A small sampling of 7digital-powered platforms (Photo: 7digital/Songtradr)

When it’s not Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube playing your music, chances are it’s powered by someone else — and often, that someone is 7digital. While the biggest platforms dominate headlines, a vast ecosystem of music services is thriving behind the scenes, many of them built on 7digital’s infrastructure.

The following comes from Samantha Sawyer, the General Manager of Licensing and Technology Solutions at 7digital parent Songtradr, a company DMN is thrilled to be partnering with.

As the industry shifts its focus from scale to superfans, 7digital’s multi-product, cross-category, and global expertise positions it to help fuel the next phase of higher-value, higher-engagement music experiences.

With streaming growth plateauing and casual listening on autopilot, the push toward deeper fan relationships is gaining urgency. So what does Superfan 2.0 actually look like, and how can platforms get there faster?

Suddenly, the music industry is rethinking the one-size-fits-all streaming model, shifting its focus to deeper, more meaningful engagement with devoted fans. The momentum is real: Universal Music Group is already channeling hundreds of millions into superfan-first platforms and experiences. But despite the headlines, this movement is still in its early days.

So where will the next wave of superfan growth come from? It’s likely to emerge through bold experimentation, and 7digital is well-positioned to help lead the charge. As the engine behind a diverse array of music experiences across categories and markets, 7digital has the flexibility, global reach, and product depth to support the emerging needs of a superfan-driven economy.

If you’re unfamiliar with 7digital, there’s a reason for that.

The company has been powering a wide range of music platforms and experiences for years, but remains a behind-the-scenes player, and that’s by design. Now operating under parent company Songtradr, 7digital continues to expand its B2B footprint.

We’ve spent over two decades helping businesses navigate the complexities associated  with music technology infrastructure and music licensing, ensuring they can deliver incredible music experiences while staying fully compliant. Throughout these implementations, grabbing the spotlight has never been our focus.

Instead, 7digital’s role has always been clear: to provide the critical, often invisible infrastructure that powers music platforms at scale, helping them innovate, grow, and connect more deeply with their audiences.

As the engine behind many of today’s music experiences, 7digital provides fully licensed commercial music while navigating the complexities of rights management and ensuring proper compensation for rightsholders. It’s a notoriously tangled space, one that demands a backend partner with deep technical and legal expertise.

Once integrated, 7digital’s infrastructure supports a wide range of front-end experiences: from streaming and downloads to gaming integrations, background music, user-generated content, and more. It’s also built to flex — enabling platforms designed for niche communities, power users, and high-ARPU audiences alike.

The list of quietly-powered clients includes platforms like Canva and Connyct, fitness apps such as ApexRides, and wellness platforms including Grandpad, MedRhythms, and Resparke. Other platforms, like Triller and Pinterest, previously tapped 7digital’s backend to get their music offerings going.

Beyond that, 7digital also powers background music services for global retail and hospitality brands such as Moodmedia, Nightlife, Audalize, Qsic, and services offering in-flight entertainment to global airlines.

At the heart of these relationships is a robust network of content licensing partnerships that spans major labels, independent music rights holders (including Merlin members), and music publishing licensors.

With a catalog of around 150 million tracks, 7digital ingests an impressive 750,000 tracks per week, with three new independent suppliers joining monthly. This expansive catalog is a key asset in attracting clients who need access to comprehensive independent collections or those focused on specific genre niches.

As the industry continues its shift towards superfan-driven models, 7digital’s catalog depth could play a pivotal role in supporting the experimentation and innovation required to build this new landscape. Universal Music Group, for example, is already pouring significant resources into artist web pages designed to foster direct fan engagement and monetization. Meanwhile, Warner Music Group is experimenting with a Weverse-style fan platform, with Ed Sheeran at the helm.

7digital has already begun to support some fan-focused initiatives with its client Stationhead, a service which allows for collective licensing and engagement around album launches and artist-hosted, artist-led livestreams, with 7digital serving chart eligible download sales of the featured artist recordings.

And what about social media platforms?

As the industry evolves, many are now viewing platforms like TikTok through a different lens; not as opportunities to engage superfans, but as lower-ARPU challenges, fraught with licensing hurdles. This shift has led to a noticeable trend: a growing demand for compliant music solutions in user-generated content (UGC) platforms and emerging digital spaces.

The risks are real. The number of companies facing lawsuits for unlicensed social media content is on the rise, with major brands like Chili’s, Crumbl, Johnson & Johnson, and even the University of Southern California (USC) embroiled in legal battles over alleged licensing violations. Navigating this complex landscape requires expertise, and for the unprepared, the consequences can be severe, and they’re only escalating.

As platforms continue to integrate music into their offerings, the complexities of licensing and rights management have escalated significantly. This is where 7digital’s expertise in legal compliance and infrastructure shines.

Many companies underestimate the intricacies of music licensing and the legal risks associated with using music without proper clearance. 7digital’s solutions provide platforms with a way to navigate those challenges by offering fully licensed music catalogs and handling the often-overlooked reporting obligations that ensure compliance with copyright laws.

While these solutions are essential for the general music ecosystem, they’re especially critical for platforms that aren’t necessarily focused on superfan engagement. For platforms experimenting with niche audiences and higher-ARPU opportunities, 7digital’s flexible infrastructure and expertise in music licensing create a foundation for rapid experimentation and innovation.

That said, Superfan 2.0 presents its own set of complexities. While 7digital doesn’t hold the rights to every artist drawing a cult following, its capabilities can still support platforms built around superfans, particularly those already focused on fan-first models.

Take Bandcamp, for instance. Now part of the broader Songtradr ecosystem, it stands as a compelling example of where 7digital’s licensing and technology could amplify an already superfan-centric approach.

As the industry shifts and grows, the need for seamless, compliant solutions will only intensify. The way companies integrate music is evolving rapidly, and the demand for scalable, compliant solutions to power the next generation of music-driven platforms and superfan engagement has never been greater.

In the evolving landscape of music engagement, 7digital is quietly leading the charge; supporting the infrastructure that enables more meaningful, innovative, and legally sound music experiences.

Adaptive Music’s Tony Alexander chats with soul artist MAJOR at Music Biz in Atlanta last week (Photo: Music Biz)

Music Biz switched cities and kept most of the music business crowd. Now, Atlanta is the chosen city for 2026 as well — leaving a potentially juicy opportunity in Nashville.

Despite excessive hand-wringing over Music Biz’s switch to Atlanta from Nashville, the music business crowd showed up in droves last week. Attendance appeared slightly down from last year’s Nashville shindig, it should be noted, though the conference announced its intention to remain in Atlanta in 2026.

We’re still unclear on the machinations surrounding Music Biz’s shift from Nashville after several years in Music City, though organizers said they’ve always planned to shift cities periodically. Apparently, COVID complicated plans to jump around, though now the original game plan is being implemented.

That’s the official line and Music Biz is sticking to it, though some chatter suggests a political motivation for the shift — though that’s one hot potato we’ll politely pass along. Either way, the crowds showed up, and the event was chock-full of core music industry companies and execs.

Music Biz’s city-switch is vaguely reminiscent of the Grammys of yore, when ‘Music’s Biggest Night’ ping-ponged between New York and Los Angeles before largely being anchored in Tinseltown.

For Music Biz, it looks like a ‘build it in a new city and they will come’ dynamic is at work: for those bumping elbows at Music Biz at the Renaissance Atlanta Waverly, crowds were solid and dealmaking brisk — all ingredients for a solid music industry fest that is poised to hop around.

So how does this shift the deck on the music industry conference scene?

Music Biz continues to emerge as a marquee music industry event in the US, particularly given SXSW’s waning reputation for actual business, dealmaking, and even showcase quality. Meanwhile, Nashville already has a smattering of good industry events — most notably CRS. But given the city’s density of music celebs, songwriters, and industry folk — not to mention its party getaway appeal — will somebody make a run at building a mega industry conference in Tennessee?

Separately, Nashville’s sudden importance to the music industry’s critical lobbying agenda can’t be overstated, particularly given the huge shakeup that just went down at the US Copyright Office. Suddenly, the music industry is waffling in Washington against the tech bros — can Nashville and its more red-leaning artists potentially turn things around on the AI and copyright protection fronts?

Shifting back to Atlanta, Music Biz kicked off just as Live Nation signed a major lease in the city’s $5 billion Centennial Yards mega-project. Specifically, the concert giant inked a long-term lease for a 5,300 seat venue in the downtown stadium and entertainment megaplex, a move designed to draw a string of superstar artists to the Centennial zone.

Perhaps Atlanta opts to sweeten the deal further and rope Music Biz into a longer-term relationship? It’s always nice to have an entire industry of movers and shakers strategizing in your town, particularly given the music industry’s tendency to bump local economies.

And with that, here’s just a quick canvas of the companies on deck at Music Biz this year:

Apple Music, Spotify, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, DiMA, ASCAP, A2IM, RIAA, SONA, The Orchard, OpenPlay, Empire Publishing, Rhymesayers Entertainment, Concord Music, CD Baby, Downtown Music Publishing, Columbia College Chicago, DDEX, The MLC, AllTrack, Sound Credit, Encore Music Tech Solutions, MusicWatch, Luminate, New West Records, Music Canada, Criminal Records, Elektra Music Group, The Vinyl Alliance, Stem Disintermedia, Lark42, Sureel AI, University of North Texas, Drexel University, Music Business Toolbox, 24/7 Artists…

… and the list goes on and on.

See y’all next year — in Atlanta, that is.

More than 300 music industry lawsuits updated daily. US-based jurisdictions with global cases coming soon.

Photo Credit: Manifest

Too Lost has partnered with Manifest Financial to revolutionize financial management for independent artists and digital creators. This collaboration addresses pain points in the music industry–including fragmented payments, delayed royalties, and the lack of banking solutions tailored for artists’ unpredictable income streams.

The following is in collaboration with Too Lost, a proud partner of Digital Music News.

Manifest’s platform integrates directly with Too Lost, offering artists the ability to track royalties, merchandise sales, and collaboration payouts in one place—reducing administrative burdens. It also helps ensure faster payments for artists by mitigating traditional banking delays through the use of direct deposits and automated peer-to-peer transfers.

Additional features, like expense categorization and the ‘Save for Taxes’ tool, empower artists to stay organized and financially prepared without disrupting their creative workflow.

The launch of Manifest Financial comes as the creator economy continues to experience rapid growth, as experts predict this market will reach $500 billion by 2027. Yet, despite creators becoming more mainstream, traditional financial services in the United States have lagged behind in adapting to key needs in the industry.

Manifest Financial, co-founded by Michael Cavallaro and Manny Alvarez, was built to address these challenges.

“After spending over two decades in banking across multiple industries, it was clear there was a gap in the market for creators needing the right financial tools,” Cavallaro told Digital Music News. “Creators face unique challenges that don’t fit conventional banking categories. That’s why we built Manifest Financial, to bridge this gap and provide the tailored financial services that the creator economy desperately needs.”

The partnership with Too Lost is already bringing financial clarity for artists. From payments to managers to managing merchandise profits, money in the music industry moves unpredictably. This partnership allows musicians to efficiently track diverse income streams and automate payments to collaborators, all while managing their finances in one place.

“At Too Lost, we’re committed to empowering independent artists with the tools they need to succeed,” shares Too Lost CEO & Co-Founder Gregory Hirschhorn. “Partnering with Manifest aligns perfectly with that mission—giving creators seamless access to smarter business banking solutions, faster payments, and financial tools designed for their careers. This collaboration is about providing artists with the financial freedom to focus on what they do best—creating inspiring music to move their community.”

Don’t Take Our Word For It—Artist Testimonials

“As an artist and manager, I’m always juggling a million things—finances are the biggest,” shares Dylan Reese, an artist using Manifest. “To me, most banks don’t get how artists really move, but Manifest is totally different. Manifest feels like it’s for the artist, and it’s built for the way we move—income coming from multiple places, the need to reinvest in my craft, making sure the money side of things actually supports my creative ideas. It’s so important to have a business banking solution that understands both my hustle and my vision.”

“I met with the Manifest team during SXSW and I use this app on the daily,” Hannah Cottrell tells Digital Music News. “Manifest helps me stay organized—when as music artists may know—royalties can come in from a lot of different places. With Manifest, they add up in one place, an easy to use app so I can grocery shop, pay bills, etc. Learning how to manage yourself is an asset and a necessity. Manifest helps with that.”

Grammy-nominated producer and singer-songwriter Hannah Cottrell is Too Lost’s ‘Artist of the Week.’ Starting her solo project Saint Sinner in 2017, Hannah has amassed over 100 million streams. She’s collaborated with artists including Tycho, The Human Experience, Dimond Saints, ATYYA, and more. Her latest single,”Pure Honey” debuted on April 11, 2025. The four-minute electronic music track adds to her growing discography, which features a mix of electronic and acoustic-driven singles.

Curious how easy it can be to manage multiple income streams? Try the Manifest app—available on both iOS and Android.

Manifest works for anyone with diverse income sources–not just musicians. Hannah also uses the app to manage direct deposit from her work as a chef, too. The platform is designed to meet creators where they are, across art, hustle, and everything in between.

US streaming subscriber growth, 2020-2024 (source data: RIAA)

As the music industry plans an extreme superfan makeover, who gets to control this party? The answer might be complicated – and seriously fragmented.

The future of the ‘superfan economy’ is unpredictable, and the current ‘2.0’ expansion is largely on its starting blocks. The broader revenue prospects tied to capturing super-engaged fans beyond current levels are also difficult to predict, and winners will likely take years to materialize and scale.

It’s a complex soup of possibilities, with music fans – i.e., the consumer – ultimately determining success outcomes. But who gets to control the action – and money – generated by engaged superfans?

In this report, we take an overview of where things stand in the music superfan expansion in the ‘early days’ of 2025 – and look at some possible winners in this game.

Report Table of Contents

I. The Superfan Economy Has Always Existed – So Why Is the Industry So Focused On It Now?

A. The Slide Into Passive Listening and the Flattening Forecast for DSPs

B. The ARPU Problem: Why Low/Mid-ARPU ‘Fans’ Simply Aren’t Cutting It

II. ‘Superfan 2.0’: A Look at the Early Possibilities

III. Who Gets to Own Fan Engagement? A Look at the Possible Ownership Hubs – And Conflicts — Surrounding Future Superfan Experiences

IV. The Macro-Economic Look: How Much Disposable Cash Do Fans Have, Anyway?

Please note: the following report is for DMN Pro subscribers only — please do not redistribute. Thank you!

Chartmetric trending artist du jour, De La Soul

Digital Music News is now expanding its longtime partnership with Chartmetric, the industry’s most respected music intelligence and data platform.

Jumping in, DMN readers will soon have access to a constantly-updating track popularity ranking, complete with fast-emerging breakouts. Complementing the ranking will be Chartmetric’s latest data trend analyses, which will include a broad range of genres, artists, and broader worldwide music developments.

Everything will be available to Digital Music News readers in a neat dropdown widget, which will complement DMN’s existing industry coverage.

The dynamic chart ranking will lean heavily on Spotify Monthly Listeners and Chartmetric’s own scoring methodologies to monitor breakout tracks and artists, 24/7. For those seeking a real time ranking that better reflects trending realities online and off, there isn’t a better barometer of what’s bubbling.

For those that want to dive deeper, Chartmetric’s data-focused breakdowns will offer unparalleled examinations of music trends worldwide.

That includes featured articles from Chartmetric’s ‘How Music Charts,’ a dedicated editorial column focused on music charts, data, and analytics – with extremely time-sensitive and relevant articles.

And that’s in addition to DMN’s non-stop, hard-hitting industry coverage and DMN Pro analyses.

“Chartmetric and Digital Music News have been partnering for years with a mission to broaden music industry intelligence,” said Chartmetric President & COO Andreas Katsambas. “Now, we’re taking things a step further.”

Meanwhile, Chartmetric is recharting the possibilities in A&R with a recently-released ‘Talent Search Tool’ to power better predictive intelligence.

As profiled on DMN, Chartmetric’s Talent Search Tool sifts through data from over 10 million artists, identifying key signals that suggest an artist’s potential for long-term success. Each artist receives a daily score from 1 to 10 across various metrics, making it easier to spot emerging talent worthy of deeper investigation.

Just recently, Chartmetric joined forces with DMN to broaden awareness of its data-powered predictive tool.

Photo Credit: Google

Google has announced it is adding its text-to-music model Lyria to Vertex AI. Vertex AI is now the only generative AI platform with models across all modalities—video, image, speech, and music.

Vertex AI can now build a complete, production ready asset starting from just a text prompt, to an image, to a complete video featuring both music and speech. The model was also updated with Veo 2, an advanced video generation model to allow video to be refined and repurposed with precision. It also includes updates to Chirp 3, a groundbreaking audio generation and understanding model.

Chirp 3 can create custom voices with just ten seconds of audio input. It allows Vertex to weave AI-powered narration into existing recordings and adds a speech transcription capability that can distinguish between multiple speakers. Finally, Imagen 3 now has improved image generation and inpainting capabilities for reconstructing missing or damaged portions of an image.

Google says in alignment with its AI Principles, the development and deployment of Lyria, Veo 2, Chirp 3, and Imagen 3 on Vertex AI prioritizes safety and responsibility with built-in precautions like digital watermarking via SynthID, safety filters, and data governance.

Lyria produces high-fidelity audio from just a text prompt. The model can be used to create soundtracks for marketing campaigns, product launches, or immersive in-store experiences—all tailored to brand identity. Lyria enables companies to create sonic branding that resonates with a target audience to foster brand recall.

For video production, podcasting, and digital content creation, finding the perfect royalty-free music can be a time-consuming process. Lyria eliminates those hurdles by allowing content creators to generate custom music and tracks in just minutes—with control over the mood, pacing, and narrative of the final piece. Google says this can help improve production workflow and reduce licensing costs for projects that need lots of background music.

