Just how big is music streaming? The format continued on its path toward total dominance in 2019, and kept up its years-long resuscitation of the music U.S. music industry. For the first time ever, on-demand streams in the U.S. reached over 1 trillion, according to a year-end report from Alpha …
Read More »Chance the Rapper's 'The Big Day' Comes Free With a … Lyft Ride?
Update: Following the publication of this article, Chance the Rapper tweeted that the Lyft partnership is “not a bundle,” and Chance’s business affairs team told Rolling Stone that it met with Billboard and Nielsen to note that the Lyft free downloads should not tally on the Billboard 200 in accordance …
Read More »The Music Industry Signs a Pledge Against Fake Streams
Streaming manipulation – the practice of artificially inflating stream counts to produce false listening data – is the music industry‘s hot-button issue at the moment. On Thursday, an assortment of music publishers, record labels, royalty-collection societies and other groups signed a code of conduct condemning fake streams and pledging to …
Read More »Steve Stoute's Music Startup Gets a Boost From the NBA
It’s been almost a year since longtime music executive Steve Stoute launched UnitedMasters, an artist-focused music startup aimed at disrupting traditional record labels, which debuted with $70 million from big-name investors includingAndreessen Horowitz, 21st Century Fox and Alphabet. The startup has made good on its word to stand out — …
Read More »Kanye's Overshadowing of Historic Bill Signing Irks Music Industry
The night before President Trump signed the Music Modernization Act, a long-awaited bill that allows artists and publishers to earn royalties on recordings made before 1972 and helps songwriters and producers get paid more efficiently in the streaming era, 100 songwriters and lobbyists gathered at City Winery in Washington, D.C., …
Read More »Spotify Is Done Fighting Apple Music — and Ready to Take on Apple
Spotify, by several measures the biggest music-streaming service in the world, has teamed up with Samsung, the biggest smartphone maker in the world.The two companies announced a major partnership on Thursday that makes Spotify the official music service provider for all of Samsung’s phones, televisions, tablets, watches and speakers. It …
Read More »The End of Owning Music: How CDs and Downloads Died
If you visited Austin’s Waterloo Records recently, you might have noticed a construction project that was unthinkable not so long ago: The 36-year-old Austin music staple was replacing 24 feet of CD racks with space for more vinyl. “After 30 years of CDs, a lot of people are moving on …
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