in 2023 soar.

Andrew Lindner of Frontier Growth led the effort, investing $1.55 million through a syndicate investment pool with other members of Frontier Growth’s ecosystem. Existing ivnestors also participated in this round, including Stephen Cook, Jay Jensen, Kip McIanahan, Advantage Capital, Rich Arnesen, and more.

Prism.fm says the new capital will be invested in product, engineering, and go-to-market strategy for the industry leading platform that brings venues, agencies, and promoters together in one system. Prism’s CEO Matt Ford says that Prism has already been used to plan hundreds of thousands of shows at over 10,000 venues worldwide.

2023 has been a booming year for concerts thanks to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé touring, but it’s also been the best year for touring artists yet. Pollstar reported its top 100 grossing tours this year accumulated a total of $9.17 billion—surging 46% compared to 2022. Roughly $2.61 billion came from just the top five grossing touring artists—Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay, and Harry Styles.

Taylor Swift’s success with her “Eras Tour” landed her as the only touring artist to have grossed over $1 billion. Meanwhile, Beyoncé grossed $580 million, surpassing Bad Bunny’s massive tour run of $393 million in 2022. For the first time in fifteen years, the top two charting artists are women. The last time this happened was in 2008 when Madonna and Celine were both touring the globe.

Prism.fm is a new booking tool that solves productivity issues for music industry professionals. The team behind it built it from the ground up to vastly reduce the work required to manage a music calender, send offers, market, advance, and settle live music shows with venues and promoters. It’s built by music professionals who are aiming to help touring artists reach new gross revenue heights in 2024.

Photo Credit: Sebastian Pichler

Where are the legal battle lines being drawn between the music industry and AI?  This exhaustive DMN Pro white paper takes an in-depth look at a rash of early-stage lawsuits against AI giants, while assessing the core issues at stake and potential outcomes for the music industry and musical artistry overall.

For an industry that revolves religiously around monetization and IP protection, the tigerish response from music labels, publishers, and industry bodies against AI giants is hardly surprising. The music industry’s early position on the matter of copyright places human artistry, creativity, and authorship at the pinnacle of eligibility and value. Generative AI, on the other hand, has a massive appetite for artist data, but little inclination to pay for it.

By now, the complaint against the music industry has become cliché. This is an industry that gets the tremors at the sight of anything tech-related, and there’s truth to that allegation. But generative AI is different: it’s not a standalone piece of tech and nothing like earlier existential threats like P2P file-sharing. AI’s core models run on pre-existing matter as fuel — and that fuel is the music industry’s copyrighted vocals, lyrics, recordings, and compositions.

And despite claims to the contrary, AI giants are usually taking this fuel for free.

One could argue that generative AI tools are assisting the human creative process of developing melodies and lyrics — but there’s still no cash flow for artists. These data-hungry AI models are inhaling copious amounts of datasets to train their models and spitting out derivatives that can potentially compete with artists’ original works. In most cases, artists receive no commercial benefit from this process.

Maybe that’s why it’s raining lawsuits. 2023 has already witnessed important legal precedents on the generative AI front, though bigger battles lie ahead — not just for the music industry, but also multiple other industries that rely on intellectual property protection and safeguards.

In this critical white paper, we take a closer look at every lawsuit that matters — and what they might mean for the future of the music and broader creative industries.

Report Table of Contents

DOES GENERATIVE AI MEAN NO COMPENSATION FOR ARTISTS?

Are generative AI giants really exempt from US Copyright laws? The music industry doesn’t think so, but this is proving to be a steep uphill battle. 

EARLY ACTION: VOICE CLONING AND DEEP FAKES

The music industry has been quick to block pathways for deep fakes and voice cloning content — but it’s too soon to celebrate.

THE STAKES: AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

The Songwriters Guild of America (SGA) explains how AI models would turn the music industry into a creativity graveyard, stab the US economy, and ultimately (interestingly) self-combust because humans will no longer be creating more ‘training data.’

AI MODELS IN ACTION: TRAINING, COPYING, AND EXEMPTIONS

Developers say ‘no copies’ are retained, and protected works are merely ‘an intermediary step’ in the training process. The NMPA says these ‘novel storage devices’ are ‘straightforward copying.’

HUMAN AUTHORSHIP: US COPYRIGHT OFFICE PRECEDENTS

What does ‘human authorship’ mean exactly? A closer look at this important legal precedent.

THE WAR OVER FAIR USE: ASSERTIONS OF AI COMPANIES

Music industry bodies NMPA, SGA, SCL, MCNA, A2IM, RIAA pick apart fact-specific fair use determinations and hit back at false ‘binary choice’ and other unsubstantiated claims asserted by AI companies in recent USCO filings.

PROTECTED WORKS: AI’S INSATIABLE APPETITE

Lawsuits against Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI, Google’s ClaudeAI, Stability AI, and injunctions to halt training on protected works — and the big-AI’s offer to pay for their users’ copyright litigation.

GENERATIVE AI: SAVIOR, VILLAIN, OR BOTH?

Is generative AI capable of solving the industry’s problems, or is it the ultimate threat to the music industry’s hard-built success?

ARTISTS: THE BURDEN, COST, AND LOSS

What do all these cases have in common — besides the copyright part — and what does this barrage of litigation mean for the industry?

INFOGRAPHIC: COMPENDIUM OF LITIGATION BY LABELS, ARTISTS, AND AUTHORS AGAINST AI

Major copyright infringement lawsuits against generative AI platforms, and their current status in US courts.

TIMELINE: THE RISE OF MAJOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PLATFORMS

The history of major AI research companies that led to Google DeepMind, Meta AI, OpenAI, Stability AI, and Anthropic — as they secure billions in investments from Amazon, Microsoft, and other tech giants.

Photo Credit: Glen Carrie

LimeWire has announced it is releasing an AI Music Studio to allow users to create “fully ownable AI-generated tracks.” This is LimeWire’s second investment in AI tech.

In September 2022, LimeWire acquired AI image generation platform BlueWillow. The company says its AI Music Studio will introduce a revolutionary, easy-to-use interface that empowers individuals, regardless of their experience, to become music artists. LimeWire says users will be able to generate full-length tracks, create cover images for their work, and publish all on a single platform.

LimeWire says it also incorporates open-source AI technologies, enabling users to retain ownership of the music they create. “The launch of LimeWire AI Music Studio represents a groundbreaking technological milestone, symbolizing not only a stride forward in our pursuit of innovation but a profound commitment to fostering creativity within the dynamic landscape of modern content creation,” shares Paul Zehetmayr, co-CEO of LimeWire. “As music continues to evolve, so does our dedication to providing aspiring musicians with cutting-edge tools that empower and amplify their artistic expression.”

The AI Music Studio debut lays the foundation for LimeWire’s continuous product development plan, aiming to fully launch the AI-enabled audio workstation in 2024. LimeWire envisions a future where anyone can be a music artist producing full-length tracks, from beats and melodies to lyrics and editable singing voices. This commitment aligns with LimeWire’s overarching mission to provide a best-in-class suite of AI tools.

“Our platform is designed to break down barriers, allowing aspiring musicians and creators to unleash their potential with the power of AI,” adds Julian Zehetmayr, co-CEO of LimeWire. “As we venture into the future of music, it is our firm believe that AI technology should be a catalyst for inclusivity, empowering aspiring musicians from all walks of life. By providing accessible AI tools, we aim to level the playing field, ensuring that traditional resource contstraints no longer hinder the creative journey.”