TikTok USA, circa 2025 (Photo: TCY)

Months after ‘the ban,’ there’s no telling what happens to TikTok next in the US.

After inching oh-so-close to a deal to secure TikTok in the US, China apparently pressed hard pause on the arrangement following Trump’s tariff slap. So what does that mean for the music industry?

If you love uncertainty, this one’s for you. Trump is now extending the ban by another 75 days, though a hard clock is now ticking on a deal that was apparently 99% done. Congressional pushback on the ‘phase 2 extension’ is already happening, and Apple is seeking White House assurance that the app can remain on its App Store.

This slow-motion cookie crumble could go in any direction. Among the possibilities within the next 30 days: TikTok shutting down for good or continuing business-as-usual — or, potentially, some insane variation in the middle.

Last we checked, TikTok is available on both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store, though this situation is volatile. And certainly not a recipe for crafting stellar, long-term artist marketing campaigns — or advertising campaigns, for that matter.

Most music folks are smartly spreading their marketing efforts across the gamut of social media giants, with IG Reels and Shorts getting a nice stability bump. That said, as long as TikTok is ticking, it has the power to blow stuff up — including entire artist careers and dusty catalog tracks.

While the over-under on TikTok’s survival has gone haywire, some executive ship-jumping is worth noting — particularly TikTok Music ex-honcho Ole Obermann, who recently packed his bags for Apple Music. And he’s not the only one potentially pondering the writing on the wall.

Meanwhile, other platforms continue to seize the moment. On that note: what major social media platform just inked a broad-reaching deal with major music publishers? (Hint: the first letter isn’t ‘X’…)

On a broader note, few in the music business seem to be rooting for TikTok’s survival.

It’s not that TikTok isn’t making some effort to play nice with the music business. Just last week, for example, TikTok was among the supporting sponsors at the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) golf classic and fire relief efforts in Los Angeles. But for the most part, the vibe within the music industry isn’t warmly supportive, to say the least.

TikTok famously refused to reasonably compensate rights owners until absolutely forced, with the aforementioned Obermann battling it out with Universal Music Group for weeks before a deal was hammered out. Indies are also understandably cool on this low-paying platform, though TikTok’s marketing muscle is certainly potent — especially if the viral fairy gods tap your shoulder.

Then again, that’s the aspiration for rivals like Reels and Shorts, among others. And we get the sense that witnessing a heavy door slamming on TikTok’s derriere would be oh-so-satisfying for many industry folks.

Guess everyone’s replaceable — and let’s face it, life will go on in the music industry, with or without TikTok USA playing a role in it.

More as this develops.

Got a juicy tip? Hit me up at paul@digitalmusicnews.com or Signal (@digitalmusicnews.07).

Photo Credit: Pexels

Music production and digital content creation is a fast-paced world, and managing payouts to all artists, influencers, and creators involved can quickly become a logistical nightmare. Let’s take a peek at how Tipalti has helped some of the biggest names in the music business, like Symphonic Distribution, Create Music Group, Spitfire Audio, and Thematic stay on track with efficiency and compliance in royalty payouts.

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

Tipalti transforms payout operations for digital music brands, allowing these companies to focus on creativity and growth. Automated tax compliance is a huge part of that, with Tipalti’s ability to manage tax compliance requirements in more than 196 countries. The company’s global reach enables financial operations for companies across the globe—especially where cross-border transactions add extra work and complexity.

Tech-focused music distribution company Symphonic Distribution uses Tipalti to automate royalty payouts for over 100,000 clients that represent 500,000 artists. The company’s proprietary SplitShare service allows creators to add collaborators, set revenue splits, and ensure automatic monthly payments. With Tipalti, Symphonic has eliminated manual processes, enhanced client security, and streamlined tax data collection—enabling a lean team to scale the business with fewer operational bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, Create Music Group and its artist-first approach uses Tipalti for an automated solution for global payouts and accounts payable. By integrating Tipalti with its ERP, NetSuite, Create Music Group reduced its payment processing time from several days down to just one hour. The company also implemented a custom iFrame for artist onboarding, which allows Create Music Group to maintain brand recognition while enhancing customer loyalty. The direct results of Tipalti’s technology include reduced payment workload by 36 days annually, centralized operations under a single system, and fast and error-free payouts to more than 25,000 artists.

Spitfire Audio also transformed its royalty payment process through its partnership with Tipalti. The company is a leader in cinematic sound libraries and was previously managing payouts to 700+ musicians manually—which equated to six weeks of manual work. With Tipalti, this process now only takes 30 minutes. Because of this success, Spitfire Audio also moved accounts payable and procurement management over to Tipalti, which freed up its finance team’s time even further. With Tipalti, Spitfire Audio automated over 1,500 global payouts, eliminated manual data entry while reducing errors, and reduced payment processing time from weeks to hours.

Thematic also partnered with Tipalti to handle its complex royalty and licensing payments. For this digital content platform, Tipalti created a self-service portal for artists to help standardize the collection of tax and bank data—streamlining global payouts in the process. Thematic also integrated Tipalti’s API to build a centralized dashboard, allowing artists to choose their preferred payment methods and receive funds faster.

For companies in the music industry, efficiently and securely paying digital creators is more than just an operational task—it’s a critical part of building lasting relationships with artists and creators. Tipalti Mass Payments has helped companies like Symphonic Distribution, Create Music Group, Spitfire Audio, and Thematic reduce the manual workload while creating a better experience for their global communities.

If you’re in the music production and services industry, consider how Tipalti may help you accelerate your payout operation and support creators. Tipalti can help music companies scale business with ease by automating manual tasks, achieving global tax compliance, and streamlining payouts worldwide. Reach out to Tipalti to learn more about transforming your financial operations.

Photo Credit: Cosynd

Trusted copyright protection platform Cosynd has announced a new partnership with performance rights organization BMI. The partnership will benefit BMI’s new Spark program, designed to support BMI’s global community of music creators at every stage of their career.

The following was created in collaboration with Cosynd, a proud partner of Digital Music News.

The innovative partnership marks the first time that Cosynd has offered an American PRO exclusive access to discounted U.S. Copyright Office registrations and vital legal agreements. This will empower BMI’s music creators to safeguard their works easily and affordably, while setting a new standard in copyright protection for the industry.

With Cosynd’s suite of tools, BMI’s more than 1.4 million songwriters, composers, and publishers can quickly establish ownership of their content and prevent unauthorized use of their work—all for 80% less than similar services and within a fast and simple UI.

“In today’s fast-paced music industry, music creators are being asked to do more than ever, not just making the music we love, but also putting it out into the world, finding and engaging with their fanbases, and creating their own unique brand,” says BMI Executive Director of Strategic Partnerships & Industry Research, Jess Robertson.

“In addition, managing the many platforms and various registration processes required to protect their work and collect revenue adds yet another layer of complexity. That’s why we are so thrilled to have Cosynd join Spark as an inaugural partner, further supporting BMI’s commitment to prioritizing our songwriters, composers, and producers and their copyrights.”

“We are proud to celebrate this milestone with BMI as the first PRO to take a bold step in prioritizing copyright protection for its members,” adds Cosynd CEO, Jessica Sobhraj. “By making it easier and more affordable for creators to secure their rights, BMI is setting a new precedent for how the industry can support music creators at every stage of their careers.”

“As AI and streaming fraud present new challenges, this partnership ensures that BMI’s members have the legal protections they need to safeguard their work, assert their ownership, and uphold the value of their music in an ever-evolving landscape.”

Through Cosynd’s efficient copyright registration service, BMI creators can easily register any of their content with the U.S. Copyright Office. That allows them to secure legal standing to pursue infringement claims, accessing statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement, and gaining global protection in over 175 countries.

Additionally, Cosynd’s agreement builder allows BMI members to quickly create customized, legally binding agreements, ensuring clarity on ownership when collaborating with others. To further enhance their experience, BMI members can also take advantage of an exclusive discount for Cosynd’s Premium Annual Membership, which includes the ability to create an unlimited number of agreements and up to four free copyright registrations (though federal filing fees will still apply).

Cosynd’s partnership with BMI arrives at a critical moment as the music industry grapples with the implications of artificial intelligence and the rising tide of streaming fraud. Recent lawsuits against AI companies for unauthorized use of copyrighted songs underscore the need for clear protections.

Reports suggest that up to 10% of global streams are fraudulent, significantly impacting streaming revenues and revealing vulnerabilities in the current system. In this complex landscape, establishing clear copyright registrations is essential for asserting ownership, preventing misuse, and ensuring creators are fairly compensated for their works.

BMI’s proactive efforts to offer secure and affordable copyright protection for its members solidify its position as a key advocate for music creators in an increasingly complex landscape. Curious about BMI Spark and its partners? You can find more information here. Cosynd is trusted by thousands of copyright owners across 160+ countries, transforming what was once a complex, expensive process into an accessible, cost-effective solution. The service saves businesses and creators thousands in legal fees with just a few clicks—here’s how.

Photo Credit: Ashley King

Earlier this month, Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl said indie distribution acquisitions were off the table — but he didn’t swear off buyouts entirely. Now, ADA, the global independent music distribution and artist services arm of WMG, has announced it has acquired music tech start-up RSDL.io.

So who’s RSDL.io, exactly?

This was a lower-profile play, though RSDL.io is a tool that offers automated accounting and a simplified view of multiple revenue streams, empowering artists and labels to efficiently manage their business. Now, it’s part of WMG’s ADA according to details confirmed to DMN earlier this morning.

“RSDL.io’s state-of-the-art technology directly addresses the complex needs of independent artists and labels,” shares Cat Kreidlich, President of ADA. “Integrating this platform into our company’s network advances our ability to deliver practical solutions to our partners across the globe.”

RSDL.io was founded by Mike Holmes, Jim Sella, Bill Sella, and Shep Goodman. It combines enterprise technology with the sensibilities of the modern music industry. With a comprehensive suite of features, the tool seamlessly facilitates payments, manages splits and recoupments, and allows for multi-level artist and contributor payout functionality and insights.

Mike Holmes will join the WMG tech team leading product solutions for RSDL.io alongside Sella (Founder & CTO) who will play a key role in integrating the application into the ADA ecosystem and adding a new roadmap of features. Sella has 20+ years of experience running tech and software development in start-ups and some of the largest communication companies in the world. That includes spearheading the creation of several industry-changing products in telecommunications.

RSDL.io offers a digital wallet that empowers creatives to take control of their rights and finances. It’s a centralized solution for managing multiple revenue streams, facilitating transparent splits and recoupments, and streamlining the relationship between various stakeholders in the music industry.

Artists can efficiently manage their business, track incoming revenue, handle splits, and more. It alleviates challenges faced by independent artists in collecting and managing their royalties, while providing valuable insights to allow them to make informed decisions about their careers. By automating this process, RSDL.io allows independent artists to focus on growing their careers rather than worrying about collecting royalties and accounting.

Photo Credit: DMN Pro Data

When it comes to handling accounts payable and royalty commitments, mishandling data can lead to catastrophic legal consequences. Incorrect or missed payments can trigger copyright actions and content removals—with time-consuming litigation soon following. A flexible payments partner becomes integral to avoiding legal mayhem — here’s a closer look.

Let’s take a peek at the data from Digital Music News’ ongoing litigation tracker to see where legal issues in the music business fall. Around 55% of all pending litigation cases since August 2024 have had copyright issues at their core. Coming in at 15% are contract and other disputes, followed by Antitrust/Federal Issues at 10%, with Patents and Trademark legal issues bring up the rear at 9% of pending litigation.

More than half of all music industry lawsuits involved copyright-related disputes in 2024. Copyright disputes include allegations of copyright infringement, but also all issues tied to improper accounting or non-payment issues. This is where having a flexible payments system can help businesses avoid these issues in the first place.

A well-oiled payments and financial automation platform can help any music business avoid this common pitfall. Just recently, DMN and Tipalti joined forces to deepen the focus on proper financial accounting and payment processing, two key components to minimizing legal liabilities. Tipalti offers full tracking and accountability, with disputes more quickly understood and resolved before they reach the litigation state.

So how can music businesses avoid these common pitfalls? Here’s a quick checklist to assess.

Does your system account for all triggered licenses within your model framework, including performance, mechanical, synchronization, and territory-specific licenses? A detailed examination of your application, model, or platform with an industry attorney or top law firm is a good first step here. Once a business sets sail, being wary of overly-aggressive claimants who may try to stretch the definition of a specific license—especially in novel use cases—becomes paramount.

Are you identifying and establishing connections with all payees for specific applicable licenses, including rights organizations, labels, publishers, and artists and songwriters themselves? For a number of triggered music licenses, an artist or IP owner often works through an intermediary to collect and administer royalties. In the case of performance licenses, publishers and songwriters in the United States often work with performance rights organizations (PROs) like ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR, or AllTrack.

Does your system appropriately bucket various licenses and payee relationships into matching territories and blocs? This is one area in which Tipalti stands out. New territories often introduce different licensing and payout requirements. Having a payment platform that can incorporate these modifications on-the-fly means compliance—and fewer legal headaches as the company expands into new territories.

Does your system tie all creator and rights owner contracts with actual payout calculations and terms? Is the system prepared to process and handle disputes when they arise, including conflicts over IP ownership? If contractual terms change, then payments may also change as well. Structuring contracts from the beginning to smartly connect into a payments platform like Tipalti reduces headaches and administrative overhead when contract obligations change.

Conflicts over IP ownership are a near certainty in the music business, though different companies deal with these issues in separate ways. For example, a conflict on YouTube could freeze all monetization for the channel until a resolution is reached. For all platforms, a uniform process in handling these disputes should ensure that royalties aren’t being paid to the wrong party and that legal liabilities aren’t created.

With the right payments platform that documents all transactions and their calculations—everyone in the payout chain is able to look up specific transactions, payouts, and royalty calculations through a unified interface. A flexible payments platform reduces legal liabilities and is a necessity to scale your business and take it to the next level while avoiding costly legal action.

Photo Credit: Genius

Genius is teaming up with Too Lost to leverage the music tech company’s distribution and administrative processes. The team up will allow the Genius Distro team to focus on talent identification, marketing, and artist advocacy while Too Lost’s tech stack handles the complexities of music distribution effortlessly thanks to its user-friendly backend system.

The following was created in collaboration with Too Lost, a proud partner of Digital Music News.

With the partnership underway, Genius plans to integrate its editorial content, including platforms like OpenMic and Verified with Too Lost’s distribution services. Genius says the integration will create a unique value proposition for artists, helping them tell their stories more effectively. The distro will also utilize Genius social platforms and its website to amplify artists’ voices, continuing the tradition of early support for emerging talent.

“Genius Distro is a small but ambitious team,” Kayvan Daragheh, Director of Music Distribution at Medialab tells Digital Music News. “Having access to Too Lost’s distribution technology is an amazing benefit for us, as it allows us to focus on some of the more challenging parts of the release process. Things like identifying the right talent, marketing, using our Genius platform to help tell artist stories and being advocates for our artists, pitching them from placements across DSPs and the digital space.”

“With all of that, Too Lost’s tech stack allows us to easily handle the administrative sides of music distribution. Their backend is one of the most user-friendly experiences we’ve had and it’s made growing the distribution side of our business seamless.”

The collaboration will also explore artist advance opportunities for select artists, with Genius and Too Lost working together to build these opportunities. Each potential advance case will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but the key focus is on making investments to grow the shared catalog while treating independent artists as equitable partners in their growth.

The Genius Distro approach to distribution and promotion is highly personalized to the artists’ needs. The team works closely with Too Lost to pitch releases to DSPs, independent curators, and traditional press partners. Their goal is to create engaged fan bases rather than passive listeners, since engaged fans are more likely to follow an artists’ body of work as it evolves.

Genius boasts over 12 million YouTube subscribers and more than 15 million followers across its social media channels. It has cultivated relationships with industry tastem akers, positioning its clients for optimal exposure to new audiences who are hungry for a new sound. Meanwhile, Too Lost distributes to over 450 outlets directly, without intermediaries, which will help Genius land better deals with digital service providers (DSPs).

Photo Credit: Audoo

Music technology company Audoo has partnered with the German performing rights society GEMA on its Music Impact Study. GEMA’s study is a multi-faceted research study quantifying the commercial value of background music in gastronomy and retail spaces. It utilized Audoo technology recognizing real-time songplay contributing to sales uplift.

Audoo audio meters installed in hundreds of venues recognized over 130,000 tracks, contributing to the insights demonstrating that the use of background music increased sales in retail by an average of 8% and in gastronomy by an average of 5.4%. The economic benefits suggest that a music license is a worthwhile investment for many retail spaces.

Overall, the most-played song in the retail sample was “Lifeline” by German artist Glockenbach, also featuring Ella Henderson. In the Gastronomy sample, “Austin” by US artist Dasha topped the list. The other leading track of German domestic repertoire was “Wave” by Fast Boy and Raf. The top domestic artists overall were Trettman for retail and Michael Schulte for the gastronomy sample.

GEMA’s Music Impact Study was a large-scale study that took place under the direction of international scientists. The connection between music and sales was examined using several methodologies. The empirical field study at the point-of-sale was preceded by extensive literature research, quantitative surveys, and expert interviews.

In addition to the trends and insights revealed through Audoo’s intelligent client dashboard, the device’s simple plug-and-play self-installation process at venues, plus its GDPR compliance, demonstrates the value of this technology to retail and hospitality businesses.

“The real-time dataset we were able to gather and analyze via Audoo technology on this study is great for seeing the overall impact of music in commercial spaces in such detail,” shares Sonja Schoenfield, Project manager of the Music Impact Study at GEMA.

