Music Business Worldwide

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.
On this 'cast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Travis Rosenblatt, founder of the SaaS platform for A&R research and scouting, Meddling.
Rosenblatt is a particularly interesting person to speak to because, by his own admission, he spends a lot of his time NOT consumed in his day job.
This allows him the bandwidth to think deeply about the music business, its challenges, and where it might be headed in future.
Meddling is very clever, gathering data from multiple touchpoints on new artists for clients that have included the likes of Republic Records, Kobalt, Columbia Records, and Atlantic Records.
But as a SaaS platform, Meddling largely runs itself – enabling Rosenblatt’s mind to wander toward various crucial topics for the modern music industry.
On this podcast, Ingham asks Rosenblatt about Meddling – a bit – but their conversation also dives into PROs, DIY distribution, music’s role on video platforms, and much more besides...

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast 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.
On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham analyzes the news the Netflix's global subscriber base fell quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2022 – and ponders whether leading music streaming services like Spotify will soon face similar headwinds.
Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in Q1, meaning that more people unsubscribed from the platform in the quarter than actually subscribed to it.
Ingham sifts through Netflix's new letter to shareholders, in which the video streamer explains why it thinks these subscribers left its platform.
Says Ingham: "One very convincing take on Netflix's poor Q1 results is that the [macro economic] sluggish economic growth and increasing inflation [in the world today] are actually the only factors that really matter here.
"Inflation in the US, for one thing, hit a very scary 8.5% in March, according to the Consumer Price Index.
"That 8.5% was the highest US inflation rate we've seen since 1981: that's over 40 years ago. This is once in a generation stuff.
"So it's no great shock that people are starting to worry very seriously about their cost of living, versus the salary they have dropping into their bank account every fortnight or month.
"And they're making sensible cutbacks of goods and services they can ultimately live without."

The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from Music Business Worldwide – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by Voly Music.
This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, explains why Spotify deleted a swathe of comedy albums from its service over the Thanksgiving weekend – and why it might be at the mercy of big-money lawsuits in the weeks and months ahead.
Ingham (pictured) explains that two prominent companies now operating in the world of comedy royalty collection and administration – Word Collections and Spoken Giants – are each respectively run by two music industry veterans who are experts in the intricacies of licensing in the US: Jeff Price (Word Collections), the founder of Audiam and TuneCore; and Jim King (Spoken Giants), a former senior figure at US collection society BMI.
Spotify has suddenly removed comedy albums by stand-ups ranging from Kevin Hart to Tiffany Haddish, Jim Segura and Robin Williams – as Jim King accuses the streaming company of knowing "they don’t have all the rights in place to serve this content".That's a reference to the rights to the underlying lyrical content of each piece of performed stand-up. Spotify has the licenses to the recordings, but possibly not this underlying right – the equivalent of the publishing right in music.
In music, such rights are now covered by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) in the United States, ensuring that Spotify has cleared rights to every song on its platform from the get-go.
But this wasn't always the case: In 2016, Spotify was sued by songwriters such as Melissa Ferrick and David Lowery for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, having allegedly not obtained the mechanical licenses required to host their music. (Spotify eventually settled in a class action case against these and other songwriters, via a $43 million fund.)
Comedy routines are not currently covered by the MLC.
On Talking Trends, Ingham wonders aloud if Price and King may have spotted an "opportunity or injustice" to discuss a similar settlement with Spotify for these analogous rights in comedy. If a party could prove "wilful copyright infringement" by Spotify on this score, Ingham notes, the streaming company could be on the hook for up to $150,000 in damages for every comedy 'track' infringed.
Says Ingham: "The fact that Jeff Price has been able to raise $3.5 million in investment for Word Collections in the in the past few weeks doesn't surprise me. Maybe opportunity knocks here, and his investors can see that."
Ingham further suggests that this story could have ramifications for Spotify far beyond comedy: "Jim King's company [Spoken Giants] defines itself as representing rightsholders who make 'spoken word content' – not just comedy content. And spoken word content, whether that's podcasts or the more obvious analogous world of audiobooks, is a big part of Daniel Ek's future strategy for Spotify. "

The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

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.
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Bloody Elon Musk. Not content with doing beastly things to Twitter (like, erm, marginally improving the user experience), he'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'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 'generative AI' 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's 'assistive AI' – a human companion, a muse. "When it comes to curing writer's block, there is nothing as powerful as LyricStudio," its website boasts.
LyricStudio's popularity is already mind-boggling: to date, it has been responsible for 'assisting' 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/'assisted' 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 'generative AI' in music-making. She points out that, so long as everyone in her field behaves ethically – which they surely all will, right? – there shouldn't be a music-biz-ending conclusion to this tale...

Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).

Welcome to the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide'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' 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's Spinnup shutting down DIY distribution last month; it now only distributes music from invited artists.)
As a result (amongst other factors), the majors' 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'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 'quality' or 'premium' 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' business model "can only triumph long term if streaming companies start acknowledging that 'quality' music is deserving of a higher rate of royalty payment than 'flotsam and jetsam'.
"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's elongated burp? "
Adds Ingham: "Defining the parameters of what constitutes 'premium' music versus 'flotsam and jetsam' 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's celestial, and vice versa. That'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'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."

Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).