Photo Credit: FLUX Software Engineering

Harman Professional Solutions officially completes the acquisition of FLUX Software Engineering, including its suite of sound solutions across live production, installation sound, content creation, and post-production.

Harman Professional Solutions, a worldwide leader in audio, lighting, video, and control technologies, has completed the previously announced acquisition of FLUX Software Engineering. The purchase includes FLUX’s immersive processing and analysis solutions across live production, installation sound, content creation, and post-production.

The acquisition broadens Harman’s offerings across multiple applications with immersive technology, in addition to establishing a foundation for future innovation by bringing together FLUX’s team with Harman Professional’s hardware and software engineers.

“With the growing demand from our customers for immersive audio solutions, we are thrilled to welcome the FLUX team to the Harman family,” said Brian Divine, President of Harman Professional Solutions. “The FLUX team is made up of a very passionate group of people who have dedicated their careers to creating exceptional audio experiences. We are excited to work together to create new products that push technological boundaries and create culturally significant experiences.”

“The FLUX team are extremely honored to join the Harman brand portfolio and work alongside the teams from some of the most legendary brands in the audio industry,” said Gaël Martinet, Founder and CEO of FLUX Software Engineering. “We look forward to continuing our work developing immersive audio solutions with the significant investment, infrastructure, and support that Harman will provide.”

Founded in 2006 by seasoned sound recording engineer and current CEO, Gaël Martinet, to create intuitive and innovative audio software tools, the France-based FLUX now features a portfolio of nearly 20 products used globally by many talented professionals across numerous applications.

Harman Professional Solutions engineers and manufactures audio, lighting, video, and control products for entertainment and enterprise markets, including live performance, audio production, large venues, cinema, retail, corporate, education, government, hospitality, broadcast, and much more. Leading brands under its belt include JBL Professional, AKG, Martin, AMX, Soundcraft, BSS Audio, Crown, dbx Professional, and Lexicon Pro.

Harman Professional Solutions is a strategic business unit of Harman International, which designs and engineers connected products and solutions for automakers, consumers, and enterprises worldwide. Harman International is a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung.

Photo Credit: Shazam / Apple

Apple announces that Shazam has surpassed 300 million monthly active users worldwide — with more people than ever using the app to discover music.

Apple has announced a new milestone, with Shazam surpassing 300 million monthly active users worldwide. With an increasingly global user base, Shazam remains one of the strongest signals to determine what people are listening to.

African countries have been some of the fastest growing user bases on Shazam, as many African songs top the platform’s yearly global charts. Rema’s “Calm Down” took the No. 1 spot on Shazam’s Top 100 2023 after spending more time atop the chart in the past year than any other song. Also ending the year in the Top 10 of the Top 100 2023 is Ayra Starr, as she becomes one of Nigeria’s most-Shazam’d artists.

“To everyone who took the energy to find this song, I hope it’s giving you joy wherever you are today, and I hope it sounds as beautiful as the first day you heard it,” says Rema.

Meanwhile, the global reach of K-pop has continued to increase on Shazam, and the app’s user numbers have seen a notable growth in Korea. More K-pop songs have made it to the Shazam global charts this year than any previous year, with emerging band FIFTY FIFTY reaching No. 3 — the first time a K-pop act other than BTS or a member thereof has charted so high.

Latin music, particularly that of Mexico, has also experienced significant growth in the last year, with the only five tracks from this genre to enter the US Shazam Top 10 all doing so within the last twelve months.

One of the longest standing apps on the App Store, Shazam has continued to innovate and introduce a number of new features to make it easier for users to discover music no matter where they are or how they’re listening.

Most recently, Shazam unveiled Concerts, a new space in the app for music fans to discover upcoming concerts happening in their area, providing personalized event recommendations based on their Shazam history or popular events around them. Fans can also discover events by filtering location, date, and artists.

Digital Music News has been a fixture in the music industry for two decades, dutifully covering deals, breaking developments, and trends as quickly as they emerge. Now, we’re taking our publication to an entirely new level, and we hope you’ll be a part of it.

Over the past few months, we’ve been busily preparing for the formal launch of DMN Pro — a premium business intelligence service tailored to professionals across all facets of the music industry. Wherever you find yourself in the music industry ecosystem, DMN Pro will have actionable information and analysis to help you accomplish more.

With DMN Pro, we’re providing even more value to our core audience, helping those in the know to increase their bottom lines and stay ahead of the curve. The music industry is now embarking on a new chapter, and fast access to data and intelligence is more critical than ever.

Best of all, we’re not paywalling anything you currently enjoy and expect from DMN.

Our same great coverage will continue to be free. That includes all of our daily articles, exclusive stories, on-site event coverage, and our Daily Snapshot morning email. For those who join DMN Pro, we’re adding an entirely new tier of analysis and proprietary data — above and beyond our normal coverage.

Ahead of 2024, we’re offering Pro in beta form for early adopters. Those who jump in early will enjoy 50% off subscription costs for individual accounts. Enterprise and team accounts are also discounted for any number of seats greater than four (see below for more on company and organizational sign-ups).

So, what’s inside DMN Pro? Here’s a quick preview.

will.i.am speaks at DMN Pro’s inaugural industry event in Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Evatt Carrodus

DMN Pro members take home more than the daily news blast. This industry moves fast, and we’re committed to ensuring you have the ammo to keep up.

As part of the rollout, we’re excited to host and moderate quarterly webinars featuring the industry’s most dynamic decision-makers. For our members, we will highlight valuable, expert insight into the many forces impacting the music industry and the intersection of music, technology, and gaming.

We recently wrapped up your inaugural event in Los Angeles on AI and are teeing up a slate of new events for 2024.

On the report side, Pro subscribers will enjoy a weekly deep dive into the most pressing industry topics.

Our Weekly Reports have already picked apart fast-moving changes across artist-centric streaming, voice cloning, AI, and music IP, with more topics ahead.

For an even deeper plunge, our Quarterly Whitepapers will feature more extensive analyses of critical industry topics, complete with expert opinions and detailed visual breakdowns to put things into perspective.

Want a simpler, more accurate way to research music industry funding, chart movements, new releases, litigation, and other arenas? Enter our unique DMN Pro member-exclusive Databases.

These sortable and filterable datasets are industry-specific and always updating. Initial datasets will include our ‘Industry Funding Tracker’ and a daily-updated New Music Releases breakdown. Future datasets will include a comprehensive rundown of active litigation, mergers and acquisitions, and music IP deals.

DMN Pro’s top songs chart also offers a unique spin on the usual Top 100 songs. We’re calling it ‘The Cool 100’ with Chartmetric powering the data. Tracking top songs across platforms that matter, we clear out notorious manipulations that cause charts to juice up certain tracks — including tricky, ever-changing rules.

Track how the industry is changing day-to-day and month-to-month.

We’re also gearing up to create a breaking news alert system for those who need it right now. We’ll deliver fast-breaking developments directly to your inbox and allow you to save articles for future reading. But we’ll also be taking a step back and making sense of the flurry of updates that can overwhelm industry professionals. DMN’s coverage of the rise and fall of the cryptocurrency trend in music is just one example of trends our editorial team has recently highlighted.

