Music Business Worldwide: Recent Episodes
Music Business Worldwide
Music Business Worldwide (MBW) is the leading information and jobs service for the global music industry. It publishes two podcasts: The weekly series, Talking Trends – which dives behind the biggest headlines in the music industry – as well as The MBW Podcast, which sees us interview some of the leading figures in the global business.
Welcome to the latest MBW Podcast – this time a special podcast entry in our long-running World's Greatest Producers series.
Salaam Remi is, by any measure, a World's Greatest Producer. A Grammy winner, he's worked closely – and made timeless hits – with musical legends from Nas to Amy Winehouse, Alicia Keys, The Fugees, and many more. He's also an accomplished music biz executive and entrepreneur.
On this podcast, Salaam joins MBW founder, Tim Ingham, to discuss topics including techniques for staying creatively hungry, why he decided to stop actively producing records on his 50th birthday, and what he's learned working with some of the most important artists of all time.
Salaam also discusses his own music rights management company, Analog Metaverse, and its new partnership with Warner Chappell Music. (WCM's CEO is Remi's long-time friend, Guy Moot.)
MBW's World's Greatest Producers series is supported by Hipgnosis.
On the latest Music Business Worldwide Podcast, Tim Ingham, founder of MBW, is joined by the founder and CEO of Harbourview Equity Partners, Sherrese Clarke Soares (pictured).
Since being established in 2021, Harbourview has acquired premium music assets associated with stars such as Wiz Khalifa Nelly, Lady A, Florida Georgia Line and Christine McVie.
One of Harbourview's biggest deals to date was its reported $325 million purchase of Sound House Acquisitions LLC in 2022.
The company has since expanded into other entertainment verticals, investing in assets in film/TV.
Founded with backing from Apollo Global Management, Harbourview has more recently inked a deal to secure $500 million in debt from KKR via a private securitization of its catalog of music royalties.
On this podcast, Ingham asks Soares about Harbourview's ambitions to keep on buying in the music and entertainment space, streaming trends, and much more.
On the latest Music Business Worldwide Podcast, Tim Ingham, founder of MBW, is joined by the CEO of Amra, Tomas Ericsson (pictured).
Amra is a global digital collection society that happens to be owned by Kobalt Music Group.
Since Kobalt acquired and relaunched Amra in 2015, the collection society has become a fast-growing business in its own right: in the 12 months to the end of June 2022 – the last year for which public financial information is available – Amra generated over USD $110 million in revenue.
Amra's clients today include Kobalt's global publishing business, plus other significant independent music publishers, including Anthem Entertainment and Armada Music Publishing.
Prior to joining Amra and Kobalt, Tomas Ericsson was Deputy CEO of Swedish collection society STIM, and he was the Managing Director of ICE until 2009. (At that time, ICE was a joint venture between STIM and the UK's PRS For Music; it would later welcome Germany's GEMA as a third stakeholder.)
On this podcast, Ingham asks Ericsson about the changing landscape for songwriter royalty collection, the opportunity ahead – and the fact that Amra has, to date, invested more than $50 million upgrading and expanding its core technology...
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Emmanuel Zunz, founder of ONErpm, one of the recorded music industry's most interesting companies and something of a quiet giant.
When it was founded in 2010, ONErpm quickly gained ground in Brazil, where it continues to challenge the major record companies for market share. Since finding success in Brazil, ONErpm has grown all over the planet, offering a range of partnerships to artists, from low-margin DIY distribution to higher-margin full-service deals.
Understood to turn over a substantial nine-figure sum each year, ONErpm is profitable because it has to be: One of the most remarkable things about the company, over and above the fact that it runs more than 40 offices globally, is that Zunz continues to fully own the business.
He's never taken a cent of private equity or venture capital money, and he's rebuffed a number of acquisition approaches from major music companies and other parties.
As he explains on this podcast, Zunz’s ambition is simple — to become the fifth largest record company in the world while maintaining a profitable, sustainable business controlled by its founder…
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Eliah Seton, the CEO of SoundCloud.
**Seton joined SoundCloud as the company’s President in 2021 after over a decade at Warner Music Group/ADA. Seton then became CEO of SoundCloud last year.
During his time at SoundCloud he has steered the company beyond major milestones – including SoundCloud's first ever annual profit, posted last year.**The biggest headline surrounding SoundCloud in 2024, however, has been the news that the company is headed towards a financial event: either a sale, an IPO, or some kind of raise, following investments in the firm in recent years from Sirius XM, Raine Group, and Temasek.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is once again joined by Charlie D'Atri, to discuss two key recent headlines from the world of entertainment.
This week's duo of topical picks get our hosts more irritated than usual:
**(1) The US Department of Justice suing Live Nation and Ticketmaster in a bid to break up what it describes as an "unlawful monopoly".
(2) Generative AI Suno raising $125 million, as its prime investor – venture capital firm Lightspeed Partners – claims that the app can spit out music "worthy of Top 40 radio".**
People and companies mentioned on this Talking Trends podcast include: Live Nation, Ticketmaster, Michael Rapino, Lightspeed Partners, Suno, Olivia Rodrigo, and more.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Temi Adeniji, Managing Director of Warner Music Africa and SVP of Sub-Saharan Africa at Warner.
Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, is already a major global music industry story with huge potential for the future. On the music-making side of things, the continent has produced global hits and superstars in recent years including the likes of Burna Boy from Nigeria, Tyla from South Africa, and many others.
Based in Johannesburg, Adeniji has been instrumental in a number of initiatives from Warner Music Group in Africa in recent years, including its partnership in Nigeria with Chocolate City, signed in 2019, as well as its acquisition of distributor Africori in 2022.
Adeniji was born in Nigeria before moving to the US as a child, where she later graduated from Princeton University and then Columbia University, before building a successful career in law. She then joined Warner Music Group in New York in 2016, working across international strategy and operations, before relocating for her current job in Johannesburg in 2021.
On this podcast, Temi discusses the potential of various African markets, plus Warner’s own strategy in the region, and the general commercial excitement in the music biz surrounding the continent.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is once again joined by Charlie D'Atri, to discuss two key recent headlines from the world of entertainment:
(1) Universal Music Group's kiss-and-make-up announcement with TikTok over the two companies' new deal, via which UMG says it's being paid more handsome compensation than it was previously;
(2) Spotify quietly moving access to lyrics behind a 'paywall' – i.e. making lyrics a Premium-only perk.
People and companies mentioned on this Talking Trends podcast include: Spotify, Universal Music Group, TikTok, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Sir Lucian Grainge, MySpace, Musixmatch, RIAA, SiriusXM, Michael Nash, WimP, TIDAL, and more.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this Music Business Worldwide podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by David Israelite, the President and CEO of the National Music Publishers' Association.
We probably don't need to ask you to guess which particular controversial topic Israelite and Ingham discuss.
Earlier this month, Spotify announced that it was changing the way it calculates mechanical royalty payments for songwriters and publishers in the US.
Spotify has re-categorized its Premium subscription tiers in the States as 'bundles,' enabling it to pay out a lesser mechanical royalty rate to songwriters than it would if said Premium tiers were classified as pure music services.
Spotify believes it is entitled to re-categorize these tiers as 'bundles' due to the fact that SPOT now offers access to music plus audiobooks.
The idea that 'bundled' services should be entitled to a lower mechanical royalty rate (vs. standard music subscription services) was enshrined in the so-called 'CRB IV' agreement/settlement between publishers and Spotify in the States, signed in 2022, and covering the years 2023-2027.
As David Israelite explains on this podcast, the NMPA is currently considering legal action against Spotify that would seek to undo the newly-lowered 'bundle' mechanical royalty rate on the service.
This isn't the first time that Spotify and songwriters have butted heads, of course: In 2019, the US Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decreed that Spotify and other streaming services needed to increase the headline mechanical royalty rates they paid publishers and songwriters in the US for the period covering 2018-2022.
That decision from the CRB (in the so-called 'CRB III' process) followed a campaign of lobbying and general legal cajoling from the NMPA, on behalf of songwriters and publishers.
Spotify (and Amazon) subsequently appealed this ('CRB III') ruling, attempting to drive down the mechanical royalty rate they paid songwriters under US law.
The CRB, though, stood firm – and told the streamers they must increase their rate.
Now, with its 'bundle' reclassification under 'CRB IV', Spotify is once again attempting to push down the percentage of its revenue that it must, by law, pay to songwriters and publishers in its biggest market.
Will Spotify ultimately get away with it? Stay tuned.
As Israelite confirms on this podcast: "This will likely end up in a legal conflict..."
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is once again joined by Charlie D'Atri, to discuss two key recent headlines from the world of entertainment:
(1) A battle between Concord and financial giant Blackstone to acquire Hipgnosis Songs Fund – the UK-listed bundle of music rights accumulated by Merck Mercuriadis;
(2) Spotify's decision to re-categorize its Premium subscription tiers as 'bundles' – including audiobooks – that will materially lessen the royalty rate paid to songwriters in the US.
People and companies mentioned on this Talking Trends podcast include: Spotify, Daniel Ek, Blackstone, Merck Mercuriadis, Concord, NMPA, David Israelite, and more.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is joined by Charlie D'Atri, to discuss two key recent headlines from the world of entertainment:
(1) Criticism of Spotify from non-superstar artists who say the platform isn't paying them a fair amount in royalties; (2) Taylor Swift unilaterally putting her recorded music back on TikTok despite her record company, Universal Music Group, continuing to refuse to license the service.
People and companies mentioned on this Talking Trends podcast include: Universal Music Group, Spotify, Daniel Ek, Sir Lucian Grainge, Stem, Milana Rabkin-Lewis, Virgin Music Group, Beggars Group, Bad Bunny, TikTok, HYBE, Scooter Braun, WeVerse, Meta.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Milana Rabkin Lewis, the founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based Stem, a distribution and services company, including financial services for independent artists.
Stem has had a big 12 months. A major highlight arrived last summer when the company announced it had secured a $250 million credit agreement with Victory Park Capital, which has transformed the size and scope of artist advances that Stem can offer.
For a firm that has grown used to seeing some of its biggest independent artists jump to major label deals, that $250 million raise is something of a game changer for Stem and Milana.
Long-term listeners to MBW's podcasts may remember that this isn't Milana’s first time speaking to us. She last appeared on this podcast four years ago, just at the tip of the pandemic, and she volunteered a number of predictions about the music businesses in the years ahead, many of which have already come true, or at least partly come true.
On this podcast, Milana and Tim discuss – with some agreement, but not always – several crucial topics in the music business right now, from TikTok versus Universal Music Group to artist-centric streaming royalties to artificial intelligence, and of course Stem, and why Milana truly believes she is building a music company fit for the future.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is joined once again by Charlie D'Atri, to discuss two key recent headlines from the world of entertainment: (1) BMI's $100 million payout to songwriters following its acquisition by New Mountain Capital; (2) Universal Music Group's investment into HYBE's 'superfan' app, WeVerse.
People and companies mentioned on this Talking Trends podcast include: BMI, ASCAP, Google, Spotify, New Mountain Capital, BMG, Kobalt, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Sir Lucian Grainge, HYBE, Scooter Braun, Shopify, David Bianchi, Goldman Sachs, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, Vivendi, SeeTickets, WeVerse, and more.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is joined once again by Charlie D'Atri, to discuss two key recent headlines from the world of entertainment: (1) Fortnite's 'Festival', built by music gaming experts Harmonix, in which players can purchase music tracks via in-game store; (2) A stat from Spotify showing that over half the 66,000 artists who generated $10k+ on the platform in 2023 were based in countries where English is not the first language.