“Audoo’s innovative technology ensured a seamless and highly-effective data collection process and the results mark a significant milestone in understanding the commercial value of music with these kinds of insights for the benefit of businesses and rights holders alike,” adds Johannes Everding, Director of Business Development at GEMA.

“Partnering with GEMA on this study is a testament to the power of real-world data in demonstrating the impact of music in public spaces,” says Ryan Edwards, CEO & Founder of Audoo. “As we continue to work with like-minded partners who share Audoo values of making public performance recognition and reporting more accurate and transparent, the landscape for all parties evolves and improves.”

Overall Top Songs Recognized by Audoo — Retail Sample

• “Lifeline” by Glockenbach ft. Ella Henderson
• “Cynical” by Chris de Sarandy, Safari Duo, twocolours
• “The Feeling” by Lost Frequencies
• “Angel Eyes” by Ásdís
• “Strangers” by Kenya Grace

Overall Top Songs Recognized by Audoo — Gastronomy Sample

• “Austin” by Dasha
• “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey
• “Belong Together” by Mark Ambor
• “Wave” by FAST Boy, Raf
• “Dancing In The Flames” by The Weeknd

Top Domestic Tracks Recognized by Audoo — Retail Sample

• “Lifeline” by Glockenbach ft. Ella Henderson
• “Cynical” by Chris de Sarandy, Safari Duo, twocolours
• “I’ll Be There” by Rita Ora, Robin Schulz, Tiago PZK
• “Waterfall” by Michael Shulte, R3HAB
• “Holding On” by Leony

Top Domestic Tracks Recognized by Audoo — Gastronomy Sample

• “Wave” by FAST BOY, Raf
• “Human Being” by Nico Santos
• ”Friends” by KAMRAD
• “Beautiful Reason” by Michael Shulte
• “Someday Soon” by ClockClock

Top Domestic Artists Recognized by Audoo — Retail Sample

• Michael Schulte
• Leony
• Glockenbach
• ClockClock
• Zoe Wees

Top Domestic Artists Recognized by Audoo — Gastronomy Sample

• Trettmann
• Bläck Fööss
• Nico Santos
• Purple Disco Machine
• FAST BOY

Photo credits: Graphic Design by Emily, snsnep

As UMG mega-studs like Lucian Grainge and Michael Nash continue to plot the strategy behind ‘Streaming 2.0,’ a bevy of questions are swirling. What will this bold and daring future of music streaming look like — particularly as it relates to revamped superfan and ‘super-premium’ tiers?

Universal Music Group’s most recent quarterly earnings call etched out—at least preliminarily—the broader vision behind ‘Streaming 2.0’  as it relates to upcoming streaming tiers and superfan maximization. Major streaming music platforms are part of the plan, but what will this bold future entail?

As it relates to maximizing per-subscriber revenue, CEO+Chairman Lucian Grainge outlined a shift from the currently limited plans at major streaming music platforms to something more sophisticated — and profitable. Think multiple tiers for different levels of music fans—with superfans dishing out more for extra goodies—and you’ve got the general idea.

Welcome to the bright future of music streaming, which includes, among many other things, more subscription tiers stuffed with goodies.

But this isn’t just Spotify cooking up a super-premium tier anymore. Now, all the streaming platforms will be playing ball, and every major platform is in discussions with UMG and other major rights owners.

All of which raises the question: What will people pay for – and what will they pass over?

According to the intercepted chatter, 2.0’s paint on upgraded tiers is far from dry for obvious reasons. Well-crafted strategy documents are lovely, though the grizzled industry vets among us warn that trial-and-error may be required to learn what sticks.

This brings us to the latest error: UMG and other major labels had been leading the charge on raising prices only to get spooked by the subscriber ‘plateau’—but does this mean that music fans can still be coaxed into paying more than $11.99 a month if the goodies package is enticing enough?

If you’re one of the legions of laid-off execs blindsided by plateau anxiety, you might be skeptical. However, this might be the strategic pivot the industry needs. Still, maximizing per-monthly charges with smartly-crafted super-tiers is a tricky game, especially since music fans can always say no.

And let’s be honest: so far, the industry’s response to super-premium proposals has been a bit ‘meh‘.

For years, Spotify has been teasing a super-premium package. But almost immediately after Daniel Ek offered the company’s latest version, several skeptics wondered if the billionaire CEO was losing his edge. For starters, Ek seems to have overlooked that premium audio—a major part of Spotify’s splashy upcoming upgrade—is already a serious differentiator at Apple Music. Perhaps most importantly, it’s baked into Apple’s lower-cost plan and integrated hardware.

Beyond that, Ek’s lightbulb moment regarding pre-sale concert tickets sounded equally problematic after Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino offered few promises to Spotify and other streaming platforms—that is, outside of accepting the biggest bids for exclusive access.

So, Spotify can offer you a pre-sale offer if Citi doesn’t offer a higher bid for the privilege?

Will Anybody Pay $6 Extra for Spotify’s ‘Music Pro’? A Hard Look at Spotify’s Attempt to Break the Streaming Plateau

And what about the endless stream of goodies already enjoyed by streaming subscribers – at no extra cost?

Case in point: Spotify is already doling out pre-sale exclusives to loyal artist followers. But now you’ll need to pay for that?

And that’s just one example of the endless freebie perks streaming music fans enjoy. Indeed, streaming music platforms have been bending over backward for years to give subscribers more stuff – without tying those improvements to increased prices or premium tiers. That includes lyrical overlays, better algorithmic recommendations, curated radio shows, integrated concert listings, merchandise offerings, exclusive artist showcases, podcasts, audiobooks, and high-fidelity audio.

All of which begs the question: How much more does this industry have left to give?

According to Universal Music Group, the flowing tiers of ‘Streaming 2.0’ will lure people to pay more. Grainge & Co. say they’ve done their research, and a significant portion of current subscribers are willing to pay more—i.e., if they build it, they will upgrade.

And maybe we’re truly living in ‘Streaming 1.0’. But how easily does 1.0 go to 2.0 – and will streaming music platforms work in lock-step to get the industry there?

For inspiration, you have to look across the other pond to China. That’s where the success of Tencent Music Entertainment’s ‘Super VIP’ tier is whetting the appetite for higher-priced tiers that revolve around higher-value offerings. Now, the billion-dollar question is whether that sort of traction will take root in the US and worldwide.

More as this develops.

Denver’s Señor Bear, one of hundreds of venues tracked by Audoo’s recent song-tracking pilot.

Theoretically, performing rights organizations (PROs) track and tally every song played in public and streaming platforms – then dole out the royalties accordingly. Now, London-based Audoo has hard evidence showing that billions of song plays can be counted with near-100% accuracy.

While mega-PROs like ASCAP and BMI do a laudable job of tracking, matching, and distributing royalties on billions of tracks played in the United States, a nagging question is whether these vast systems can be improved. This is more than just an academic musing: the answer to this surprisingly complex question has the potential to reshape the public performance sphere for decades to come.

Enter Audoo CEO Ryan Edwards, who is driven by a mission to count every song played worldwide in public places for years — and is marching towards that goal with backers like Bjorn Ulvaeus and Sir Elton John. Theoretically, the tech exists to count everything with total accuracy, though the details are devilish. Accordingly, Edwards and his team have spent millions developing the ‘Audio Meter’ and deployed it into thousands of venues and public places worldwide to capture the music in action.

That effort is now hitting the United States. Just recently, Audoo concluded a far-reaching first entry to the US in Denver involving hundreds of public places – with nearly 100% of songs played in those establishments tracked. That included restaurants, gyms, bars, and retail establishments across the city.

“The feedback from the license holders was very supportive,” Edwards told DMN. “Many of them have wondered for years how their fees are distributed and were very passionate about the way music sets the tone of their businesses.”

The results of the Audoo pilot, shared with Digital Music News and part of an ongoing partnership, began in late June of 2024 and concluded in February of this year.

Among the most refreshing takeaways is that virtually every song can be successfully detected, logged, and tallied with all key metadata information (including ISRC & ISWC) using the installed Audio Meters, which makes sense. Imagine an industrial-scale, private version of Shazam in every venue, and you’ve captured Audoo’s business approach.

“Music has always been consumed in so many different ways, from business owners creating a ‘mixtape’ CD or playlist, playing the radio, and empowering employees to adjust the music based on the tone they need,” Edwards said. “To us, it’s about what’s been played and then reporting that accurately. Just get the music playing, and we’ll work with the PRO/CMO to do the rest.”

But what’s actually getting played? Here’s where things start to get really interesting. The current thinking is that music played in public spaces roughly mirrors popular playlists on media like terrestrial radio and streaming platforms. But Audoo’s data shows a surprisingly slim overlap with massive DSPs (i.e., Digital Service Providers or streaming platforms) and social media platforms.

Here’s just a quick look at the overlap – or complete lack thereof.

The following breakdown was pulled from a sample week in February (2025) using the top 40 songs tracked throughout the city. It was then compared to the top 40 songs played on other platforms for the same period.

What’s the overlap percentage? Take a look.

• • Audoo x Apple Music – 0% crossover
  • Audoo x Billboard – 2.5% crossover
  • Audoo x Shazam – 5% crossover
  • Audoo x Spotify – 5 % crossover
  • Audoo x TikTok – 0% crossover

“The results mirror what we have seen and reports in other markets around the world,” Edwards shared. “The more US cities we launch into, the more diverse [data] we expect to see. This can make a difference in thousands of creators making a living, or sadly, not.”

Also surprising: most of the music played in Denver hails from the United States (more than 50%) and the UK (nearly 15%). Other countries were marginal single-digit contributors, including Australia, France, Germany, and Sweden. Those percentages are likely different in other cities, though Audoo also highlighted some interesting exceptions.

Denver bar and restaurant Señor Bear, for example, plays a blend of Latin-inspired music from Argentina, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Spain. The curated playlist also includes 24% American music sourced from local artists.

That’s a far cry from the top 10 list of most-played artists throughout the city, which includes Tame Impala, Jungle, Hozier, Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Bad Bunny, Zach Bryan, and Neil Frances. Sounds like tried-and-true stuff, though many of the most–played songs aren’t topping the charts on radio or Spotify.

The data also offers a range of other insights, including detailed breakdowns by venue type (restaurant or gym, for example) and the most frequently played songs. Audoo even tracks the level of commonality between different venue types, while identifying unique establishments (for example, a physical therapy clinic that is also a local music champion).

“Business owners know first hand the value of playing music, and of those we have started working with in the US, the feedback has been very positive,” Edwards shared. “Nobody challenges paying for a music license, despite the complexities of multiple PROs in the US. But knowing the hard-earned money is being paid to the artists they play is key.”

“Our technology is there to help PROs: no more manual surveys, proxy data sets, or outdated analogies. The past cannot be changed, but now is the time for accurate reporting for fair and transparent distributions.”

But what does this have to do with Congressional inquiries into PROs currently happening in Washington?

Just recently, the US Copyright Office launched a significant inquiry into PROs in response to Congressional concerns. Among the many questions being examined is how PROs gather performance information and how this impacts rights owners.

For Edwards, it’s a complex question with a surprisingly simple answer: just count everything!

A tally of core music industry funding, 2025 YTD (Source: DMN Pro/Digital Music News)

Duetti’s recent $200 million in debt funding pushed core music industry funding past the half-a-billion threshold for 2025, per DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker. That’s certainly a big number, though it represents a major drop from comparable YTD fingers in 2024 and 2023. Here’s a breakdown of the numbers — and a look at which companies are scoring rounds.

As the music industry enters the first half of March, year-to-date 2025 funding isn’t too shabby. Over a total of nine core music industry rounds, funding levels have now crossed $645.5 million, per DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker. For those hoping for an outperforming year, however, there are early signs of softness.

Compared to the same period last year, total 2025 funding is nearly 50% lower. Part of that can be attributed to an absolute gangbuster February 2024 period, which was one of the strongest music funding months in recent memory. That contributed to a strong 2024 annual funding total, which slightly edged out 2023 rounds.

Here’s a look at early-2025 tallies, 2024’s early-year rounds, and the broader funding picture over the past few years.

Table of Contents

I. Music Industry Funding Crosses Half-a-Billion In 2025: A Look at the Companies Scoring Cash This Year

II. Year-Over-Year Differences Remain Great – A Comparison to YTD Figures In 2024

III. Bigger Picture: Core Music Industry Funding, 2020-2024

IV. What’s Next? Future Research from DMN Pro

Please note that this report is for DMN Pro subscribers only. Please do not redistribute — thank you.

Chartmetric’s ‘Talent Search Tool’ sifts through an enormous amount of data to better predict winners (photo: Chartmetric)

You can forgive the music industry for being blasé about the fate of TikTok in the United States.

In fact, many have privately expressed to DMN that they’d love to see TikTok pack its bags. Over the past year, TikTok has done an impressive job of pissing off a vast range of rights owners, from Universal Music Group to the smallest indie. In the blunt language of this business, TikTok’s payouts stink — and so does its attitude towards rights owners.

But there’s a deeper reason why many in the music industry have done little to advocate for TikTok’s survival in the US: it just doesn’t matter as much for their businesses. That came into stark focus with UMG: according to data unearthed by DMN Pro, Universal Music was making more from paid downloads than TikTok royalties before their dispute.

Beyond the financial calculations, there’s an even more serious issue: chasing down viral TikTok artists is becoming a losing game.

“The TikTok gold rush is declining,” Chartmetric analyst Domenico Randazzo told Digital Music News while pointing to more reliable success indicators like Instagram engagement and user-created streaming playlists — among dozens of other data predictors.

Others, including Duetti, are finding that TikTok’s supposed star-making magic only runs so deep. TikTok is undoubtedly breaking new artists and breathing life into old songs, but the success levels aren’t great outside of the flashy outliers. Digging into the data, Duetti found that even amongst the fewer than 1% of tracks that ‘go viral’ on TikTok, only about 15% experience long-term streaming growth on digital service providers (DSPs) like Spotify and Apple Music.

Those stats aren’t shocking for data players like Chartmetric. The company quickly realized that music executives were shifting away from TikTok signing derbies and more towards sophisticated data analytics to identify the next generation of chart toppers. After nearly two years of intensive research, the company recently launched a predictive talent search tool, promising to give companies an edge in the race to identify tomorrow’s superstars.

The company’s new offering, simply called ‘Talent Search Tool,’ sifts through data from over 10 million artists, identifying key “signals” that suggest an artist’s potential for long-term success. Each artist receives a daily score from 1 to 10 across various metrics, making it easier to spot emerging talent worthy of deeper investigation. Just recently, Chartmetric joined forces with DMN to broaden awareness of its data-powered predictive tool.

“Data has always been an essential component of the gut instinct that A&Rs rely on,” says Chaz Jenkins, Chief Commercial Officer of Chartmetric. “But with so many artists releasing music today, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to have sufficient awareness of the marketplace.” In that soup, Chartmetric aims to offer a data-driven lens to navigate the overwhelming volume of music being released globally.

Decoding the Signals: What Makes a Future Star?

Chartmetric’s Talent Search Tool filters in action (photo: Chartmetric)

Chartmetric’s tool categorizes these signals into Performance Metrics and Contextual Metrics. Performance Metrics, such as user engagement (for example, Instagram likes relative to followers), consistent growth across streaming platforms, and user-created playlist additions, provide quantifiable measures of an artist’s traction.

Contextual Metrics, on the other hand, offer a more nuanced view, considering factors like editorial playlist placements, presence in “trigger cities” (those with high listener growth potential), international reach, and audience demographics.

“There is no single metric that can predict success,” explains Akash Mukherjee, VP of Product Management at Chartmetric. “Each of the signals we identified integrates multiple data points from many services.”

According to Mukherjee, the tool’s power lies in its ability to handle the “heavy analytical work behind the scenes,” allowing users to identify emerging talent far earlier than traditional methods.

Suddenly, Context Is King.

Chartmetric emphasizes that these metrics are not to be interpreted in isolation. Context is crucial. For instance, a low editorial curation score might indicate that an artist is gaining traction purely through organic fan engagement, which could be a valuable asset. “Extreme values provide context about an artist’s profile, not necessarily positive or negative,” notes Randazzo.

The tool’s flexibility is also key. Users can apply filters for genre, region, gender, career stage, and other criteria to narrow their search and find artists who align with their specific goals. This customization is vital in an industry where different stakeholders have varying priorities. Labels may seek rapid growth, while publishers might focus on established, recurring success.

But is Chartmetric simply setting the stage for the next ‘A&R arms race’?

Companies are notorious for glomming around rising TikTok stars with checkbooks in hand. But Chartmetric is hoping to offer something more tailored to what different companies are actually chasing. Chartmetric’s Morgan Burrell told DMN that companies are now racing to “determine specific findings and tailor the tool to individual needs” instead of chasing a single viral sensation.

That said, more sophisticated data could create future signing derbies, particularly around fast-surging artists. But that’s always been part of the business.

Speaking of specialization, Chartmetric also noted that its Talent Search Tool goes beyond record labels and publishers. For example, artist managers can leverage the tool to track their clients’ progress and refine their strategies. Advertisers and marketers can gain insights into audience demographics for targeted campaigns. Even universities and business schools use Chartmetric to train the next generation of music industry professionals.

But great results will probably take some training, particularly for those wanting to find long-term artists who can thrive in their businesses. As for the evolving expertise required to interpret the data, this is about as far from the days of A&R guys hitting clubs and listening to demo tapes as possible.

It’s also a step beyond the madness of chasing TikTok virality. “It’s all about the nuances of interpreting various metrics on the platform,” says Randazzo. “Contextual understanding of these metrics is critical.”