Become part of the core group that drives music industry news.

Then there’s the community aspect. DMN Pro subscribers will also receive an invite to join our digital networking community — where industry professionals gather and discuss moderated topics online or facilitate one-on-one connections.

Network with industry professionals to discuss trends as they emerge — instead of waiting for those trends to become tomorrow’s headlines. This moderated and vetted community of like-minded readers offers expert insight into trends, what impacts engagement, and sensing new headwinds in the industry before they become mainstream news blasts.

DMN Pro Individual Accounts: Monthly, Annual, or Bi-Annual Plans Available

DMN Pro subscriptions are available monthly, yearly, or bi-annually. A 50% early-bird special is now being offered for early adopters and long-time supporters. This discount will apply to all subscription tiers, though the deal ends in just a few days.

Require DMN Pro access for your entire company?

We’re also actively signing up companies and organizations to group accounts. If you’re interested, please send an email to noah@digitalmusicnews.com and ask about enterprise pricing. Whether it’s for 5, 500, or 5,000 seats, our volume-based discounts will make it cost-effective for your whole company to gain an edge — with member-exclusive insights, critical info, and much more.

Gain better data and insights to improve your teams’ bottom line. See you on the premium side!

Pictured: Jason Donnelly aka Dj Puzzle (L) and Matthew Yost (R). Photo by Tony Chiapetta. Taken at The Grammy Museum.

Back in 1998, Matthew Yost and Jason Donnelly (aka DJ Puzzle) were working at Sonic Foundry putting loops onto discs. That early-stage experience was the start of the pair’s 20-year journey into the understated world of background sounds, sonic libraries, and sound loops.

Today, their company, Soundtrack Loops, is powering sound libraries for major platforms and companies like Antares, 1010Music, Acoustica Mixcraft, Roland Cloud, Recording Academy Grammy Museum, and Storyblocks. You may not know the name, but if you’re in music, you’ve probably encountered their sonic creations.

Donnelly recalls the pair’s early days at Sonic Foundry as a ‘fun time,’ adding, “We were cutting and editing loops for products, and that’s kind of how we got introduced to everything. Back then, producers had to rip audio discs to edit the loop off of them. We were part of a revolution that was going to change all that by burning loops to data discs and selling them for affordable prices.”

Yost remembers what it was like before streaming MP3s surfaced. The pair had to use Real Player because that was the best way to stream audio for demos. “I still remember making MP3s and it being like a big thing,” he adds.

Donnelly and Yost went on to build the first platform that allowed artists to listen to loops before paying for them. That way, buyers knew what they were getting, and users no longer had to order CDs with sound loops that arrived in the mail — hoping they liked the collections. By 2005, the duo were also among the first to offer downloadable packages instead of physical CDs.

Fast-forward to 2023, and Yost and Donnelly have been in the game for over two decades. With an extensive catalog of audio loops, Soundtrack Loops has crossed major milestones during its evolution, forging partnerships with producers and tech manufacturers.

The modern day music loop business is vast and multi-faceted. Artists, producers, and even app developers have unique sound requirements to fill their sonic scopes. Most are burnt out trying to bake music into the endless nooks and crannies of their productions.

Providing solutions for that problem, Soundtrack Loops offers expertly formatted royalty-free sound packs for productions in a multitude of genres and formats. The company just concluded a three-year tie-up with Berlin-headquartered music hardware company Native Instruments for their product Sounds.com. Just recently, Soundtrack Loops joined forces with DMN to further broaden their imprint.

Speaking about more current partnerships, Donnelly explains that technology company 1010Music provides samples and loops within its digital audio products, and Soundtrack Loops is the force behind it. “Soundtrack Loops designed all the presets for 1010Music’s Razzmatazz drum synth,” Donnelly relays, adding, “Their Blackbox comes with a bunch of our samples and loops in it. Then there’s Lemondrop and just-realized Tangerine — more 1010Music hardware devices that feature our sounds.”

Soundtrack Loops also tied up with Antares Audio Technologies, a company best-known for developing Auto-Tune — the professional standard for pitch correction. Antares Audio creates a range of hardware and software solutions, backed by Soundtrack Loops’ libraries, to bring musicians and artists creative audio tools for production.

Earlier this year, Soundtrack Loops paired up with Soundware, a provider of VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plugins for music producers.

Other partnerships include StoryBlocks, a provider of high-quality stock videos, audio clips, and images. Soundtrack Loops’ sounds are also featured on Roland Corporation’s Roland Cloud.

Furthermore, Soundtrack Loops’ partnership with Audiokit, a swift audio synthesis, processing, and analysis platform, has resulted in Donnelly and Yost’s craft appearing in several iOS apps. Donnelly further added, “We also licensed a bunch of drum samples to keyboard player Jordan Rudess for his new iOS app, Jam With Jordan, an immersive audio-visual synthesizer that you can play on your phone or tablet.”

Soundtrack Loops’ entire catalog is also fully compatible with Apple’s digital audio workstation Garageband, ‘to take advantage of all metadata and formatting that you receive in the Apple looping utility.’ Jason adds, ”These prefab loops are widely used in compositions by artists.”

Discussing the company’s abundant and significant partnerships, Donnelly reveals they have also licensed tens of thousands of loops to Mixcraft — a digital audio workstation for Windows. Soundtrack Loops’ audio is now bundled within Mixcraft’s workstation.

The company also just launched their new brand, Array Sounds.

According to the duo, Array Sounds will bring an additional suite of services to artists. The brand’s first product is a VST synthesizer called Double Scoop — interestingly themed with pastels and desserts as its core motif.

From clipping audio for loops to building a company that’s trusted by mega-giants in music tech — the duo have made an incredible entrepreneurial journey. Photo by Tony Chiapetta. Taken at The Grammy Museum.

The Double Scoop release comes alongside the launch of an AI-focused platform stuffed with usable loops and sound effects. These sounds will be pre-cleared for use by machine learning and AI developers to train AI music creation software — without infringing on copyrights.

If a producer or artist looked under the hood of their music today, there’s a high chance they’ll find a loop from one of Soundtrack Loops’ 300+ sound packs.

The company currently provides multiple formats to suit creators, producers, and app developers, with their catalog containing 70,000+ loops, or wav files — compatible across all DAWs.

The duo behind Soundtrack Loops has made an incredible entrepreneurial journey — from clipping audio for loops to building a company that’s trusted by mega-giants in music tech. Before Soundtrack Loops, Donnelly also founded Peace Love Productions in 2001. Collectively, the duo says they’ve offered ‘slinging loops and sound design since the very early 2000s.’

According to Yost, one of their most critical company goals remains fundraising and charity work — giving back to the community.

Soundtrack Loops is also an integral part of the ‘Sonic Playground’ installation at the Grammy Museum in LA. Hip Hop America: The Mixtape Exhibit is a 50th anniversary celebration of hip hop that launched on October 7th, 2023, and will run through September 4th, 2024.

As part of the exhibit, attendees at the Grammy Museum will be able to experience loops and samples by Soundtrack Loops. “We loaded up four iPads with 42 loops on each using Ampify’s Launchpad app. We chose iPads and Launchpad because it just seemed like the easiest solution for our needs,” Donnelly said, adding, “Participants can choose from Boom Bap, Old School, Trap, and G Funk. They can mix and match loops to create their own instruments on the fly right there in the Sonic Playground and we think that is way cool.”