People and companies mentioned on this Talking Trends podcast include: Epic Games, Harmonix, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, Universal Music Group, Gabe Newell, Valve, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Daniel Ek, Spotify, Luminate, Mavin Records, Believe, and Denis Ladegaillerie.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
**Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide Podcast, supported by Voly Entertainment.
J**oining MBW founder, Tim Ingham, on this podcast is Julius Erving III, better known as J. Erving.
Erving is the founder of Los Angeles-based Human Re Sources, a distribution and services company working with premium independent artists. Its successful clients since launch have included Brent Faiyiz, Pinks Sweats, Ant Clemons, and YBN Nahmir.
Right now, though, people are focusing on Human Re Sources for one artist more than any other: RAYE.
In February 2024, two years after that signing to Human Re Sources, RAYE swept the UK’s BRIT Awards, with a record-breaking six wins including Album Of The Year.
There is, then, lots to ask J Erving about the success of independent artists like RAYE – and what that reflects about the wider music business.
On this podcast, we also ask him about his previous life as an artist manager, his personal motivations, and his decision in 2020 to sell Human Re Sources to Sony Music and The Orchard.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends (supported by Voly Entertainment): MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is joined by Los Angeles-based music biz seer, Charlie D'Atri, to discuss two recent headlines from the world of entertainment:
(1) Deezer's decision to remove 26 million music tracks from its library of content; and (2) The amount of 'manipulated audio' that continues to thrive on TikTok today - even when it's a Universal Music Group recording being 'manipulated'. (Also discussed Skibidi Toilet – a cultural phenomenon driven by a 'manipulated' Timbaland track.)
People and companies mentioned on this Talking Trends podcast include: Deezer, Bob Roback, Ingrooves, Epidemic Sound, Calm, Amazon, Windham Hill Records, Universal Music Group, Endel, Oleg Stavinksy, Pex, TikTok, JP Morgan, YouTube, Rasty Turek, Neil Young, and more.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is once again joined by US-based music biz veteran, Charlie D'Atri, to discuss two specific recent headlines from the world of entertainment: (1) A tough time on the public markets for private members' chain – and music industry favorite – Soho House; and (2) The increasing prospect of a battle between Denis Ladegaillerie and Warner Music Group to acquire control of Believe.
People and companies mentioned on this Talking Trends podcast include: Soho House, Hipgnosis Songs Fund, Merck Mercuriadis, Warren Buffett, Denis Ladegaillerie, Warner Music Group, Believe, Robert Kyncl, Ingrooves/Virgin Music Group, The Orchard, Willard Ahdritz, SoundCloud, and AWAL.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this Music Business Worldwide Podcast, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, interviews Aaron Bay-Schuck, the CEO and co-Chairman of Warner Records in Los Angeles.
Right now, Warner Records is on fire like no other time in its recent history. It's seeing blockbuster success from several artists who, according to Bay-Schuck, are all true artist propositions – in this industry for the long-term, rather than just a quick streaming or TikTok hit.
These artists include the likes of Teddy Swims, Benson Boone, Dua Lipa, and – not least – country star Zach Bryan, whose No.1 US single, I Remember Everything (feat. Kacey Musgraves), continues to bounce around the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100... despite being released last summer.
Alongside his fellow co-Chairman, Tom Corson, Aaron Bay-Schuck last year led Warner Records to become the fourth biggest frontline record company in the US. According to Billboard, Warner Records 'current' US market share jumped by 110 basis points in 2023, up to 5.96% from 4.86% in 2022.
Bay-Schuck's industry story before Warner was an interesting journey – from being a junior at the A&R team of Atlantic Records, where he signed Bruno Mars, through to becoming President of A&R at Interscope, where he worked with the likes of Imagine Dragons, Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani, and Selena Gomez.
For Bay-Schuck, his more recent success with Zach Bryan and co. isn't evidence of Warner Records suddenly becoming a ‘hot’ label.
In his eyes, it’s evidence of a patient, long-term, and consistent A&R strategy…
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
MBW's Talking Trends is back!
On this episode, Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, is joined by US-based industry expert, Charlie D'Atri, to discuss two specific topics that have made headlines in recent weeks: (1) A recent wave of lay-off announcements at major music companies, and (2) Universal Music Group's new $240 million investment into Chord Music.
People and companies mentioned on this Talking Trends podcast include: Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Robert Kyncl, Julie Greenwald, Chance The Rapper, Peter Mensch, Cliff Burnstein, Roc Nation, John Janick, Monte Lipman, Irving Azoff, Jeffrey Azoff, Stephen Hendel, Sam Hendel, AWAL, In2une, Sir Lucian Grainge, Boyd Muir, Mubadala, Sony Corp, EMI Music Publishing, Golnar Khosrowshahi, Reservoir, Blackstone, KKR, and Hipgnosis.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Hello and welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide Podcast, supported by Voly Music – now known as Voly Entertainment.On this podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses a crisis that's rapidly deteriorating the UK live music scene.
The Music Venue Trust is a trade body representing the interests of a vital collective of British live music venues. It’s just released a bunch of shocking statistics in its annual report – including the fact that in 2023, an average of two of the UK’s live music venues were shutting their doors every WEEK.
Amongst the venues that Music Venue Trust represents are what it calls Grassroots Music Venues, or GMVs. It surveyed 835 of these GMVs for its 2023 annual report.
These venues have an average capacity of 309 people, though that can range to a capacity over 650 people. As mentioned, the Music Venue Trust’s latest report shows that two GMVs are shutting down per week in the UK.
But perhaps the most shocking data point in the new report is that 38.5% of GMVs reported an annual financial loss in 2023. To repeat that: Over a third of ‘club’-sized music venues in the UK are currently operating at a loss.
On this podcast, Tim Ingham is joined by Mark Davyd, founder and CEO of the Music Venue Trust. Davyd explains how his organization intends to solve this issue – likely via a levy placed on ticket sales in larger venues like arenas and stadiums.
He also explains why this is a more complicated scenario than merely being the free market in action – and suggests that it’s only a matter of time before the UK’s live music venue crisis reaches a similar point of desperation in the United States…
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
On this episode of the Music Business Worldwide podcast – supported by Voly Entertainment – MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is joined by Rasty Turek.
Rasty is the founder and CEO of Pex – which, amongst other things, tracks and analyses copyrighted content on digital services.
According to Pex's tech, over a million tracks on audio streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and TIDAL, are not what they appear to be.
These million-plus tracks are what Pex calls “modified audio” – which means an original track has been sped up, slowed down, or otherwise manipulated, and then uploaded as an entirely new recording.
The main issue for the music industry? Unless these million-plus tracks have legally licensed the original recording on which they’re based, they’re infringing copyright.
More than that, they’re pulling royalties away from the original artists in question.
Pex has provided a number of examples of ‘sped up’ tracks on audio streaming platforms that aren’t attributed to a recording's original artist.
There’s a version of Halsey’s 'Without Me', for example, with over 6 million streams on Spotify. There’s also modified version of Coldplay and The ChainSmokers’ ‘Something Just Like This’ that has over 12 million plays.
It’s not hard to find more: I took a cursory search through Spotify before recording this and discovered a sped-up version of Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj’s Beauty and a Beat with over 8 million streams, and a sped-up version of Lady Gaga’s Bloody Mary with over 25 million streams. In all of these cases, the credited artist on each track – and therefore, presumably the artist account collecting royalties – is not the original artist in question.
As you can hear in our interview with Pex’s Rasty Turek, he thinks this is an industry failing – and something of a sibling to streaming fraud…
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Hello and welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide Podcast, supported by Voly Entertainment.On this 'cast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by two people who know all about music 'superfans': Alexander Seidl, the CEO of Aviator, and Lindsay Jones, the COO of Aviator.Aviator, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, specializes in serving these superfans rare content from the artists they love – often with archive video that has long gone undiscovered and has been gathering dust.
It’s worked with artists including Mark Knopfler, James Taylor, Cliff Richard, Cher, James Brown and Olivia Newton-John.
Aviator also specializes in rights clearance and rights management. You can see how that expertise marries with its archive content business – Aviator finds, say, the long-forgotten content from a French TV performance in 1986, clears the rights, smartens up the audio and video using hi-tech tools, before finally releasing it to... superfans.
This expertise in serving superfans, especially superfans of catalog artists, puts Aviator squarely in the center of one of the defining questions of today’s music business: Is the industry getting enough money from superfans – and is it serving them adequately?
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Hello and Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.
On this podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Anthony Davenport, the CEO and founder of New York-headquartered Regal Credit Management.
Regal Credit, as the name suggests, helps high-profile and high-net-worth individuals with their credit – both in terms of building it and protecting it.
Regal Credit, which was recently named on the Inc. 5000 list of companies in the US, counts many clients from across the music business
The particular reason we invited Davenport on this podcast was to discuss a tool of Regal’s called CyberSweep.
CyberSweep is a data removal service that either suppresses or outright deletes personal information from across the internet – whether on the dark web or more legitimate sites.
According to Davenport, Cyber Sweep has been used by very high-profile figures in the music business including superstar artists - who are looking to protect themselves both from fraudulent online activity, and from stalking from fans.
On this podcast Davenport discusses why he believes such activity is becoming a growing societal problem, and we also get time to dig into Davenport’s own interesting origin story that led to the birth of Regal Credit.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.Joining MBW founder, Tim Ingham, on this podcast is Scott Cohen, the CEO of JKBX.
JKBX is a new platform that enables investors (including so-called ‘retail investors’) to acquire royalty shares in hit songs. It will, in future, also allow you to trade those royalty shares by selling them to others.
JKBX launched in September and according to Bloomberg had over $1.7 billion -worth of music assets secured. Right now on the platform, JKBX is offering royalty shares in hit songs like Halo performed by Beyoncé, Rumour Has It performed by Adele, Welcome To New York performed by Taylor Swift, and many more.
However, as you read this, you can only reserve your acquisition of royalty shares on JKBX. Before it completes any transaction, the company is in the process of attempting to secure regulated approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (aka the SEC).
As well as its primary investor, Dundee Partners, JKBX has reportedly attracted strategic investors including Spotify, Live Nation, YouTube, Red Light Management and others.
Things to know about Scott Cohen before we get into the podcast? He is the co-founder of The Orchard – which he co-launched with Richard Gottehrer in the second half of the nineties, before selling it to Sony Music for a total of around $250 million, partly in 2012 and partly in 2015.
Before joining JKBX, Scott was most recently Chief Innovation Officer at Warner Music Group, where he kept his ear close to the ground on tech such as artificial intelligence, the metaverse, and blockchain.
On this podcast, we ask Scott about JKBX’s prospects, the changing nature of technology’s involvement in music, and the lessons he learned building the Orchard into a $250 million company…
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.
On this 'cast Tim Ingham, founder of Music Business Worldwide, is joined by Maria Egan, the Global Head of Music – as well as events – at Riot Games.
Riot is home to a number of extremely popular online games, including League of Legends and Valorant. But it’s also a TV and movie producer: Riot made the award-winning Netflix animated series, Arcane.
