Streaming
Anchor Co-Founder Michael Mignano Resigns From Spotify
Michael Mignano, co-founder of the popular podcast creation platform Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify in 2019, submitted his resignation last week, a company spokesperson confirmed with Billboard. Mignano’s departure was first reported by The Verge. It is the latest shake-up on the podcasting side of Spotify. In April, a pair of top executives — Courtney Holt, head of talk partnerships, editorial and global markets, and Lydia Polgreen, managing director of Gimlet, which Spotify also acquired in 2019 — both announced plans to leave the company. Mignano founded Anchor with Nir Zicherman eight years ago. “We tried to start podcasts of our own… only to become discouraged by the complicated process and expensive hardware we found ourselves endlessly researching,” the two wrote in 2019...
Electronic Music Industry Tops $6 Billion In 2021, Makes Key Strides In Web3: IMS Business Report
According to the newly published annual IMS Business Report 2022, electronic music continues to have an optimistic growth trajectory in a variety of key areas. As a sector, electronic music was valued at $6 billion in 2021, which is up 71% from 2020, but down 20% from 2019. Throughout the report, encouraging signs of the industry bouncing back in the aftermath of the pandemic continue to be apparent. Metrics including the number of festivals that book electronic artists and the quantity of search results for flights to Ibiza are up significantly year-over-year, but there’s still ground to cover when it comes to achieving the pre-pandemic levels of 2019. While the world was in a variable state of lockdown over the last two years, dance music made key strides in the digital arena. In 1...
The Ledger: Tencent Music Highlights Risks of Doing Business in China
Doing business in China got tougher in 2021 after government agencies handed down new rules and levied fines against some well-known companies. For evidence this has made investing in Chinese companies more complicated, look no further than Tencent Music Entertainment’s annual report released Tuesday. All publicly traded companies’ financial statements include risk factors mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission to help investors understand companies’ unique challenges and possible negative outcomes if things go south. TME’s previous annual reports have listed numerous risk factors, ranging from licensing third-party content to its corporate structure. It’s a long list that just got longer. The new risk factors in TME’s 2022 annual report are further evidence of the challenges f...
Joe Rogan Claims Massive Subscriber Boost Due to Recent Controversies
Joe Rogan says his recent controversy has given his Spotify podcast even more horsepower. The podcaster claims the media frenzy over anti-vax conspiracy theorist guests and his past use of the N-word has netted him two million additional subscribers. In Friday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comic and UFC commentator was asked by his guest, British political commentator Douglas Murray, about the uproar. “You have been put through the wringer since we last met,” Murray says. “They did a number on you. Wow.” Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “It’s interesting, my subscriptions went up massively — that’s what’s crazy,” Rogan replies. “During the height of it all, I gained two million subscribers … Yeah, [the media] went for it. It...
CNN+ Announces It’s Shutting Down Three Weeks After Launch
CNN+, the billion-dollar bet that CNN’s future depended on digital streaming, will be shutting down at the end of the month, The New York Times and CNN report. The news comes scarcely three weeks after CNN+ launched on March 29th. The streaming offshoot of the cable news titan was championed by former CEO Jeff Zucker, who had planned to spend $1 billion on CNN+ over four years. But Zucker departed in February after failing to disclose a relationship with CNN’s marketing chief, and the future of the platform fell further into doubt last month, when CNN’s parent company WarnerMedia finalized a merger with Discovery to become Warner Bros. Discovery. Its fate may have been sealed when Warner Bros. Discovery announced that HBO Max and Discovery+ would be combined into one streaming platfor...
Which Cities Listen to Bob Marley the Most?
I was almost not going to write this, because it felt a little too much like trying to force the cliché, but then I got an email from the Bob Marley online shop promoting its exclusive 4/20 merch with the subject line, “When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself,” so I decided we weren’t forcing anything after all. But I digress. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news It is 4/20 after all, the universally agreed-upon day where a bunch of people make jokes about stoners and stoners just continue going about their lives as normal. But where are those stoners — and, more specifically, where are those stoners in the U.S. who are listening to Bob Marley? In 2022 so far, Luminate, formerly MRC Data, has logged more than 308 billion on-deman...