Illustration Credit: Ironbull534

In our latest DMN Pro Weekly Report, we pick apart the tangled string of recent events surrounding generative AI voice cloning. Are we on a journey towards ‘generating’ an entirely new music ecosystem? And if so, what are the mechanics governing artist copyright and compensation in this new environment?

Despite the AI technology’s scary first steps into the music industry and multiple copyright infringement lawsuits filed against AI companies, are we also witnessing a general theme of acceptance slowly gaining steam?

Here’s another complex question to add to this soup: how are monster-funded AI platforms reacting to the US Copyright Office’s suggestions of modified copyright rules? Is there any hope of fair compensation for artists whose content is used in generative AI training?

A major focus in this debate is now emerging around voice AI. Viewpoints covered in this report come from influential music industry players like UMG, WMG, SME, the RIAA, and others. Strangely, we’re witnessing both takedowns and partnerships from the same mega-companies, with cohesive strategies elusive.

Perhaps the most interesting development in this arena involves an embrace of this new-fangled tech. As AI voice cloning prepares to kickstart its first mainstream application on YouTube Shorts, it holds the power to forever alter the music industry’s organic fabric to something more ‘synthetic.’

Report Table of Contents

No Grammys — But AI Voice Cloning Is ‘Absolutely Eligible’ for Youtube

The video-sharing giant introduced bio labels for creators using generative AI in their content, and is now preparing to launch a mass movement of AI voice clone proliferation with its 60 million+ creators.

Generative AI Behemoths on Using Copyrighted Content for Training: ‘Fair Use’

Major generative AI companies — now having already trained initial versions of their models on copyrighted material for free — are flat-out refusing to acknowledge that copyrighted works deserve compensation for their continued mass-usage in advanced generative AI models. The recurring theme in their responses revolves around two words: fair use.

Responsible AI Voice Cloning: An Oxymoron?

Two of the three major labels appear to be on board with licensing their artists’ voices for YouTube’s grand plans. But what about malicious use of the technology? Is that inevitable collateral damage for generative AI advancement?

Timetable of Major Events In AI Voice Cloning

Significant events that led the current circus of generative AI voice cloning — from Ghostwriter’s first release on YouTube, to YouTube unveiling its very own voice cloning tool for Shorts.

Photo Credit: Mozaic.io

Co-creator payments platform Mozaic.io has secured a $20 million Series A funding round, led by Volition Capital.

The total creator economy is expected to reach an estimated $480 billion by 2027. With the proliferation of streaming content and social platforms that accelerated during the pandemic, more creators than ever are collaborating to make music, podcasts, social content, video gaming, books, and much more. There’s a massive need for an easy way to pay and get paid for these collaborative projects—no matter whether it’s music, books, video content, or more.

Payment apps like PayPal and CashApp make it easy to send money, but there’s no real solution for creative teams to automatically split income with all collaborators in their local currency. Mozaic fills this market gap by offering the only global split payments API. Mozaic started with a focus on payouts for music distributors, artists, and collaborators. Today, the company serves the entire peer-to-peer creator economy with a goal to expand further into the gig and freelance economy.

Mozaic differentiates itself with its high-level API that allows users to easily implement splits and automated payments for collaborators. The API enables users to define smart agreements to split payouts and send cross-border mass payouts. The alternative for creators is to manually capture splits and pay the team via PayPal, CashApp, or other payment processor.

“The creator economy is a global economy and for it to reach its full potential, compensation has to be a seamless and as natural as collaboration,” says CEO Marcus Cobb. “There is massive demand for a solution that enables simple and transparent payments. We estimate 7 out of 10 collaborative payments are painfully delayed or distressed. So, you can imagine what might happen if that pain turns into joy at-scale. It’s a multi-billion-dollar opportunity.”

The investment from Volition Capital brings the total raised to $27.1 million, with existing investment from Rise of the Rest, Maverick Nashville, and music industry exec Joe Galante. With the new investment, Mozaic will focus on new product development, including its new self-serve offering that enables creators to manage everything and connect to other platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, Shopify, and others.

Photo Credit: Roxanne Joncas

Samsung-owned Harman has acquired Roon, a multi-room audio technology platform aimed at music enthusiasts. Here’s the latest.

Roon offers a rich interface for browsing and discovering music, along with compatibility with almost any audio device. The playback engine is designed to deliver the best possible sound and is available for all popular operating systems. It also manufactures a line of hardware server appliances called Nucleus.

Under the acquisition, Roon will operate as a standalone Harman business with its existing team still in place. All Roon operations will stay in place and continue to be dedicated to serving and growing Roon’s community of device partners and customers.

Harman says it is committed to growing Roon’s open device ecosystem, which includes collaborating with more than 160 other audio brands. It delivers audio across more than 100 high-performance devices—with its sights set directly on Sonos and its closed ecosystem.

“Our team is ecstatic to join Harman, a visionary company that has been leading the audio industry forward for decades,” says Enno Vandermeer, CEO of Roon about the deal. “By combining forces with Harman, Roon gains the incredible scale, resources, and reach of a global technology leader, while maintaining our independence to invest in the businesses’s growth and future.”

“We look forward to continuing to bring our advanced data management, SaaS expertise, and customer engagement capabilities to our broad ecosystem of partners, as we join forces with Harman to deliver even greater audio experiences to our customers.”

Samsung acquired Harman for $8 billion in March 2017. Harman owns several audio brands under its umbrella now including AKG, Bang & Olufsen, Harman Kardon, Infinity Audio, and JBL. Meanwhile, Roon makes apps for all types of devices including DACs, smartphones, laptops, PCs, smart TVs, Wi-Fi speakers, and even USB players (remember those?). It also supports AirPlay, Chromecast, Internet Radio, Qobuz, Roon Ready, Sonos, Squeezebox, Tidal, and local music files.

Photo: Vlad

Spotify overlooked a few details in its much-ballyhooed ‘royalty modernizing’ plan — including the illegal parts. What else is about to blow?

On paper, it all seemed so simple. A well-considered, 1,000-stream-per-year minimum threshold — and a benevolent redistribution of $40 million in funds that would have been locked up anyway. Actually, make that a billion dollars, according to Spotify’s five-year calculations of the ample redistributions its ‘royalty modernizing’ plan would yield.

Yes, this plan to reimagine streaming royalties was that good — and that beneficial to the artist community.

It was also illegal, at least on the publishing side. Turns out that the entire publishing side has strict royalty payout rules under US Copyright Law (and the copyright laws of other countries), with little room to make things up. A 1,000-play threshold might fly on the recording side, but withholding funds for publishing-specific licenses like mechanicals is against the law.

The problem came to light in a bombshell DMN report earlier this month — with a showdown between Spotify and an army of litigants potentially next.

After word of Spotify’s royalty revamp started circulating, activist songwriter George Johnson promptly raised the matter with the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB).

“This fraudulent scheme is apparently a way for Spotify to not pay almost two-thirds of all American music copyright authors for their performances, reproductions, and distribution of their individual works already licensed to Spotify,” Johnson fumed in a CRB filing.

