Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.Austin Daboh (pictured) is one of the UK&apos;s most influential and forward-thinking major record company executives.In addition to being EVP of Atlantic Records UK, he was recently promoted to President Of Black Music at the label.A member of the Warner Music UK leadership team, Daboh also sits on the board of the Warner Music and Blavatnik Family Foundation Social Justice Fund, where he has helped secure around £2 million in funding for Black-led British charities.Prior to joining Warner in 2020, Daboh was a high-flying executive at Spotify, where he was Head of Music Culture & Editorial, and also at Apple Music, where he was Head of Editorial for UK & Ireland.At Atlantic, Daboh, a music marketing specialist, has worked with artists including Burna Boy, Tion Wayne, Jack Harlow, Cardi B and Mahalia.On this podcast, Daboh discusses the future of music marketing, social media in music, artificial intelligence – and why he believes that the industry should be striving to offer fans a "seamless music experience"...The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Music Business Worldwide

Austin Daboh on music, tech, AI, and the future of artist marketing

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music. On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham speaks to Ola Sars, founder and CEO of Soundtrack Your Brand.A graduate of Harvard Business School, Sars went on to become the co-founder and COO of Beats Music – the music subscription streaming service, associated with Beats By Dre headphones, that would become Apple Music. In 2013, Sars launched Soundtrack Your Brand (then called Spotify For Business) as a JV with Spotify. The premise is simple: a music streaming service specifically made for businesses – whether multi-nationals or mom&apos;n&apos;pop shops.In 2018, Sars spun the company out of that ownership structure as the independent Soundtrack Your Brand (although Spotify remains a minority investor today).One of his key arguments: any business playing music from an individual&apos;s Spotify account is breaking the terms and conditions of their agreement with the service.  Said businesses, according to Sars, should be paying a premium monthly fee for a streaming service that clears them to play music for their customers (and which, ideally, also recommends music designed to draw more purchase activity from consumers).Sars calculates there are 100 million different types of public-facing businesses globally that are a target market for this kind of B2B music streaming service.Between them, he says, they could bring in an additional $40 billion of revenue into the music industry. Right now, Sars is some way from that kind of target: In 2022, Soundtrack Your Brand turned over 214 million SEK, which works out at just over $20 million US dollars. However, that revenue wasn’t far away from doubling year-on-year – up 61% on 2021. As you read this, Soundtrack Your Brand has just over 54,000 paying monthly subscribers globally.Sars says there&apos;s much more to come...The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Can this entrepreneur unlock $40 billion in new revenue for the music business?

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.-------As the years tick by, more and more DIY artists will earn a liveable chunk of annual cash from Spotify.That&apos;s an inevitability, right? Wrong.In 2022, according to Spotify&apos;s own figures, the number of DIY/self-releasing artists who generated over USD $10,000 in royalties on the platform annually – from both recorded music and music publishing combined – actually fell year-on-year.That fact is revealed (and chewed over) in the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide&apos;s Talking Trends podcast, presented by MBW founder, Tim Ingham.Ingham explains that, according to Spotify&apos;s Loud & Clear data, just over 14,700 DIY artists generated more than $10k on Spotify in 2022.That figure was down on the number of DIY artists who managed to do the same thing in 2021... despite the total number of artists (i.e. DIY plus non-DIY acts) who annually generated more than $10k on Spotify growing last year.The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Fewer DIY artists generated over $10k on Spotify in 2022 than they did in 2021 (according to Spotify's own figures).

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.-----Why is Spotify pursuing a new design that borrows heavily from time-sucking short-form video services like TikTok?That&apos;s the question on the mind of Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, on the latest Talking Trends podcast.As Ingham explains, Spotify&apos;s motivations for its much-debated new home feed (as well as its new AI-powered DJ) aren&apos;t likely to lie solely in its aid of artists.Instead, he suggests, Spotify has made the move because it knows the power of its key USP in the view of investors – algorithmic recommendation – has been deteriorating.The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Why is Spotify copying TikTok? To cling on to power.

