Music Business Worldwide Music Business Worldwide

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide Podcast supported by Voly Music. 

On this episode, MBW founder Tim Ingham speaks to Ola Sars, founder and CEO of Soundtrack Your Brand.

A graduate of Harvard Business School, Sars went on to become the co-founder and COO of Beats Music – the music subscription streaming service, associated with Beats By Dre headphones, that would become Apple Music.
 
In 2013, Sars launched Soundtrack Your Brand (then called Spotify For Business) as a JV with Spotify. The premise is simple: a music streaming service specifically made for businesses – whether multi-nationals or mom'n'pop shops.

In 2018, Sars spun the company out of that ownership structure as the independent Soundtrack Your Brand (although Spotify remains a minority investor today).

One of his key arguments: any business playing music from an individual's Spotify account is breaking the terms and conditions of their agreement with the service.  

Said businesses, according to Sars, should be paying a premium monthly fee for a streaming service that clears them to play music for their customers (and which, ideally, also recommends music designed to draw more purchase activity from consumers).

Sars calculates there are 100 million different types of public-facing businesses globally that are a target market for this kind of B2B music streaming service.

Between them, he says, they could bring in an additional $40 billion of revenue into the music industry. 

Right now, Sars is some way from that kind of target: In 2022, Soundtrack Your Brand turned over 214 million SEK, which works out at just over $20 million US dollars. 

However, that revenue wasn’t far away from doubling year-on-year – up 61% on 2021. 

As you read this, Soundtrack Your Brand has just over 54,000 paying monthly subscribers globally.

Sars says there's much more to come...
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends 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.

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As the years tick by, more and more DIY artists will earn a liveable chunk of annual cash from Spotify.
That's an inevitability, right? Wrong.

In 2022, according to Spotify's own figures, the number of DIY/self-releasing artists who generated over USD $10,000 in royalties on the platform annually – from both recorded music and music publishing combined – actually fell year-on-year.

That fact is revealed (and chewed over) in the latest episode of Music Business Worldwide's Talking Trends podcast, presented by MBW founder, Tim Ingham.

Ingham explains that, according to Spotify's Loud & Clear data, just over 14,700 DIY artists generated more than $10k on Spotify in 2022.

That figure was down on the number of DIY artists who managed to do the same thing in 2021... despite the total number of artists (i.e. DIY plus non-DIY acts) who annually generated more than $10k on Spotify growing last year.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends 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.

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Why is Spotify pursuing a new design that borrows heavily from time-sucking short-form video services like TikTok?

That's the question on the mind of Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, on the latest Talking Trends podcast.

As Ingham explains, Spotify's motivations for its much-debated new home feed (as well as its new AI-powered DJ) aren't likely to lie solely in its aid of artists.

Instead, he suggests, Spotify has made the move because it knows the power of its key USP in the view of investors – algorithmic recommendation – has been deteriorating.
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 Ed Newton-Rex, VP of Audio at Stability AI – and one of the world's foremost experts on generative AI in the field of music. 

An entrepreneur and inventor, Newton-Rex built the pioneering AI-driven music-making platform Jukedeck, before selling it to TikTok in 2019. 

He then went on to work at TikTok as Product Director of the company's AI Lab – as TikTok looked to build on Jukedeck's impressive song-forming technology. 
 
Newton-Rex left TikTok in 2021 to join music startup Voisey, which was subsequently sold to Snap Inc (parent of Snapchat).

These days, Newton-Rex is VP of Audio at Stability AI, which is best known as the home of AI-powered text-to-image creator Stable Diffusion.
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...
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Hello and welcome to the first episode of 2023 of Talking Trends – a podcast from Music Business Worldwide, supported by Voly Music. 

As ever on Talking Trends, we'll be diving behind a major entertainment industry headline to explain what’s really going on.
It’s a new year, which means a bucketful of music biz statistics about the prior 12 months – in this case 2022 – are tumbling out of trade bodies in all major markets.
The data Ingham focuses on here has just been published by the UK’s Entertainment Retailers’ Association, which both monitors the commercial entertainment market in Britain, and represents companies like Spotify, YouTube, Deezer and Amazon.
The latest batch show a dramatic slowdown in the annual growth in money being spent on music streaming subscriptions in 2022.

They suggest 'peak streaming' may be coming to the UK sooner rather than later – and seem to accentuate the need for streaming price rises (especially from Spotify) to keep growth at healthy levels in the years ahead.
The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.