Fast-forward to Tuesday of this week, and Spotify’s officially unveiled royalty remake suddenly applies only to recordings — with words like ‘publishing’ and ‘songwriters’ not even mentioned.

“Starting in early 2024, tracks must have reached at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months in order to generate recorded royalties,” the streaming giant clarified.

Translation: Spotify won’t be paying for streams 1-999 on the recording side, but will still comply with statutory requirements on the publishing side. One payment will be withheld while under the threshold, while the other will be immediately distributed to comply with various laws.

Which means that instead of simplifying the royalty accounting process, Spotify has invented a way to double the complexity. And keep the fun times rolling in the accounting and legal departments.

Beyond that successful pushback, however, the rebellion may be muted.

Despite continued kvetching within indie, distribution, and artist rights corners, it’s unclear if Spotify will face any serious challenges ahead. In an email to Digital Music News, indie label organization Impala promised to discuss Spotify’s plan at its upcoming board meeting on November 30th. But outside of a broad pledge of ‘ensuring a fair, diverse and sustainable music ecosystem for all,’ the organization didn’t offer any concrete resolutions or demands.

And it’s uncertain if any will come. Part of the issue is that most serious artists, even unsigned emerging artists, have long since crossed the 1,000-song threshold that Spotify now requires. And for those struggling to get those plays, it won’t make a difference anyway. For starters, the money is already extremely low. And as Stem Disintermedia’s president Kristin Graziani recently articulated, most of that sub-1,000-stream money gets trapped in distributor accounts anyway.

Spotify’s plan just isn’t that bad — or damaging — at least at this stage. It might even be helpful (though be cautious with Spotify’s grandiose redistribution claims.)

However, the fallout from the changes for ‘noise’ recordings remains uncertain.

For starters, Spotify has decided to denigrate one of its most important sub-categories as ‘noise,’ a term that typically refers to aggravating sounds that people want to escape, like a jackhammer or screaming baby.

Gentle raindrops on a tin roof may not be the pinnacle of musical achievement. Still, people enjoy listening to this ‘noise’ for hours and hours while studying, working, or focusing on something demanding. In that light, does it make sense for Spotify to launch an attack on this ‘noise?’

This is actually a fairly large category for Spotify, with listeners tapping the platform for raindrops and Drake alike. With that in mind, it’s difficult to understand Spotify’s sudden shift in tone towards this creator group.

Perhaps Spotify felt pressure to appease UMG chief Sir Lucian Grainge, who’s adopted a sneering attitude towards sound effects and non-musical focus tracks. Whatever the reason, Spotify now looks condescendingly at this class of audio. Some changes certainly make sense, including forcing minimum length requirements on ‘noise’ tracks to block royalty-gaming schemes. But even for those following the rules, royalties will be severely chopped.

In its Tuesday disclosure, Spotify promised to “value noise streams at a fraction of the value of music streams,” with “white noise, nature sounds, machine noises, sound effects, non-spoken ASMR, and silence recordings” facing the cut. That will make Grainge and other major label executives happy, though it may also result in a thinner ‘noise’ selection on Spotify.

Perhaps you study best to that smattering of raindrops for hours. But will you be able to find what you need on Spotify? If not, other platforms like YouTube will happily fill the void, with Spotify suddenly becoming less competitive and functional for millions of subscribers.

Photo Credit: Jonathan Kemper

Over the weekend, OpenAI’s board of directors voted to oust CEO Sam Altman. He was quickly snapped up by Microsoft for its AI ventures—but that may not be the full story.

A letter signed by 505 of 700 OpenAI employees asks instead that the board of directors resign, while inviting Sam Altman and Co-Founder Greg Brockman to return. The Verge reports that the duo is willing to make that return—as long as the members who voted to oust him step aside.

The open letter was obtained by Wired this morning and features signatures of more than 500 current OpenAI employees that reads “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.” It asks for Altman and Brockman to be reinstated and then for the board itself to resign.

In a post this morning on Twitter, Sam Altman wrote “we have more unity and commitment and focus than ever before. we are all going to work together some way or other, and i’m so excited. one team, one mission.”

An apparent power struggle has surfaced inside of OpenAI and nearly all employees appear to be on Altman and Brockman’s side. The three-person board that opposes the two has conducted its own CEO search for the company. Reports indicate that employees refused to attend an emergency meeting on Sunday with CEO Emmett Shear. Employees have posted on social media to state they are keeping the lights on and maintaining service stability for OpenAI developers—but hope the board is pressured to resign.

OpenAI board holdouts who oppose the return of Sam Altman include:

• Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo
• Ex-GeoSim Systems CEO Tasha McCauley
• Helen Toner, Director of Strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security & Emerging Tech

It’s worth noting that despite announcing that he’s been hired, Sam Altman does not yet appear in Microsoft’s internal corporate directory. Altman has also posted that his and Satya Nadella’s priorities are to “ensure OpenAI continues to thrive” by “providing continuity of operations to our partners and customers.” Altman seems to suggest that if the ouster is complete and he’s severed from OpenAI—he’ll continue to create directly under the Microsoft umbrella rather than as a partner.

Hosted at multiple venues in Santa Monica, the Music Tectonics 2023 conference rallied innovators in all fields of music. The three-day event provided the stage for attendees to network, discuss innovations in music-making, share ideas about the future of music, and show off their gear.

The following was developed in collaboration with Open On Sunday, a company DMN is proud to be partnering with.

Music and tech came together for Music Tectonics 2023 last month in Santa Monica, CA. Startups, distributors, investors, gear manufacturers, software developers, consultants, labels, streaming services, and creators — among many others in the music field — took their time to network and explore innovative solutions.

Speaking to DMN, Dmitri Vietze, founder and curator of Music Tectonics, told DMN what makes the conference unique. “We’re topic agnostic. We think a lot of innovation can happen around solving problems for the music industry, so some of it is super cool, super consumer-facing, sexy stuff [in] gaming and music, artificial intelligence, and music generation,” said Vietze, adding, “Also, some of it’s just really specific to untangling data or how startups get licenses and that sort of thing.”

The three-day conference took place at various ‘nontraditional’ locations and venues throughout the area. Vietze explained why: “We’re picking nontraditional locations because we want people not to feel like they’re in a box physically, but also psychologically.”

“When they’re having conversations around music innovation, we want that expansive feel for brainstorming new concepts and getting business done together,” said Vietze.

Holly Hagerman, founder of AmptUp — a company that streamlines the booking process between venues and bands — told DMN that being at Music Tectonics 2023 was about celebrating innovation, meeting other players in the field, and ‘about community, which is our number one core value.’

Speaking about the conference, Hagerman said, “This is a special group of people. Our business focuses on innovation, and changing what is an ages-old, generations-old industry — and making it more simple, more innovative. That’s what Music Tectonics is about.”

USC Business School student Adewale Oduye attended the conference to bank on the knowledge of like-minded individuals. “One of the things I love is hearing from the folks that have done it before, that understand the music business. They’re imparting that knowledge upon me. That’s what I appreciate,” Oduye said.

Music Tectonics 2023 provided the perfect platform to discuss what’s happening in music now, and what’s on the horizon.

Songwriting advocate Mark Lynch spoke passionately about ‘getting writers paid,’ adding, “Music is not free. It needs to be compensated. Any opportunity that I get to ensure that copyright owners get paid, I will do.”