Today, Riot Games is owned by Chinese giant Tencent, which paid $400 million to buy a 93% stake in the company in 2011.
Maria Egan joined Riot last year from music-making platform Splice, where she was Chief Music Officer. Prior to that, Egan was a highly successful President and Head of Creative at PULSE Music Group.
Egan's career so far has seen her work closely with talent including Kehlani, Tiesto, Run The Jewels, and more.
She is also an alumnus of Columbia Records, where she was once Vice President of A&R.
In addition to its work in games, TV, and film, Riot Games is taking music very seriously: It has previously worked with Imagine Dragons on the hit single from the Arcane soundtrack, Enemy, which has over 2 billion streams to date.
Each year, for the League of Legends World Championship, a different track is chosen as the official anthem of the tournament. In previous years, this honor has fallen to the likes of Imagine Dragons and Lil Nas X.
For this year’s tournament, the anthem comes from fast-rising Korean act New Jeans, who are signed to HYBE, with a track called GODS.
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.On this podcast we dive head first into one of the most-talked-about topics in the music biz this year.
That topic is generative AI music, but more specifically, the fact that vast volumes of music are now being produced by AI platforms and then uploaded onto various streaming platforms.
There is arguably no one better placed to talk on this topic than Alex Mubert, founder and co-CEO of the self-titled platform Mubert.
That’s because, in July, Mubert announced that its AI platform had now been used to create more than 100 million music tracks, with an average length of over 4 minutes.
As it pointed out, Mubert’s 100 million created tracks were roughly the same size in volume as the entire catalog available on Spotify.
Mubert’s sub-platforms include Mubert Render, for online content creators – YouTubers, podcasters etc. – looking to create royalty-free soundtracks for their productions. There’s also Mubert Studio, for artists and composers, which allows musical creators to earn money on tracks, samples and loops.
On this podcast, you’ll hear Music Business Worldwide editor - Murray Stassen – ask Alex Mubert all about that 100 million stat, and how AI music is going to change the industry in the years ahead…
Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).
Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.On this 'cast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Denis Ladegaillerie, founder and CEO of Believe.
Paris-headquartered Believe is now well established as one of the largest recorded music companies in the world, both via its Believe-branded artist and label services operation, as well as its subsidiary, TuneCore, which announced the close of last year that it had paid out over USD $3 billion to independent artists to date.
Believe currently is valued at around USD $1 billion on the Paris Euronext stock exchange, having turned over around USD $450 million in revenue in the first half of 2023.
(Believe reports its revenues in Euros.)
On this podcast, MBW's Ingham asks Ladegaillerie all about a number of key topics including:
- How the music industry should deal with streaming fraud;
- Why Asia is set to commercially explode in music in the years ahead;
- What Believe’s strategy is to challenge the ‘major’ music companies; and
- Yep... Artificial Intelligence. (AI is a particularly timely subject at Believe and TuneCore, which recently partnered with Grimes to distribute music created by other artists using an AI replication of her voice.)
One other important point: Believe is no longer just a recorded music company.
Since March it has also run its own global music publishing operation, housed under TuneCore, following Believe's acquisition of the $51 million-valued Sentric Music.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music**.
On this 'cast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Lisa Yang, Managing Director of Media & Internet at Goldman Sachs’ Global Investment Research.
Yang keeps a very close eye on the music business – and is the lead analyst on Goldman’s hugely influential ‘Music In The Air’ paper, a new and updated version of which is released each year.
The latest iteration of ‘Music In The Air’ arrived in June 2023, and contained amongst its 72 pages financial and data analysis of all corners of the music business.
It also contained headline forecasts, including that the global recorded music industry will be generating over $50 billion dollars by 2030, from some 1.2 billion paying streaming subscribers worldwide.
On this podcast we ask Lisa about her team’s latest forecasts in 'Music In The Air', while picking on her brains on other conclusions from the report, and asking more generally about how the global music business will change in the decade ahead of us….**
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music**.
On this 'cast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Travis Rosenblatt, founder of the SaaS platform for A&R research and scouting, Meddling.
Rosenblatt is a particularly interesting person to speak to because, by his own admission, he spends a lot of his time NOT consumed in his day job.
This allows him the bandwidth to think deeply about the music business, its challenges, and where it might be headed in future.
Meddling is very clever, gathering data from multiple touchpoints on new artists for clients that have included the likes of** Republic Records, Kobalt, Columbia Records, and Atlantic Records.
**But as a SaaS platform, Meddling largely runs itself – enabling Rosenblatt’s mind to wander toward various crucial topics for the modern music industry.
On this podcast, Ingham asks Rosenblatt about Meddling – a bit – but their conversation also dives into PROs, DIY distribution, music’s role on video platforms, and much more besides…**
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music**.
On this podcast, one of the industry's sharpest minds, Will Page, joins MBW founder Tim Ingham to cover a range of topics including pricing, streaming, royalties – and why the global industry is more local than ever.**
Page **is the ex-Chief Economist of both Spotify and UK collection society PRS For Music.
These days he’s a consultant and the author of the book Tarzan Economics (aka Pivot), which presents compelling principles for business owners facing uncertain and disruptive times.**
Will is also the co-author of a new paper published by the London School of Economics and Political Science that focuses on what he calls ‘Glocalisation’ of music. In other words, music has never been more global as an industry, yet when you dig into the most popular tracks in individual markets, they have a decidedly local feel.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.How big can an independent artist get without help from a major record label deal?
It’s been a fierce source of debate at this point for 20 years ever since the likes of TuneCore launched in the early to mid-noughties.
These days, though, we have the receipts to answer the question.
Take Bruno Major, a fully independent artist and our guest on this episode of the MBW Podcast.
Major, who released his music via AWAL and owns his own recordings, has comfortably more than a billion streams on Spotify, with two of his tracks – Nothing and Easily – racking up over quarter of a billion streams each.
He recently released his latest singles, We Were Never Really Friends and Columbo, ahead of his third studio album – also called Colombo – which will be out later this summer.
Major is a successful live act, with a tour of Asia, Europe and North America recently confirmed. He's previously toured arenas with Sam Smith. And he has a particularly interesting history with the record business: Major started out in the music industry signing a major label deal with Capitol Records, then owned by EMI, in Los Angeles.
On this podcast, Major discusses his experience of being signed to that major record company as a young man, how that experience has help fuel his career ambitions ever since, and how he keeps himself creatively motivated as an independent artist…
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported byVoly Music.
Audius is one of the most talked-about new digital streaming startups in the music business today.
Powered by Web 3.0 technology, it describes itself as a “global decentralised music community and discovery platform that puts the artist in control”.
What that really means is that Audius enables artists to connect with their superfans, and offer those superfans the opportunity to pay more for access to coveted digital products, be that rare catalog recordings, or even the permission for a fan to remix a track.
Audius boasts 7 million unique monthly users on its platform, and has attracted investment from some impressive people, both music artists and music executives.
On this podcast, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, speaks to Audius’ co-founder, Forrest Browning, about what differentiates his company from other music streaming platforms. We also discuss how Audius’ model fits increasingly snugly with clamouring from major music company bosses, Sir Lucian Grainge included, for a better commercial relationship with music’s superfans…
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.
Austin Daboh (pictured) is one of the UK's most influential and forward-thinking major record company executives.
In addition to being EVP of Atlantic Records UK, he was recently promoted to President Of Black Music at the label.
A member of the Warner Music UK leadership team, Daboh also sits on the board of the Warner Music and Blavatnik Family Foundation Social Justice Fund, where he has helped secure around £2 million in funding for Black-led British charities.
Prior to joining Warner in 2020, Daboh was a high-flying executive at Spotify, where he was Head of Music Culture & Editorial, and also at Apple Music, where he was Head of Editorial for UK & Ireland.
At Atlantic, Daboh, a music marketing specialist, has worked with artists including Burna Boy, Tion Wayne, Jack Harlow, Cardi B and Mahalia.
On this podcast, Daboh discusses the future of music marketing, social media in music, artificial intelligence – and why he believes that the industry should be striving to offer fans a "seamless music experience"...
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music.
On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham speaks to Ola Sars, founder and CEO of Soundtrack Your Brand.
A graduate of Harvard Business School, Sars went on to become the co-founder and COO of Beats Music – the music subscription streaming service, associated with Beats By Dre headphones, that would become Apple Music.
In 2013, Sars launched Soundtrack Your Brand (then called Spotify For Business) as a JV with Spotify. The premise is simple: a music streaming service specifically made for businesses – whether multi-nationals or mom'n'pop shops.
In 2018, Sars spun the company out of that ownership structure as the independent Soundtrack Your Brand (although Spotify remains a minority investor today).
One of his key arguments: any business playing music from an individual's Spotify account is breaking the terms and conditions of their agreement with the service.
Said businesses, according to Sars, should be paying a premium monthly fee for a streaming service that clears them to play music for their customers (and which, ideally, also recommends music designed to draw more purchase activity from consumers).
Sars calculates there are 100 million different types of public-facing businesses globally that are a target market for this kind of B2B music streaming service.
Between them, he says, they could bring in an additional $40 billion of revenue into the music industry.
Right now, Sars is some way from that kind of target: In 2022, Soundtrack Your Brand turned over 214 million SEK, which works out at just over $20 million US dollars.
However, that revenue wasn’t far away from doubling year-on-year – up 61% on 2021.
As you read this, Soundtrack Your Brand has just over 54,000 paying monthly subscribers globally.
Sars says there's much more to come...
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
As the years tick by, more and more DIY artists will earn a liveable chunk of annual cash from Spotify.
That's an inevitability, right? Wrong.
In 2022, according to Spotify's own figures, the number of DIY/self-releasing artists who generated over USD $10,000 in royalties on the platform annually – from both recorded music and music publishing combined – actually fell year-on-year.
That fact is revealed (and chewed over) in the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends podcast, presented by MBW founder, Tim Ingham.Ingham explains that, according to Spotify's Loud & Clear data, just over 14,700 DIY artists generated more than $10k on Spotify in 2022.
That figure was down on the number of DIY artists who managed to do the same thing in 2021... despite the total number of artists (i.e. DIY plus non-DIY acts) who annually generated more than $10k on Spotify growing last year.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
Why is Spotify pursuing a new design that borrows heavily from time-sucking short-form video services like TikTok?
That's the question on the mind of Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, on the latest Talking Trends podcast.
As Ingham explains, Spotify's motivations for its much-debated new home feed (as well as its new AI-powered DJ) aren't likely to lie solely in its aid of artists.
Instead, he suggests, Spotify has made the move because it knows the power of its key USP in the view of investors – algorithmic recommendation – has been deteriorating.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music.
On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham speaks to Ed Newton-Rex, VP of Audio at Stability AI – and one of the world's foremost experts on generative AI in the field of music.
An entrepreneur and inventor, Newton-Rex built the pioneering AI-driven music-making platform Jukedeck, before selling it to TikTok in 2019.
He then went on to work at TikTok as Product Director of the company's AI Lab – as TikTok looked to build on Jukedeck's impressive song-forming technology.
Newton-Rex left TikTok in 2021 to join music startup Voisey, which was subsequently sold to Snap Inc (parent of Snapchat).
These days, Newton-Rex is VP of Audio at Stability AI, which is best known as the home of AI-powered text-to-image creator Stable Diffusion.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music. On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham speaks to AI expert, and the CEO of LyricStudio, Dr. Maya Ackerman.
