Primary Wave Music has bought the catalog of songwriter and producer Patrick Leonard, in a “multi-million-dollar deal”, Music Business Worldwide reports. Included in that acquisition is Leonard’s share of a number of hits from Leonard Cohen such as 'You Want It Darker', 'It Seemed the Better Way', and 'If I Didn’t Have Your Love', as well as his share of songwriter royalties from his work with Madonna - 'La Isla Bonita', 'Frozen', and the classic 'Like A Prayer'. MBW also reports about the first acquisition by the Influence Media Partners - a portfolio of select copyrights from the catalog of multi-platinum songwriter Ali Tamposi: 'Havana' by Camila Cabello, 'It Ain’t Me' by Selena Gomez, Shawn Mendes' 'Señorita' with Camila Cabello, Justin Bieber' 'Let Me Love You', Beyoncé's 'Save The Hero' and others.

Apple Music has published last week that their average per play rate is $0.01, which is roughly double what Spotify pays the artists. But it's not that simple - MBW and Trapital explain Apple Music's and Spotify's models, their reach, the number of users, and how much exactly they pay to the labels (not directly to the artists, actually). Variety also points out, with word of an unnamed executive, that the best option is "a lot of users streaming a lot of music”, which would in return mean a lower per-stream rate. For example, if one artist were racking up a high percentage of streams on a less-popular streaming service, their per-stream rate would be quite high — but they’d actually have fewer streams than they would on a site with more users. Spotify has an industry-leading 155 million paying subscribers and 345 million active users, according to its most recent report, while Apple last reported more than 60 million Music subscribers in June 2019.

Songwriter of, well, the most popular pop band in the history of pop music, has some ideas for underpaid songwriters, which he shared in an op/ed in the Guardian: "Record labels could encourage a 'songwriter in residence' model, where artists are paired with songwriters at the development stage, as a long-term partnership: the writers would effectively become part of the band, paid a regular salary... I suggest that streaming services allocate their royalty payments based on the behaviour of individual listeners. The subscription should be divided by the number of songs the individual listener has played during a month".

Financial Times has shared a video about a struggling hip-hop artist Dirty Blonde trying to make it in the time of coronavirus and the domination of streaming. FT also talked to some of the world's biggest music companies, record labels, and producers, how they are adapting to this fast-changing industry.

"Big companies going forward will just be managers of catalog. I don’t see the need for a record company [beyond that] to exist... Their ownership in artists’ intellectual property will diminish" - UnitedMasters founder Steve Stoute tells MBW. Last month, his independent artist distribution platform has secured a $50 million investment by Apple, Alphabet, and Andreessen Horowitz supporting his mission to become "a full-service music company in your pocket”.

Taylor Swift released 'Fearless (Taylor's Version)', a much-anticipated re-record of her 2008 pop breakthrough album. Since 2016, Wheatus have been working on a painstaking re-record of their 2000 debut. KISS, Blondie, DMX, Frank Sinatra and many more have made re-records of their biggest hits for their hits albums. Pre-Beatles rock artists, from '57 to '63, the 90 percent majority of them must have re-recorded their hits at some point or another in the last half century - as Andy Zax, a music producer specializing in historical and archival releases, assesses. In general, NPR puts it simply, the reasons for these re-records are simple: financial control and creative ownership.

Scooter Braun has sold the entirety of his Ithaca Holdings to South Korea’s HYBE, formerly known as Big Hit Entertainment, and the home of K-pop superstar BTS. A regulatory filing in Korea shows that HYBE has agreed to pay a total of $1.05 billion for Ithaca, Music Business Worldwide reports. This deal brings together a range of services including management, label services and publishing for global artists BTS, TXT, SEVENTEEN, NU’EST, GFRIEND, ENHYPEN, ZICO, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, J Balvin, Demi Lovato, Thomas Rhett, Florida Georgia Line, Lady A and more.

Master tapes are the direct result of all those hard days, weeks, and months in the studio. They’re the fully realized artistic vision, not just notes on a page, and their mismanagement can have enormous financial consequences - Quartz writes in its breakdown of owning your master tapes.

Sony Music Publishing has bought the “complete collection” of Pual Simon’s classic songs spanning more than six decades, from his time as a member of Simon & Garfunkel, through his career as a solo artist, Forbes reports. The acquired songs include evergreen hits such as 'The Sound of Silence', 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', 'The Boxer', 'Mrs. Robinson', 'Homeward Bound', 'I Am A Rock', 'America', 'Graceland', and many others. Sony didn’t disclose the price of this deal, but it is believed than it ran into a nine-figure sum.

Streaming had the biggest impact on recorded music revenue growth last year - 62% came from streaming. Trapital emphasizes three few less discussed but interesting findings from IFPI reports. Vinyl sales grew 23.5% last year - vinyl are collectibles. It's a callback to a time when fans valued owning art. Synchronization - the use of music in media like games, TV, film, ads, podcasts, etc. - declined 9.4%, but that dip came from pandemic-related production delays. Now that vaccinations are up and production is back on, this will bounce back. South Korea's music revenue grew 44.8% last year. It's now the sixth-largest music market (behind the US, Japan, UK, Germany, and France). It's driven by K-Pop, which is driven by the world's biggest musical act of 2020, BTS.

