“ASCAP, the global leader in performance rights royalty collections and advocacy on behalf of songwriters, composers and copyright owners, today announced strong revenues of $985 million for calendar year 2011, the second highest revenues in the organization’s history, and an increase of 5.4% over 2010. Collections from foreign countries totaled $347 million, an increase of approximately $50 million over 2010.”
“If you want to build a long-term, healthy, and profitable career in music, you have to recognize that:
You Are
Whether you’re a solo musician, side-man, singer, songwriter or aspiring Mega-Star you are at least half of what you offer your fans, customers, fellow musicians, club owners, supporters, and other people.”
“Streaming is no new thing. Napster, Rhapsody, YouTube have been with us for many years. What changed is that Spotify made it work with elegant simplicity, wrapped up in a consumer-friendly value proposition. Of course Spotify had timing on its side too, coming to market once most of us already had broadband and at a time when a rapidly growing share of us were getting smartphones with data plans. And of course timing is everything in business.”
“We hear a lot about how dramatically the music industry is changing. And indeed, there are plenty of positive trends amidst the disruption. Music creation is easier than ever. So is music discovery. Streaming services offer a new model for the consumption of music on any device, in any location. Whether from within a startup or at Music Hack Day, developers are building new things everyday that will help shape the future of music.”
“In 2010 Spotify founder Daniel Ek co-opted the analogy and has brandished it in every interview since. Aside from a few askance sentences buried in various article comment threads, I was hard pressed to find anyone else that found the concept distressing. To date, the only formal counter-argument I’ve seen published was by Andrew Dubber in 2007 (who has been fighting the good fight ever since). I would like to present another.”
“That said, radio’s digital revenues in 2011 ($709 million) accounted for just over 4% of total revenues. “While that number is growing, it’s not growing fast enough to replace ad dollars lost in the form of declining spot revenues,” writes Jennifer Lane in Audio4Cast (here). Spot revenues reportedly dropped 1% from 2010.”
“Over the last few months, the music industry has been rocked by multiple lawsuits alleging that artists such as Kenny Rogers, Sister Sledge, Rob Zombie and others have been cheated out of substantial money from the improper calculation of revenues from digital music. The plaintiffs in these cases assert that the music giants have been wrongfully treating digital music purchases as “sales” rather than “licenses,” and thus only sharing 10-20 percent of revenue instead of a near 50-50 split they believe is owed.”
“A new infographic from Gerson Lehrman Group’s GPlus.com maps out the current online music on-demand landscape from the top 10 players. You can see at a glance what the monthly fees are, whether or not you can add your own tunes to their online libraries, how many current users, whether they have mobile, Web or desktop apps and what the major features are. If you were thinking about trying one of these services, this is a handy place to start to evaluate their basics.”
“It’s such a challenge to get that fleeting hint of attention these days, you probably put most of your “marketing” focus on that aspect alone. That’s why you celebrate every small gain you make in getting Facebook fan page likes, Twitter followers, email subscribers, YouTube views, LinkedIn connections, and more.”
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