The beatBread Deal Comparison Tool dashboard, which compares proposed terms from labels, distributors, and others (photo: beatBread)

beatBread has launched a “Deal Comparison Tool” designed to enable artists and indies to weigh offers’ long-term value and secure the best available terms.

The indie-focused funding platform reached out with word of its Deal Comparison Tool, billed as a means of accessing side-by-side breakdowns of proposed agreements. Those deals can, of course, come from beatBread itself, which says it’s wrapped approximately 1,500 advances since launching in 2020.

But artists and indies can also use the Deal Comparison Tool to weigh terms floated by various distributors, major labels, and, against the backdrop of continued song-rights sales, different companies yet.

That includes beatBread partners and straight competitors – with Deal Comparison Tool users having “often” opted for third-party offers during the beta test.

“And that’s okay,” weighed in beatBread co-founder and CEO Peter Sinclair. “Our mission is to empower artists and independent labels, and to become the place where smart deal choices are made.”

According to an introductory video, the one-stop tool compiles each deal’s total value, fee specifics, and possible recoupment timetable.

Regarding the latter, the Deal Comparison Tool can adjust figures based on music’s anticipated commercial performance (whether “low case,” “expected case,” or “high case”), the video shows. Theoretically, the information will then help talent and indies make more informed dealmaking decisions.

Per Too Lost-partnered beatBread, the Deal Comparison Tool’s beta saw around 60% of artists (some with seven-figure contracts before them) and label owners (fielding up to $100 million proposals) ultimately select “a deal other than their original offer.”

“In the worst cases,” the company elaborated, “beatBread’s beta test showed that some independent labels would most likely end up forced into a distress sale after a few years had they taken the seemingly best distribution or label JV offer in front of them.”

Amid a steady stream of indie-label sale announcements, that seldom-discussed angle is significant. And in a statement, the former Universal Music higher-up Sinclair emphasized the Deal Comparison Tool’s perceived benefits for “[e]ven the most sophisticated executives.”

“Even the most sophisticated executives are sometimes deceived by ‘headline terms’ in a deal,” the beatBread CEO said. “The Deal Comparison Tool gives artists and labels the chance to cut through the fog and get true understanding of a deal because it links the key terms of a contract to a real range of probable outcomes as music is released and continues to perform.”

A breakdown of streaming music platform pricing, packages, and audio fidelity options for early 2025 (Click to enlarge; for full footnote annotations see full report; source: DMN Pro).

Can Spotify’s latest ‘super-premium’ tier break the streaming music plateau? In this report, we pick apart the rumored offerings within ‘Music Pro’ – and examine the serious challenges that each presents from both an execution and consumer adoption standpoint.

Spotify has been teasing a possible ‘super-premium’ tier for years, though nothing substantive has surfaced. Now, the latest intel indicates that Spotify is planning to release a superfan tier called ‘Music Pro’ that will include the following:

• • • Lossless, high-quality audio streaming.
    • AI-powered remixing tools allowing users to mix songs from different artists.
    • Exclusive concert ticket access, including early access or better seating options for shows.

Music Pro is expected to surface later this year with a price tag of $5.99 above existing Premium subscription rates (at least in the US). Sounds exciting, but given serious competition and overlapping features from platforms like Apple Music, will people pay for the added benefits?

Here’s a breakdown of Music Pro’s purported features themselves, and the challenges Spotify faces in building them.

Photo Credit: SoundCloud

Which music streaming platform is delivering the most reliable data on play counts? In a surprising turn of events, SoundCloud has emerged as the leader in Legitary’s latest DSP transparency and accuracy rankings, surpassing industry giants Spotify and Apple Music.

Based on Legitary’s aggregated ‘Anomaly Scores’ for music streaming platforms over the entire 2023 period, the latest ranking evaluates the accuracy and transparency of reporting practices among digital service providers (DSPs). Platforms that wildly misreport stream counts have high Anomaly Scores and lower rankings, while more accurate platforms carry lower scores and higher rankings.

Legitary, an AI-powered auditing company based in Vienna, Austria, has recently emerged as a serious player in the streaming music monitoring and oversight space. The company’s analyses are now proving critical to major content owners who need to ensure accurate reporting and payments from DSPs. But the partnerships don’t end there: just recently, Legitary joined forces with DMN to further broaden their mission to dramatically improve accuracy and transparency on streaming platforms.

To date, Legitary has scanned and monitored billions of streams across dozens of DSPs worldwide, analyzing anomalies and aberrations for content owners. The result: lots of streams are now being assessed as over-counted or under-counted and require further investigation or corrections.

Just last year, Spotify trumped Legitary’s transparency list, though stream-count accuracy and reporting have become a separate competitive arena. Enter SoundCloud, which lags far behind Spotify and Apple Music in terms of subscribers and revenues but currently boasts the most accurate stream counting in the business.

Rounding out the bottom is TikTok, a chronic underachiever. But Legitary noted that TikTok is a highly viral platform, which introduces unique challenges to tracking large—and often short-lived—spikes in song plays.

Here’s Legitary’s latest ranking of the top 10 DSPs worldwide based on overall transparency and reporting accuracy.

Outside the top three, other platforms experienced mixed results.

Deezer and Apple Music showed significant improvements in their reporting accuracy. However, YouTube’s ranking declined, and TikTok remained among the lowest performers. This indicates ongoing inconsistencies in reporting practices across the industry, though unfortunately, TikTok has been a consistently low performer in Legitary’s rankings.

Legitary’s CEO, Nermina Mumic, has emerged as an ardent champion of both transparent and reliable reporting. “This year’s ranking reaffirms that innovation and a commitment to quality can disrupt even the most established players,” Mumic shared. “Transparent and reliable reporting is the cornerstone of a sustainable future for the music industry.”

Let’s dig deeper into the Legitary data, shall we?

To understand the rankings, it’s essential to delve into Legitary’s methodology. The company’s Anomaly Score focuses on measuring the magnitude of significant under- or over-performances for each DSP relative to its total stream counts. These issues occur when reported streaming numbers are significantly lower or higher than what would be expected based on historical data and other available information, such as streaming behavior on other platforms or in different countries.

While the exact factors that separated the top three DSPs remain unclear due to the close competition, some key takeaways emerge. The consistent presence of ‘bad’ actors at the bottom and better performers at the top of the rankings suggests that reporting quality and monitoring varies significantly among DSPs.

Additionally, the rankings demonstrate that smaller DSPs can match or even exceed the reporting accuracy of larger platforms. Regardless, Mumic expressed the hope that every DSP boat will continue to elevate their games and deliver more accurate reporting and payouts to rights owners in the future.

“Reports like our latest DSP ranking underscore the critical need for transparent analyses of streaming data to ensure accountability and fair compensation in the music industry,” Mumic said. “In the end, we are all part of the same ecosystem, and only through collective efforts can we continue to elevate the integrity of our industry.”

A look at the latest music industry scuttlebutt on Spotify’s post-bundling renegotiations with major content owners – and how the calculus keeps shifting for publishers, labels, songwriters, and artists.

If you want to force Spotify back to the negotiating table, you need some serious leverage — which Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment enjoy thanks to their colossal and culturally-relevant catalogs. In the case of UMG, there’s also a willingness to exercise the nuclear option (most recently displayed with TikTok), which certainly helps to move negotiations forward.

But now that UMG and WMG have tucked away direct publishing negotiations, who’s next? Here’s a look at the scuttlebutt on Spotify’s pending direct publishing renegotiations and whether anyone beyond the ‘big three’ has the clout to force Spotify to give them better terms.

Table of Contents

I. Spotify Dials It to 99+% on Subscription Bundling – Then Finally Faces the Blowback

II. A Quick Recap of UMG and WMG’s Spotify Bundling Renegotiations

III. So, Who’s Next? Scuttlebutt Points to Sony Music, Though Others May Be in the Wings

IV. Spotify Suffers a Setback In Its Bundling Gambit – Or Is This Just Part of the Chess Match?

V. Spotify’s Special Deals Shift the Industry Calculus: Suddenly, Major Labels Have Serious Advantages on Both the Recording and Publishing Sides

VI. What Does This Mean for the Antitrust Picture?

Please note that this report is for DMN Pro subscribers only. Please do not redistribute — thank you.

Photo Credit: Saydung89

The music industry faces a bevy of challenges in 2025 – as we’ll cover exhaustively in the pages of Digital Music News – but ensuring accurate and timely payments to rights owners shouldn’t be one of them.  In partnership with Tipalti, we’ve created a guide to address this issue: introducing our playbook on How to Pay People In the Music Industry.

The global music industry is now projected to exceed $100 billion in annual revenue, though payment structures and splits are becoming a lot more complicated. You can’t wing it anymore: the complexity of accounts payable in the music industry necessitates robust financial platforms and partnerships to guarantee prompt and precise payments.

To address this critical music industry need, Digital Music News and Tipalti have collaborated to provide a comprehensive playbook for streamlining payments in the music industry.  This guide offers solutions for payment challenges faced by music businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises. We hope it offers some critical tips to companies in any industry sub-category, as well as entrepreneurs, investors, and music platforms of all varieties.

The playbook is available here – and it’s a great guide for plotting out your entire accounts payable stack or simply upgrading your existing one.

This was pretty fun to build, and also offered some optimistic takeaways.

The good news? We quickly realized that there are a number of companies who are already killing it in this sphere, pumping out millions of payments often within 30 days of a usage, license, or other triggering event. The reason is that music accounts payable (or AP) is now a manageable art, and no longer a hindrance to a company’s success in this space.

The available tools and infrastructure are advanced and can be implemented swiftly and efficiently. That was our biggest and most hopeful lesson learned while creating this playbook.

Tipalti also observed that the music industry is rapidly establishing competitive benchmarks for payments. Indeed, AP industry standards are quickly becoming established.

These benchmarks include capturing, accounting for, and paying rights owners for every play on any platform, in any territory, within 30 days.  Payment infrastructure must also accommodate various payment methods and automatically handle tax obligations across different regions (whether states, provinces, or countries). 

Furthermore, seamless integration with existing cloud ERP software is crucial for managing large volumes of payees and clients without excessive manual labor.

Something else Tipalti taught us during this process: you should always be able to definitively answer the question, “Who are we paying, exactly?”

A key step is to figure out exactly who you need to pay, where and when you need to pay them — and of course, how much they should receive. Then you can evaluate your current accounting and payment infrastructure against industry standards.

Anyway: the playbook kicks off with a number of checklists to assess your AP stack, with solutions on how to fill the gaps. 

We hope you’ll check out the playbook – and hope it helps!

Photo Credit: Ri Ya

Here’s a music industry newsflash: everybody hates Spotify’s cut-rate ‘bundled’ royalty payments — except for Spotify. Six-year-olds enjoy cauliflower more, but now that Spotify just whipped the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) in court, is there anything music publishers can do about it?

This is not just a topic of spirited industry conjecture, but a matter that could potentially reshape the music industry in 2025. But where do music publishers and songwriters go next?

For starters, NMPA chief David Israelite, music publishers, and The MLC may appeal this decision, even if that means losing again. This wasn’t a close case, but it’s the principle of it. However, according to sources eyeing this chess match, the court system is only one battleground, with legislation another vital arena for publishers.

After all, the legislative branch (not to mention the President) approved the landmark Music Modernization Act and created the MLC and its many rules — which included vast indemnifications and protections against licensing litigation for Spotify and other DSPs. You’re welcome Spotify, though rules can be changed and updated, especially when enough special interests want to make it happen.

There’s also the matter of David Israelite, who is almost certainly not walking away from this fight. Speaking of legislation: Israelite was just recently lobbying for across-the-board direct publishing deals last year. For now, however, Spotify gets to send out its discounted mechanical royalty checks after ramping up its US-based bundled subscriptions past 99%, as first tracked by DMN Pro.

But what happens when music publishers are finally sick of cashing those checks?

Previously, all indications were that major label bosses wouldn’t be intervening in publishing-specific disputes, at least in a meaningful way. But those assumptions were incorrect. Enter Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), which corralled its bigger brother parent to force Spotify to pay more and modify its cut-rate payouts.

Now, the hundreds-million-dollar question is what happens next — and more importantly, who rattles the cage demanding a direct licensing relationship.

Under US Copyright Law, any direct deal supersedes a statutory one. So who’s next to demand a direct deal to shutter the bundling loophole?

We don’t have the specific deal terms of the UMPG direct deal. But it’s certainly not worse than what Spotify was paying before. Big deals with UMG tend to set templates for smaller deals, which means that Spotify might end up paying more money to more music publishers than they did pre-bundling via direct deals and demands.

Net-net on a royalty-revenue basis, it’s hard to predict whether Spotify actually wins or loses here. But back at Spotify HQ, life is good: the stock is soaring, and Spotify’s brass are filthy rich. So who cares if a few publishers get stepped on?

This is reminiscent of TikTok’s scorched-earth licensing approach, though Spotify’s hearts-and-minds problem could spell trouble down the line. Already, we’re seeing more fallout, with songwriters boycotting Spotify’s songwriter-themed Grammy party (which itself got canceled).

(As a quick aside, there’s a reason why few in the music industry are advocating for TikTok as it struggles to remain in the US.)

It’s also important to note that Apple Music could easily ‘pull a Spotify’ and flip their subscriptions into bundles overnight. But they aren’t doing that according to DMN Pro’s research on bundling. But will major label and publisher bosses reward Cupertino for ‘doing the right thing’ and paying more to rights owners — even if they technically don’t have to? Others are also playing far more cooperatively than Spotify, and deserve to be rewarded with more exclusives, access, and other perks that come with friendlier partnerships.

Perhaps Spotify foolishly wants to have it both ways. But it’s hard to be the villain and the savior at the same time.

Spotify wants you to believe that they saved the music industry, and they’re pumping billions in found money into the industry ecosystem (we’d know, being on the receiving end of their PR machine). That assessment isn’t entirely incorrect, though for a company trying to shake its image of screwing artists and songwriters, bundling loopholes wasn’t the smartest idea.

Even today, prominent artists like Björk are landing zingers at Spotify over their measly royalties and artist-unfriendly practices. And she’s not wrong, either. Fresh data shows that Apple Music is the better industry partner, with better payouts to rights owners and creators. Whether it’s fair or not, Spotify remains the villain to many, and the shift to bundling isn’t helping.

More as this develops.

Got a tip? Confidentially email me at paul@digitalmusicnews.com; drop a text to (310) 804-0560; or send a Signal to digitalmusicnews.07. 

Spotify US-based subscribers, both overall and Individual Premium, from November, 2023 to November, 2024 (Source: DMN Pro/Digital Music News)

Surprising declines in Spotify’s US-based individual Premium subscriptions first emerged in September of 2024, part of a broader slowdown in music subscription growth in the country. Now, Spotify’s all-important subscription tier appears to be flatlining, with slight year-over-year gains surfacing for November of 2024.

After years of breakneck subscriber and revenue growth, 2024 offered the music industry a rude slowdown in music streaming subscription growth across multiple markets. Suddenly, the music industry discussion became dominated by a ‘streaming plateau’ that roiled labels, publishers, and investors while raising vexing questions about future revenue sources.

As 2025 sets sail, a number of major markets are grinding through the slowdown, including the United States. The US-based streaming music market is now dominated by four major platforms – Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music – with at least two of those platforms exhibiting serious signs of a subscriber slowdown.

Report Table of Contents

I. The Music Subscription Plateau: Troubling Signs at Amazon Music and Spotify In Late 2024

II. Spotify’s Individual Premium Subscriber Declines: The First Indications

II. The Latest Individual Subscription Data: A Look at the Relative Flatline

IV. A Parting Thought for the Price Increase Hawks

This report is for DMN Pro subscribers only. Please do not redistribute. Thank you.

Since early 2024, Spotify has been ramming nearly every subscriber into a cut-rate ‘bundled’ package involving music and audiobooks — and boasting about the huge royalty savings while fighting publishers tooth-and-nail. Now, there’s serious pushback coming from Universal Music Group itself — and a brand-new, direct licensing deal with Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) to deal with the bundling funny business.

Earlier this month, DMN Pro revealed that Spotify had successfully migrated more than 99 percent of its subscribers into bundled packages in the all-important US market, part of a dramatic shift that started in March 2024. Now, the pushback is expanding beyond the music publishing sector, forcing Spotify to potentially reconsider those royalty downgrades.

According to fresh deal terms confirmed to Digital Music News over the weekend, Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) have finalized a multi-year agreement encompassing recorded music and music publishing with important direct-licensing components.

It’s a first-of-its-kind deal on the publishing side and a signal of a potentially colossal royalty correction ahead.

Spotify re-ups with UMG every few years, but this time, it’s different — very, very different.

A significant aspect of the refreshed agreement is a direct licensing arrangement between Spotify and Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) in the United States and other regions. This direct deal is the first of its kind since the Music Modernization Act of 2018, and signals a potentially profound shift in the dynamics between streaming platforms and music publishers — and their label group parents.

As of this weekend, it’s unclear exactly how Spotify’s deal with UMPG changes the publishing payout structure, particularly for bundled royalties. However, at least two sources noted that UMPG is getting substantially better payouts than the statutory mechanical royalties being metered out to other publishers, particularly regarding bundled plans. That involves a substantial rollback or modification of bundling-based discounts, though it’s unclear whether Spotify is doing away with them entirely.

Beyond the UMPG deal, Spotify is understood to be keeping its payments for other music publishers the same.

But that could change very rapidly as mega-label groups like Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and even Merlin start making demands—potentially with the threat of content removals on the recording side. You can almost feel the rumblings coming ahead, particularly given that UMG tends to set the tone for ‘downstream’ deals involving smaller major labels and IP owners.

But why would a direct publishing deal be needed if the Music Modernization Act outlined terms for all music streaming platforms (DSPs) and music publishers?

