"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".

Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Pandora and 15 other digital service providers paid out a total of $424.38 million to the Mechanical Licensing Collective in accrued historical unmatched royalties, Forbes reports. It's 10 years of royalties DSPs have collected but couldn't match countless songs to their writers and publishers, so they just - sat on that half a billion dollars. In addition to their payments, the DSPs also delivered more than 1,800 data files, which contain in excess of 1.3 terabytes and 9 billion lines of data. The MLC is now reviewing and analyzing the data in order to find and pay the proper copyright owners.

DaBaby shared some family clips on his social media unveling how he charged $5,000 for a feature in January 2019. In the meantime, his price went up 40 times over - "From 5k a verse to 300k", XXL reports.

The US music industry revenue grew to $113 billion in 2018 and generated an additional 50 cents of revenue on every dollar earned for adjacent industries such as tourism, hospitality and marketing, which means it contributed a total of $170 billion to the economy, Billboard reports. Of the total sum, employee earnings were over $88 billion.

Sony Music acquired Kobalt’s indie distributor AWAL and its rights business for $430 million, continuing a trend of major labels acquiring the companies built to disrupt them (AWAL, ironically, stands for Artists Without A Label). Music analyst Bob Lefsetz says "this is a bad sign for artists. The more power major labels get, the worse it is for them... But now the people who left major label distribution to go to AWAL…are back where they started, and there’s no viable alternative. Never ever forget that distribution is king". Billboard naturally approves the acquisition.

The newly-established UK fund Round Hill has just acquired over 18,000 songs from another Round Hill-managed fund, for $282m, and it now owns Beatles classics ('She Loves You', 'I Saw Here Standing There'), plus songs recorded by The Rolling Stones, Backstreet Boys, Otis Redding, Britney Spears, John Lee Hooker, Marvin Gaye, Martha & The Vandellas, and The Supremes. Next up for Round Hill’s UK-listed fund is the acquisition of a 29% stake in the 100,000 copyrights previously owned by music publisher Carlin, which includes classic songs recorded by artists such as Elvis Presley, Meatloaf, James Brown, and Billie Holiday, for an estimated $81m, Music Business Worldwide reports.

Spotify’s pre-tax loss in 2020 weighed in at €709m, five times the equivalent loss seen at the company in the prior year, Music Business Worldwide reports on the financial year of the biggest music streaming service. Other infos are much better - share price surged from $152.50 on January 3 to $341.66 on December 31, up 106%. Spotify's revenues grew 93% from 2017 (€4.09bn) to 2020 (€7.88bn). Spotify’s Sales & Marketing expenditure bounded up in 2020 - it jumped a full 25% to surpass a billion euros (€1.03bn) for the first time ever, doubling in the three years from 2017 to 2020.

Primary Wave publishing and talent management company has bought the iconic Sun Records label, including its 6,000 song masters with such classic recordings as Carl Perkins 'Blue Suede Shoes', Jerry Lee Lewis’ 'Great Balls of Fire', Johnny Cash’s 'I Walk The Line', Roy Orbison’s 'Ooby Dooby' and Billy Lee Riley’s 'Red Hot' among them. Primary Wave paid about $30 million, according to The New York Times.

Decades before Merch Mercuriadis's Hipgnosis Fund started spending billions of dollars on famous artists' catalogs, David Bowie did a similar thing. In 1997 he sold 10-year-security on his entire catalog for $55 million to Prudential Insurance at a fixed interest rate, backed by the royalties from his pre-1990 master recordings and publishing. In essence, he gave up a decade's worth of royalties on 'Heroes', 'Life on Mars', and everything else in exchange for an immediate payout, MusicREDEF reminded us and started a thread about it. Last 12 months Bob Dylan, Shakira, Imagine Dragons and many others did a similar thing - it's a lasting deal, not just 10 years.

Neil Young has sold 50 percent of the worldwide copyright and income interests in his 1,180 song catalogue to the U.K. investment firm Hipgnosis Songs, Variety reports. This deal includes both 50% of the publisher's share and 50% of the writer’s share in Young’s music, spanning his work with Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Crazy Horse, in addition to the singer/songwriter’s full solo catalog. Industry experts Music Business Worldwide consulted suggest that the deal would have cost Hipgnosis in the region of $150m. Hipgnosis's Merck Mercuriadis told Rolling Stone "there will never be a ‘Burger of Gold’", since Young has never licensed his music for commercials.