Bloody Elon Musk. Not content with doing beastly things to Twitter (like, erm, marginally improving the user experience), he's also triggered the actual beginning of the actual end of the world.
Well, not directly. But Musk was one of the co-founders and funders of San Francisco-headquartered OpenAI, which is the progenitor of ChatGPT – the AI-powered online tool that can not only research and regurgitate online facts, but also weave that regurgitation in a variety of generated tones and styles.
Some tech experts are so impressed with ChatGPT, they say, in just a few more iterations, it will become a serious challenger to (and perhaps even surpass the usefulness of) Google, and turn the business of online search upside down.
(The next chapter in this sci-fi novel: ChatGPT gains sentience, turns our own long-trusted devices against us, and subjugates the human race. But that's probably still a few years away, so chill out, and, as Warren Zevon famously recommended, Enjoy every sandwich.)
The music industry is actually a little ahead of the curve on this topic. Because language-based 'generative AI' platforms are already transforming this business in a meaningful way – in the world of lyric writing.
LyricStudio, owned by California-headquartered parent WaveAI, produces original lyrics for songwriters in a style that mimics their own. In this sense, it's 'assistive AI' – a human companion, a muse. "When it comes to curing writer's block, there is nothing as powerful as LyricStudio," its website boasts.
Its popularity is already mind-boggling: to date, LyricStudio has been responsible for 'assisting' the creation of over a million songs, from over a million songwriters, musicians and producers. And at least 15% of the people that use it, say LyricStudio, are professional artists.
One of those artists, rapper Curtiss King, released a No.1 album (on the US iTunes chart) last summer – with lyrics written/'assisted' by LyricStudio.
On this podcast, the co-founder and CEO of WaveAI/LyricStudio, Dr Maya Ackerman, discusses the future for AI and music – especially when it comes to lyric writing. Ackerman has some powerful credentials in the world of generative AI, having studied the field
She points out that, so long as everyone behaves ethically, there shouldn't be a huge problem...
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music.
Hello and welcome to the first episode of 2023 of Talking Trends – a podcast from Music Business Worldwide, supported by Voly Music.
As ever on Talking Trends, we'll be diving behind a major entertainment industry headline to explain what’s really going on.
It’s a new year, which means a bucketful of music biz statistics about the prior 12 months – in this case 2022 – are tumbling out of trade bodies in all major markets.
The data Ingham focuses on here has just been published by the UK’s Entertainment Retailers’ Association, which both monitors the commercial entertainment market in Britain, and represents companies like Spotify, YouTube, Deezer and Amazon.
The latest batch show a dramatic slowdown in the annual growth in money being spent on music streaming subscriptions in 2022.
They suggest 'peak streaming' may be coming to the UK sooner rather than later – and seem to accentuate the need for streaming price rises (especially from Spotify) to keep growth at healthy levels in the years ahead.
Lyor Cohen believes that short-form video poses a major threat to the music business. He also thinks it might be the industry's savior.
On this MBW Podcast, Cohen – Global Head of Music at YouTube – explains his fears over short-form video platforms that fail to push users into deeper engagement with music and artist content.
"Short-form video that doesn't lead anywhere is the most dangerous thing I've seen the music business face in a long time," says Cohen.
Cohen believes that, if left unchecked, the rise and rise in music consumption on this type of short-form video platform could become one of the music industry's "biggest crises to date".
(Cohen doesn't mention any particular platforms, but it's worth noting that there's been a lot of headlines written on MBW this year about TikTok's failure – so far, at least – to launch a connected music service to its main platform.)
Cohen argues that YouTube's approach with its YouTube Shorts product offers an important distinction: A platform that hooks you in with short-form video – but then nudges would-be fans to longer/deeper audio and visual content about artists on both YouTube and YouTube Music.
Cohen lays out three problems he sees growing to a head in the current music business:
Problem No.1, he says, is an expectation for modern artists to spend a significant amount of their time, creativity and energy on certain social media platforms – platforms that in Cohen’s view rarely lead to deeper fandom amongst consumers;
Problem No.2, he says, lies with consumers themselves – and his concern that the next generation of fans aren’t currently delving deep into artists, their stories, and their catalogs;
And Problem No.3, says Cohen, lies at the door of record companies, who are struggling to break artists with regularity in this current digital environment.He believes the migration of fans away from long-standing social media platforms towards short-form video services is a major opportunity for the music business to foster true fandom in a vast potential audience globally.
But he also warns the music business to drop its current "euphoric" state, and think hard about how short-form video's role must evolve to best serve the next generation of fans and artists.
The MBW Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
If you watch the new Netflix dramatization of the Spotify story – 'The Playlist' – you'll come across an entire episode told from the perspective of Per Sundin.
That's because Sundin was the CEO of Universal Music Sweden at the time of Spotify's EU launch (2008), and one of the early believers that Daniel Ek's streaming platform could one day rule the global music industry.
Yet arguably what Sundin's up to today is even more worthy of some TV drama treatment. As he explains on this MBW Podcast, Sundin has since 2019 been CEO of Pophouse Entertainment – the Stockholm-based company behind a number of successful ventures with ABBA.
The most radical of those ventures is ABBA Voyage, the technologically stunning 'virtual concert residency' from the legendary Swedish band that has been playing to hundreds of thousands of wowed ticketholders in London since May this year.
Portraying the group as they appeared in 1977, the show has been created by ABBA in conjunction with Pophouse and Industrial Light & Magic, the Disney-owned visual effects company most famous for working on Star Wars properties through the decades. (Founding ABBA member Björn Ulvaeus is a shareholder in, and board member of, Pophouse.)
PopHouse recently got even more interesting from a music business perspective, buying a majority stake in the rights of catalogs created by names such as Swedish House Mafia and Avicii.
On this podcast, Sundin tells us how Pophouse plans to "amplify" the artist brands behind this catalog music using lessons learnt from working with ABBA.
He also discusses why he's confident, after a major financial investment, that the ABBA Voyage show will soon become profitable, go global – and change the face of 'virtual' artist performances forever more.
And he explains why he believes that the major record companies will soon switch their smartest executives (if they haven't already) to focus more on catalog, rather than frontline, music.
The MBW Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
According to Spotify, Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) was officially its biggest 'Song Of The Summer' in the United States.
In the three months from the end of May to the end of August, it racked up more streams in the States than even Harry Styles' As It Was (the biggest track globally in the period).
Over in the UK, Running Up That Hill was also crowned 'Song Of The Summer' by the Official Charts Company, which said it was streamed and downloaded more than any other track during the season.
But now we're in autumn, the music industry seems to have failed to meaningfully capitalize on Kate Bush's resurgence, suggests Tim Ingham, founder of Music Business Worldwide on MBW's latest Talking Trends podcast.
Could basic economics be the reason behind for this inability to keep the commercial fires of Kate Bush's re-ignited brand burning?
Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music.
Sony Music Group. Warner Music Group. BMG. Hipgnosis. Concord. Primary Wave.
They've all been tipped to be at the negotiating table to acquire a career-spanning catalog from legendary British band Pink Floyd.
On this episode of the Talking Trends podcast, Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, reveals what his sources are telling him about the process.
Ingham's industry whisperers suggest that Floyd's camp are looking for GBP £420 million-plus for the catalog, which includes recorded music rights but NOT music publishing rights.
He also explains why exchange rates could play a major role in who ends up landing the rights. (Clue: The British pound is currently at its weakest vs. the US dollar since 1985).
Also discussed:
Why some sources think Concord may end up as the victor in the race, while others think the smart money's on Sony;
Why tax implications linked to the locations of the band's members might play an impact on who signs on the dotted line;
* How a handful of the companies in the race to buy Floyd's catalog already have a working relationship with the band
Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music.
In this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses the recent quarterly results of music industry giants such as Universal Music Group, Sony Corp, Warner Music Group, and Believe.
Ingham notes that Q2 2022 saw something of a consistent slowdown in streaming revenue growth for the 'Big Three' major record companies.
With macro-advertising spends set to drop in the months ahead, Ingham suggests that we now may be moving into a new era for the majors when it comes to streaming growth.
Says Ingham: "It looks to me like we’re seeing the first signs of a new chapter for the recorded music industry: single-digit recorded music streaming revenue rises, following years of double-digit growth across the board."
Some people say the modern music business lacks entrepreneurial new independent record companies. Those people haven't met Stef Van Vugt.
The 25-year-old Dutchman founded Strange Fruits (now Fruits Music) in 2016 while studying music as an aspiring DJ.
The label-cum-playlist company now has millions of followers on Spotify, where it's racked up tens of billions of streams.
From Dance Fruits (5.4m followers) to LoFi Fruits (7m followers), Fruits Music's playlists have become a phenomenon on Spotify – but not without controversy.
For one thing, Fruits Music 'buys out' the rights to all its tunes from artists who work with the company (although it does continue to pay through royalties as part of these deals).
In addition, in order to better ride the Spotify algorithm, the lead 'artist' name on all of the tracks the company produces is Fruits Music itself (or one of its sub-brands). This creates similarities to the 'fake artists' that caused controversy for Spotify a few years back.
And last year, Rolling Stone wrote an exposé of Fruits Music playlists – particularly Rain Fruits Sounds – that are designed to maximize payouts from Spotify (via its 'pro rate' royalty model). Rain Fruits Sounds contains over 2,000 'tracks' of rain noises, many of which are just over 30 seconds long. Every time one of those 'tracks' gets played, Strange Fruits increases its market share of Spotify's royalty pool – ultimately ensuring it gets paid more each month, and 'real' artists get paid less.
On this MBW Podcast, Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, grills Stef Van Vugt on the story of Strange Fruits, accusations that its actions hurt 'real' artists, the 'gaming' of streaming playlists – and what he thinks about a shift to 'user-centric' licensing on streaming platforms. (His answer to that last one might surprise you.)
The MBW Podcast is supported by Voly Music) .
Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music.
In this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses the model under which TikTok currently pays the music industry.
Music Business Worldwide sources suggest that TikTok's deals with rightsholders are currently 'buy-outs' – i.e. the platform pays a lump sum upfront, rather than paying a revenue share based on each artist/label's popularity on its platform.
With TikTok's revenues expected to triple to $12 billion in 2022, concerns are growing amongst music companies that TikTok could soon get "too big and too powerful" to force into an agreement that sees it "pay music rightsholders properly".
Says Ingham: "The music industry is growing increasingly worried that it's about to star in a movie we've seen play out time and time again when it comes to music's relationship with tech and media giants.
"In short, that movie is about a tech or media giant – you've guessed it! – 'building its business off the back of artists' without paying those artists what they deserve.
"As my major record company source put it to me the other week: 'Soon TikTok is going to be too big and too powerful for us to force it into a revenue share deal. The last time we let a company of this size and power run away with things without paying us properly... was MTV."
Ole Obermann, TikTok's Global Head of Music, has told Music Business Worldwide in response to this podcast: ""From the outset we wanted to pay rightsholders and we built a team to do that. We're proud of the deals we've struck and how in a few short years we've been able to offer a new and growing revenue stream to the industry, as well as becoming a powerful marketing and promotional platform for artists of all genres.