One reason is that the MMA pact is simply breaking down, with music publishers effectively despising Spotify for exploiting statutory loopholes to pay them less. That includes UMPG, one of the largest music publishers in the world, which has become increasingly vocal about its mistreatment by Spotify. After a year of fruitless pushback, perhaps it was time for a sit-down with UMG’s bosses.

Leading up to this point, major music publishers—represented by the NMPA and its battling CEO David Israelite—spent a good chunk of 2024 pushing back against Spotify’s bundling shenanigans, which involved significantly lowered royalty payments to publishers and songwriters. The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) even sued Spotify over the bundling shifts, though Spotify has been litigating back.

At one point, David Israelite even started pushing for a direct licensing structure between music publishers and streaming platforms to complement current statutory rates. Israelite certainly has the pull on Capitol Hill, though it’s unclear where those direct-licensing efforts stand now.

Either way, Spotify’s message to publishers has been extremely unfriendly. Given the predefined statutory rates and agreements, publishers have little recourse outside protracted legal battles and protests that rarely make it outside of industry circles.

Total US-based Spotify subscribers, November 2024, broken down by tier (Source: DMN Pro).

All of which necessitated a change in the game plan for 2025, with a different sort of blowback now coming from Universal Music Group. But there are also other aspects to this deal.

In the agreement announcement, Universal Music Group said its Spotify agreement supports its “Streaming 2.0” vision, which seeks to reshape the economics of music streaming and ensure fairer compensation for artists and songwriters. That vision includes new product developments and offerings, including new subscription tiers, bundled content offerings, and enhanced audio and visual experiences.

And, of course, there’s the reset on bundles combining music and non-music content.

Notably, the deal also continues UMG’s focus on ‘artist-centric principles,’ which, according to UMG, ensures that artists are rewarded based on their contribution to listener engagement and that their royalties are protected from fraudulent activity.

That includes previously established rules like a 1,000-stream-per-annum threshold for triggering payments and weeding out the ‘noise’ of background sounds and AI-generated recordings.

(As a humorous aside, one indie label manager called this ‘Streaming 2X’ given that UMG is using its muscle to get a bigger cut from Spotify. Indeed, UMG has been shifting the tables to drive more revenues into their coffers and away from indie labels, producers of background tracks, and AI factories, among other camps.)

Sir Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, expressed his enthusiasm for the deal, stating that it aligns perfectly with UMG’s ‘Streaming 2.0’ vision. “When we first presented our vision for the next stage in the evolution of music subscription several months ago—Streaming 2.0—this is precisely the kind of partnership development we envisioned,” Grainge relayed.

“This agreement furthers and broadens the collaboration with Spotify for both our labels and music publisher, advancing artist-centric principles to drive greater monetization for artists and songwriters, as well as enhancing product offerings for consumers.”

Got a tip? Confidentially email news@digitalmusicnews.com, text +1 (310) 804-0560, or Signal to digitalmusicnews.07.

Music startups have crashed across nearly every category, DMN Pro data reveals (Photo: DMN Pro/Digital Music News)

Splashy funding announcements are extremely common in the music industry. But what happens to startups after they exit the media spotlight? It’s not always pretty.

When it comes to startup success, getting the big funding round is just the beginning. Unfortunately for many startups, it’s also the beginning of the end — with a brutal crash, hard pivot, or other unfortunate ending emerging just a few years later.

So how many promising music startups have crashed in the past few years? For our latest Weekly Report, we scoured our database to find out.

Dialing it back to 2020, DMN Pro found more than $320 million in burned cash, with little to show for it. Many of those came from flash-in-the-pan categories like NFTs, though surprising, crashed startups hailed from a wide number of different sub-sectors.

Data was pulled from DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker, which is available to all subscribers. Here’s a closer look at the carnage.

Please note: this report is for DMN Pro subscribers only. Please do not redistribute. Thank you!

Spotify non-bundled subscription accounts in 2024 (Digital Music News/DMN Pro Data)

Spotify’s non-bundled, music-only subscriptions virtually disappeared in 2024, according to DMN Pro’s latest intel. But that’s a Spotify feature, not a Spotify bug. Here’s what the latest data shows across all plan types and tiers in the United States, and what this means for streaming royalties going forward.

For those just tuning into this imbroglio: during the first part of 2024, Spotify aggressively shifted its subscribers towards subscription packages that went beyond on-demand music to include audiobooks. More importantly from a financial perspective, the shift allowed the platform to take advantage of statutory royalty discounts that apply to bundles – and shave considerable royalty costs in the process.

Now, several months after the company’s pronounced shift into bundling, there are few signs that Spotify is letting up on this strategy. Here’s the latest data on Spotify’s ‘project bundle’.

Table of Contents

I. Spotify’s Big, Bad Subscription Bundle Is Here to Stay: How We Got Here

II. A Dying Breed: Percentage of Music-Specific Spotify Accounts In the United States as of November 2024

III. Big Bundles = Big Savings: A Look at Spotify’s $100 Million+ Bundling Windfall

IV. Spotify Is Mercilessly Killing Off Its Music-Only Subscribers – Here’s a Look at the Plunge In 2024

V. Further Research: Will Other DSPs Follow Spotify’s Lead?

Please note: this report is for DMN Pro subscribers only, so please don’t redistribute. Thank you!

Music Industry Funding Breakdown by Type, 2024 (Digital Music News/DMN Pro)

Music industry funding ticked upward in 2024, but year-over-year levels would have plunged if not for a few huge raises. Amid rumblings of a significant rebound, what does 2025 have in store?

Will 2025 offer a funding bounce? While we don’t have an answer to that all-important question, we certainly aren’t without valuable takeaways from 2024. Like with our prior analyses, those takeaways are made possible by DMN Pro’s Music Industry Funding Tracker, a one-stop database of raises from in and around the music space.

On top of marking a slight YoY increase, 2024 core funding was well above the respective annual totals associated with 2020, 2021, and 2022. But the noticeable funding spike turns into a substantial slip when omitting 2024’s three largest raises (Hipgnosis, Iconic, and Concord).

Here’s a breakdown of the funding picture in 2024, and what it might portend for 2025.

Report Table Of Contents

I. Core Music Industry Funding Grew Slightly In 2024 – But The Total Fell 71% When Omitting the Year’s Three Largest Raises

II. By Raise Type and Quantity, Music AI, Live, Collaboration, snd Superfan Startups Dominated 2024

III. How Does 2024’s Music Industry Funding Stack Up Against Prior Years?

Please note that this report is for DMN Pro subscribers only. Please do not redistribute.

Ask Hearby in action (Photo Credit: Area4Labs)

How much bigger can the global live concert space grow? Boston-based Hearby is betting that AI-generated concert searches can crack the discovery riddle and boost attendance across the board. Here’s a look at the just-launched ‘Ask Hearby.’

Ready for a break from AI infringement problems, endless legal battles, and dystopian nightmares? While most of the music industry is focused on the very serious threats posed by AI, a number of companies are playing in less problematic sandboxes and making serious strides.

That includes Hearby, an AI-focused music braintrust owned by Area4Labs in Boston. The company is focused on concert-related applications driven by AI, with an eye towards resolving decades-old issues. Just recently, Hearby joined forces with DMN to accelerate its mission.

As Chat GPT doesn’t provide information on live events, the group has a mission to solve the giant discovery gap that exists in live music, particularly for music fans who are surrounded by great music but often lack awareness of what’s out there.

“Giant shows for artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are only one-third of the market,” Area4Labs cofounder Ian Condry relayed. “The rest of live music events in smaller venues is scattered and difficult to find.”

Suddenly, AI is doing something great – helping people find gigs and discovering new artists. It’s a refreshing change of pace.

If you’ve stumbled on a great jazz set in your neighborhood – or worse, didn’t realize an artist you love played last night – then you’re one of millions of music fans Hearby wants to help.

Enter ‘Ask Hearby,’ a first-to-market AI chatbot for live event discovery.

Ask Hearby taps into Large Language Model (LLM) AI technology and decades of anthropology expertise to properly match intent with great gigs. On the LLM front, Hearby has been tinkering with this tech for more than five years, according to details shared with DMN.

The end goal, according to the company, is to simulate a knowledgeable friend offering curation of local gigs.

Actually, the goal is to supercede that benchmark, given that a knowledgeable music fan is likely to offer recommendations based on their specific preferences and favorite venues, not yours.

The result is – voila! – an AI chatbot specifically designed for discovering live events. Based on specific prompts, Ask Hearby shakes the tree on what’s out there, effectively shifting discovery beyond personal recommendations, chance encounters, and limited online apps.

“This is the first of its kind in the live event discovery space,” said Area4Labs CEO Gary Halliwell.  “Our coverage of live music shows across UK cities and towns is second to none, and we look forward to extending discovery of North American shows in 2025.”

That’s completely different from more closed-end AI chatbot systems like Satisfi, which focus on providing support details after concert tickets have been purchased. Shifting the timeframe to the moments before a ticket is purchased, and the challenge becomes exponentially more challenging.

We tested Ask Hearby out by asking for live events in our area.

The results were interesting: some local jazz spots were highlighted alongside some lesser-known alternatives. That includes restaurants that added trios or pianists to accentuate the ambience, which can be tricky to find.

There were also a few misses, depending on your perspective: Azealia Banks was noted as a jazz option, perhaps based on a line in her biography referencing jazz as an influence. That type of result could lead to some disappointing results for concertgoers, though Ask Hearby will learn what’s relevant – and what isn’t – over time.

The next step in Ask Hearby’s development arc involves serious personalization.

Based on your repeated searches and results, the company envisions generating personally curated show lists that can be shared on social media. Suddenly, fans aren’t limited to a few mega-shows at $150 a pop. Instead, the options will include more local gigs, up-and-coming artists, and hole-in-the-wall jazz trios more accessible than ever.

A look at Spotify’s US-based paying subscriber numbers, including Individual Premium subscribers, since September 2023 (Source: DMN Pro)

Last week, DMN Pro pointed to US-based subscriber declines at Amazon Music as part of our latest DSP competitive analysis. Now, full year-over-year data is revealing tepid US-based premium subscriber gains for Spotify, including near-zero growth and recent declines in the all-important Individual Premium subscriber category.

Now, another alarming statistic has surfaced based on an expanded, full-year dataset of US-based subscribers.  Specifically, DMN Pro has discovered that Spotify Individual Premium subscribers have essentially flatlined. The total number of Individual Premium subscribers totaled approximately 23.96 million for the month of September 2024, which is a mere 1.3% increase over the September 2023 figure of 23.66 million and represents a slight decline from early 2024 totals.

More importantly, Individual Premium subscribers have actually declined over the past two quarters, suggesting a possible downward trend heading into 2025.

Report Table of Contents

I. More Data, More Problems: Subscriber Trouble Signs Continue to Emerge In the US

II. The ‘Big Four’ Subscriber Growth Picture: Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube Music

III. US-Based Individual Premium Subscribers Flattening for Spotify: A Closer Look at the Data

IV. Spotify’s Broader Global Subscriber Picture

V. Time to Pause Aggressive Price Increases?

This research report is for DMN Pro subscribers only. Please do not redistribute, thank you! 

Photo Credit: Downtown Music Holdings

Virgin Music Group, a division of Universal Music Group, has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Downtown Music Holdings for $775 million. The deal, expected to close in the second half of 2025, will bring together two leading services and technology providers for independent labels, publishers, and music IP owners, while dramatically expanding UMG’s involvement in the indie space.

The acquisition, officially disclosed this (Monday) morning, will enable Virgin Music Group to expand its global footprint and enhance its offerings for independent artists and labels. The combined company will offer a far broader suite of services, including distribution, marketing, rights management, and royalty collection.

The deal follows months of rumblings of a possible sale, with Downtown reportedly consulting with private equity firms in July.

Suddenly, Universal Music Group is a much bigger player in the burgeoning indie space. Once finalized, UMG will enjoy an expanded footprint across numerous tiers of independent distribution (for both artists and labels), not to mention an array of indie-focused monetization and rights management competencies.

Downtown, founded in 2007, has grown into a diversified music services company with divisions spanning artist and label services, distribution, royalty and financial services, and music publishing. Thanks to a string of aggressive acquisitions and expansions over the years, Downtown’s portfolio now includes CD Baby, Soundrop, Curve, FUGA, Songtrust, Found.ee, Sheer Publishing Africa, and homegrown neighboring rights, studio, and artist and label services divisions.

Downtown currently manages more than 50 million music assets from virtually every country worldwide. It serves over 5,000 business clients and 4 million creators across 145 countries, according to stats shared by the company with Digital Music News.

“Justin Kalifowitz, Andrew Bergman, and Pieter Van Rijn have built Downtown Music into one of the most diversified and respected operations in the world,” said JT Myers, Co-CEO of Virgin Music Group.  “This combination enables us to expand on the Downtown legacy and offer the independent music community a dynamic and innovative global infrastructure both in terms of service offering and territorial footprint, and we look forward to working with the Downtown team to serve independent entrepreneurs, artists, and creators with an even broader portfolio of services.”

Justin Kalifowitz, Founder of Downtown Music Holdings, also expressed enthusiasm about the deal, stating, “This is a tremendous recognition of the importance and vitality of independent music, and the value that our company brings to its clients every day.”

Indeed, the deal is happening alongside a growth spurt within the independent music sector that is cramping the market share of major label artist releases. That has prompted a number of strategic changes from the major labels, with acquisitions another weapon to exert more influence in the space.

That said, Downtown Music isn’t focused on music IP ownership — at least not anymore.

Back in 2021, Downtown offloaded a catalog of roughly 145,000 songs to Concord in a deal valued north of $300 million. The decision followed Downtown’s Q4 2020 “strategic review of its business interests,” which involved shifting away from IP ownership in favor of services and other core competencies.

After the deal, Downtown used the proceeds to expand Downtown Music Services, part of a broader effort to focus “exclusively on the fast-growing music services sector to support the extraordinary growth of the independent music economy.”

It may be premature to consider the post-acquisition changes that will happen in 2025. But it’s plausible that Virgin will leave many Downtown sub-divisions intact, in particular CD Baby and FUGA. Both are well-known and established within their distribution niches, with strong brand identities among artists and labels.

Nat Pastor, Co-CEO of Virgin Music Group, emphasized the company’s commitment to supporting independent artists and labels, stating, “This is an investment into the global independent music ecosystem and a commitment to nurture current and future creators and entrepreneurs with world-class support.”

The two companies will continue to operate independently until the deal closes, pending regulatory approvals. Goldman Sachs and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom advised Downtown Music on the transaction, while Kirkland & Ellis and Freshfields advised Virgin Music Group.

Photo Credit: Muso.AI

Music credits are no longer relegated to the back of a CD insert or a vinyl sleeve. Yet despite the move to the digital era, 63% of popular tracks have missing credits. Muso.AI aims to fix that by bringing together the industry’s entire credit and analytical data. Muso.AI has enabled music professionals and now music businesses to clean up inaccuracies, ensure credits are complete, and showcase their work—all in one place.

The following was created in collaboration with Muso.AI, a proud partner of Digital Music News.

Music credit management has long been a headache to manage for individuals and companies alike. Incomplete or inaccurate data prevents proper recognition of all parties involved and hinders promotional efforts. Muso.AI helps solve these challenges by providing a comprehensive platform to consolidate, verify, and showcase credits across the music ecosystem.

Muso.AI is launching a suite of advanced tools tailored for music industry companies to manage their profiles, credits, and rosters efficiently. The platform already handles modifications of up to 40,000 credits per week. Now it is expanding its exclusive credit ecosystem beyond top-tier clients (RIMAS Publishing, Sony Music Publishing, Neon16) to make the platform accessible for all music industry players.

Inaccurate or incomplete credit representation can hinder a company’s ability to promote its roster, track accomplishments by its creatives, and close data gaps. Without accurate data, companies may miss milestone achievements for their songwriters, producers, and engineers. Muso.AI offers a streamlined solution to these challenges by enabling companies to manage and promote their roster’s accomplishments as they happen.

Photo Credit: Muso.AI

Manage Music Credits — Muso.AI B2B Tools Can Make A Difference

• Create a Music Business Profile: Build a comprehensive public page to showcase company credits, staff, and roster. Perfect for Labels, Publishers, Management, Agencies, Studios, Schools, and Brands.
• Centralized Credit Management: Oversee and manage an entire catalog to ensure accuracy, enabling smoother royalty tracking and promotional efforts.
• Roster Analytics & Collaboration: Share access with roster members, allowing them to view analytics and manage their own credits while maintaining central oversight.
• Promote Achievements: Showcase your company and roster’s accomplishments with analytics, custom playlists, and more.
• Discover Talent & Affiliations: Access detailed artist profiles, affiliations, and subsidiaries to foster talent discovery and collaboration.

Use Muso.AI’s music business profile to showcase your company’s roster’s achievements, access analytics, or create custom playlists to highlight the success of the team. It can also be used to view detailed artist profiles, affiliations, subsidiaries, and more to support talent discovery and collaboration among creatives.

Photo Credit: Muso.AI

Music professionals and businesses across the industry are already seeing the transformative impact of Muso.AI. Here’s what they have to say:

“Expanding our ecosystem to involve companies is a logical next step for us,” Kyran de Keijzer, Co-Founder, Muso.AI tells Digital Music News. “Seeing individuals take control of their own credits has been inspiring, and it’s no surprise that the first businesses are now wanting to be involved. It feels like we’re part of a larger movement toward transparency and a shared commitment to valuing everyone’s contributions in the industry.”

“Muso is an invaluable tool both for me as a songwriter and for Vidrio Music as a publisher,” shares Erika Vidrio, Owner of Vidrio Music. “It allows us to monitor the monthly growth of our works in streaming and showcase impactful results, strengthening our marketing strategy and opening up new recording opportunities.”