Photo Credit: Evatt Carrodus

Digital Music News explored the evolution of AI in a recent panel highlighting how the technology has shaped the industry in 2023 with its ‘Rules for AI’ conference. The viral ghost-written song “Heart On My Sleeve” started the conversation on how to utilize AI ethically and responsibly, with will.i.am quickly reframing things conceptually.

Utilizing artificial intelligence in the creative aspect of the industry should come with guiding principles. DMN’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Noah Itman discussed those principles with our panelists, highlighting how AI can be used ethically and responsibly by artists and creatives within the industry.

Perhaps most notable is the idea that creation shouldn’t be limited to the narrow scope the industry has carved out for itself in the last 100 years of existence.”If I had AI [back when I got started], I wouldn’t use it in the narrow scope of what’s happening today. I would create a whole new music industry,” will.i.am shared with the panel. “The concept of structure was the first algorithm to fit the industry’s lacquer limitations.”

“Even now, we’ve condensed it down to algorithmic limitations in the music industry, this is how to go viral on TikTok! You’re not being creative with that, you’re being algorithmic,” will.i.am continued. He highlighted how he uses AI in his messaging tool for creatives to outline and strategize how content should be released—rather than creating wholesale with AI at the helm.

Meanwhile, TuneCore’s Andreea Gleeson highlighted some of the guiding principles that should define how AI is used creatively.

“Often when there’s new technology that emerges, some people look at it as an opportunity while others say, ‘what about bad actors?’ These two perspectives are both valid and true. I think we’re definitely living through that today and what you can do when exploring new technology is to think ethically about the principles that should guide its use,” Gleeson explained. “As we started talking with Daouda at CreateSafe, it was our first real life example of how we’re going to help artists engage with AI in a responsible way.”

Gleeson outlined four principles for engaging ethically with AI including Consent, Control, Compensation, and Transparency. Obtaining consent from the original artist, giving the original artist creative control, compensating for the use of their voice, and transparency with DSPs when distributing AI-created content by labeling it as such.

“Grimes was very smart and thinking a few steps ahead in training her model on music she 100% owns,” Gleeson explained. “Artists can then use that model to transform her voice and distribute the music through TuneCore. Because Grimes has said we can do this, we have her consent. Distribution credits Grimes.AI for these tracks, giving her a 50% split of any revenue; that’s compensation. The tracks are also routed through Grimes’ creative team, who can reject or accept any track—that’s control. Finally, the transparency is listing Grimes.AI as a creator, not Grimes herself.”

The panel also highlighted how AI can be used during the collaboration process—not specifically for creation. will.i.am shared that creating is “like therapy for me.” He compared using AI in a creative aspect as like asking a yoga AI to do stretches. No matter how creative the AI is at doing those stretches—you receive no benefit unless you do them yourself.

“As far as focusing my ideas and strategizing with collaborators, I use AI for that,” Will shared. “The thinking through how to put [a track] out in the world, what does it mean to the world? It’s more solution oriented for helping with marketing and I like AI for that. I know it has limitations, that it hallucinates. But I love the banter of what it does for my brain to look at a problem uniquely.”

Will shared that during the COVID-19 pandemic, he envisioned a creative messaging platform without limitations. A place where creatives can ask AI to summarize chats, view uploaded files, and collaborate together seamlessly without being spread across several tools. FYI.me is the brainchild of that desire, giving creatives a place to share ideas with feedback from AI for quick summaries and ideas—but without any stake in the actual creation process.

Another nascent use for AI within the music industry is voice cloning. Voice cloning can be done using a relatively small dataset to essentially match someone else’s voice. For example, taking a voice and applying a filter to make it sound like will.i.am. Jordan Young says the ability of AI to clone a voice is just one example of how technology is evolving.

“If you think of the history of music and the way it has evolved genre-wise, music has always evolved alongside the technology of the day. From the electric guitar, to synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, and even auto-tune—each of these innovations created a new sound we’ve never heard before. They shaped how we hear music today,” Young continued.

“That’s how I think of these generative AI tools. These are new tools for new artists to create new music that we’ve never heard before. There is a line to draw though—at what point do you build a tool that completely removes the human element from creativity. We’re really excited about these creative tools, but we as creators don’t want to build a tool that removes the human from the process.”

What about the uses of AI outside of the creative and collaborative processes? Philippe from MatchTune shared how his company is identifying covers on YouTube and other platforms to detect unauthorized cover songs.

“Generative AI is more like a revolution,” Philippe shared. “Every revolution comes with the good and the bad. Generative AI is going to become even more clever in the coming years. We already know that the traditional way of detecting songs and copyrighted content based on fingerprinting is outdated. It’s what we can see today, but it can be tweaked a bit and suddenly there are thousands of covers on YouTube undetected.”

“For example, we scanned nine different networks for a single artist, single track. For this example, let’s say a Bruno Mars track. We found 210,000 videos featuring Bruno Mars that are supposed to be monetized for the artist, but they are not because they are undetected by current fingerprinting technology. Some of them are even monetized to someone else. When you multiply by artists and tracks, this amount of unauthorized covers is massive. MatchTune has a great background in detection using AI tools and as they get more powerful, it complements our mission to find uncollected money for artists.”

With generative AI making it possible for ghost-written songs like “Heart On My Sleeve” to go viral, Noah asked Nick Minicucci whether there should be higher restrictions placed on companies and DSPs themselves, rather than individual creators. The short answer is yes.

“It’s one of the most important things we need to figure out in the music industry right now,” Nick said. “Baseline regulations have to be implemented, but sometimes that gets roped into stopping Big Tech. I don’t know if that’s the best way to think about it. We have to get the foundational elements taken care of now. I agree with TuneCore’s principles of AI, but we have to be ready to evolve because AI will evolve quickly.”

Andreea Gleeson also shared some stats taken from a survey TuneCore did with artists who utilize the service to distribute their works. From 1,600 respondents across hip-hop, EDM, Rock, and Pop—57% have been in the industry for over 10 years. TuneCore asked those respondents if they are familiar with AI or using it already. 50% said they currently use it, or would be interested in using the tech in the future. The most cited uses now include generating creative assets for marketing on social media.

However, 50% of respondents said they would opt-in to machine learning if it was done responsibly. What does that mean? Counteracting plagiarism and receiving proper credit for one. 33% of respondents said they would be interested in utilizing generative AI in their creative process. So the interest in AI is there—as long as its use can be done ethically.

Finally at the close of the panel, Noah asked Jordan Young of Hooky if the service would enable someone to create new works from the voice of someone who has passed away.

“Some artists it makes sense for, and others it does not,” Young responded. “I would never envision Prince wanting his voice to be used in this way. But there are lots of artists that may, if their estates are okay with it. Is it really a huge leap or step too far if Sony Music and the Estate of Whitney Houston want to make a tribute album to an artist we love, with producers whom she would have wanted to work with in her life? To me, that seems like a reasonable approach.”

“There’s a grey area that you have to approach in a holistic way, but I definitely think there’s an opportunity. AI can be used to fill in the gaps, but it can also be used to access entirely new fanbases. For example, one of the things we’re working on is translations of songs. You could have Will rapping or singing in perfect Korean and delivering that song to new audiences around the world. You could do that in any language and have it sound perfectly like Will.”