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music. On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham speaks to Ed Newton-Rex, VP of Audio at Stability AI – and one of the world&apos;s foremost experts on generative AI in the field of music. An entrepreneur and inventor, Newton-Rex built the pioneering AI-driven music-making platform Jukedeck, before selling it to TikTok in 2019. He then went on to work at TikTok as Product Director of the company&apos;s AI Lab – as TikTok looked to build on Jukedeck&apos;s impressive song-forming technology.  Newton-Rex left TikTok in 2021 to join music startup Voisey, which was subsequently sold to Snap Inc (parent of Snapchat).These days, Newton-Rex is VP of Audio at Stability AI, which is best known as the home of AI-powered text-to-image creator Stable Diffusion.The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

He built TikTok's music AI tech. But he says robots will never replace human songwriters.

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music. On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham speaks to AI expert, and the CEO of LyricStudio, Dr. Maya Ackerman.------Bloody Elon Musk. Not content with doing beastly things to Twitter (like, erm, marginally improving the user experience), he&apos;s also triggered the actual beginning of the actual end of the world. Well, not directly. But Musk was one of the co-founders and funders of San Francisco-headquartered OpenAI, which is the progenitor of ChatGPT – the AI-powered online tool that can not only research and regurgitate online facts, but also weave that regurgitation in a variety of generated tones and styles. Some tech experts are so impressed with ChatGPT, they say, in just a few more iterations, it will become a serious challenger to (and perhaps even surpass the usefulness of) Google, and turn the business of online search upside down. (The next chapter in this sci-fi novel: ChatGPT gains sentience, turns our own long-trusted devices against us, and subjugates the human race. But that&apos;s probably still a few years away, so chill out, and, as Warren Zevon famously recommended, Enjoy every sandwich.)The music industry is actually a little ahead of the curve on this topic. Because language-based &apos;generative AI&apos; platforms are already transforming this business in a meaningful way – in the world of lyric writing.LyricStudio, owned by California-headquartered parent WaveAI, produces original lyrics for songwriters in a style that mimics their own. In this sense, it&apos;s &apos;assistive AI&apos; – a human companion, a muse. "When it comes to curing writer&apos;s block, there is nothing as powerful as LyricStudio," its website boasts. LyricStudio&apos;s popularity is already mind-boggling: to date, it has been responsible for &apos;assisting&apos; the creation of over a million songs, from over a million songwriters, musicians and producers. At least 15% of the people that use it, say LyricStudio, are professional music-makers.One of those artists, rapper Curtiss King, released a No.1 album (on the US iTunes chart) last summer – with lyrics written/&apos;assisted&apos; by LyricStudio.On this Music Business Worldwide podcast, the co-founder and CEO of WaveAI/LyricStudio, Dr Maya Ackerman, discusses the future for AI and music... especially when it comes to lyric writing.Ackerman has some powerful credentials: she is a professor of AI at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Santa Clara University, as well as a singer, songwriter and music producer. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, held Postdoctoral Fellowships at Caltech and UC San Diego, and has published over 50 peer-reviewed research publications.We ask her all about LyricStudio and the moral and artistic quandaries presented by the use of &apos;generative AI&apos; in music-making. She points out that, so long as everyone in her field behaves ethically – which they surely all will, right? – there shouldn&apos;t be a music-biz-ending conclusion to this tale...The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

As ChatGPT sets the internet aflame, will AI write the lyrics of tomorrow's hits?

Hello and welcome to the first episode of 2023 of Talking Trends – a podcast from Music Business Worldwide, supported by Voly Music. As ever on Talking Trends, we&apos;ll be diving behind a major entertainment industry headline to explain what’s really going on.It’s a new year, which means a bucketful of music biz statistics about the prior 12 months – in this case 2022 – are tumbling out of trade bodies in all major markets.The data Ingham focuses on here has just been published by the UK’s Entertainment Retailers’ Association, which both monitors the commercial entertainment market in Britain, and represents companies like Spotify, YouTube, Deezer and Amazon.The latest batch show a dramatic slowdown in the annual growth in money being spent on music streaming subscriptions in 2022.They suggest &apos;peak streaming&apos; may be coming to the UK sooner rather than later – and seem to accentuate the need for streaming price rises (especially from Spotify) to keep growth at healthy levels in the years ahead.The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

These worrying stats send a clear message: Give us a Spotify price rise now.