“Muso.AI empowers our ability to keep up with the vast array of music that gets recorded in our space,” adds Dewey Boyd, Owner of Forty-One Fifteen. “We care deeply about fostering community, and the songs we record are the product of a lot of love and collaboration. Muso.AI is how we keep up with our family. It’s how we know when one of our song babies is doing really well, and it’s the tool we use to keep our community woven together.”

Interested in getting started with Muso.AI? It’s easy and free to start—companies can join the platform by claiming an existing company out of the 12 million pre-seeded companies or create one from scratch. Experience the power of organized credits, seamless catalog management, and meaningful milestone tracking all under one roof with Muso.AI.

Photo Credit: Amazon

On Friday, Amazon announced it has invested $4 billion more into genAI startup Anthropic. This new funding round brings its total investment in the company to over $8 billion yet maintains its position as a minority investor.

Amazon says Anthropic is working closely with Annapurna Labs at AWS on the development and optimization of future generations of Trainium accelerators to advance the capabilities of specialized machine learning hardware. The deep technical collaboration allows the duo to write low-level kernels to directly interface with Trainium silicon, contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack to strengthen Trainium.

Through Amazon Bedrock, Claude has become core infrastructure for tens of thousands of companies seeking reliable, practical AI solutions. Pfizer uses the latest Claude models in Amazon Bedrock to accelerate research and delivery timelines for critical medicines, while saving tens of millions in operational costs. Intuit uses Claude to explain complex tax calculations for millions of users during tax season.

Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, delivers more accurate responses at twice the speed by using Claude in Amazon Bedrock. The European Parliament uses Claude to power ‘Archibot,’ making 2.1 million official documents instantly searchable and easier to analyze in multiple languages while reducing research time by 80%.

Meanwhile, Anthropic is engaged in a legal battle against Universal Music Publishing Group for what constitutes ‘fair use’ among AI training models. Anthropic asked the courts to dismiss three of the four counts in a case brought in August 2024 by UMPG, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO.

Anthropic has sought to dismiss the ‘contributory’ copyright infringement, ‘vicarious’ copyright infringement, and ‘removal or alteration of copyright management information’ (a violation of the DMCA)—leaving in place the single direct copyright infringement claim.

Music publishers argue Anthropic has committed copyright infringement by training Claude on a vast amount of copyrighted music and lyrics without permission. Anthropic says it has used the materials in a manner that falls under the ‘fair use’ exemption in U.S. copyright law.

Photo Credit: Tung Nguyen

Understanding how your audience interacts with your music is essential to helping grow a fan base of dedicated superfans. Too Lost offers advanced analytics for drilling down data by source—so you can focus your promotional efforts where they’ll have the most impact. Curious? Let’s take a peek at some of the data sources you can track with Too Lost.

The following was created in collaboration with Too Lost, a proud partner of Digital Music News.

Digital distribution has changed how fans consume music, especially with most music discovery happening on social media sites like TikTok and Instagram. Too Lost can help artists monitor their music across the internet and see where it is played most. This can help artists choose where to focus their marketing efforts or where to build fan relationships, especially if music discovery is happening on one social media site over another i.e., more listeners on TikTok vs. Facebook.

Too Lost’s advanced analytics can monitor both digital streaming provider (DSP) stats and stats across social media including TikTok and Meta (Facebook, Instagram). Too Lost offers data drill down for Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, and Amazon Music—though its data drill down for Spotify is much more robust than the other three DSPs.

“Independent artists thrive with data—they can feed it into their creative process to make their music more impactful or use it to sharpen their marketing efforts,” Damien Ritter, Director of Marketing for Too Lost tells Digital Music News. Let’s take a look at some of the data drill-down that Too Lost offers music creatives to track the performance of their music online.

Spotify’s basic data like total streams, discovery mode streams, playlist, countries, and tracks provides a basic look at how your music is performing. When it comes to drilling down analytics, Too Lost is able to offer a robust look at artists’ Spotify data, including stats like shuffle rate, completion rate, total saves, total skips, and first-time listener stats. Weekly engagement and hourly engagement can also highlight fans who are falling in love with your music by playing your tracks over and over.

Music use on TikTok is a bit different since the whole track usually doesn’t feature in a TikTok video. Video creators can select a portion of your track to share and Too Lost can highlight the total number of video creations, total views, comments, likes, and shares those clips have generated for an artist.

So how can artists use Too Lost’s advanced analytics feature to promote their music?

Consistently releasing music on DSPs where fans have gathered is a guaranteed strategy of drip-feeding content to fans who are already interested in your music. Releasing a new song every month or two keeps fans interested in your sound and each release can be tracked using Too Lost’s analytics. Having a presence on social media helps keep fan interest high—since fans expect their favorite artists to showcase their creative process, talk about their influences, and share the experiences they’re having.

The data can also help you find likely collaborators who may help you build out your musical career with artists who have a similar sound. Playing shows, doing split releases, and featuring artists on tracks can help artists find crossover fans who are interested in new music discovery through artist exposure. Too Lost can help you track how well those collaborations are performing across social media and any DSPs to which you’ve distributed your music.

Photo Credit: Arilena Ara by Andis Rado / CC by 4.0

V-Nova Studios introduces ‘Weightless,’ an immersive experience and collaboration between Diane Warren and X-Factor alum Arilena Ara.

V-Nova Studios introduces Weightless, the first-ever music experience created with the revolutionary V-Nova PresenZ format. The release expands on traditional platform distribution, into new and exciting 6DoF (Six Degrees of Freedom) immersive opportunities for the first time. Weightless features a collaboration between Grammy and Emmy-winning songwriter Diane Warren and Albanian X-Factor winner Arilena Ara.

The immersive experience in V-Nova PresenZ was shown for the first time at the ITTV International Forum & TechInEntertainment in Los Angeles and will be available exclusively on SteamVR through the ImmersiX app.

Launching Weightless marks a new chapter for XR music, enabling fans to interact with a lifelike digital double of Arilena Ara in a dynamic, space-themed visual journey that allows fans to step into a cinematic music experience. The song, coming soon in this new medium to SteamVR and ImmersiX with traditional music channels to follow, also features Sharkarma, an upcoming shark-themed cinematic 6DoF production by V-Nova Studios.

“Weightless marks the beginning of a new era in music and XR entertainment. Fans don’t just watch — they’re part of the scene, creating an unparalleled connection to the music,” said Gianluca Meardi, General Manager of V-Nova Studios. “We’re excited to launch this song as a new medium on ImmersiX; it is a stepping stone toward future innovations, offering an immersive experience that pushes the boundaries of what is possible.”

Diane Warren, a musical icon whose career spans decades, has written nine #1 hits and 33 Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, and received the prestigious Johnny Mercer Award from the organization in June 2024. She has received 15 Academy Award nominations, as well as being a Grammy winner, Emmy winner, a two-time Golden Globe winner, and an Honorary Oscar recipient.

Arilena Ara is an award-winning Albanian singer known for her powerful vocals. She won The X-Factor Albania, represented Albania in Eurovision 2020, and achieved international success with hits like “Nentori.” She has performed on the most prestigious stages and held hundreds of concerts around the world with an audience of millions of people.

The Lumiere Award-winning V-Nova PresenZ blends cinematic visuals with 6DoF XR immersion, allowing users to move within the scene as though physically present. This breakthrough format is set to transform entertainment by combining Hollywood-quality visuals with dynamic movement, in an immersive experience without motion sickness.

As the XR market grows, with gaming revenues already exceeding $7 billion annually, V-Nova breaks through the technical barriers in music and cinema, offering viewers the comfort and photorealism previously unobtainable in immersive media.

ImmersiX serves as a showcase for the V-Nova PresenZ format, distributing original productions and third-party projects that highlight the potential of cinematic 6DoF experiences. Weightless will be available exclusively on SteamVR through the ImmersiX app for two months, before expanding to other platforms.

Photo Credit: Kenny Eliason

Ed-tech platform Conduction raises funding to re-imagine music education across the country and allow students to compose digital songs.

Conduction, the ed-tech platform revolutionizing the music classroom, has announced a $265,000 pre-seed investment from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. The funds will be used to advance the company’s proprietary music software modules, increase corporate partnerships, and expand operations in schools across Pennsylvania and throughout the United States.

Despite efforts to keep music and the arts alive in US schools, millions of students lack access to these programs, according to research from the Arts Education Data Project. For many schools with existing music programs, teachers struggle to engage students with outdated curricula and limited budgets.

Conduction, which meets several national education standards, is designed to enable students to easily create and produce digital songs. Each week, classes vote on their favorite song creations, and Conduction sources local musicians to make music videos playing the classroom’s selected songs within days. With Conduction, individual schools and entire districts can bring music back into the classroom at a fraction of the cost of traditional programs.

Unlike other music platforms, Conduction provides learning experiences that align with the interests of present-day students. Students get to learn beat making, composition and songwriting, sheet music education, and band integration, all with an intense element of student engagement. These modules help increase classroom participation, reduce absenteeism and create new digital education experiences.

“Music is the one school subject that is meant to touch the soul, inspire aw, and light up life — and yet today’s music classrooms fail to do this,” said Joe Maggiore, CEO and co-founder, Conduction. “Music curriculums are often stuck in the past, focusing on topics kids never would want to hear about — like outdated classical music from the 1700s.”

“Today’s students want to become producers, DJs, songwriters, and beatmakers, and our schools are failing to meet them where they are in their interests while providing distinct curricular needs,” Maggiore continued. “We created Conduction to refocus music education on today’s student values while still finding a way to incorporate critically important national music education standards.”

Today, Conduction works with dozens of schools and districts, as well as countless community musicians, to bring students’ digital songs to life. Over the last 12 months, Conduction has seen growing demand for its platform, having spoken to over 100 schools that are fully ready to incorporate the solution into their education programs to enhance the overall student experience. The company also works with corporations interested in sponsoring individual schools by subsidizing the costs of music education.

Photo Credit: iXimus

A closer look at whether TikTok can beat the ban under the Trump Administration in 2025 — and why many in the music industry couldn’t care less.

The emergence of TikTok as a dominant social media platform has not only transformed how users engage with content and music. It has also raised significant concerns about data privacy, underage exploitation, influence peddling, and national security over the past few years.

For many within the industry, the sentiment toward TikTok is ambivalent at best. And if TikTok is shown the exit door, some will undoubtedly advise the app to monitor its rear on the way out.

But will that happen?

Under the previous Trump administration, TikTok was at the center of a contentious political debate, leading to calls for a ban on the app due to its ties with China. Under President Biden, those calls intensified and led to a law banning the app in 2025. With Trump set to return to the presidency, however, the fate of TikTok remains a toss-up.

This DMN Pro report will delve into the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” the potential timeline for a TikTok ban, Trump’s new stance on the app, international developments, including Canada’s recent ban, and the implications for the American music industry amidst these changes.

Report Table of Contents

I. The Looming TikTok Ban: A Look at the Fast-Dropping ‘Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’

II. Could TikTok Actually Go Dark In January 2025?

III. Trump’s 180 on TikTok – And Where He Stands Heading Into 2025

IV. A Look at Canada’s Recent Ban

V. How Would a Reversal in the U.S. Work, Anyway?

VI. Why the American Music Industry Might Not Miss TikTok, After All

VII. Trump: TikTok Savior?

Please note that this report is for DMN Pro subscribers only. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

The Complexities of Building a Music Streaming App

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

Copyright and Music Licensing

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

Data Protection and User Privacy

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

Content Responsibility and Anti-Piracy Measures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legal and Licensing Framework: Avoiding Pitfalls

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

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

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

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

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

Engaging Users: Features That Keep Them Coming Back

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

Personalized Recommendations

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

Playlists and Social Sharing

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

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

Community Development – Identifying and Engaging Superfans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing for Users: UI/UX That Elevates Experience

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

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

Simplified Navigation

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

Inclusive Design

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

Building a Scalable Backend: Meeting Growing Demand

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

Cloud-Based Solutions

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

APIs and Third-Party Integrations

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

Load Management and Optimization

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

Business Model Planning: Finding the Right Monetization Strategy

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

Subscription and Freemium Models

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

In-App Purchases

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

Ad Integration

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

👉 Get the full ebook here: Soundscapes of Tomorrow

Building the Right Team: Expertise at Every Stage

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

Key Roles

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

Collaboration

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

Outsourcing or In-House Development

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

Marketing and Promotion: Launching Your App with Impact

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

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

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

Pre-Launch Marketing

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

User Acquisition

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

Retention Strategies

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

Budget Management: Controlling Costs Without Compromising Quality

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

Cost Breakdown

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

Scalability Considerations

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

Balancing Quality and Costs

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

Music App Development in Tune With Your Goals and Budget

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: On Air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: On Air

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Too Lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data! Give me all the data!

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

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

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

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

Bring in the hybrids.

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

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

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

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

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

(5) Augment that answer with links and images.

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

It’s a sandwich

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

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

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

Onward!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s a problem.

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

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

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

‘Overload’ is a fitting descriptor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: SonoSuite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Ticketmaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: .MUSIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Alexander Shatov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Important Notes on Data Sources and Methodology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Toa Heftiba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July & August

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

August & September

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

September

• Improving the reliability of Alarm consistency

September & October

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

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

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

Photo generated by AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirdly: supervised vs. unsupervised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Hayden Bower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

Graph: WMG Recorded Music Subscription Revenue

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Stefany Andrade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Kunlun Tech/Melodio

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

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

Report Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Luke Heiber on Unsplash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pex: Provides robust content identification and monetization tools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Udio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Mohamed Hassan

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

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

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

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

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

Report Table of Contents

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

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

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

III. Epidemic Sound v. Meta

IV. TikTok and ByteDance v. Department of Justice

V. Department of Justice v. Live Nation

VI. Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) v. Spotify

VII. MLC v. Pandora

VIII. SoundExchange v. SiriusXM

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

X. RIAA v. Verizon

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

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

Photo Credit: Ugglemamma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned.

Photo Credit: Created by Humans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please note: unauthorized redistribution of this report is prohibited. 

Image adapted from an illustration by CDD20.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More as this develops.

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

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

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

Report Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information can be found at the Songbox official website.

Photo Credit: Ircam Amplify CEO Nathalie Birocheau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: BoliviaInteligente

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More as this develops.

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

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

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

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

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

Report Table of Contents

I. Where Radio Stands in 2024: The Surprising Stats

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

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

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

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

Please note: redistribution of this report is prohibited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DMN Pro subscribers only.

Panelists:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a peek at what’s inside.

REPORT TABLE OF CONTENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who owns what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Joshua Reddekopp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REPORT TABLE OF CONTENTS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join the DMN Pro subscriber-only discussion below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Chartmetric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information, visit the Chartmetric Learning Hub.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SXSW 2024 took place on March 6-18.

Photo Credit: Smart Filters

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

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

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

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

How Chartmetric Smart Filters Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Bandzoogle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report Table of Contents:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music Merch Manager App by Merch Cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merch Cat FAN Band Merchandise App

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Kenny Eliason

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

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

Symphonic is a Tampa-based digital music distribution service with footprints across major music markets in the United States and around the world. Symphonic says its commitment to transparency and the independent spirit are integral to its success. Helping to drive that success, Tipalti ensures Symphonic artists are paid on time, whether domestic or international.

Symphonic distributes its artists’ music to streaming platforms as well as user-generated content platforms like YouTube and TikTok, collecting performance royalties via SoundExchange—all of which flows through Tipalti’s payment automation platform.

“Tipalti is helpful to ensure compliance,” Symphonic told Digital Music News. “We don’t generally consider Tipalti for advances but require that individuals set up their account with us with an agreement, then pass through Tipalti as a requirement prior to any payment.”

Symphonic’s internal Know-Your-Customer (KYC) process operates alongside Tipalti to reduce streaming fraud for the distributor. Streaming fraud has become commonplace and is one of the reasons Spotify has adjusted its royalty scheme.

Symphonic says it monitors activity and works closely with its DSP partners to keep its digital distribution services free from fraud like stream manipulation. Bots, click farms, and imposters impact all artists—including independent artists and those signed to labels.

A diluted royalty pool from stream manipulation means reduced revenue for artists for their legitimate streams. Symphonic’s Trust & Safety team handles client onboarding, and once set up with Symphonic, clients are set up with Tipalti to receive their royalty advance and payments.

With Tipalti, Symphonic can support artists in over 120 countries and 196 currencies, giving their team an international competitive advantage. Symphonic knows that with Tipalti, their artists will get paid accurately and on time every time.

Tipalti streamlines Symphonic’s entire payment management process, from artist onboarding to invoice processing, tax and regulatory compliance, remittance, payment issue resolution, artist reporting, and more. As part of the onboarding process, Symphonic artists submit their payment and tax details, which are then reviewed and approved by Tipalti, streamlining the payment experience even more.

Tipalti helps improve the artist experience for Symphonic in many ways. The ability to send payments in artists’ local currency is a game changer. Tipalti’s FX (Foreign Exchange) and currency management features ensure funds arrive in the artist’s local currency, removing the need to convert payments from US dollars. Tipalti also offers the additional convenience of ready-to-use funds when receiving payments.

Ready to get started with Symphonic?

Symphonic offers a Symphonic Starter plan that allows artists to keep 100% of the royalties from their music. Most companies take a small fee from royalties once they start coming in, and the start plan allows for free royalty splits so that all collaborators, featured artists, or anyone else entitled to a share of the song gets paid from the generated royalties.

Best of all, Symphonic’s partnership with Tipalti means it doesn’t matter where your collaborators are located around the globe—they can get paid. Learn more about Tipalti here.

Just how little is TikTok paying UMG? A comparison between Universal Music’s estimated annual revenue from TikTok versus permanent downloads (Source: UMG statements and financials).

