"Indie artists like Roc Marciano, R.A.P. Ferreira, and more have incorporated DSP-sidestepping, direct-to-consumer models for years. But now, some mainstream artists like Kanye West, who is selling 'Donda 2' on his $200 Stem Player, are divesting from DSPs, and the reaction to it has been a mixed bag" - Complex goes on to question the motives of artists pulling their music from the big three streaming platforms.

Music piracy declined consistently year-on-year from January 2017 - there was a 65% decrease in music-related piracy visits globally in 2021 compared to 2017. Then, last year, a change - there was a 2.18% increase in 2021 compared to 2020, and an 18.6% increase in Q4 2021 compared to Q4 2020. MBW looks for reasons. The No.1 online destination for music piracy is so called ‘stream-ripping’ websites, which allow users to rip and download audio from YouTube, and which accounted for 39.2% of all music piracy globally in 2021, up from 33.9% in 2020.

Major music streamers Spotify, Amazon, and Pandora have filed to the US Copyright Royalty Board recommending a significant reduction in royalty rates over the 2018–2022 period. The three platforms have proposed lowering the rate to pre-2008 levels, with headline rates close to 10.5%. Consequence reports on the sensitive issue.

"In the digital era, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we have long had physical relationships with the pieces of culture we consume. The way we interact with something — where we store it — also changes the way we consume it, as Spotify’s update made me realize. Where we store something can even outweigh the way we consume it" - Kyle Chayka writes in an essay about the meaning of collections in a time of digital music. "While we have the advantage of freedom of choice, the endless array of options often instills a sense of meaninglessness: I could be listening to anything, so why should any one thing be important to me?".

Music Business Worldwide does a great job analysing the UK government's inaction about the payment for music streaming issues. In July, the UK parliament's Department of Culture, Media & Sport Committee published a report which called for government action on a number of music industry issues regarding streaming payouts. The standout recommendation from the DCMS report was that the majors’ dominance of the UK record industry be referred to the UK’s competition watchdog – the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA). The UK government response was less than lame - it has declined to announce any legislative measures, and has also not officially referred the issue of major label-dominance to the CMA.

Anghami is a music streaming service based in the Middle East, namely Abu Dhabi, serving mostly the Middle East. "It has 70 million registered users and nearly 60 million songs in its library. It’s also set to be the first Arab tech startup to go public on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange. Anghami’s trajectory has also been something of a case study in how the global music industry is being slowly transformed from outside its core centers of New York, Los Angeles, and London". Rest of the World brings the whole story.

Streaming gives the artists an opportunity to break out from obscurity, but makes it exponentially more difficult to have a follow-up hit. That’s because like so many other viral hits, the song, not the artist, became the asset - Vox writer Charlie Harding says in an interesting essay about the artist and the album in the age of never-ending flow of music. “Streaming is a great way to make an artist faceless” - says Lucas Keller, the CEO of the entertainment management company Milk & Honey, who adds - “the song becomes bigger than the artist”. Emily Warren, who has written hits for Dua Lipa and the Chainsmokers among many others, said that she knows songwriters with hundreds of millions of streams and Grammy nominations who still drive Uber for a living. But she says that a songwriter with just two big radio hits is set up to retire.

Streaming music services Apple Music and Amazon Music are upping their audio game with their various versions of High-Res Audio, and Global News argues, however, this is not all good news. A critical listen will reveal that the vocals get lost in the mix, reducing the singer to just another part of the song, fighting for attention with all the instrumentation. How many people will even notice the better audio since the last couple of generations of music fans were brought up on MP3s, often heard over boomy headphones, cheap earbuds, or laptop speakers. Also, fans won’t hear anything with wireless headphones since the signal requires more bandwidth than Bluetooth can provide, and iPhones and a few other Android units don’t come with headphone jacks anymore.

The World Intellectual Property Organization, a United Nations agency tasked with the protection and promotion of intellectual property, issued a lengthy report Artists in the Digital Music Marketplace, where its authors Chris Castle and Claudio Feijoo took a clear stand: "Why does everyone in the streaming economy seem to be prospering except performers whose work drives it all?". The report recommends a new streaming music royalty that would be paid directly to "performers (and potentially to producers)" without going through labels or publishers.

Universal Music Group’s total revenues hit $2.20 billion in Q1, up 9.4% year-on-year. MBW does a breakdown of that number - $2.20bn quarterly turnover was equivalent to $24.5m a day, or $1m an hour. The star of the period, expectedly, was streaming - it generated $1.23bn, up 19.6% year-on-year.