"We're delighted by the success [that] artists, both new and old, have found using TikTok; connecting with fans and kick-starting their careers. This success and the power of our platform has translated into record label and publishing contracts [for artists], the launch of careers, significant streaming uplift and TikTok having a positive impact on charts worldwide.
"TikTok is a unique service and has pioneered the adoption of short-form video. We're not a streaming platform and we do not offer a subscription model. We negotiate our licenses on a rolling basis and as engagement with music on TikTok evolves, our business model will also evolve."
Adds Obermann: "We want to play our part and contribute to a growing music industry, enabling music creators and makers to find success both on and off our platform.”
Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music.
In this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses the market share threat that the major record companies currently face on Spotify from DIY distribution platforms – and the millions of independent artists they service.
As music from these independent artists swamps streaming services, the majors' refusal to allow the music they distribute to fall under a certain perceived quality threshold limits their ability to compete on volume / scale with the likes of DistroKid. (A prime example of this refusal: Universal Music Group's Spinnup shutting down DIY distribution last month; it now only distributes music from invited artists.)
As a result (amongst other factors), the majors' cumulative market share on Spotify is statistically falling – down by a full 10% from 2017 (87%) to 2021 (77%).
We hear from Rob Stringer, Chairman of Sony Music Group, who last week told investors that Sony has widened its own distribution net – via The Orchard and AWAL – to work with more independent acts, and counteract the market-share erosion created by DIY distribution.
However, Stringer noted that a proportion of this DIY-distributed music isn't of a good enough quality to be considered anything more than "flotsam and jetsam".
Ingham theorises that the majors may soon pressure Spotify to pay out higher royalties for 'quality' or 'premium' artists – especially those who attract subscribers to its service – versus the tens of thousands of tracks uploaded to streaming services daily.
Ingham wonders aloud if the majors' business model "c*an only triumph long term if streaming companies start acknowledging that 'quality' music is deserving of a higher rate of royalty payment than 'flotsam and jetsam'.
"In other words, will Spotify agree that not all music is worth the same, or that a play of Bohemian Rhapsody is intrinsically worth more than a play of a large man's elongated burp? "
Adds Ingham: "Defining the parameters of what constitutes 'premium' music versus 'flotsam and jetsam' is going to be fun. Music by its nature is subjective. You might think a certain track or an album is complete dreck; I might think it's celestial, and vice versa. That's part of what makes the industry so much fun."*
He continues: "*Lest we forget that the other week I was on this very podcast telling Music Business Worldwide listeners that I had seen an app – Soundful – that can create studio-quality music via machine learning at the touch of a button, and every single one of its tracks is original.
"There is no reason technology like this won't soon be able to create millions of tracks per day at the touch of a button, and then upload all of them to Spotify within seconds.
"Imagine the threat that kind of tidal wave of music hitting services daily brings to the major record companies and their need to dominate market share on Spotify and other platforms.
"So: if the majors are going to take the argument to Spotify that some music simply deserves more financial respect than other music, surely they are now compelled to do so sooner rather than later."*
We've called SK Sharma an 'AI expert' in the headline above, but it hardly does him justice.
We could have just as easily called him an expert on theoretical chemical physics, marketing analytics, computational biophysics, or antimicrobial therapeutics.
Granted, 'AI expert' was snappier.
In his 20s, Sharma graduated with a Ph.D in Chemical Physics and Biophysical Chemistry from Caltech.
He went on to create medical pharmaceuticals, before turning his hand to analyzing markets for the likes of Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers.
Along the way, he began managing investments – using data science to help guide his clients' money.
Amongst his early bets? Tesla, owned by that shrinking violet, Elon Musk.
From there, Sharma went on an impressive run as an entrepreneur: To date, he has either been a co-founder or a Partner / equity owner in four startups, in multiple fields, that have each exited for over $100 million.
And then, in 2017, he took a sharp turn into the music business – joining Ingrooves Music Group, the global distribution and services provider for indie artists and labels.
Ingrooves first successfully patented tech underpinning its 'Smart Audience' marketing platform in 2020.
The other week, it announced that it had won its second US patent for further developments on this tech – developments, the company claims, that now means Smart Audience drives streams for artists that amount to more than double the plays they would have received via traditional digital marketing methods.
In this latest MBW Podcast (supported by Voly Music), SK Sharma discusses Ingrooves' strategy, the music business's relationship with technology – and why, in his view, the "defining characteristic of success" for any new-fangled inventions in music (see: metaverse, NFTs etc.) is "going to be separating the bulls**t from the facts..."
Imagine being able to tell an app exactly the type of music you'd like to create – the key, the tempo, the genre, the sub-genre – and then that app just... making it for you.
Imagine recording yourself singing a verse and a chorus into your phone, uploading this vocal to a platform, and that platform wrapping an entire professional musical production around it, all in the style of your choosing. And the result sounding so polished, it could comfortably sit in the tracklist of Spotify's Today's Top Hits.
This is Soundful.
The artificial intelligence-driven platform, currently in beta, was recently founded and created by San Diego-based entrepreneur, Diaa El All (pictured).
To date Soundful has raised somewhere around $4 million in seed funding – from "leaders" of companies such as Disney and Microsoft.
A fuller Series A round is expected to open soon.
Soundful's website describes the platform thusly: "Soundful’s music-theory trained algorithms put studio-quality tracks in your hands so you can produce the next hot album, make a viral-worthy TikTok or YouTube sound, or amplify your gaming stream."
It promises that anyone using it can "make tracks at the speed of sound".
On this Podcast (supported by Voly Music), Diaa El All joins Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, to talk about the effect Soundful is about to have on the global music business.
Soundful's founder is upbeat and optimistic about how his platform will help today's billion-plus online content creators worldwide find music to use in their content.
He also suggests Soundful is already inspiring music makers to move in interesting new creative directions.
Ingham is a little more circumspect.
He says: "In short, I'm a bit scared of Soundful. And I am utterly amazed by Soundful and its creator."
Gunnar Greve believes, with all his heart, that Web3 and decentralized networks are about to turn the music industry upside down. In a good way.
Greve is the long-term manager of Alan Walker, the Norwegian-British electronic music sensation whose tracks have been streamed across audio and video no less than 50 billion (!) times... including more than 5 billion times in China.
In addition, Greve is a co-composer of Alan Walker's music (including the 2015 global mega-smash, Faded).
But all of that is just part of why Greve joins MBW founder, Tim Ingham, on this MBW Podcast (supported by Voly Music).
Alan Walker's background is intertwined with the world of video games. Walker is a video games design geek, and proud of it. His music career began when, as a teenager, he began sharing his epic compositions with fellow video games fans online.
Today, Walker (with Greve's help) has devised his own entire fictional world – The World Of Walker – within which his fans, the Walkers, are (not surprisingly!) the good guys.
This world extends to Walker's music videos, which have racked up over 11 billion views on his YouTube channel... which happens to be the world's 11th biggest music artist channel on the platform.
It's no great shock, then, that Gunnar and Alan are rather enthused about the possibilities for Web3's combination with music – and the impact it can have on artist-fan relationships.
If you're growing a little weary of all the chatter around the metaverse, NFTs and the blockchain, this is just the pep talk you need.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham analyzes the news the Netflix's global subscriber base fell quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2022 – and ponders whether leading music streaming services like Spotify will soon face similar headwinds.
Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in Q1, meaning that more people unsubscribed from the platform in the quarter than actually subscribed to it.
Ingham sifts through Netflix's new letter to shareholders, in which the video streamer explains why it thinks these subscribers left its platform.
Says Ingham: "One very convincing take on Netflix's poor Q1 results is that the [macro economic] sluggish economic growth and increasing inflation [in the world today] are actually the only factors that really matter here.
"Inflation in the US, for one thing, hit a very scary 8.5% in March, according to the Consumer Price Index.
"That 8.5% was the highest US inflation rate we've seen since 1981: that's over 40 years ago. This is once in a generation stuff.
"So it's no great shock that people are starting to worry very seriously about their cost of living, versus the salary they have dropping into their bank account every fortnight or month.
"And they're making sensible cutbacks of goods and services they can ultimately live without."
Amy Thomson has pretty much done it all as an artist manager, and is now disrupting the modern music industry from another angle as Chief Catalog Officer of Hipgnosis Song Management.
Before joining Hipgnosis in 2020, Amy ran her company ATM artists, and has managed acts including Seal, DJ Snake, and Swedish House Mafia.
Most famously, Amy took Swedish House Mafia from being a baby band to kings of the globally dominant EDM scene of the early 2010s.
She also worked closely with Kanye West on the stunning marketing campaigns launched during his Yeezus era.
On this MBW Podcast (supported by Voly Music), Amy discusses the three areas of the music business that she believes need drastic change.
Those areas are: (1) NDAs. That's nondisclosure agreements in artist and songwriter contracts; (2) Data – as in the flow of data to music makers and the vast inefficiencies that bad data is causing; and (3) Service and royalties, particularly the level of service that catalog artists are receiving from labels.
Claims Thomson: "I think that the service of record labels for 99% of artists since 2006 has been absolutely shocking. In 2006, when streaming was launched 30 million records got re-released [on streaming platforms]...
"Labels are getting better at [marketing catalog records]. But when I say better, that means instead of 500 catalog projects a year [being prioritized for marketing by the major record companies], maybe there's now 700 catalog projects a year.
"There are 30 million records on Spotify. [And] 75% of streaming is catalog, and that grew 10% last year."
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, responds to a new set of statistics released by Spotify about what artists earn from its platform.
Those stats, published on Spotify's Loud & Clear site, reveal that 16,500 artists generated over $50,000 in royalties from Spotify in 2021.
But, Ingham argues, this wasn't the most revealing piece of data issued by Spotify. He focuses in on a number buried towards the bottom of the Loud & Clear site: Spotify estimates that around 200,000 artists on its platform are “professional or professionally aspiring”.
Spotify has partly estimated this figure, Ingham explains, via two key questions.
The first is: How many of the 8 million artists on Spotify's platform have released fewer than 10 tracks? The answer might surprise you: it's 5.4 million, or just over two-thirds of artists on the service.
Spotify has then calculated how many of the 2.6 million artists on its platform with more than 10 tracks are popular enough to also have more than 10,000 monthly listeners.
The answer? Just 165,000 acts.
Separately, Spotify has estimated that 199,000 artists sold a ticket to a live concert in 2019 (pre-pandemic) via the likes of Songkick, Ticketmaster and other platforms.
This is how Spotify gets to its estimate of 200,000 artists on its service that are “professional or professionally aspiring”.
Argues Ingham: "To put it a slightly crueller way, 98% of the 8 million artists on Spotify today either aren’t popular enough to have 10,000 monthly listeners, or have released less than 10 tracks to date."
He adds: "Spotify’s own stats show that just 0.2% of [the 8 million] artists on its platform are generating $50,000 or above per year. As a standalone stat, 0.2% sounds like a scandal.
"But now we can move that [narrative] on, and ask what percentage of genuinely 'professional or professionally aspiring' artists – that club of 200,000 – are generating more than $50,000 a year on Spotify.
"And I’ll tell you: it’s just over 8%. Eight percent – or around one in 12 – artists deemed 'professional or professionally aspiring' by Spotify are now generating more than $50,000 dollars on that one platform per year.
"Is eight percent good enough? Is having one in 12 commercially meaningful artists generating $50,000 a year on Spotify a positive or a negative?