More than one month into the TikTok and Universal Music Group standoff, all signs point to an intensifying dispute between the companies. Here’s an analysis of where the high-stakes impasse stands – and how the episode’s fallout could drive a fundamental shift in the way music factors into the UGC space.

It can be safely stated that February delivered little concrete progress toward a resolution for TikTok and UMG, thereby setting the stage for a possible multi-month (or longer) standoff. As a result, the conversation naturally transitions to what UMG’s aggressive approach means for TikTok and the broader UGC space.

Report Table of Contents:

I. Universal Music Execs’ Earnings Call Comments Point to a Deepening TikTok Disagreement – And a New Approach to Deals With the App’s Competitors

II. How Are Universal Music and TikTok Faring Amid Their Escalating Licensing Battle?

Graph: Universal Music Group Permanent Downloads vs. Estimated TikTok Royalty Revenue, 2020-2023

Graph: TikTok Active User Net Changes, 1/21-1/27 and 2/18-2/24

III. As TikTok and UMG Square Off, Are We Witnessing a UGC-Licensing Realignment?

IV. By the Dates: A 2024 Timeline of the Universal Music-TikTok Dispute

New! Join the DMN Pro subscriber-only discussion below.

Also please note that any authorized redistribution of this report is prohibited — thank you.

Photo credit: Techivation

If you’ve never mixed music before, it may feel daunting to learn. There’s so much depth to it that even experienced mixing engineers continue to learn and improve. But in this article, we’re going to walk through the basics of how to mix music. And I’m going to give it to you straight and keep things simple.

What Does It Mean to “Mix Music”?

Mixing music just means blending all the instruments of a song together so it sounds good.

You use gain levels (volume), panning (left and right), and effects to make the whole song sound like the players are in the room with you. You’re trying to create the illusion of left, right, front, and behind.

Here are some general mixing tips to keep in mind:

• Bass frequencies (bass guitar, kick drum) should always be up the center
• Keep the vocals up the center (and usually upfront in the mix depending on your preference)
• Cutting and boosting frequencies with an EQ can help highlight certain frequencies and de-muddy your mix
• A compressor helps tame the loudest peaks of an instrument so its perceivability stays balanced throughout the song
• Reverb can help fill out your mix and make it sound more interesting

Step 1: Get Good Recordings

The first step is to make sure you capture high-quality recordings. If you’re just the mixing engineer, you don’t have control over this. But if you’re doing the recording, doing it well will make mixing so much easier.

This article is not about how to record music, so I’d recommend checking out these articles:

• 5 Methods That Will Improve Your Recordings
• How To Treat Your Home Recording Studio

Step 2: Edit the Takes

Recording, editing, and mixing have a lot of crossover, but you’ll want to make sure all the takes are fully edited before really diving into mixing.

First, you’ll want to comp the takes. “Comp” refers to a compilation of the best takes, using crossfades in between edited sections. Everyone has different comping preferences. On one end of the spectrum, some editors will edit word-by-word or note-by-note. On the other end, other editors will only comp when there’s a mistake or they’ll comp entire sections.

Here’s one of my favorite videos on vocal comping…

Next, you may want to fix timing issues. Ideally, there won’t be many (or any) timing issues because the parts were performed and recorded well. If you’re spending hours editing the timing, maybe you should re-record the parts.

When editing timing issues, use your ears and your eyes, making sure things snap to the grid. And apply crossfades when shifting items.

Here’s a walkthrough of how you can fix timing problems…

Pro tip: many singers tend to be slightly ahead of the beat, so it can make the vocals sound a lot more professional if you nudge them back 5-10ms.

The third main thing you’ll want to do is tune the vocals. Any good DAW has a pitch correction stock plugin. And for autotune that doesn’t sound like autotune, start the response time between 65-80ms.

However, instead of slapping an autotune plugin on the entire vocal track, it’s a much better option to only tune the notes that sound off. You can shift individual notes on your vocal track with a plugin called Melodyne.

Lastly, you may want to do volume automation. This is where you go through a track (usually a really dynamic one) and adjust the volume so it’s more even across the whole song. You should definitely do this on your lead vocal track, if nothing else.

Step 3: Set Up Your Mixing Session

Before you start mixing, you need to make sure your channels are properly labeled and organized.

If you recorded the tracks, they’re probably already labeled. But if a client sent you a mix, you’re going to get a folder of probably lots of tracks, some of which may not have clear names.

So it’s important you make sure you know what each thing is, label it appropriately, and then organize the channels to your preference.

Personally, I put the vocals a the top, then acoustic guitar, then supplemental instruments like electric guitar, piano, and synths. Then bass, and then drums and percussion at the bottom.

But you’ll find your own organizational preference. The goal is to be able to quickly navigate your session so your mixing experience is as efficient as possible.

Step 4: Begin! How To Mix Music

Now it’s time to actually mix music.

Before you start, you should know that a great mix doesn’t rely on the plugins, it relies on your knowledge and your ears. Yes, there are some cool plugins that can definitely help. But you don’t need super fancy plugins, especially if you’re just learning the basics of mixing.

Monitors vs. headphones: which is better?

Ideally, you would have a nice pair of monitors in an acoustically treated room. However, not everyone has that. And good records have been mixed on headphones.

The main goal is to become familiar with what you have. Whether you have sub-par monitors in an untreated room, a pair of studio headphones, or an expensive, high-quality home studio, you can mix music.

You first have to learn what good music sounds like in your mixing context. So listen to your favorite songs that are professionally mixed and mastered. This will train your ears and brain to know what a good mix should sound like. That way, you know what to aim for when you’re mixing.

The first step to a mix is to set the gain levels and pan percentages. This is called a static mix – you try to get the mix sounding as good as possible with only gain levels and panning, no effects.

Here’s how to do a static mix:

1. Set all the volume/pan knobs at zero or in the middle
2. Begin by raising the volume of one instrument at a time, starting with the most important, until they sound balanced
3. Next, adjust the panning levels so you have a wide, balanced mix
4. Loop 4-5 times, continually re-adjusting the volume knobs
5. Find the volume/pan position for each instrument that works for MOST of the song (effects can take it the rest of the way)
6. Leave about -5 dB of headroom on the master track (effects can make things louder, you may adjust the gain levels more, and you also want to leave headroom for the mastering engineer)

Here’s what a static mix looks like…

Now we turn to EQ (“equalization”). Basically, EQ helps you cut unwanted frequencies and boost (or simply keep) desirable frequencies.

Just to keep things simple, here’s how I approach EQ, and you can try this too:

• Listen for too much bass
  • If so, try cutting the low end starting at 50-150 Hz and adjusting from there
• Listen for any “weird” or harsh sounds in your mix
  • If so, go find the track that’s causing the problem
  • Using a narrow bandwidth that’s fully boosted, slowly sweep across the frequency spectrum until the unwanted sound pops out
  • Once you find the unwanted sound, cut the Hz at that spot
• Sometimes it can be nice to boost the high end (around 10k Hz), especially on vocals
• If the mix is muddy, check the 200-500 Hz range and cut as necessary with a broad bandwidth

Now let me clarify some things. These tips will vary widely depending on many things, including but not limited to:

• The microphone you used
• How close or far away the voice/instrument was to the mic
• The room in which the recording happened
• What else is happening in the song

The main takeaway is, keep it simple. If it sounds good, it is good. It’s important to know how to use EQ, but you also don’t want to overuse it.

The next tool you need to know about is compression. This essentially brings down the loud parts of a sounds and effectively makes the quieter parts more perceivable. It evens out the dynamics of a track.

As a beginner, you can use one of your DAW’s compression presets then adjust the threshold from there. You’ll end up with some pretty good results.

However, you should still be aware of what’s happening. So here are the parts of a compressor that you should be familiar with:

• Threshold: determines the level at which the compressor starts to act. Any audio signal that exceeds this threshold will be affected by the compressor (ex. if you set the threshold to -20 dB, any signal louder than -20 dB will be compressed)
• Ratio: controls the amount of compression applied to the audio signal once it exceeds the threshold (ex. a ratio of 4:1 means that for every 4 dB that the input signal exceeds the threshold, the compressor will only allow 1 dB of that to pass through…so higher ratios = more aggressive compression)
• Attack: determines how quickly the compressor responds once the audio signal crosses the threshold (fast attack time = compressor kicks in quickly, slow attack time = compressor take longer to act)
• Release: controls how quickly the compressor stops compressing the audio signal once it falls below the threshold (short release time = compressor stops acting quickly, fast release time = compressor takes longer to stop acting)
• Knee: determines the compressor’s transition from uncompressed to compressed signal levels around the threshold (hard knee = the compressor applies full ratio immediately once the threshold is exceeded, soft knee = gradually applies compression as the signal approaches the threshold)

Regardless of your compression plugin, here are some general tips to get you started:

• Have a goal with compression, don’t just apply it because you “should”
• Compression works best if you’ve already done volume automation
• If you’re a beginner, try starting with one of your DAW’s compression presets and adjust the threshold from there

Here’s some more context for how to use compression…

Now let’s talk about bussing. It’s a method that will make your mixing experience way easier.

A bus channel (AKA send or aux track) lets you effect multiple tracks equally at the same time instead of adding an effect to each individual channel and adjusting them separately.

Simply put, a bus channel receives all the channels you send to it and output a copy of those channels but coming out of one channel. You then apply an effect to the bus channel, which applies your chosen effect to the copy of these channels.

Think of it like a literal bus: you’re picking up each channel, putting them all on the same bus, and taking them to the same place – applying your chosen effect.

Here’s how to create a bus track:

1. Create a new track and apply your desired effect
2. Open the FX option for this new track
3. Under “Receive” or “Input,” you can choose which tracks to send to this bus track
4. Alternatively, you can go to each individual track and route them to the bus track (under “Send” or “Output”)
5. Make sure the signals you’re sending to the bus track are stereo, not mono
6. From here, when you adjust the effect on your bus channel, it will affect the tracks you routed to it
7. If your DAW gives you the option for a track type, choose AUX
8. This lets you send only a portion of the signal to the bus track, allowing you to control how much of your chosen effect is applied to each routed track (some DAWs let you control this for each routed track directly on the bus channel)

Here’s a video that walks you through how to set up a bus/aux channel…

The last thing we’ll talk about is reverb. Reverb is basically room emulation (big room, small room, cathedral, small bathroom, etc).

Before you apply reverb, know what you’re trying to achieve with it. Most likely, you’re trying to add depth, encourage cohesion, or make the mix more interesting.

To add depth, keep in mind that more reverb makes the instrument sound further away.

For cohesion, you can bus multiple tracks to the same bus track with reverb applied to it.

And to make things more interesting, try adding reverb to just specific parts of specific instruments (ex. chorus vocals, acoustic guitar on just the strum going into the bridge, on just the drum fill, etc).

Here are the main settings you’ll see on a reverb plugin:

• Room Size/Type
• Pre-Delay: determines the time gap between the original sound and when the reverb kicks in
• Decay Time: controls how long it takes for the reverberated sound to decay to -60 dB below its original level
• Damping/EQ: shapes the frequency response of the reverb effect by letting you cut or boost specific frequency ranges
• Wet/Dry Mix: determines the balance between the original dry signal and the processed reverberated signal

I highly recommend ValhallaVintageVerb. It comes with any kind of preset you’d want, and you can adjust the effects from there.

Once you become familiar with how to mix music, you can ignore every single guideline in this article if you want to. Mixing is an art. But if you’re just starting out, I’d suggest sticking to the basics. You can’t break the rules until you first understand them.

Indie artist emlyn is a star on the rise, thanks in part to her usage of platforms like Chartmetric and Venice Music that equip emerging talent with the tools they need to succeed in the music industry.

The following comes from Chartmetric, a company DMN is partnered with.

There’s an array of music companies out there with tools, data, and insights to support many of today’s emerging independent artists. Meet Chartmetric and Venice Music, two all-in-one platforms that are doing just that.

Since 2015, Chartmetric has equipped artists and music industry professionals with comprehensive streaming, social media, and audience data to help musicians thrive in their careers, while Venice Music provides tools to distribute music, monitor streaming performance, and collect royalties.

Emlyn, an LA-based indie singer-songwriter originally from Nashville, is just one of the rising indie artists who has seen success using both platforms. Emlyn’s father was a studio drummer, while her mother worked as a therapist, so growing up she learned what it took to craft a song that connects emotionally with a listener. She also taught herself to play the piano and guitar, thanks to the help of Taylor Swift’s songbook.

Now, emlyn releases her own music, which is distributed by Venice Music. For the past six years, she has been represented by her manager Joshua Russak, whom she met after one of Russak’s other clients sent him emlyn’s demos.

“I thought she had such an incredible ear for melodies and storytelling,” Russak told Chartmetric. “We really hit it off talking about music and the business and felt she had a great grasp of all the things it takes to succeed in today’s music environment.”

Russak was drawn to emlyn by her lyrics and writing style, which he saw as conveying a sense of realness and approachability. He also discovered early on that she had a unique way of getting inside of the heads of other artists and helping others express what they’re feeling.

"Most people think artists just wake up and are some supernatural being that creates against all odds, when, in reality, artists are works-in-progress," Russak said. "It takes time for an identity to be clearly defined and I watched emlyn go through a lot of stages. What was clear from the beginning was that she was going to keep improving and I will bet on people like her all day."

For the first half of their time working together, she was focused more on songwriting, but the pandemic is when she really started to release some of her own music.

"She was always interested in being an artist, but never had the right vehicle, time, or songs to launch it in the way that we would have wanted to," Russak told Chartmetric. "[During the pandemic,] there were a lot less songwriting sessions happening, so she ended up deciding to focus on herself and changed the trajectory of her career."

In January 2021, emlyn released new music and quickly started to gain momentum after she landed on some of the earlier feeder playlists on Spotify and Amazon Music. By May of the same year, emlyn found semi-viral success on TikTok with the release of her song "B.O.M.B.," with her post teasing the song since receiving over two million views. This is when Russak started to lean more on data to gain better insights to continue building on the momentum emlyn was already seeing early in her career.

@emlyn_music SHOULD I PUT IT OUTTTT 😭😭😭 #original #artist #viral #singing ♬ B.O.M.B OUT NOW - emlyn

Russak said they had to make many decisions like figuring out which song they should go with, whether it should be fast or slow, if they should be doing campaigns, how they should be moving in between songs, and determining which of emlyn’s posts are gaining traction.

According to Russak, "Sometimes certain posts on certain platforms will work for follows, but not for streams, or will work for streams, but not for Instagram follows, or certain viral TikTok pieces are great for profile views, but don’t filter through to anything else. Even though we’re in this age of algorithms, I think the audiences aren’t machines at the end of the day, but there are some general trend lines where you can find best practices."

For Russak, that’s where Chartmetric comes in. "Everything I find on Chartmetric has helped me think about what our problems are a little differently," Russak shared. "We do a little bit of an analysis on where we are, what's working, and what isn't. Then we’re just—poking the bear—so to speak, to figure out how to get things to continue moving and growing. Sometimes there aren't answers, but it at least gives us the clues to figure out where to lean into and where we have problems.

"So, I really use [Chartmetric] as my home base. I open up [the dashboard] every morning. I use [the dashboard] at midnight to see every release, or check out early playlist pickup. From there, when I'm interested in even more granular data, I might kick off to more DSP-specific platforms, but this absolutely is my home base for everything."

Emlyn has 485,000 followers on TikTok, 107,000 on Instagram, and 174,000 on Spotify, where she saw a 14.4% increase in the past year.

Additionally, her YouTube channel has 26.4,000 subscribers and 13.5 million video views. There is a strategy to what content is posted where, according to Russak: shortform video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels are used to tease music and encourage user-generated content, while Instagram and Twitter posts are best for making more formal announcements and sharing milestones.

Michele Akinsanya, Director of Data and Streaming Analytics for Venice Music, said Chartmetric has been helpful in allowing them to see all of the playlist placements that their artists — like emlyn — land on release days.

"It’s in beta, but I love the artist insights that highlight growth spikes on social and streaming platforms," Akinsanya said. "This enables us to investigate and take action on moments in a quick and efficient way. The visualizers are also a really great way to quickly assess the magnitude of growth over time. I love the convenience of having both social and streaming data in one place."

"In the future, I would love to take more advantage of the integration with One Sheet, playlist evolution features, and the Artist Comparison Pro to help with the strategic side of things," Akinsanya added.

For Janice Wang, VP of Partner Acquisition and Success at Venice Music, the three key takeaways from emlyn’s career trajectory that other artists can learn from are to "invest time in nurturing connections with fans, execute on pre-release buildup and post-release promotion plans, and remain attentive to fan feedback with the flexibility to adapt and refine your release strategies."

This is why artists can so greatly benefit from platforms like Venice Music and Chartmetric, which provide the data and support needed at every stage of one’s music journey.

As for emlyn, her album, that’s how you make a villain - chapter 1 came out this past November. Ahead of its release, emlyn wrote on Instagram that the decision to split the album into three parts came from a realization that "this story of who I am, and where I came from, is meant to be told as a trilogy."

She will also be going on tour in the U.K. and Europe in February 2024.

Graphics by Nicki Camberg and cover image by Crasianne Tirado; data as of Jan. 11, 2023.

“Everyone is on the same starting line in Dolby Atmos,” says Alex Solano. (Photo: Apple Music)

Back in October, Digital Music News first reported that Apple Music was introducing higher royalty payouts for Dolby Atmos mixes. That has sparked some pushback, particularly from indie and unsigned artists who feel Atmos upgrades come with a hefty price tag. AlexProMix is hoping to dispel that notion.

An early adopter of Dolby Atmos immersive formats, AlexProMix founder Alex Solano recently shared his thoughts on  how the rapid evolution in the Dolby Atmos ecosystem paves the way for musicians to gain ‘creative and monetary benefit.’