Lyor Cohen believes that short-form video poses a major threat to the music business. He also thinks it might be the industry&apos;s savior.On this MBW Podcast, Cohen – Global Head of Music at YouTube – explains his fears over short-form video platforms that fail to push users into deeper engagement with music and artist content."Short-form video that doesn&apos;t lead anywhere is the most dangerous thing I&apos;ve seen the music business face in a long time," says Cohen. Cohen believes that, if left unchecked, the rise and rise in music consumption on this type of short-form video platform could become one of the music industry&apos;s "biggest crises to date".(Cohen doesn&apos;t mention any particular platforms, but it&apos;s worth noting that there&apos;s been a lot of headlines written on MBW this year about TikTok&apos;s failure – so far, at least – to launch a connected music service to its main platform.)Cohen argues that YouTube&apos;s approach with its YouTube Shorts product offers an important distinction: A platform that hooks you in with short-form video – but then nudges would-be fans to longer/deeper audio and visual content about artists on both YouTube and YouTube Music.Cohen lays out three problems he sees growing to a head in the current music business:Problem No.1, he says, is an expectation for modern artists to spend a significant amount of their time, creativity and energy on certain social media platforms – platforms that in Cohen’s view rarely lead to deeper fandom amongst consumers;Problem No.2, he says, lies with consumers themselves – and his concern that the next generation of fans aren’t currently delving deep into artists, their stories, and their catalogs;And Problem No.3, says Cohen, lies at the door of record companies, who are struggling to break artists with regularity in this current digital environment.He believes the migration of fans away from long-standing social media platforms towards short-form video services is a major opportunity for the music business to foster true fandom in a vast potential audience globally.But he also warns the music business to drop its current "euphoric" state, and think hard about how short-form video&apos;s role must evolve to best serve the next generation of fans and artists.The MBW Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Lyor Cohen: 'The music industry is facing one of our biggest crises to date.'

If you watch the new Netflix dramatization of the Spotify story – &apos;The Playlist&apos; – you&apos;ll come across an entire episode told from the perspective of Per Sundin.That&apos;s because Sundin was the CEO of Universal Music Sweden at the time of Spotify&apos;s EU launch (2008), and one of the early believers that Daniel Ek&apos;s streaming platform could one day rule the global music industry.Yet arguably what Sundin&apos;s up to today is even more worthy of some TV drama treatment. As he explains on this MBW Podcast, Sundin has since 2019 been CEO of Pophouse Entertainment – the Stockholm-based company behind a number of successful ventures with ABBA.The most radical of those ventures is ABBA Voyage, the technologically stunning &apos;virtual concert residency&apos; from the legendary Swedish band that has been playing to hundreds of thousands of wowed ticketholders in London since May this year. Portraying the group as they appeared in 1977, the show has been created by ABBA in conjunction with Pophouse and Industrial Light & Magic, the Disney-owned visual effects company most famous for working on Star Wars properties through the decades. (Founding ABBA member Björn Ulvaeus is a shareholder in, and board member of, Pophouse.)PopHouse recently got even more interesting from a music business perspective, buying a majority stake in the rights of catalogs created by names such as Swedish House Mafia and Avicii. On this podcast, Sundin tells us how Pophouse plans to "amplify" the artist brands behind this catalog music using lessons learnt from working with ABBA. He also discusses why he&apos;s confident, after a major financial investment, that the ABBA Voyage show will soon become profitable, go global – and change the face of &apos;virtual&apos; artist performances forever more. And he explains why he believes that the major record companies will soon switch their smartest executives (if they haven&apos;t already) to focus more on catalog, rather than frontline, music.The MBW Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Per Sundin on ABBA, buying Avicii's rights – and why he thinks the smartest music execs will soon be working on catalogs

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends from Music Business Worldwide (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.----------According to Spotify, Kate Bush&apos;s Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) was officially its biggest &apos;Song Of The Summer&apos; in the United States. In the three months from the end of May to the end of August, it racked up more streams in the States than even Harry Styles&apos; As It Was (the biggest track globally in the period).Over in the UK, Running Up That Hill was also crowned &apos;Song Of The Summer&apos; by the Official Charts Company, which said it was streamed and downloaded more than any other track during the season.But now we&apos;re in autumn, the music industry seems to have failed to meaningfully capitalize on Kate Bush&apos;s resurgence, suggests Tim Ingham, founder of Music Business Worldwide on MBW&apos;s latest Talking Trends podcast.Could basic economics be the reason behind for this inability to keep the commercial fires of Kate Bush&apos;s re-ignited brand burning?

Where are all the Kate Bush T-shirts?

Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide&apos;s Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music.----------Sony Music Group. Warner Music Group. BMG. Hipgnosis. Concord. Primary Wave.They&apos;ve all been tipped to be at the negotiating table to acquire a career-spanning catalog from legendary British band Pink Floyd.On this episode of the Talking Trends podcast, Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, reveals what his sources are telling him about the process. Ingham&apos;s industry whisperers suggest that Floyd&apos;s camp are looking for GBP £420 million-plus for the catalog, which includes recorded music rights but NOT music publishing rights.He also explains why exchange rates could play a major role in who ends up landing the rights. (Clue: The British pound is currently at its weakest vs. the US dollar since 1985).Also discussed: * Why some sources think Concord may end up as the victor in the race, while others  think the smart money&apos;s on Sony; * Why tax implications linked to the locations of the band&apos;s members might play an impact on who signs on the dotted line;* How a handful of the companies in the race to buy Floyd&apos;s catalog already have a working relationship with the band

Who's going to buy the Pink Floyd catalog?

Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide&apos;s Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music.In this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses the recent quarterly results of music industry giants such as Universal Music Group, Sony Corp, Warner Music Group, and Believe.Ingham notes that Q2 2022 saw something of a consistent slowdown in streaming revenue growth for the &apos;Big Three&apos; major record companies.With macro-advertising spends set to drop in the months ahead, Ingham suggests that we now may be moving into a new era for the majors when it comes to streaming growth.Says Ingham: "It looks to me like we’re seeing the first signs of a new chapter for the recorded music industry: single-digit recorded music streaming revenue rises, following years of double-digit growth across the board."

Record labels are seeing slower growth from streaming. But growth is still growth.

Some people say the modern music business lacks entrepreneurial new independent record companies. Those people haven&apos;t met Stef Van Vugt.The 25-year-old Dutchman founded Strange Fruits (now Fruits Music) in 2016 while studying music as an aspiring DJ.The label-cum-playlist company now has millions of followers on Spotify, where it&apos;s racked up tens of billions of streams. From Dance Fruits (5.4m followers) to LoFi Fruits (7m followers), Fruits Music&apos;s playlists have become a phenomenon on Spotify – but not without controversy.For one thing, Fruits Music &apos;buys out&apos; the rights to all its tunes from artists who work with the company (although it does continue to pay through royalties as part of these deals). In addition, in order to better ride the Spotify algorithm, the lead &apos;artist&apos; name on all of the tracks the company produces is Fruits Music itself (or one of its sub-brands). This creates similarities to the &apos;fake artists&apos; that caused controversy for Spotify a few years back.And last year, Rolling Stone wrote an exposé of Fruits Music playlists – particularly Rain Fruits Sounds – that are designed to maximize payouts from Spotify (via its &apos;pro rate&apos; royalty model). Rain Fruits Sounds contains over 2,000 &apos;tracks&apos; of rain noises, many of which are just over 30 seconds long. Every time one of those &apos;tracks&apos; gets played, Strange Fruits increases its market share of Spotify&apos;s royalty pool – ultimately ensuring it gets paid more each month, and &apos;real&apos; artists get paid less.On this MBW Podcast, Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, grills Stef Van Vugt on the story of Strange Fruits, accusations that its actions hurt &apos;real&apos; artists, the &apos;gaming&apos; of streaming playlists – and what he thinks about a shift to &apos;user-centric&apos; licensing on streaming platforms. (His answer to that last one might surprise you.) The MBW Podcast is supported by Voly Music) .

Strange Fruits has tens of billions of streams... but it's not without controversy. Its 25-year-old founder speaks out.

Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide&apos;s Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music.In this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses the model under which TikTok currently pays the music industry.Music Business Worldwide sources suggest that TikTok&apos;s deals with rightsholders are currently &apos;buy-outs&apos; – i.e. the platform pays a lump sum upfront, rather than paying a revenue share based on each artist/label&apos;s popularity on its platform.With TikTok&apos;s revenues expected to triple to $12 billion in 2022, concerns are growing amongst music companies that TikTok could soon get "too big and too powerful" to force into an agreement that sees it "pay music rightsholders properly".Says Ingham: "The music industry is growing increasingly worried that it&apos;s about to star in a movie we&apos;ve seen play out time and time again when it comes to music&apos;s relationship with tech and media giants. "In short, that movie is about a tech or media giant – you&apos;ve guessed it! – &apos;building its business off the back of artists&apos; without paying those artists what they deserve. "As my major record company source put it to me the other week: &apos;Soon TikTok is going to be too big and too powerful for us to force it into a revenue share deal. The last time we let a company of this size and power run away with things without paying us properly... was MTV."Ole Obermann, TikTok&apos;s Global Head of Music, has told Music Business Worldwide in response to this podcast: ""From the outset we wanted to pay rightsholders and we built a team to do that. We&apos;re proud of the deals we&apos;ve struck and how in a few short years we&apos;ve been able to offer a new and growing revenue stream to the industry, as well as becoming a powerful marketing and promotional platform for artists of all genres. "We&apos;re delighted by the success [that] artists, both new and old, have found using TikTok; connecting with fans and kick-starting their careers. This success and the power of our platform has translated into record label and publishing contracts [for artists], the launch of careers, significant streaming uplift and TikTok having a positive impact on charts worldwide."TikTok is a unique service and has pioneered the adoption of short-form video. We&apos;re not a streaming platform and we do not offer a subscription model. We negotiate our licenses on a rolling basis and as engagement with music on TikTok evolves, our business model will also evolve."Adds Obermann: "We want to play our part and contribute to a growing music industry, enabling music creators and makers to find success both on and off our platform.”

When will TikTok start paying the music industry 'properly'?

Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide&apos;s Talking Trends, supported by Voly Music.In this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses the market share threat that the major record companies currently face on Spotify from DIY distribution platforms – and the millions of independent artists they service.As music from these independent artists swamps streaming services, the majors&apos; refusal to allow the music they distribute to fall under a certain perceived quality threshold limits their ability to compete on volume / scale with the likes of DistroKid. (A prime example of this refusal: Universal Music Group&apos;s Spinnup shutting down DIY distribution last month; it now only distributes music from invited artists.)As a result (amongst other factors), the majors&apos; cumulative market share on Spotify is statistically falling – down by a full 10% from 2017 (87%) to 2021 (77%).We hear from Rob Stringer, Chairman of Sony Music Group, who last week told investors that Sony has widened its own distribution net – via The Orchard and AWAL – to work with more independent acts, and counteract the market-share erosion created by DIY distribution.However, Stringer noted that a proportion of this DIY-distributed music isn&apos;t of a good enough quality to be considered anything more than "flotsam and jetsam".Ingham theorises that the majors may soon pressure Spotify to pay out higher royalties for &apos;quality&apos; or &apos;premium&apos; artists – especially those who attract subscribers to its service – versus the tens of thousands of tracks uploaded to streaming services daily.Ingham wonders aloud if the majors&apos; business model "can only triumph long term if streaming companies start acknowledging that &apos;quality&apos; music is deserving of a higher rate of royalty payment than &apos;flotsam and jetsam&apos;. "In other words, will Spotify agree that not all music is worth the same, or that a play of Bohemian Rhapsody is intrinsically worth more than a play of a large man&apos;s elongated burp? "Adds Ingham: "Defining the parameters of what constitutes &apos;premium&apos; music versus &apos;flotsam and jetsam&apos; is going to be fun. Music by its nature is subjective. You might think a certain track or an album is complete dreck; I might think it&apos;s celestial, and vice versa. That&apos;s part of what makes the industry so much fun."He continues: "Lest we forget that the other week I was on this very podcast telling Music Business Worldwide listeners that I had seen an app – Soundful – that can create studio-quality music via machine learning at the touch of a button, and every single one of its tracks is original. "There is no reason technology like this won&apos;t soon be able to create millions of tracks per day at the touch of a button, and then upload all of them to Spotify within seconds. "Imagine the threat that kind of tidal wave of music hitting services daily brings to the major record companies and their need to dominate market share on Spotify and other platforms. "So: if the majors are going to take the argument to Spotify that some music simply deserves more financial respect than other music, surely they are now compelled to do so sooner rather than later."

The major labels face a battle for streaming market share. Here's how they might fight back.

Music Business Worldwide (MBW) is the leading information and jobs service for the global music industry. It publishes two podcasts: The weekly series, Talking Trends – which dives behind the biggest headlines in the music industry – as well as The MBW Podcast, which sees us interview some of the leading figures in the global business.

hubhopper

Music Business Worldwide

hubhopper