An interesting webinar 'Why Artists Are Selling Their Music Catalogs' about reasons why so many artists sold their catalogs in 2020, the companies that want them, and where this trend is heading. Two main reasons for artists - loss of income due to the pandemic, and lower taxes in the US (which will probably be raised soon).

Music REDEF's chief Jason Hirschhorn tweeted a thread of music business documentaries, including docs about the Rolling Stones, Bad Boy Records, Clive Davis, David Geffen etc.

Warner Music Group has signed a deal with TikTok that will boost its fees for song rights and increase collaboration with the popular social-media app, Bloomberg reports. In the past year alone, major music companies have signed licensing agreements with Facebook, TikTok and Snap, creating a new, billion-dollar business. Warner alone now generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year from such deals, YouTube paid the music industry more than $3 billion in 2019, Facebook paid the music industry more than $600 million a year since 2017, and TikTok now is expected to be a big spender as one of the most popular apps in the world, boasting more than 600 million users.

Reddit has acquired short video platform Dubsmash, one of TikTok’s biggest rivals, which has however struggled for several years after a brief stint of popularity in 2015 during its first incarnation as a lip-sync video app. In 2017 it began transforming itself into a social platform and moved its headquarters from Berlin to Brooklyn. By the beginning of this year, Dubsmash’s share of the United States’ short-form video market was second only to TikTok when counted by app installs. While many of TikTok’s highest-profile stars are white, Dubsmash is known for its large communities of Black and Latinx content creators, TechCrunch reports.

Big music companies are trying to make money on old hits, engineering them to become viral TikToks, Vice argues, suggesting we are going to see more of that. New York Times reporter wrote that some record companies have been paying influencers to feature music from their back catalog, also looking for that Fleetwood Mac effect.

Bob Dylan has sold his entire songwriting catalogue to Universal Music for $300 million, according to the New York Times. The deal gives Universal the ownership of over 600 Dylan's songs spanning a period of almost six decades, starting with early classics such as ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, all the way through to 2020’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’. The deal means that Universal now controls one of the most celebrated back catalogues in history, and does not have to share future revenues with any other songwriters.Let's hope

China’s two biggest streaming platform operators, Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) and NetEase Cloud Music, are battling for the DIY artist market. According to Music Business Worldwide, Tencent Music had paid 590 million yuan (over $84m) to date to indie artists using its ‘Tencent Musician’ program, as well as offered services such as music publishing, marketing, copyright management and professional training. Tencent's biggest rival in China, NetEase Cloud Music was, in October 2020, home to music from over 200,000 Chinese independent musicians – representing 100% year-on-year growth in volume terms. In similar news, several streaming platforms under the umbrella of Tencent - QQ Music, Kugou, and Kuwo, as well as WeSing, a karaoke application - are offering micropayments from fans to artists, which make a big difference; top creators on WeSing pocket more than $7,000 per month in tips alone, Slate reports.

SoundCloud has achieved its first ever profitable quarter in Q3 this year, Music Business Worldwide reports. Also, SoundCloud posted €147.6 million in revenues in calendar 2019, up 37% year-over-year, which made for annual operating losses in 2019 narrowing significantly - down 28% to €23.8m from €32.9m in 2018. Some more good news - Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music currently have circa 70 million tracks on each of their platforms, SoundCloud now plays host to over 250 million tracks.

Music creators in the UK will lose 65% of their income in 2020 due to Covid-19, according to the new annual Music By Numbers report by UK Music. The effective shutdown of concerts and festivals will also cause live music revenues to fall by 85% this year. UK music industry contributed £5.8 billion to the UK economy in 2019, and employment in the industry hit an all-time high of 197,168, NME reports.

YouTube has just announced its milestone of reaching two billion music users on the platform, MusicAlly reports. In mid-2018 YouTube had one billion users, by the end of 2019 the number rose to 1,2 billion, and in the year of the lockdown it climbed sharply to today's two billion. Speaking in terms of money, Google is now the second largest global payer of music royalties, with $5.2 billion across free and paid as well as masters and publishing (Spotify takes the top spot). In 2019, YouTube generated $15.2 billion in ad revenue with $4 billion of that music related.

The European music sector supports two million jobs and contributes €81.9 billion gross value added annually to the GDPs of the 27 European Union member countries and the U.K., a new Oxford Economics study has found. It also found that the music sector exported €9.7 billion worth of goods and services to countries outside the EU and the U.K., Variety reports. Music sector generated €31 billion in tax receipts in the EU and U.K. in 2018, which is 19.4% of the entire EU budget in the same year.