According to Solano, labels already understand the need and value of the format, with high-priority playlisting and better revenues. However, artists are still unaware that spatial audio doesn’t just make music ‘sound expansive and immersive’ but offers an incredible monetary benefit.

But can they afford it?

Absolutely yes, according to Solano. AlexProMix is currently offering fully-upgraded Atmos mixes for ‘as little as $350 per song,’ a more workable price range. Suddenly, the math could make sense for artists hoping to score a bumped-up royalty rate on Apple Music.

Solano, a music mixing engineer and educator for artists, labels, and music studios, also sees a big opportunity for producers and mixers as well. He predicts that gaining expertise in the heavily invested space of immersive audio could be ‘the biggest opportunity for audio professionals today.’ Just recently, AlexProMix partnered with DMN to further expand awareness around spatial audio possibilities.

Diving into his take on the importance of spatial audio in the current music industry terrain, Solano clarified that despite popular belief, spatial audio is ’not just an exclusive service available to the majors.’

Solano points out that many of the largest distribution platforms for indie artists — such as Avidplay, CD Baby, The Orchard, Audio Salad, Distrokid, Golden Dynamic, Rebeat, and Rock Mobile (to name a few) — currently support Dolby Atmos as a deliverable format. “Any indie artist who’s self-publishing and self-distributing can hire an independent immersive mixer and upgrade their audio to Dolby Atmos,” he added.

Backed by almost two decades of experience in music mixing and his unique position as an early adopter of immersive audio processing, Solano believes the evolving technology will be ‘creating a whole new set of job opportunities for audio professionals who want to have a sustainable career in the music industry.’

“There’s going to be a huge need for Dolby Atmos mixers like myself and thousands of others who have become early adopters.”

Before Dolby Atmos, anyone could have the tools and gear to mix and master — all from a home studio using headphones. But Spatial Audio, Solano says, is ‘different.’

Immersive mixes require expensive gear, specifically equipped studios, and distinct professional knowledge. These extensive requirements for Dolby Atmos have reset the terrain for mixers and offer a blank slate for experimentation, Solano explains. “Mix engineers at all levels are exploring new ways to expand the sonic possibilities with Dolby Atmos,” Solano noted. “Everyone is now at the same starting line with Dolby Atmos, with lots of new possibilities ahead.”

Speaking about AlexProMix, the spatial audio professional told DMN that his background has allowed him to ‘build a complex type of service’ for artists, labels, and studios.

His journey to becoming a spatial audio professional started in 2005, when Solano says he began ‘working behind the scenes for companies ahead of the curve,’ such as Avid Technology, the makers of Pro Tools. From there, Solano went on to gain early certifications from Universal and Warner. 

Speaking about the advent of his role as educator, Solano says he had to go through the whole process of educating his clients on spatial audio, why it’s needed, and the required equipment details.

“So I took that format and basically started creating videos on YouTube on what immersive audio is and how it benefits music producers and artists,” says Solano.

Solano admits he’s in a ‘unique position’ as an early adopter of immersive audio because he’s a music mixer, an online educator, and is ‘flying out to studios to teach immersive mixing.’

“All of that centers around something that I enjoy doing — my passion for music technology and music services and my early adoption of immersive audio.”

Solano also recounts his recent stint in Dubai, where he was called by LPME to assist with three recently built studios with two Dolby Atmos rooms. “They made the investment but needed a seasoned professional to train their in-house staff of producers and mixers in the new format.”

“That’s significant because you can have a multi-million dollar studio. You can have a lot of capital and resources, but there’s a very steep learning curve on knowing what to do when you sit in a room with speakers.”

The technology has been quickly growing and evolving, but audio professionals still need guidance and education when setting up a studio. “A Dolby Atmos music studio is a dedicated room for immersive mixing,” Solano explains, adding, “It’s not like a traditional recording or mixing room — it’s not a multi-purpose room.”

“It’s much easier to get into it now than two years ago, but it’s still quite a bit of an investment. You’re talking about 12 speakers plus all the rigging gear and acoustic treatment everywhere. And everything needs to be treated because sounds are coming at you from different directions, so there’s more possibility that audio reflections will bounce around the room,” explains Solano.

Solano believes his work impacts the music ecosystem beyond artist and label knowledge, adding, “As an early adopter, I’m supporting both Dolby and all the companies who are creating software compatible with Dolby.”

Looking at the bigger picture, what does the future of spatial audio look like in terms of traction on major streaming platforms like Amazon Music, Apple Music, and the 20+ other DSPs supporting Dolby? Moreover, in the spatial audio realm, what’s happening at Spotify?

Recalling a panel discussion he attended at MUSEXPO 2023, Solano pointed out the possibility that by the end of 2024, Apple Music and Amazon will require Dolby Atmos to be a deliverable format. Similarly, he mentioned that in March of 2022, major labels had set a mandate to go through the archives and convert everything into Dolby Atmos.

And leading from that progression, Spotify can’t possibly be so far behind. Solano relays that even though Spotify isn’t currently in a financial position to make that jump or investment into spatial audio, the streaming giant built a Dolby Atmos studio at its facilities in late 2022.

However, Solano predicts that when the streaming giant finally steps into the field and adopts Dolby Atmos as a format, ‘every music mixer who’s working in immersive audio will see their rates going up. Because there will be such a high demand for their skill.’

Spotify (SPOT) Stock Insider Sales Cumulative Value by Month, April 2023-February 2024 (photo: Digital Music News)

Following the release of Spotify’s Q4 2023 earnings report, insiders including CEO Daniel Ek sold a total of almost $100 million worth of company stock. Amid a push for profitability – and as shares continue to hover around a 52-week high – what does the selloff mean for the streaming giant’s 2024?

Spotify (NYSE: SPOT) posted its Q4 2023 financials on Tuesday, February 6th, reporting the addition of 10 million subscribers from the prior quarter and a smaller-than-expected operating loss. Against the backdrop of the business’s push for profitability, the market responded positively to the results; SPOT rose from the low-$220s at the week’s beginning to surpass the $240 mark.

But Spotify execs and officers acted on SPOT’s valuation spike as well. On the 7th and the 8th, insiders sold a cumulative $96.64 million worth of company stock, according to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulatory filings. For multiple reasons – among them SPOT’s value fluctuations in recent years – the moves are spurring questions about the trajectory not only of Spotify stock, but of the company itself.

Report Table of Contents

I. Spotify Insiders’ Post-Earnings Selloff: Who Sold What, and Should Investors Be Worried?

II. Graph: Spotify Stock Insider Sales’ Cumulative Value by Month, April 2023 – February 2024

III. Spotify Stock’s Long and Winding Road to Early February’s 52-Week High

IV. Graph: Spotify Stock’s Per-Share Value, 2018-24

V. Spotify Stock’s 2024 Outlook – Where Does SPOT Stand As Profitability Takes Center Stage?

VI. Spotify Stock by the Dates: A Timeline of Insider Sales, Share-Price Fluctuations, and Related Developments

UMG’s Grainge (l) vs. WMG’s Kyncl (r): A Tale of Two TikTok Deals

While Universal Music Group is rallying plenty of music industry support following its TikTok pullout, that love isn’t spilling into a mass pullout. Even more telling are those that aren’t even thinking about it.

Check out our recent DMN Pro Weekly report for a complete breakdown of the recent UMG-TikTok standoff and what we know about TikTok’s music deal structures. We dive deeper into what this standoff means, what led to the breakdown, TikTok’s royalty contributions to the music industry compared to other UGC platforms, and an eye-opening comparison between the revenues of UMG versus TikTok owner ByteDance.

In seemingly every corner of the music industry, Universal Music Group is getting love for sticking it to TikTok. The chutzpah is real and getting respect, and this is a riskier gambit than it appears — even for a hefty mega-label like UMG.

In the days following the pullout, supportive statements emerged from the NMPA, Downtown Music Holdings, and A2IM. That’s a healthy chunk of the music publishing and indie label community rallying to UMG’s cause. But so far, none of this is going past a supportive bro-hug..

Perhaps even more telling is who isn’t threatening a pullout: fellow major label Warner Music Group.

During WMG’s recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Robert Kyncl expressed empathy but not solidarity. It turns out that Warner Music Group is in a good place with TikTok — though they feel UMG’s pain. “Our deal was very difficult too,” Kyncl relayed in the analyst q&a session. “But we got there, and for us it was fair.”

Kyncl himself is a YouTube alum who has previously battered through similar stare-downs with powerful content owners. “I have a pretty unique experience in this obviously having been on the other side and having gone through these types of disputes where content has come down,” the tech-turned-content CEO continued.

“I know exactly what both Lucian [Grainge] and Shou [Zi Chew] are feeling, because I have gone through all of those feelings, multiple times. It is not great for either side, obviously, because I think everybody wants to consummate the deal.”

Volumes, spoken. And what about Sony Music Entertainment, the other mega-major? So far, it’s been crickets.

A percentage breakdown of the approximately $1.6 billion in global recorded music revenue attributed to UGC and ancillary licensing sources for 2022 in Goldman Sachs’ “Music in the Air” report.

But back to those who are publicly backing UMG. Why aren’t those approving statements shifting into action?

Part of this boils down to contractual realities. TikTok has many deals with many rights owners, and they don’t all expire on the same date. Some are months or years away from renewal. Simply stated: some of these IP owners may be getting the proverbial s—t sandwich, but simply can’t renegotiate right now.

But even if the stars align on a contractual renewal date, pulling an entire catalog from TikTok is risky, especially for companies lacking UMG’s weight. TikTok has a lot of leverage, particularly on the ground level with music fans and artists themselves.

For starters, plenty of musicians want to remain on TikTok, have few issues with royalty payments or AI, and would hate the label or publisher that forcibly removed their content.

That dynamic quickly became evident following UMG’s pullout. Universal Music hates their TikTok terms, that we know. But Noah Kahan, a TikTok-bred artist signed to UMG/Republic, couldn’t care less.

“So, like you, I’ve read the news about the UMG catalog being taken off TikTok,” Kahan began in a short video posted to the platform immediately after the UMG pullout. “Some of my songs aren’t gonna be on there anymore; I won’t be able to promote my music on TikTok anymore, but luckily, I’m not a TikTok artist, right?” he concludes facetiously.

Suddenly, the TikTok-to-signed-artist pathway has been strangely disrupted. If you’re an artist who’s blowing up on TikTok, do you want to sign with Republic/UMG, which will quickly remove that content?

The Universal Music-TikTok Licensing Battle Is in Full Swing — But What Do We Actually Know About TikTok’s Licensing Agreements?

But even artists who didn’t emerge from TikTok or rely on the platform have an issue, because a powerful marketing platform is suddenly unavailable. By contrast, it’s also entirely available for any non-UMG artist.

But this gets even worse: in the days following the UMG takedown, DMN uncovered some evidence that TikTok’s algorithms were responding to shift users away from muted videos. Not only were songs getting silenced, but artists signed to other labels might be getting more attention.

We can’t prove that. But TikTok had been a surprisingly sonified platform, considering it just lost up to 40% of its synched music content, according to our upper-end estimates.

Indeed, UMG’s chairman and CEO, Lucian Grainge, had to think through these issues the night before he pulled the trigger on the TikTok takedown. This wasn’t an easy call, and if the stalemate goes on too long, some artists might demand exemptions or simply walk. Given ByteDance’s relatively monstrous revenues, perhaps TikTok can afford a prolonged stare-down.

Graph: Digital Music News

Incidentally, WMG’s Kyncl also predicted that the UMG vs. TikTok battle would quickly resolve itself, like so many licensing standoffs before. But what if it doesn’t?

History says this will end soon. But if it doesn’t, both sides would suffer considerable damage. Most of the music industry would simply watch the carnage.

That hesitation could make a big difference in the UMG/TikTok standoff. Losing up to 40% of the music played on TikTok videos is a shocking blow, but this isn’t moving to a crippling level of 50%, 60%, or higher — because nobody else is joining ranks.

At least not yet.

A percentage breakdown of the approximately $1.6 billion in global recorded music revenue attributed to UGC and ancillary licensing sources for 2022 in Goldman Sachs’ “Music in the Air” report.

Predictably, the nuances of TikTok’s deal (or lack thereof) with Universal Music aren’t publicly available and will likely remain confidential. But that doesn’t mean we lack insight into the deal TikTok sought to secure with the major label. Here’s a much closer look at the standoff and its bones of contention.

On January 30th, Universal Music Group (UMG) announced the imminent end of its TikTok licensing deal. As described in an open letter, a lowball offer from the short-form app on a new agreement, along with user safety and AI content concerns, had prompted UMG to “call time out.” 

The ByteDance subsidiary then fired back with a comparatively concise message, taking aim at what it described as Universal Music’s decision to leave behind an invaluable marketing resource due to “greed.” Subsequently, no shortage of TikTokers lamented the absence of their favorite artists’ music on the app and, more pressingly, the removal of audio from videos containing the impacted works.

But are the bones of contention in this debate? The answer — like many music industry matters — is complicated.

Report Table of Contents

I. Is TikTok’s Value As a Promotional Tool Enough to Justify Lower Rightsholder Payments?

II. TikTok Licensing At a Glance: What We Know About the Platform’s Rightsholder Deals

III. Graph: Universal Music and ByteDance Annual Revenue, 2019-23

IV. The Bottom Line: Can TikTok and Universal Music Put Their Dispute in the Rearview?

V. By the Dates: A Timeline of the TikTok-Universal Music Licensing Dispute and Related Developments

If you’d like to download this report, simply send an email to support@digitalmusicnews.com.

Photo Credit: Salt

Music rights company Salt draws a major investment round from Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, and Quincy Jones.

British music rights company Salt has announced closing a significant investment round with songwriters and producers, including Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart (pictured center), Canadian songwriter and producer Dan Kurtz, and legendary producer Quincy Jones.

The investment sees Ulvaeus joining Salt’s board alongside Robert Ashcroft, former chief executive of UK collection society, PRS for Music, and Roger Faxon, former chief executive of EMI. Dan Kurtz joins as Senior Vice President for the Americas, while Niclas Molinder (pictured right) is appointed as Head of Industry Relations.

Other investors in Salt’s latest funding round include the preeminent European investment firm Lansdowne Investment Company, and the family office of Nicolas James Group.

Salt streamlines music rights and royalties from attribution to distribution, with a global network that’s “flexible, accurate, high-speed, and transparent.” Its royalties platform processes usage, matches ownership, and calculates royalty distributions, providing societies with advanced royalty-processing software so they can pay rightsholders quickly and accurately.

“Making and distributing music is easier than ever. But the systems for crediting and rewarding creativity are stuck in the pre-digital era, unable to compete in a world where 140,000 tracks are added to Spotify every day,” says Salt CEO Doug Imrie (pictured left). “That’s why we created Salt. It plugs into existing back-office systems, processing usage, matching ownership and calculating distributions with cloud-powered speed and accuracy. With Salt, music creators will get played AND paid.”

Salt’s other software platform, Session, allows songwriters, producers, artists, and other performers to easily assign critical and correct metadata and songwriting credits to their work during the creation process, as well as share music releases with the downstream industry.

The platforms enable songwriters to access the so-called “Black Boxes” of unclaimed or mis-allocated royalties, which an Ivors Academy report found to be as high as $624 million a year. Already, Salt has signed a ten-year deal to process over $3.4 billion in music royalties with its first customer, Dutch music collection society BumaStemra.

Salt has also signed a deal with The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) in the US to provide data matching services to improve music rights and royalties collection for music creators. The MLC administers blanket mechanical licenses for eligible streaming and download services, collecting royalties due under those licenses and paying music publishers and administrators, ex-US collective management organizations, and self-administered songwriters, composers, and lyricists.

Apple’s AirPods Max are a cornerstone of Apple’s premium content+hardware ecosystem, which includes Apple Music’s Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos (photo: MaxWdhs)

After years of investing in lossless and spatial audio, Apple Music and Amazon Music have cemented premium audio as a key part of their offerings. But the market leader, Spotify, is still plotting its entry into high-definition and spatial audio, raising questions about the streaming landscape’s trajectory in 2024 and beyond.

Nearly three years have passed since Apple Music and Amazon Music announced (on the same day) far-reaching premium audio expansions, extending both to spatial audio and lossless formats. Almost simultaneously, Spotify users uncovered a HiFi icon on select versions of the app. And with the Stockholm-based platform having revealed plans earlier in 2021 to adopt high-fidelity audio, a launch seemed imminent. 

As frustrated users frequently lament on social media, though, Spotify has yet to move forward with these plans. Inversely, Apple Music and Amazon Music are framing premium audio as a major reason to choose their services. “Hear sound all around,” reads central text on Apple Music’s subscription landing page, with the Amazon Music Unlimited counterpart encouraging listeners to “experience spatial audio” and enjoy “the HD difference.”

But a distinction in the approaches to premium audio – an all-in strategy on the one hand versus, at least to date, no strategy whatsoever on the other – suggests a significant competitive differentiator between the services. Following uncertainty about the interest in and reach of lossless and spatial audio, it’s become abundantly clear that higher-quality listening options are here to stay.

Report Table of Contents

I. The Premium Audio Imbalance: Apple & Amazon vs. Spotify

II. Graph: Premium Audio Today: A Quick Look At Who Offers What (and for How Much)

III. Spotify’s ‘Supremium’ Tier: The Long-Rumored Package At a Glance

IV. Spotify Playing Catch-Up With Premium and Spatial Audio – Will Premium Audio Be a Gamechanger for Apple Music and Amazon Music in 2024?

V. By the Dates: A Timeline of Premium Audio’s Streaming Integration

VI. Source Documentation

If you’d like to download this report, simply send an email to support@digitalmusicnews.com.