Spotify Scraps Greenroom Creator Fund Amid Live Audio Rebrand
Spotify has shuttered its fund for live audio creators less than a year after the funding program was first unveiled, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. Originally, live audio creators using Spotify Greenroom — which has since been renamed Spotify Live — would have been able to participate in the fund to receive payouts for their work. Spotify never disclosed how exactly the funding would be determined, but the company said in its initial announcement last June that a creator’s audience size and how their content was consumed would factor into the payments. But the creator fund never ultimately launched last summer, as Spotify said it would at the time, and a Spotify spokesperson said on Tuesday that the funding will be shifted to...
Netflix Loses 200,000 Subscribers, First Loss in Over Ten Years
Netflix has reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers so far this year — the first time the customer base has declined in 11 years. As Bloomberg reports, the bleeding may have only begun. In an earnings report, Netflix said it expects to lose an additional two million subscribers in the second quarter of 2022. This is despite the fact that Netflix signed up an additional one million new users in Africa during the first quarter. Those gains were offset by losses across the rest of the globe, especially in the US and Canada, where 600,000 people cut their service after a price hike, and in Russia, where the company lost another 700,000 subscribers after ceasing operations in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Advertisement Related Video The Big Red N boasts a total of abou...
Snoop Dogg Says Death Row Records Classics Will Live Exclusively On New App
HipHopWired Featured Video Source: Kevin Winter / Getty Snoop Dogg made quite the big score after buying back Death Row Records and relaunching the legendary label, but some fans noticed some of the classic records from that time were missing from streaming services. The Doggfather explained in a recent interview that he intends to launch an app where those classics will live exclusively. Uncle Snoop was a recent guest on the Drink Champs podcast with N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN, naturally running through the Long Beach, Calif. native’s lengthy and still-ongoing career. As has been noted in earlier reports, Snoop elected to remove Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, his debut album Doggystyle, and Tha Dogg Pound’s Dog Food from Spotify, Apple, and Amazon Music for streaming. Snoop explained, “First thing I did...
Here’s Why Snoop Dogg Says He Pulled Death Row’s Catalog From Streaming
Snoop Dogg’s first course of action after purchasing the Death Row Records brand and catalog in February was seemingly pulling the whole catalog off streaming services — now he’s explained why. In a new interview with REVOLT’s Drink Champs on Friday, Snoop said he removed Death Row’s music — including his 1993 debut Doggystyle and Dr. Dre’s seminal The Chronic — from traditional streaming services “because those platforms don’t pay.” Instead, the rapper claimed he’s planning to launch a standalone “Death Row app” that will host the label’s music. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “Those platforms get millions and millions and millions of streams and nobody gets paid other than the record labels,” said Snoop. “So what I wanted to do is snatch...
Swedish House Mafia Make History With First-Ever Spotify Livestream at Coachella Afterparty
The dance music mega-group Swedish House Mafia made history early Saturday (April 16) when the trio became the first artists to be livestreamed by Spotify as part of the streaming platform’s new Spotify Live offering. Axwell highlighted the news while the Swedes performed at a private Coachella afterparty hosted by Spotify to celebrate the release of Swedish House Mafia’s first studio album, Paradise Again. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The group performed for over two hours at a highly curated event at a private mansion near the Coachella festival grounds with a faux lake and beach, where a bevy of VIP influencers, the DJ Alesso, the pop star Anitta and Euphoria actress Chloe Cherry also made appearances. They played many of the...
Drake Outstreams All Pre-1980 Music: The 2021 Streaming Market, by Decade
The most popular oldies are getting younger. Since at least 2014, the market share of catalog has been rising – from just over 65.1% in 2020 to 69.8% of album consumption units last year, according to Luminate (formerly known as MRC Data). At the same time, though, the music that dominates the catalog category – defined by Billboard as albums released more than 18 months ago, as long as they’re not being actively promoted by labels or in the top half of the Billboard 200 – is more recent than ever. In a trend apparently driven by streaming, growth is now being driven mostly by older albums from newer artists – sometimes referred to as “shallow catalog” – rather than the “deep catalog” of the ’60s and ’70s rock acts that used to dominate the category. To get a sense of how profound this shi...
