By Kevin Cornell
Another month is coming to a close, and TuneCore is here to fill all you independent artists in on some of the headlines you may have missed.
Whether it’s music streaming, publishing, product updates, studies and reports, or op-eds, we’re rounding up some music industry must-reads for all of you looking to stay in touch with the business and advance a career!
Industry Bodies Launch “50 States of Music” Site
A2iM, ASCAP, BMI, RIAA and SoundExchange came together this month to provide a new, interactive website that dives into the music industry economy by way of jobs, royalties, artists/songwriters, events and schools that exist in each of the United States. Not only a fascinating look at the U.S. music industry overall, 50StatesOfMusic.com also provides visitors with a ton of resources for artists seeking to get into new territories. Read more here.
Apple’s Quarterly Results Show Increasing Support from Subscriptions
390 million. That’s the number of paid subscribers paying monthly for Apple services such as Apple Music, resulting in $11.5bn last quarter. Their last reported Apple Music subscriber in the beginning of this year was 50 million; however the tech giant jumped up 120 million overall service subscribers over the course of a year. Read more here.
What is ‘Playlist Stuffing’ and Why Does It Matter?
Last month blogger and music executive Kieron Donoghue did some digging on what’s known as ‘playlist stuffing’ – aka jamming a playlist with short songs that can qualify as a stream/earn a payment after 30 seconds for maximum revenue in a short amount of time – and the trends he is seeing on streaming platforms. Read more here.
Move Over Billboard … Rolling Stone to Launch U.S. Charts
Rolling Stone announced in May that it’d be launching its own version of those charts made famous by Billboard. Though the data sets will be different: Rolling Stone’s charts intend to capture a daily glimpse of what folks are listening to primarily in the streaming realm. How long this will take to roll out has not been determined, but it will be interesting to see how it intends to showcase artists across genres and career level. Read more here.
ASCAP Pays Out a Record $1.1bn to Rights Holders in 2018
Dropping its annual report in May, U.S. performance rights organization ASCAP announced a 10% year over year in payments, totalling $1.1bn paid out to rightsholders signed up with the society. Good news for any songwriter, as ASCAP highlights the help of licensing agreements for its clients across streaming platforms, TV, and social media channels. Read more here.
YouTube Introduces Discovery Ads and ‘Bumper Machine’
In an effort to give creators more new solutions to market across their platform, YouTube rolled out two new features within Google Marketing Live: Discovery Ads and something called Bumper Machine. The latter will help channel owners and creators to create six-second videos from longer from video files. This may be a major opportunity to market across an already extremely popular platform for artists. Read more here.
Changes in Facebook’s Newsfeed Algorithm – Get Up to Speed
As an independent artist, Facebook can be a majorly important platform for marketing your latest releases and videos, engaging with fans, building a brand, and getting the word out about events. This month, Facebook made an announcement about the ways it defines a post as ‘relevant’ to users – give it a look over to make sure your social strategy as an artist is working in accord with this. Read more here.
MusicAlly’s Coverage of The Great Escape: Music Marketing in 2019
Our friends over at MusicAlly had a great mid-month feature on their time at panels during the UK’s Great Escape conference. While TuneCore and Believe were on the ground, we thought MusicAlly’s coverage was worth sharing, as it offers relevant discussions around content creation for artists, playlisting, social media, and more. Read more here.