"Let that debate rage. But let it rage with the key information that the vast majority of artists on Spotify – 5.4 million, or more than two thirds of all acts on the platform – haven’t even released enough tracks to fill an album."
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, responds to the news that US-based video games giant, Epic Games, has fully acquired online independent music retailer Bandcamp.
Following the surprise acquisition earlier this month, some suggested that Epic's driving reason to buy Bandcamp was the buzzword of the year – the metaverse – and the use of music within it. (Epic is, after all, the maker/owner of Fortnite, which has already hosted some major music events featuring artists such as Travis Scott and Ariana Grande.)
Ingham posits a different theory. He notes that, according to its co-founder, Ethan Diamond, Bandcamp has been profitable since 2012. In addition, Bandcamp charges its customers (indie artists) just 10-15% commission rates as a retailer – and on Bandcamp Fridays, it charges nothing at all.
Last year, Ingham notes, Epic Games failed to force Apple to reduce its 30% commission rate for large app makers as part of an ill-tempered legal battle. That failure potentially cost Epic hundreds of millions of dollars a year, notes Ingham, much of it from microtransactions taking place within Fortnite.
In that legal battle, Epic cited its own Epic Games Store – on which it sells its own games and third-party titles for just a 12% commission – as an example of how a digital store could be run successfully without the need to charge a much higher 30% (as Apple does on its App Store).
But Epic came unstuck when Apple probed the finances of this Games Store, which, it transpired, was making heavy losses.
As neatly summed up by the Washington Post: "By highlighting how the Epic Games Store is not profitable, Apple is trying to show that a 12% commission like Epic charges is not sustainable for running an app store, and that a 30% commission such as what Apple charges makes business sense.”
Comments Ingham: "In short, Apple exposed the lack of profitability of Epic’s store, and in doing so sunk [Epic's] legal argument."Ingham doesn't believe Epic's battle to reduce app store commissions is over – following its Apple trial, it may turn attention to Google Play, for example, which also charges a 30% commission to large-scale app makers on its platform.
"[With Bandcamp] Epic now owns an online retailer that charges its customers just 10-15% commission, and sometimes nothing," says Ingham. "But that retailer has paid out around a billion dollars to artists, and crucially, it says that it has long been profitable.
"Epic can now point to Bandcamp as what it might claim to be proof of Apple or Google's excessive commission fees. In return, Apple or Google won’t be able to attack Bandcamp for running on a broken model, or being unprofitable… because it’s not."
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music. This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, responds to the news that Warner Music Group is co-investing in a new music acquisition fund **with investment giant BlackRock.
Ingham notes that this is Warner's second co-investment fund in recent years – following its Tempo Music vehicle with Providence – but also points out that Sony Music Group invited outside capital from Eldridge Industries last year in its acquisition of the Bruce Springsteen catalog.
Why are these major music companies not entirely using their own funds to make these acquisitions?
Ingham suggests that it could be because they're hedging their bets against threats to the potential future growth of the music industry.**
"**Demand in the music marketplace today, largely driven by these Wall Street investment banks, means that multiples being paid for music rights have infamously gone wild," notes Ingham. "This comes with risks. If the music market changes, or is hit by some kind of slowdown in growth, the prospect of getting a return on these investments can suddenly disintegrate."
Ingham highlights three key areas where the future value of music rights could be hit by a slowdown.
They include:
1) "A fear that the growth in music subscription streaming in the future might not be as sunny as some analysts estimate."
Ingham notes that Goldman Sachs is currently predicting that over 1.2 billion people will be paying for music streaming by 2030 – an optimistic forecast that makes sense from a lot of angles. Yet Ingham notes: "In 2021, Spotify saw slower global streaming subscription growth - in terms of volume – than it did in 2020. So what happens if [overall] streaming subscription growth now doesn’t meet the bright hope analysts at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere have? What if these numbers start to get downgraded as the years tick on? What happens if Gen Z, who are currently obsessed with TikTok, don’t value an all-you-can-eat streaming service menu like Spotify’s?"
2) Says Ingham: "When you look at the [banner copyright] investments being made in the business today, there’s definitely a question mark over whether these artists are going to be long-term mainstream propositions in non-Anglo-American markets. He adds: "Look at what’s happening to the charts in local markets globally: They’ve never been domestic in their tastes. MBW reported earlier this year that Italy’s entire Top 20 album and Top 10 singles in 2021 were from domestic artists. Where do Bruce Springsteen or Wiz Khalifa fit in that?"
3) Economic uncertainty on a macro level – and shooting interest rates in the months ahead. "Consumer prices are said to be rising by 5%, 7%, even 9% this year, while energy prices also shoot up making spending on so-called luxury goods or services like a streaming music subscription harder to justify for many people," notes Ingham.**
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, posits that country music could be the biggest story in 2022 for the voracious catalog-acquisition world of the modern music business.
Ingham notes that country music's market share of total streaming (according to Nielsen / MRC Data) grew by nearly 1% in 2021 vs. 2020 and grew by 2% in 2021 vs. 2019.
Joining Ingham on this episode is Round Hill Music founder and CEO, Josh Gruss.
Round Hill made significant acquisition and go-forward deals with songwriters in 2014 onwards.
Those writers include a number of writers who contributed to the biggest overall and streaming album in the United States in 2021: Morgan Wallen's Dangerous: The Double Album.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, discusses Neil Young's decision to remove his catalog from Spotify in protest to what he deems Covid-19 misinformation appearing on the platform.
Specifically, Young is unhappy about at least one episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, on which Rogan interviews a Covid vaccine-sceptic doctor.
Young has been joined in pulling his music from Spotify by Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren.
Will more artists now follow? And could an artist exodus cause irreparable damage to Spotify's valuation?
"The artists who’ve left Spotify in these past few days are all protesting what they deem to be Covid misinformation," says Ingham. "But we already know there are of artists out there, big and small, who have other consequential problems with Spotify, particularly economic."
He adds: "Spotify’s stranglehold on the music business is weakening – the stats back that up... So if artists and songwriters become less frightened of the commercial consequences of removing their music from Spotify, why wouldn’t they follow Neil Young if they felt strongly enough?"
On this episode of the Music Business Worldwide Podcast (supported by Voly Music), we speak to a legendary entrepreneur in the world of dance and electronic music: Patrick Moxey.
Moxey hit the headlines last week after Sony Music confirmed it had acquired 100% of the famed record label he founded, Ultra Records.
According to Moxey, Sony acquired 50% of Ultra Records via a partnership deal in 2013, and has now acquired the remaining 50% stake – from Moxey himself – to take full control.
As such, Moxey is walking away from Ultra Records, the label he founded way back in the mid-nineties, after more than 25 years. (Ultra's history really is a who's who of dance music: the label has released music by everyone from Steve Aoki to Roger Sanchez, Kygo, Deadmau5, Benny Benassi and many, many more.)
There are, though, big plans afoot: Moxey says he's readying the launch of a new independent record label, for which he has already employed 38 staff worldwide.
Moxey has additionally maintained ownership of Ultra's sister publishing company, which he says has a portfolio of 35,000 copyrights.
On this podcast, Patrick Moxey – also the founder of hip-hop specialist Payday Records – discusses the reasons he decided to leave Sony Music, and explains why he believes the streaming-led modern music business is the perfect place to grow his new venture.
He also talks NFTs, and why he thinks they will be an increasingly meaningful piece of the music business as it heads into the web3 era: Moxey says Ultra recently worked with DJ NGHTMRE on an NFT drop that raised $1.3 million within three hours.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
There isn't much about Spotify's explosive growth over the past ten years that Sachin Doshi can't tell you about in great detail.
Doshi was working in business development at Universal Music Group in New York in early 2008, when Daniel Ek left him with a demo of the platform.
As Doshi explains on this Music Business Worldwide Podcast (supported by Voly Music): "Both from a pure concept perspective, and the execution that Spotify was bringing to the market, I genuinely believed it would scale... I was pitching internally at Universal this idea that like music subscription should become a household utility like cable."
He was right, of course: now, 13 years on, there are over 500 million paying subscribers to music streaming services worldwide.
Doshi was such a Spotify acolyte that he not only played a key role in the service's launch in the US in 2011 while working at Universal Music Group – he then left UMG to join Daniel Ek's company as Spotify's VP of Content towards the end of that year.
Doshi eventually departed Spotify in 2016 to co-found the ad-free news subscription app, Scroll, which grew to the point it was acquired by Twitter last year (2021).
This month (January 2022), Doshi was unveiled as the new Chief Content Officer (CCO) at Podimo, a Denmark-based podcast and audiobook subscription platform that competes with other providers such as Spotify, Apple, and Luminary.
Podimo has been making serious moves in this fast-growing space, including a raise of $78 million in a Series B round last year.
On this podcast, MBW quizzes Doshi about the rise of Spotify, the stagnation of music streaming pricing, the potential of Podimo to rival some of the world's biggest tech companies – and whether the music business should be scared of the rapid growth in podcasting's global reach.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, discusses the stunning amount of money paid to Universal Music Group boss, Sir Lucian Grainge, in 2021.
Ingham (pictured) calculates that Grainge pulled in around $45 million in basic salary plus annual bonuses in 2021, in addition to a nine-figure one-time payment related to Universal's flotation on the Amsterdam stock exchange in September.
Grainge's astronomical payday in 2021 has agitated some sections of the music industry, but Ingham argues why – from a Universal shareholder perspective – the British exec was "worth every penny" of the huge one-time payout he received.
Much of this week's episode comments on this Guardian article from November 2021, and why it's problematic to compare the one-time payments of a public company CEO/Chairman to the annual cumulative royalties of UK songwriters in 2019.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, explains why Spotify deleted a swathe of comedy albums from its service over the Thanksgiving weekend – and why it might be at the mercy of big-money lawsuits in the weeks and months ahead.
Ingham (pictured) explains that two prominent companies now operating in the world of comedy royalty collection and administration – Word Collections and Spoken Giants – are each respectively run by two music industry veterans who are experts in the intricacies of licensing in the US: Jeff Price (Word Collections), the founder of Audiam and TuneCore; and Jim King (Spoken Giants), a former senior figure at US collection society BMI.
Spotify has suddenly removed comedy albums by stand-ups ranging from Kevin Hart to Tiffany Haddish, Jim Segura and Robin Williams – as Jim King accuses the streaming company of knowing "they don’t have all the rights in place to serve this content".That's a reference to the rights to the underlying lyrical content of each piece of performed stand-up. Spotify has the licenses to the recordings, but possibly not this underlying right – the equivalent of the publishing right in music.
In music, such rights are now covered by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) in the United States, ensuring that Spotify has cleared rights to every song on its platform from the get-go.
But this wasn't always the case: In 2016, Spotify was sued by songwriters such as Melissa Ferrick and David Lowery for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, having allegedly not obtained the mechanical licenses required to host their music. (Spotify eventually settled in a class action case against these and other songwriters, via a $43 million fund.)
Comedy routines are not currently covered by the MLC.
On Talking Trends, Ingham wonders aloud if Price and King may have spotted an "opportunity or injustice" to discuss a similar settlement with Spotify for these analogous rights in comedy. If a party could prove "wilful copyright infringement" by Spotify on this score, Ingham notes, the streaming company could be on the hook for up to $150,000 in damages for every comedy 'track' infringed.