Label and publisher BMG and investment firm KKR announced a partnership to fund acquisitions of major recorded music and publishing catalogs, establishing yet another player in the gold rush for music’s biggest song collections, Music Business Worldwide reports. KKR currently manages global assets with a combined worth over $230 billion. KKR partner Nat Zilkha tells Rolling Stone the companies are prepared to spend into the billions.

In 2019, music copyright was worth $31.6bn, up by 7%, or $2.1bn from the previous year, and the third consecutive year that the growth was more than $2bn. These record-breaking copyright valuations are due to streaming - its contribution to labels, publishers and CMOs has gone from 14% in 2015 to almost 47% in 2019. Tarzan Economics predicts that 2020 will be another record-breaking year.

An interesting statistic in the MBW about the potential to earn an average wage as a musician, as opposed to a footballer. Spotify announced this week that 13,400 artists generated over $50,000 each in royalty payouts (records plus publishing) from their platform in 2020. There are now somewhere around 7 million artists with their music on Spotify, which means just 0.2% of artists on Spotify are generating $50k per year (median annual US wage). On the other side, there are around 320 million footballers today, and, by FIFA numbers, 128,983 of them actually get paid (something) to play, which is 0.04% of them.

"Over more than 40 years I've never had anyone say to me, 'I sure am glad I sold my publishing when I did. It was the best thing I ever did'. But I couldn't begin to estimate the number of times that folks like Tom Petty, Paul McCartney, Steve Lukather, Tom Johnston, Roger McGuinn, George Harrison and Donald Fagen have told me that selling their songwriting catalogs was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made" - Randall Wixen of the Wixen Music Publishing wrote in Billboard about a recent surge of sales/purchases of publishing rights by Hipgnosis, Universal etc. So, why are they selling? - "writers' representatives have seen the money they make plummet over the past few years (especially if COVID-19 or an artists' age interrupted touring plans) and hope to make some nice fees for 'helping' them sell their songs. A lot of the encouragement to sell (and make money off of the sale) begins with the assertion to songwriters that 'folks are offering insane amounts for catalogs' and 'you should sell ASAP because Biden might raise the capital gains tax'".

A very interesting theory in The Baffler about Hipgnosis and similar investment funds which buy rights to old hit songs, and make cash from those songs being played or remade. "This puts them in a curious position with regard to 'new music', which they must perforce view with a combination of avarice, suspicion, and fear. Every original song that gains cultural traction drains potential listeners—and therefore revenue—away from the Hipgnosis portfolio, diluting the value of their assets... In their ideal world, therefore, there are no original songs, no fresh styles or hybrid genres—nothing, in short, which might lure listeners away from the necrotic embrace of 'Can’t Touch This'”.

Spotify has launched a new website – Loud & Clear – with plenty of information about money generated on the streaming platform. In 2020, some 13,400 acts generated total payments in excess of $50,000 around the world, double the number of artists who generated over $50k in payments from Spotify in 2017 (7,300). Also, L&C shows that 7,800 artists generated $100k-plus in 2020, the $500k-plus-per-year club counted 1,820 artists in 2020, and the $1 million-plus-per-year club counted 870 artists in 2020. Generated is important here - it's the amount made by the artist's music, and that amount is being split by the artist and the publisher, with the big chunk (85% or so) going to the publisher. As of 2020, Spotify has paid over $23 billion in royalties to rights holders — including over $5 billion in 2020 alone, up from $3.3 billion in 2017.

"We’ve sold six million albums for Epic Records, and they’ve made $50 million... We haven’t made any money off of record sales, album sales. It’s all gone to the major labels" - Chevelle's frontman Pete Loeffler said, adding "we just don’t make money the way the deals are structured". He explained that "contracts are a bitch, and we’ve signed some raw ones. And we need to start trying to make some money off of our catalog, which is 10 albums deep, plus all the side stuff", according to Blabbermouth. Chevelle have a new album 'Niratias' ('Nothing Is Real And This Is A Simulation') out.

"Twitter shaman Jack Dorsey’s recent acquisition of Jay-Z’s streaming service, Tidal, by his company, Square points to something that is bubbling up in the business right now that is still early, but ultimately will build into a huge, new movement of massively monetizing direct artist-fan connection and engagement" - Peter Csathy writes in his CoS editorial, adding - "Just think of the virtual/tangible 'combo package' possibilities – where passionate superfans happily pay premium prices to support and get ever-closer to the artists they love in all modes of engagement".