Photo Credit: Mac Downey for The Come Up Show / CC by 2.0

Producer Murda Beatz teams up with FL Studio to release an exclusive platinum sound kit available as part of FL Cloud’s latest update, with contributions from 9th Wonder, Slushii, Alex Lustig, and more.

Multi-platinum producer Murda Beatz has joined forces with digital audio workstation (DAW) FL Studio to release his exclusive new Murda Beatz Platinum Kit for FL Cloud. The new feature arrives as part of their 21.2 software version update, and contains over 400 samples, including melodies, drums, synth, FX, songstarters, 808s, and more. Murda Beatz is one of six producers contributing to this update, along with 9th Wonder, Slushii, K-391, Alex Lustig, and nuphory.

“My whole life changed when I downloaded FL Studio on my parents’ desktop and started making beats, so the fact that my sounds will be on there for other creators to use is a really cool full-circle moment for me,” says Murda Beatz, whose new collaboration with FL Studio is just the first of many.

Offering access to sounds, mastering, and distribution packaged into one subscription, FL Cloud provides users with a vast sample library from which to download, integrated through FL Studio. Users can browse for inspiration or search for a specific sound using smart filters for instrument type, BPM, key, and many other modifiers.

FL Cloud presents producers with an all-inclusive workspace that it boasts will allow them to concentrate on making music and stay “completely in the creative flow at all times.” While FL Cloud offers a subscription service, users who prefer not to subscribe can purchase credit packs to use on any sample in the library, including those from artist packs such as the Murda Beatz sound kit.

FL Studio makes a great entry-level DAW for anyone interested in creating music, though it is primarily geared towards creating electronic music. Notable users of the program include Avicii, Afrojack, 808 Mafia, and many more.

Photo Credit: Lauren Dunn

Singer-songwriter Lauv has utilized a combination of AI and Korean songwriters for a translation of his track, “Love U Like That.”

Following the sold-out arena tour in Asia, Lauv says he wanted to celebrate his fan base with a thank you gift. For the Korean version of the track, he teamed up with Korean singer-songwriter Kevin Woo (U-KISS) and producer Jordan ‘DJ Swivel’ Young of Hooky to faithfully translate and record the original track into Korean.

Lauv utilized Hooky’s AI voice modeling technology to apply a ‘Lauv AI filter’ over Woo’s Korean vocals to sing perfectly in the language. Now, his voice brings the words to life in Korean and makes history as the first Western artist to utilize this AI voice modeling technology to release a song in a new language. Ghost writing has always been a thing in the music industry, but now Kevin Woo has provided ghost vocals to layer Lauv’s distinct sound onto.

“I had such an amazing time on tour this year. All the countries and fans were unbelievable, but I wanted to say a special thank you to Korea for being my biggest headline show to date and creating a concert environment I’ll never forget,” adds Lauv about the Korean version of his song. “I’m so lucky to have the fans around the world that I do and I’m excited to be able to sing directly to them in this new, innovative way.”

So far, “Love U Like That” has amassed 25 million streams on Spotify, with 5 million more on the YouTube music video. With a whopping 11 billion streams and 18 million monthly Spotify listeners, Lauv has solidified his position in the pop landscape. For the remainder of 2023, he will be performing headline and festival sets across the globe including Summer Sonic in Japan and Loveloud Festival in Salt Lake City, UT.

Photo Credit: Stems

What happened to decentralized music NFT platform Stems? It raised $4 million in a pre-seed round last year—yet remains in invite-only beta more than 12 months later.

Looks like Hipgnosis isn’t the only high-flying music company now battling its own mortality. In the once-bubbly NFT space, DMN has unearthed another troubled play — with $4 million apparently torched in about a year.

The October 2022 investment round was led by firm Ideo CoLab Ventures, with additional investment from Collab+Currency, Village Global, Polygon Studios, Merit Circle, Yield Guild Games, FireEyes, NoiseDAO, Jump, GSR, Akatsuki and others. The company aims (or aimed) to create a social hub for music makers and listeners to collaborate and connect with emerging and major artists around the globe.

Ideo CoLab Ventures didn’t return an inquiry by Digital Music News by press time.

“Artists can release music stems or components that make up a track such a drums, bass, and guitar to the Stem community,” the company’s press release said at the time. “Members of the community can then use the stems to create remixes and turn them into music NFTs. The original artists of the stems will receive royalties from sales of the remixes featuring their stems.”

The platform was supposed to launch on October 6th, 2022 on the Polygon blockchain. It utilizes MATIC tokens, and at launch was supposedly minting seven NFTs for 100 MATIC each. At the time, MATIC was worth about $1 per token, but at the time of writing the token is down to just $.67.

The platform itself doesn’t appear to be available. An address associated with the Stem Labs LLC company also appears to be associated an apartment near The Grove in Los Angeles. Polygon was supposed to be a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, first launched in 2017.

Polygon features zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine—the ability to process smart contract transactions without revealing the underlying user information. The abbreviated ‘zkEVM’ is faster and more privacy-oriented than standard smart contract transactions. In 2021, the blockchain’s market cap was estimated to be over $9 billion, but in 2023 it has fallen significantly to just $6 billion as the crypto market has deflated massively after several scams were exposed.

Photo Credit: Vault Music

Vault Music, headed by FanDuel co-founder Nigel Eccles, is launching a fantasy sports-inspired music game, Fantasy Music Manager, with a private beta open now — “Think fantasy sports but for the music industry.”

Web3 limited-run music platform Vault Music — whose CEO Nigel Eccles co-founded fantasy sports gambling platform FanDuel — is launching a fantasy sports-inspired music game that just entered a private beta test available to the first 100 sign-ups.

“Build a roster of emerging artists and score points based on their growth in monthly listener numbers,” the company says in a post revealing the concept on social media. “You can create your dream roster of artists, monitor their stats, and earn cash prizes every week.”

“Think fantasy sports but for the music industry,” said Vault in a statement to DMN. “It’s a fun exploration for us given our CEO Nigel Eccles’ background as co-founder and CEO of FanDuel.”

Given the dwindling spark remaining in the flash-in-the-pan of the NFT phenomenon, it makes sense Vault would dip its fingers into a growing market like fantasy sports. But could the concept of “fantasy music” really take off?

The rise of fantasy sports has grown at an impressive clip since its infancy in the ‘80s, thanks predominantly to the prevalence of the internet. Whereas fantasy sports used to be played only among friends or co-workers, where participants had to manually track their player statistics and calculate their scores, the internet has made every aspect infinitely more accessible.

Online platforms (like FanDuel) offer users things like team management, real-time player performance tracking, and competition with other users worldwide. The increased availability of online gambling in the United States is another key factor. Fantasy sports and sports betting become easily entwined online, enabling the popularity of both to blossom.

With that in mind, fantasy music betting has the potential to find its niche. With the focus on rising stars, the platform also appears it could help boost the visibility of upcoming artists. But there’s also no guarantee that the same interest generated from sports fans will be present in the music industry’s demographics.

Photo Credit: SquadHelp

After burning through $6.2 million of investment in the last eight years, it looks like the Tunemoji domain is up for sale for a measly $2,495.

The developer of Tunemoji—Emoticast—raised the $6.2 million over the course of several investment rounds. In March 2017, Napster co-founder Sean Parker was among angel investors who contributed $5 million to the musical GIF project.