Says Ingham: "The fact that Jeff Price has been able to raise $3.5 million in investment for Word Collections in the in the past few weeks doesn't surprise me. Maybe opportunity knocks here, and his investors can see that."
Ingham further suggests that this story could have ramifications for Spotify far beyond comedy: "Jim King's company [Spoken Giants] defines itself as representing rightsholders who make 'spoken word content' – not just comedy content. And spoken word content, whether that's podcasts or the more obvious analogous world of audiobooks, is a big part of Daniel Ek's future strategy for Spotify. "
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
This week on Talking Trends, host Louise Porter asks MBW founder, Tim Ingham, about a raft of new changes coming to TIDAL – the music streaming platform founded by Jay-Z, and acquired by Jack Dorsey's Square earlier this year for over $300 million.
Last week, TIDAL announced three big changes were coming to its service in 2022: (i) That it would launch a free tier for the first time, allowing non-TIDAL-subscribers to listen to music on the platform; (ii) That it would introduce 'direct to artist' payments on its most expensive ($19.99 per month) tier, that will see a proportion of each subscriber's monthly payment go direct to that subscriber's favorite artist; and (iii) The adoption of a 'user-centric' payment system, like that launched by SoundCloud earlier this year.
Ingham (pictured) explains the details behind all three moves – and considers the impact they might have on fans, artists, and the wider music business.
Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast, supported by Voly Music.
Tempo Music has been sitting on a billion-dollar-plus fund to buy music rights since 2019. This fund is bankrolled by a private equity giant – Providence Equity – that has over $45 billion in assets under its control.
Josh Empson (pictured) is the CEO and founder of Tempo Music, and the guest of this episode of the MBW Podcast.
According to Empson, Tempo is quietly and efficiently building a catalog of what he terms "modern masters".
Not to be confused (solely) with master rights, Empson's "modern masters" descriptor refers to songwriters and artists who have established themselves as standout, enduring talents over the past 10 or 20 years.
This explains Tempo's occasional announcement of deals in 2021 that have included its acquisition of a portion of the song catalog of Twenty One Pilots star, Tyler Joseph, as well as – more recently – its acquisition of a majority stake in the recording rights of two classic albums by Korn.
Josh Empson knows the finance world intimately: before founding Tempo, he was previously a Managing Director at Providence and a director of Learfield Sports, MLS Media and the NFL/PEP investment fund.
With a rich history of investing in media/entertainment properties and IP, he moonlights today as Director of European Media Partnership – a big-money partner of soccer giant Real Madrid.
Here, MBW asks Empson about Tempo Music's strategy going forward, and how contingent that strategy might be on the fund's cozy relationship with Warner Music Group.
We also get into how Empson believes the shape of the music business might change in the years ahead, and why Tempo is quite so bullish on the future growth of value in music rights.
The MBW Podcast is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of two major news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
This week, host Louise Porter asks MBW founder Tim Ingham about the news that Warner Music Group is raising $535 million in order to part-fund three new potential acquisitions.
Ingham suggests that one acquisition that makes perfect sense for Warner is David Bowie's songwriting catalog, which is reportedly on the block for around $200 million.
He points out that Warner's Max Lousada has already announced an important deal with the Bowie estate this year – with Warner licensing Bowie's entire post-1968 recordings catalog from 2023 onwards.
This may have "opened an ongoing line of negotiation" between WMG and the Bowie estate, suggests Ingham.
Says Ingham: "If Warner is going to be in complete control of Bowie's hit recordings catalog from 2023 onwards, then it's an obvious complement to also be in control of – or indeed own – the publishing rights to his songs.
"Imagine a SuperBowl or a Grammy special, for example, celebrating all of Bowie's hit music – maybe around an anniversary of a particular release – with Warner earning both on the recorded side and on the publishing side, not only from the usage of music at the event, but also on the subsequent uplift in Bowie's catalog."
The second story discussed on Talking Trends this week is the news that Universal Music Group is teaming with Authentic Brands Group to acquire 'name and likeness' rights from artists.
Ingham suggests that this move may have a fair amount to do with Universal's internal audio-visual company, PolyGram, and the artist films it hopes to make in the future.
He says: "Universal starting to have more exclusive control of name and likeness rights of legendary artists will not only help propel [UMG's] audio-visual business forward, but I'm guessing it will also help Universal and PolyGram obtain exclusivity to making artist biopics, scaring off others in Hollywood from from trying to do the same films."
Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
It's the biggest story in the modern music business, certainly for those whose eyes are drawn to dollar signs: acquisition funds buying up music rights.
From Blackstone to KKR and beyond, recent months have seen some of the world's most powerful investment institutions throwing billions at the music market to quickly capture market share.
Many investors presumed that year zero for this trend began when Hipgnosis Songs Fund floated on the London Stock Exchange in summer 2018. And it’s certainly true that Merck Mercuriadis’s then-flamboyant-looking move to publicly list his fund was a swift accelerant of the rush to buy and sell music rights.
But Hipgnosis wasn’t the first player in this space. In the United States, for one example, Primary Wave, led by Larry Mestel, was acquiring music rights using institutional investor money from as early as 2006.
And over in the UK, one of the most notable pioneers in this space was Darren Michaelson, who joins us on this episode of the Music Business Worldwide Podcast.
After leading a bunch of activity in the music rights space, in 2018 Michaelson co-founded the Barometer Music Royalties fund, partnering with Toronto's Barometer Capital.
Barometer Music Royalties fund acquired hits made famous by the likes of Jason Derulo, Chris Brown, Notorious B.I.G and more, before the fund (and its portfolio) was sold on to a Swiss Fund of Funds earlier this year, having delivered a internal rate of return of 24.5% to investors.
Here, Michaelson tells us what he's observed from his front-row seat to the music M&A market in the past half-decade – and explains why he's so bullish about music’s growing value in the future.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of two major news stories affecting the entertainment industry.
This week, host Louise Porter and MBW founder Tim Ingham discuss the tragic news that eight people have died, with hundreds injured, following a crowd crushing disaster at Travis Scott's Astroworld in Houston.
What level of responsibility should Scott take vs. the festival's promoter, Live Nation? Could anything have been done differently at the time? And what lessons can the music industry learn from the tragedy?
Also this week: Ingham discusses why he believes Bill Ackman, the billionaire investor in control of 10% of Universal Music Group, might be taking a close look at video platform Vevo.
UMG currently owns around 49% of Vevo, which operated both on and off YouTube. With music's implied market value on YouTube being worth $50 billion on more, is there an aggressive play for Ackman and the major labels to make in the future? Or is YouTube too valuable a partner to walk away from?
Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of two major news stories affecting the entertainment industry.
This week, host Louise Porter and MBW founder Tim Ingham discuss the music industry's "quiet giant" – the DIY distribution and tools sector.
One leading player, UnitedMasters, recently secured a valuation of $550 million, via a new $50 million fundraise. That news came shortly after another key DIY company, DistroKid, secured a $1.3 billion valuation.
According to Midia Research, self-releasing artists using these and other platforms generated $1.2 billion in royalties last year – making up over 5% of the total global recorded music industry.
On the Talking Trends podcast, Ingham suggests that UnitedMasters founder, Steve Stoute, could now be considering a potential sale of some or all of the company – or an IPO on the stock market.
Says Ingham: "The [IPO] narrative for UnitedMasters is an easy and obvious one: we are a major player in this DIY space [which is] statistically growing faster as a sector than the major record companies. The other part of it is that the DIY industry is actually an active threat to Warner and Universal. So if you wanted to sell the sort of 'alternative investment' argument – 'bring your money over here, rather than putting it into Universal or Warner' – that would be a good line."
Porter and Ingham also discuss Universal Music Group's latest quarterly results, as Ingham analyzes a Q3 earnings call presentation given by Sir Lucian Grainge, UMG's Chairman and CEO.
Ingham suggests that, by committing to long-term investment in artists while also projecting bulky profits for its investors, Universal is navigating "the age-old business dilemma of what to save and what to spend".
Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of two major news stories affecting the entertainment industry.
This week, host Louise Porter and MBW founder Tim Ingham discuss the shock news that, following a long and successful partnership, Korean superstars BTS (via HYBE) have ended their relationship with Sony Music / The Orchard / Columbia.
Instead, BTS will release music through Universal Music Group and Interscope in the future.
Porter and Ingham discuss why BTS might have made this decision – or had the decision made for them – and what the motivations might be in the new deal for both Universal and HYBE, each of whom are publicly-traded companies.
Ingham casts his eye back to a partnership announcement between Universal and HYBE early in 2021. That agreement conspicuously didn't mention BTS – but he suspects an "all-in" agreement might have been shaken on there and then.
"Looking back now, I wonder if Universal essentially said to HYBE, behind-the-scenes: 'We are completely happy to get into bed with you on these [other] co-controlled projects, but we need a guarantee that BTS will come over to our side," suggests Ingham.
That belief is only made more of a likelihood, says Ingham, by the fact that Sony "barely put a foot wrong" in its multi-year relationship with BTS. That view is especially true, he suggests, when it comes to Columbia Records and the label's President Ron Perry, who successfully helped BTS cross over from being K-Pop stars to bone fide US pop sensations.
Says Ingham: "This raises the question: why on earth would BTS leave Sony? It strikes me that this must be part of a bigger plan where HYBE and Universal are growing closer and closer to one another."
Elsewhere this week, Porter and Ingham chew over the news that Warner Music Group – the world's third biggest major music rights company – has seen its valuation explode by over $10 billion in the past year.
What's driven such a scintillating rise in value? Ingham suggests a number of factors... not least Universal's own debut on the stock exchange last month.
There's also mention of Warner's digital licensing team, led by Oana Ruxandra, and the surprising number of experimental and industry-first deals that WMG has struck over the past year-and-a-half.
This deal-making frequency, suggests Ingham, has "turned on the taps" to an influx of revenue from alternative platforms at Warner.
Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of two major news stories affecting the entertainment industry.
This week, host Louise Porter and MBW founder Tim Ingham discuss a hostile regulatory environment for the major record companies in the UK market.
On Tuesday (October 19), the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced it was launching a unilateral "market study" into streaming, and the market power wielded by the majors.
That study follows a damning report on the majors from UK politicians earlier this year – and takes place as the CMA also investigates Sony Music's acquisition of AWAL.
Also on this episode: Music publishers and composers are gearing up for a fierce legal battle with 'Big Tech' over the royalty rates that streaming services pay songwriters in the US.
Porter and Ingham discuss what the likely defining arguments of this clash will be – and the numbers that show why songwriters are the least-well-paid element of the music industry today.
Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Late yesterday (October 14), the National Music Publishers' Association made the claim that a number of digital service owners – including Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and Pandora – are trying to cut the amount of money they pay songwriters in the US to the "lowest royalty rates in history".
That claim was made by David Israelite, CEO and President of the NMPA, in reference to a new rate-setting procedure in the States involving the Copyright Royalty Board ('CRB IV') that has just got underway.
CRB IV will result in a new statutory royalty rate paid to songwriters between the years of 2023 and 2027.
Each digital service provider must now file a proposal for what they think songwriters should get paid from their platforms during this period.
These filings aren't yet public, but Israelite claims he knows what's in them – and it's not good news.
In this exclusive Music Business Worldwide Podcast, Israelite sets out his argument, explaining why the NMPA is now demanding that songwriters in the US effectively get 20% of revenue generated by any streaming service.
