Decential shares an interesting outtake from the latest Water & Music academy on global music rights: "To be fully licensed a startup would have to speak to about 150 entities and spend between $500,000 to $750,000 in legal fees. And being licensed then means you have to pass about 85 percent of your revenue straight to the rightsholders – one of the reasons Spotify has such slim margins. So unless you’re a massive platform with a savvy team, there’s not much you can do to disrupt entrenched power dynamics". “Music innovation only stays innovative until they start to touch rights and licensing, Is it any wonder that the last great innovation was Spotify?” - Dan Fowler, director of Open Source Projects at HIFI Labs and author of newsletter Liminal Spaces, said. The solution the academy has offered? Web3.

Music writer Cherie Hu had gathered "over 40 of our community members across industries, geographies, career stages and skill sets... to try to make sense of the immense challenges and opportunities that lay ahead for music/Web3's future. The result is a first-of-its-kind, five-part syllabus on the state of music/Web3, with a selection of clear market maps, best practices and calls to action for music-industry stakeholders to use Web3 as a tool for fostering a more innovative, sustainable and equitable environment for everyone involved". Read it.

"The creator economy is growing much more quickly than the music streaming economy right now, by multiple measures" - music/tech analyst Cherie Hu argues in her latest post. She continues: "For instance, while the number of audio creators on Spotify roughly doubled from 2018 to 2021, the overall number of creators using Stripe grew by 8x over the same time period. In terms of revenue, certain subsectors of the creator economy are growing as much as 8x faster as music streaming. According to Stripe, community platforms like Luma have seen a 150% increase in revenue year-over-year in 2021 — far outpacing the 25% year-over-year revenue growth that Spotify reported this quarter, and the 17% year-over-year growth that the IFPI last reported for the entire global music streaming market in 2020".

Game-streaming platform Twitch has been the victim of a leak, with leaked documents appearing to show Twitch's top streamers each made millions of dollars from the Amazon-owned company in the past two years, Eurogamer reports. However, as music and technology analyst Cherie Hu points out, the top gamer on Twitch earns ~10x more per year from direct tips and subs than the top music artist on the platform. xQcOW made $752,467 in September 2021, whereas the top paid musician Kenny Beats has made $677,00 in the two-year period from Aug 2019 to Oct 2021.

"With live shows slowly returning, we’re seeing a fundamental contradiction play out: Even as livestreaming platforms continue to raise more funds and announce marquee celebrity partnerships, demand for music livestreams has gone down significantly from its peak last year" - Cherie Hu looks at the (last year's) promising new live music domain. "There are two possible reasons for this stagnation. One is that music livestreams just haven’t really innovated as a format to the point where fans are continually willing to pay for them... Maybe fans are just more interested in seeing these artists perform in person".

Music technology and music industry Cherie Hu goes deeper into NFT. Her high-points:

• Musicians have sold over 55,000 total NFTs since June 2020, worth over $60 million
• Independent artists still run the show, but major artists and labels are quickly catching up
• Several technical, legal and political challenges remain to mainstream NFT adoption in the music industry

Bob Dylan has sold his entire songwriting catalogue to Universal Music for $300 million; Beach Boys sold their masters and brand to Irving Azzoff to $100 million; Taylor Swift is re-recording her older records; Round Hill has bought some Beatles The Rolling Stones, and Backstreet Boys classics for $282 million; Neil Young has sold 50 percent of his catalogue for $150 million - these are only some of the deals in the music business last year. Music business podcast Money 4 Nothing talks to Cherie Hu of Water & Music and David Turner of Penny Fractions about whether this makes any business sense, and how will it shape the future of music.

"Paid memberships - the decades-old model in which fans contribute a regular fee directly to their favourite creator or brand in exchange for exclusive content and experiences - are back in vogue in the music industry" - Cherie Hu writes in DJ Mag about the lifesaver of electronic musicians in lockdown - Patreon. In the seven years since it launched, "Patreon has facilitated total membership transactions of over $1 billion between 6 million fans and 200,000 creators, half of which launched their respective pages in the last six months. The music category has grown by 200% over the past half-year (by the number of creator pages), making music one of the top two categories on Patreon for the first time in the company’s history".