Fast Company chooses 10 companies that are changing the face of the music industry. They are: Neon16 - a talent incubator and music label for Latin music, BeatStars - an online marketplace for producers to sell their beats to artists, Royalty Exchange - a marketplace allowing artists who are earning royalties to sell them to investors during online auctions, Audiomack - a music streaming and discovering platform aiming at Africa, Stem - a music distribution platform making it easier to artists, as well as Verzuz, Parkwood Entertainment, Harmonix, Bandcamp, and Dolby.

Germany’s revenues from physical music sales and streaming grew 9% year-on-year to €1.79 billion in 2020, Music Business Worldwide reports. A good portion of 71.5% of revenues came from digital music, growing 24.6% in a year, from €1.13bn to €1.27bn. CD sales in the market fell 18% YoY, remaining the second-strongest format in the German recorded market with a 21.6% share of sales in 2020. totalling €387m. Vinyl revenues grew 24.7% YoY to €99m, and had an overall market share of 5.5%.

David Crosby has sold all of his music - his solo work, his work with the Byrds, Crosby & Nash, CSN, and CSNY - to famed music executive Irving Azoff’s new venture Iconic Artists Group, Pollstar reports. It includes the recorded music and publishing rights to his entire music catalog. “Given our current inability to work live, this deal is a blessing for me and my family and I do believe these are the best people to do it with” - Crosby said.

SoundCloud is introducing what it calls “fan-powered royalties” – its own branding of the user-centric royalties model – which it says will mean each SoundCloud listener’s subscription or advertising revenue is distributed among the artists that they listen to, rather than their plays being pooled, MBW reports. “Fan-powered” royalties will launch on SoundCloud on April 1, the platform suggests the move will “benefit rising independent artists with loyal fans”, and cites two independent artists currently operating on SoundCloud – Chevy and Vincent. Chevy currently has 12,700 followers on SoundCloud, Vincent has 124,000. By switching these artists to a “fan powered” model and away from ‘pro rata’, based on their recent playcounts on SoundCloud, the service estimates that Chevy’s monthly royalties will grow 217%, while Vincent’s will multiply by five, up from $120 to $600. Fingers crossed!

Spotify CEO and cofounder Daniel Ek said the company paid out $5 billion in royalties in 2020, Spotify reports. Chief content officer Dawn Ostroff announced that over the last four years, the number of recording artists whose catalogs generated more than $1 million a year across recording and publishing is up over 82% to more than 800 artists (the majority of money is still going to the labels), and the number generating more than $100,000 a year is up 79% to more than 7,500 artists. Spotify this week also announced that it will be introducing a hi-fi option later this year.

Daft Punk’s catalog brought in $6.4 million in revenue annually over the last four years, which would make $1.883 million in artist royalties for the band, according to Billboard estimates. Parisian duo's catalog averaged around 317,000 album consumption units a year; also their last tour of 2007 has made them $20-40 million. Billboard also makes interesting estimates on possible earnings: a two-weekend headliner set at Coachella would have easily netted them $12 million minus costs, while at least 10 other major global festivals would have likely paid $5 million to $6 million per set. Pairing those festival appearances with a select stadium tour could have grossed the duo $3 million a night allowing them to surpass the $100 million mark by playing 35 to 40 shows in a single year.

Across the course of this year, approximately 22 million tracks will be added to Spotify’s catalog, which is approximately 60,000 tracks per day, meaning a new track is uploaded to its platform every 1.4 seconds, Music Business Worldwide reports. Spotify confirmed in November last year that its platform played host to around 70 million tracks.

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.

The use of Splice, a highly rated app for mobile video editing, has boomed during the pandemic, as people stuck at home experimented with making their own tracks, Bloomberg reports. The company specializes in royalty-free samples, which allow people to use drum sounds or flutes from a large library for a monthly fee. The company has just raised an additional $55 million from investors, raising the value of the company at close to $500 million.

Spotify is expanding into over 80 new markets in more than 36 new languages – including key territories across Africa such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, Spotify reports. Together, these 80 markets house more than a billion people with nearly half of them already using the internet. The vast expansion over the coming days means that Spotify will be active in more than 173 markets.

Billboard examines the financial side of Morgan Wallen's scandal, estimating that Wallen's label, Big Loud, is currently making more than $1.5 million a week from sales and streaming of his album 'Dangerous'. This record has been the #1 album in the US for five weeks, two of those weeks coming after his racial slur. Officially, Big Loud has suspended Wallen, but his fans are coming to his defense, so the sales of that double album have gone up. Country star Maren Morris sums it up pretty good: "I think that your fans are a reflection of you and what you’re about. And you can’t control a human being, but you absolutely can let them know where you stand", meaning it's a change that'll take time.

Music mogul Irving Azoff has acquired a majority interest in Beach Boys' music, their master recordings, a portion of their publishing, the Beach Boys brand, memorabilia, an archive of photos, videos and interviews, for an estimated $100 million to $200 million, Rolling Stone reports. Azoff, manager of the Eagles and Jon Bon Jovi, takes control over everything from Beach Boys' social-media accounts to their names, likenesses, and life stories. Azoff's company Iconic will be overseeing Beach Boys their work even after the remaining members die.