He also tackles the counter-arguments of Big Tech over a songwriter pay rise head on... and doesn't mince his words.
The MBW Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of two major news stories affecting the entertainment industry.
This week, host Louise Porter and MBW founder Tim Ingham discuss the return of Adele with her new album 30, now confirmed for release on November 19.
In Ingham's words, we're already seeing strong evidence of the British superstar "doing things her way" when it comes to the record, and the strategy around it.
This week's episode of Talking Trends also covers Blackstone's huge deal to pump (at least) $1 billion into a new song-buying venture with Merck Mercuriadis and Hipgnosis.
Could the financial giant's investment in Hipgnosis Songs Capital ultimately stretch to multiple billions of dollars?
Plus: Ingham reveals what he – and MBW's secret sources – think the NEXT game-changing financial trend in the music business will be. Clue: it's happened before, and it might just create some Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps).
Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Welcome to the debut episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends podcast.
Each week on Talking Trends, host Louise Porter and Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, will delve behind the headlines of two major news stories affecting the entertainment industry.
In this episode, Ingham ruminates on where music's next big music rights buyout will come from – and the relevance of Scarlett Johansson's recently-settled Disney lawsuit for the music business.
Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.
Online marketplaces selling music beats and samples are big business. Los Angeles-based Splice has raised over $150 million to date, including a recent round led by Goldman Sachs.
The latest entrant to this fast-growing sector comes with a twist. Multi-grammy-winning producer Timbaland is launching Beatclub alongside his long-term manager, Gary Marella, who is our guest on the Music Business Worldwide podcast here.
Marella is founder of Mono Music Group, and boasts over two decades of music industry experience , working at the likes of Universal Music Group and Three Six Zero.
Beatclub’s pitch is that it offers independent music-makers the chance to use beats crafted by Timbaland himself, alongside other VIP producers such as Mike Will Made IT, Mike Dean, and Dallas Austin.
The launch of Beatclub comes after Timbaland and Marella found huge success with online battle platform Verzuz during 2020. Verzuz originally launched on Instagram but has now become a multi-platform phenomenon following deals with the likes of Apple Music.
Troy Carter has seen the music business from all sides.
He was the manager of superstar artists like Lady Gaga and Eve at Los Angeles-based Atom Factory; he was also an early investor in Spotify, Uber and Lyft. Now, he's the latest guest on the Music Business Worldwide podcast.
In 2016, he joined Spotify full-time as the platform's global head of Creator Services, with a direct line into Spotify CEO & founder, Daniel Ek. There, Carter helped transform the record industry into a streaming-led future, while bringing Spotify closer than ever to artists.
In 2018, Carter left Spotify before launching his distribution, services and tech company, Q&A, the following year. Q&A services major-league independent artists such as Pink Sweat$.
In April 2019, Carter announced that Q&A had merged with J.Erving's Human Re-Sources, a fellow independent artist services and distribution company with particular success in hip-hop. In December 2020, Q&A and Sony announced that Sony Music / The Orchard had acquired Human Re-Sources from Q&A, bringing in J.Erving as an EVP of the major record company.
On paper, Richard "Biff" Stannard is having one of the toughest years of his life. But music, as it has time and time again, has steered him away from the shadows – and towards celebration.
Stannard says that his songwriting style has always been to "write myself happy". This approach has led to him writing and producing some of the fizziest and most successful pop songs of all time, including a run of Spice Girls' hits such as Wannabe – a timeless No.1 record in both the US and the UK.
"Writing himself happy" is also a big part of how Stannard has dealt with mental health issues across his whole life. That life began in East London in 1966, in a house typified, he says, by an "environment of hyper-masculine men". Stannard had a troubled relationship with his father, a boxer, who didn't take kindly to his son's childhood love of music.
In this candid MBW Podcast, Stannard discusses his personal journey, including his early relationship with British maverick impresario, Tom Watkins, who gave the songwriter his break working with boyband East 17 in the 1990s.
Watkins sadly died earlier this year – as did Stannard's mother, at 91. Stannard says his mom was particularly "protective" of him during his youth, and the only member of his immediate family that didn't discourage his love of music and creativity.
That's not the only trauma Stannard has faced in the past 12 months, either. Having re-invented himself as a weight-lifter – replete with muscles like beach balls – Stannard broke the UK record for bench-press in his age category during a competition. He walked off stage jubilant, an official master of yet another discipline... before suffering a life-changing heart attack.
This narrative, though – again, thanks to music – has a happy ending. Stannard has co-written two singles on Kylie Minogue's DISCO, which has just become the UK's fastest-selling album of 2020, even outstripping the first-week performances of new records from superstars like Lady Gaga.
As such, DISCO is Stannard's biggest career success since he co-wrote and produced Ellie Goulding's worldwide hit Lights six years ago – and the beginning of a new chapter in his book of triumphs.
Kylie has been a constant collaborator in Stannard's career, which has seen him work with everyone from U2 to Little Mix, One Direction and Leona Lewis – and win both Ivor Novello and ASCAP Awards.
Is Larry Mestel about to raise a billion dollars? Don't bet against it.
Mestel's Primary Wave has already raised over $800m in the past four years via two IP funds: a $300m fund in 2016, backed by Black Rock, and a further $500m-plus fund launched last year.
This money has been used by Primary Wave to acquire assets that live up to the company's billing as "the home of legends".
As such, Primary Wave now owns substantial stakes in the song catalogs of the likes of Ray Charles, Bob Marley, Whitney Houston, Smokey Robinson and the Four Seasons.
Now, Mestel tells the MBW Podcast that Primary Wave is plotting an additional raise of equity that will be "significantly bigger" than those that have come before – although he's remaining tight-lipped on what form this might take.
Other topics covered in this discussion between Mestel and MBW founder, Tim Ingham, include Primary Wave's record label-esque approach to marketing, why the firm might consider a fundraise on the stock exchange, and the fiercely competitive modern music rights acquisition marketplace.
Jason Boyd aka Poo Bear is one of the most successful songwriters working in the modern US pop music industry.
During a storied and Grammy-winning career, he's written and/or produced tracks for the likes of Pink, User, Lupe Fiasco, Chris Brown, Mariah Carey and Ty Dolla Sign.
He's perhaps best known as a long-time collaborator of Justin Bieber, for whom Poo Bear has co-written hits like What Do You Mean?, Where Are U Now? (with Jack U) and Yummy, as well as working on Bieber's record-breaking remix of Despacito in 2017.
Poo Bear is now readying his own new solo album (set to be released via Platoon), Bars & Guitars – a follow-up to 2018's Poo Bear Presents... Bearthday Music, which featured the likes of Bieber, Jennifer Lopez and Zara Larsson.
We talk songwriting, the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, getting ripped off by the music business and much more.
Mattias Tengblad is co-founder and CEO of Stockholm-based Corite, which believes it can revolutionize the way artists generate money from their recorded music.
Corite is, at first glance, a simple digital distributor, in the same core space as TuneCore, CD Baby, United Masters, Ditto etc. But it has a key difference: Corite enables fans to directly invest in artists themselves – and then take a share of money paid out to these artists from future streaming royalties. As such, it enables fans to collectively act like a record label, financing artist campaigns while financially benefitting from an act's success.
Tengblad previously worked in eSports (as Head of Digital Development at MTG) as well as spending nearly five years at Universal Music Group as Commercial Director in Sweden, where he launched both UMG's flagship playlist brand, Digster, and the major's own DIY upload service, Spinnup.
Corite released its platform in beta in October 2019, and has since run over 25 campaigns that have raised over $30,000 for artists during its Swedish pilot. In the past two months, it has launched out of beta in Europe and raised an inside seed round to fund its growth.
Dooney Battle is CEO & Founder of Tha Lights Global – a record label, publisher and artist management company whose clients include Dominic Fike and Lil Pump.
Lil Pump previously signed to Warner Records in an $8m deal but now, two albums on, is back independent and releasing with Tha Lights Global direct, via distributor Vydia.
Battle initially built Tha Lights Global as a home for social media influencers, especially on Musical-ly – the karaoke app which would go on to power TikTok.
Here, Battle explains why Tha Lights Global and Lil Pump have spurned major record company offers to stay indie this time around – and what he’s learned from his time in the business so far...
Merck Mercuriadis is Founder & CEO of UK-based Hipgnosis Songs Fund, which has acquired songs – or pieces of songs – that have fuelled hits like Rihanna's Umbrella, Al Green's Let's Stay Together, Ed Sheeran's Shape Of You, Beyoncé's Single Ladies, The Chainsmokers' Closer and many more. Hipgnosis floated on the London Stock Exchange in July 2018 and, according to Mercuriadis, as of April 2020, has spent over a billion dollars acquiring music catalogs.
Steve Stoute is the founder and CEO of UnitedMasters – the US-based music distribution and services platform that in 2017 raised $70 million from backers including Google/Alphabet and 20th Century Fox.
UnitedMasters has signed brand partnership deals with the likes of the NBA and Apple Music, while helping break artists like NLE Choppa who – according to Stoute – signed an $8 million deal with Warner Records last year.
Stoute knows about the major label world: he's the ex-President of Urban Music at both Interscope and Sony Music, and rose to EVP at the former company.
On the podcast, Stoute explains why COVID-19 lockdown presents an opportunity for independent artists, why in his view modern record labels are over-spending and playing a "lottery" game with their money, and where UnitedMasters is going next.
Stem is one of the most talked-about companies in music distribution.
The Los Angeles-based company was founded by Milana Rabkin Lewis (pictured) in 2015, and has raised over $12m to date, reportedly from figures including Scooter Braun and Mark Cuban.
Here, Rabkin Lewis sets out Stem's vision for the future of the music industry, and explains why Stem quit DIY distribution last year to focus on making tools – particularly financial tools – for VIP artists.
David Israelite is President and CEO of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA).
The NMPA is up in arms over the fact that Spotify and Amazon - in addition to Google and Pandora – are objecting to a ruling offering songwriters a streaming pay rise in the United States.
Apple Music has declined to oppose the royalty rate rise, which has been decided by the Copyright Royalty Board.
David explains: "[Spotify and Amazon] have shown their true colors. They don't respect songwriters, they are attacking songwriters to try to cut what they pay them. It's time for everybody to rise up and say: enough."
An exclusive interview with SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor on the MBW Podcast. Trainor, who took charge of SoundCloud in August 2017, discusses a range of topics with MBW, including SoundCloud's power for emerging artists, the company's financial health, his hopes for the future of the industry and Spotify's recent flotation on the New York Stock Exchange.
An interview with Justin Tranter, one of the most in-demand pop songwriters in the world today. Tranter has written hits for the likes of Selena Gomez, Fifth Harmony, Justin Bieber, Gwen Stefani and Britney Spears.
An interview with Mike Caren, the founder of APG.
Mike Caren started his career in A&R 21 years ago, aged 17, at Atlantic subsidiary Big Beat Records. Since then, he has signed or co-signed over 20 artists that have achieved gold or platinum status.
From 2009 to 2012, he served as Co-President alongside John Janick of the relaunched Elektra Records (Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Cee Lo Green).
He established Artist Partners Group in 2013 as a sister company to Artist Publishing Group, which is administered by Warner/Chappell.
In addition to APG, he has a global remit as Warner Music Group’s Creative Officer.