The music and technology specialist Cherie Hu discusses the very essence of gaming as a music medium: "Travis Scott’s Fortnite show and Lil Nas X’s recent Roblox show paint a picture of a world where music shifts from a static, finished product to a dynamic, immersive audiovisual system. But these in-game shows were 100% premeditated, with fans not being able to interact with the artist, or influence the content or outcome of the performance itself, aside from walking or flying around the ‘set’. This is more equivalent to an immersive movie than to an interactive game. What if you made use of gaming technology to make the experience around a given piece of music more dynamic and responsive to the ways individual players were behaving?". The essential idea.

The excellent Cherie Hu highlights three major themes not just in how big-tech music strategies are constructed, but also when and why their execution falls short. Her latest blog post:

1. The commoditization of music streaming is nothing new, but must be acknowledged in any conversation about big tech’s role in the music industry.
2. Thinking about the impact of content-driven music strategies, three interlocking parts come to mind: Licenses, ecosystems and interfaces.
3. No corporation is a monolith, but most of them are generalists

Award-winning music journalist and analyst shared some advice with Compound Writing on how to stand out, in any business really:

1. You don’t need to beat the industry titans at their own game

2. Whatever the press release says the story is probably isn't - dig deeper

3. People are drowning in information - connect the dots for them

4. Record labels make most of their money from their back catalog of classics - writers should do the same

5. Avoid the temptation to reach everybody - you win by reaching the right people

Cherie Hu, one of the biggest authorities on music technology and music industry, predicts the future of music business and technology for Beats & Bytes blog. Hu sees futuristic brain-computer interface for music consumption, and the rise of "fake" artists like algorithms, holograms, vocaloids...

Livestreaming platforms of the future need to offer these three features, Cherie Hu argues: high production quality, close intimacy or proximity with artists and fans and/or frequent and consistent output. It's kinda obvious, but Hu emphasizes that in general the future of music livestreaming platforms must match the kind of livestreaming content musicians love to make, and that their fans love to watch and are willing to pay for.

Cherie Hu has made a list of all the board members and C-Suite executives across the top three record labels (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment) and their biggest imprints, as well as the top two concert promoters (Live Nation and AEG), to see what is the percentage of Black people among them. There are 61 board members and C-Suite executives on her list. 53 of them are white, and only five of them - or 8% of the total - are Black: Jon Platt (Sony), Nadia Rawlinson (Live Nation), Maverick Carter (Live Nation), Jeffrey Harleston (Universal), and Kevin McDowell (AEG), Hu wrote on her Music & Water blog. She then expanded her scope to include President and Executive Vice President (EVP) roles and label imprints as well, and the percentage improved slightly - the total number of executives increased to 121 people. 92 of them are white, while 22 (around 18% of the total) are Black.

The great Cherie Hu has identified five major music-tech pivots happening right now that are impacting all corners of the music industry with potential for far-reaching systemic consequences:

• Digital media is becoming a core part of the fan experience, not just a means to an end
• Immersive, at-home video, not lean-back audio, is now the highest source of music consumption growth
• Artists and fans are turning to direct-to-consumer revenue models over third-party aggregation models
• Social isolation has led to a surge in demand for social music tech
• Without touring, digital scarcity could become a financial necessity for music

Cherie Hu published a well researched and highly valuable article on her Water & Music blog about music licensing in this time of mass music livestreams. The area is, as it turns out, highly unregulated, with sporadic solutions here and there - Facebook and YouTube have blanket deals for on-demand content, Twitch has "flat-fee agreements... to avoid litigation for 12 to 18 months as its business matures". Some people in the music business consider livestream-only performances to be "ephemeral" uses that don’t require sync licenses. Several publishing companies disagree. An essential read.