Investment fund Shamrock Holdings has purchased the rights to Taylor Swift's first six albums from Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, marking the second time in 17 months that ownership over her early recordings has changed hands, Variety reports. The deal of record label Big Machine's resale is thought to be worth somewhere in the region of $300-$400 million. Shamrock Capital, which now owns Swift's first six albums, is a private equity firm originally set up by the Disney family. Swift isn't happy with this deal either, since Scooter Braun will maintain some control of her recordings. Swift signed a deal with Big Machine in 2004 granting them ownership of the master recordings to her first six albums in exchange for a cash advance to kick-start her career. Ownership of masters means the owner controls what can be done with the original recording of a song or album, from re-releases and box sets to making it available for use in an advert or on a streaming platform. Swift, as the writer or co-writer of her music, still owns the publishing rights, which means she has the power to veto some of the owner's attempts to exploit her recordings.

Almost all record labels producing classical music CDs today require artists to pay them, as companies are unlikely to earn enough profit on sales to cover their costs - Van magazine reports on the shift of responsibility. Big artists also don't get their CDs for free anymore. Costs range from about $6,000 to release with a small label, to up to $70,000 for a recording with a major label. Artists still want their music on a CD, for applications, networking, press, and to record their careers...

A great profile in the LA Times on Irving Azoff, the most powerful manager in music - getting inducted in Hall of Fame today - manager to The Eagles, Bon Jovi, Lizzo, Roddy Ricch and many others. Azoff started in 1970s, and says there wasn't really that much competition - "I never felt the music business was that competitive. It’s just not that f—ing hard. I don’t think there’s that many smart people in our business”. He still manages artists, although it's not about the money, as the singer-songwriter and Azoff client J.D. Souther famously put it - “Irving’s 15% of everybody turned out to be more than everyone’s 85% of themselves”.

Hipgnosis Songs has acquired more than 33,000 songs from Kobalt Music Copyrights S.à.r.l. for $322.9 million, including songs from 1,500 songwriters, Music Business Worldwide reports. The catalog includes hits such as Fleetwood Mac’s 'Go Your Own Way' and 'The Chain', 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' and 'One Sweet Day' by Mariah Carey, 'Bailando' and 'Hero' by Enrique Iglesias, 'Higher Love' by Steve Winwood, 'Roar' and 'Teenage Dream' by Katy Perry, 'Halo' by Beyoncé, 'Love Shack' by the B-52s, 'In Da Club' by 50 Cent, 'Sorry' by Justin Bieber, 'Let It Go' from Disney’s 'Frozen' soundtrack and thousands more. Hipgnosis Songs Fund Limited total portfolio now comprises 117 catalogs and 57,000 Songs, with an aggregate acquisition value of £1.18 billion ($1.525 billion).

Spotify has announced a new feature through which artists, labels and rights holders can promote specific songs within the service's autoplay and Radio algorithms, The Verge reports. This visibility boost will be available at the cost of lower royalty payouts. Spotify hasn't yet announced how much lower.

A very useful article by Henry Prince about monetisation features at the biggest platforms for artists and managers turning to live-streaming. The article provides artists with a beginner’s guide to ways of making money from live streaming at Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter...

The proportion of black, Asian and minority ethnic staff in the music industry in the UK has risen from 15.6% in 2016 to 22.3% this year, according to trade body UK Music. But, there are bigger differences when it comes to pay - among those earning more than £100,000 per year, just 27% were women and 12.2% were not white. In low-paid jobs - where salaries are less than £15,000 - the figures were 59.4% and 33.6% respectively. Overall, female representation was at 49.6% in 2020 - roughly the same as in 2016, Independent reports.

Over 6,000 musicians, producers, road crew, and other industry workers had signed an online petition demanding a penny per stream royalty from Spotify, which is about triple what Spotify is currently paying. It might, however, be too much for the Swedish streaming company - "If Spotify's model can’t pay artists fairly, it shouldn’t exist", Union of Musician and Allied Workers says, according to CoS.

The UK government is to launch an investigation on whether the artists are paid fairly by streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, BBC reports. Music streaming in the UK brings in more than £1bn a year in revenue, however, artists can be paid as little as 13% of the income generated. Spotify is thought to pay between £0.002 and £0.0038 per stream, Apple Music pays about £0.0059, with YouTube paying the least - about £0.00052 per stream.