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 pales compared to comparable YTD fingers in 2024 and 2023. Here's a breakdown of the numbers — and a look at which companies are scoring rounds.

A flyover of where things stand in the music industry’s critical AI legal cases.

Can Spotify’s ‘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.

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 nucl... Read More...

The latest streaming music platform market share breakdown in the United States by subscriber (source: DMN Pro/Digital Music News) If 2024 goes down as the year that streaming music entered a plateau, then 2025 could be the year that Apple Music closed the gap on Spotify’s subscriber lead — at least in the US . Here’s a look at the latest DSP market share numbers heading into Apple Music’s monstrous Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show sponsorship. Who’s winning the race for streaming music subscriber dominanc... Read More...

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 reve... Read More...

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 j... Read More...

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.

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 In... Read More...

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.

As the sun sets on a wild 2024, here’s where major streaming music platforms stand in the all-important race for paying subscribers.

Here's a closer look at why so many mega-events crashed in 2024, and the scary possibilities heading into 2025.