At its height, the app allowed users to share music GIFs and sounds from artists inside messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. In 2018, Tunemoji partnered with Snapchat to integrate GIFs directly within the app. In 2019, it even got a short-lived Twitch extension for creators to use.

The app secured licenses from Universal Music, Warner Music, Sony/ATV, Warner Chappell, Universal Publishing Group, Sony BMG, and PRS. These deals allowed Tunemoji to become the first GIF provider app that featured licensed music—which still wasn’t enough staying power in the long-term.

So why did this crash? Attention spans are shorter than ever and Gen Z has wholly embraced TikTok, which features its own in-house stickers. There’s little need for third-party developers to create integrations like these anymore because they’ve become an essential part of how Gen Z communicates.

At present, Tunemoji iOS app has been disconnected and is no longer available to download, while the domain appears to be for sale for less than $3,000.

A screenshot from SquadHelp showcases the current owner of the domain trying to sell it to interested parties. The sale of the domain does not include trademarks or other business registrations relevant to the domain—which raises some questions about how much you can do with the domain without the underlying trademarks.

Either way, it appears the era of GIF making apps is coming to a close as services like TikTok and YouTube seek to integrate these features natively. Many of these features are now ways that creators can monetize the interactions they have with their communities.

Photo Credit: Nick Minicucci

Digital Music News is exploring the myriad of ways in which artificial intelligence is impacting the music industry. Our upcoming ‘Rules for AI’ conference features panelists from across the industry sharing their opinions on what the technology will add to our industry in the coming years.

Immensity’s Nick Minicucci took the time to speak with Digital Music News about the impact of generative AI on music creation and how AI is already benefiting music production. Minicucci shares that he believes it’s hard to put a number on the impact AI will have in the future, but that it will open new avenues for creative expression.

Digital Music News is hosting a mini-conference dedicated to exploring the impact AI will have on the music industry in the coming years, with experts like Immensity CEO Nick Minicucci weighing in. Want to listen in or attend in person? Here’s what you need to know.

• What: Digital Music News’ Conference ‘The Rules for AI’
• When: October 25 | 11 am – 2 pm
• Where: Hollywood, Los Angeles
• Cost: $35
• Tickets: RESERVE YOUR SPOT

“AI tools will make music creation more accessible, so I expect we’ll see higher quality music coming from a larger number of people—not just artists,” he explains. “AI will also power more advanced tools for music production, so the most creative and innovative artists will have more ability to explore new sounds and ideas—potentially spinning up new genres and music unlike anything we’ve heard before.”

“Generative AI can already create music on its own and while that’s not going to replace human creativity, it will replace the need for humans to write much simpler or repetitive music—like functional background music.”

The impact AI will have on background music is a universal issue expressed by our panelists so far. It will definitely change that landscape, but AI is already being deployed on the production side to make that process much more streamlined. We asked Nick who he believes is the biggest winner in AI so far.

“I think that some of the biggest winners are the companies out there doing AI-powered stem separation. A lot of musicians in my network have been adopting this tech very quickly and have a ton of positive feedback. There’s a lot of opportunity for AI in that space.”

Stem separation is the ability to isolate individual elements of a mix—which is sometimes as easy as clicking a button with AI. Separating stems can mean separating vocals from instrumentals, or various instruments present in a mix. Traditional methods of stem separation involved a process of equalization and phase cancellation—but the result was never pristinely clean separate elements. AI separation is leaps and bounds better than traditional methods.

AI algorithms can identify minute differences in sound waves, resulting in more accurate separation than manual methods that rely on the human ear. Stem separation by AI is also much faster, typically with results in minutes instead of hours. Artifacting does happen in the process, but that often depends on the quality of the original recording. As it stands, stem separation tools for digital audio workstations (DAW) have become massively popular for music production.

Photo Credit: Aleksandr Popov

After partnering with Australasian music rights management organization APRA AMCOS last year, Music Recognition Technology (MRT) company Audoo has now announced an expanded rollout of its Audio Meters in the region. Audoo’s CEO reveals that the first tranche of installations in key Australian and New Zealand cities was a success — and ‘scaling is now the next step.’

DMN first reported on the initial phase of the partnership between APRA AMCOS and British MRT company Audoo in the summer of 2022. Now a year later, Audoo reveals that APRA AMCOS is committed to the tech’s early adoption. With a focus on that ambition, APRA AMCOS is significantly expanding the number of its devices installed in venues that are licensed for public performances.

Ryan Edwards, CEO of Audoo, explained that the extended rollout will exhibit a significant increase in Audio Meters being installed throughout Australia and New Zealand. “Australia is very populous around the edges, and this next phase will encompass all major cities and major metropolitan areas. We’re already dotted across the country,” Edwards relayed.

The Audoo and APRA AMCOS expansion will allow licensees to ensure that songs played in their premises are more accurately recognized, and paid for in compliance with copyright laws. Several years ago, Audoo partnered with DMN to accelerate its accuracy-focused mission.

Edwards relayed that the partnership and their Australasian model will potentially kickstart a global evolution of methodology for rights management organizations — switching from estimated public performance plays to actual play data.

For decades, the public performance royalty-collection process has been dominated by the use of proxy data and surveys. More recently, innovation-focused organizations like APRA AMCOS have sought out precise methodologies and technologies to enhance their distribution practices.

With Audoo, Edwards believes that rights management companies can implement better technologies to ensure even greater accuracy and transparency of play counts and rights holders’ payments. Focusing on that very aspect, Edwards says, “Audoo utilizes real world data to accurately digitize, streamline, and scale public performance data.”

Audio Meters allow Audoo to tune out the noise of busy public environments, and accurately recognize the music being played via ‘fingerprinting.’

Audoo’s Audio Meter is a multi-patented solution that monitors music played on commercial premises. The technology allows Audoo to tune out the noise of busy public environments, and accurately recognize the music being played via ‘fingerprinting.’ This data is then taken to Audoo’s cloud-based platform to streamline revenue disbursement for partner royalty societies. “Rights management organizations analyze this data alongside other music-use data sources. This is a complex, ongoing process,” says Edwards.

Edwards believes that public performance insights paired with global data will kickstart a new era of accuracy.

He also revealed that Audoo has already partnered with multiple rights management organizations, with more formal announcements to follow in the coming months.

According to Edwards, Audoo is uniquely placed because governments are now inquiring about the standards and quality of metadata across the music industry supply chain. “This is another step towards music modernization. We are now dealing with rights management organizations around the world and seeing different data standards and processes,” he added.

Generic insights involving most-played artists in different locations will also assist labels, publishers, managers, and organizers. By discovering which areas have the highest traction for a certain artist or music genre, Edwards says managers gain another data point to guide targeted promotions — and ultimately higher revenue. “As one example, artist tours could be planned based on higher geographical-based plays,” he relayed.

Edwards admits that this data already exists via social media and streaming numbers, but makes a case that Audoo insights are the missing puzzle piece that make data more usable and implementable. He added, “That’s what we’re plugging. We allow rights management organizations to harness data and use it.”

In July, Audoo also announced partnerships with PRS for Music and PPL for a large-scale UK rollout. Speaking about the move, Edwards said, “The take up from venues has been amazing. We’re getting into as many locations as possible.”