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!
Russian Music Fans Continue to Adopt Streaming
Yandex, a TuneCore digital partner, announced that it doubled its paying subscribers over the past year. Now up to 2 million, Yandex has subscribers from Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, Belarus and more. Read more here.
‘You Down With CPP?’
Chartmetric unleashed a new measurement to track artists’ success across music streaming platforms, social media channels and sites like WIkipedia called ‘Cross-Platform Performance’ (CPP). The goal of the analytics platform’s new metric is to not just focus on revenue, but also growth in following and activity among fans online, to measure audience size. Read more here
From MIDEM: Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube As the “New Record Labels”
MusicAlly provided a great rundown of a panel that featured Believe Digital’s own Marie-Anne Robert, covering the parallel states of record labels and major streaming platforms. Any independent artist distributing these days should have a read! Read more here
Instagram Adds Lyrics Feature To Stories
As reported here on the TuneCore Blog in June, Instagram unrolled a new feature allowing fans and artists alike to share lyrics alongside the songs they highlight in their Stories. Stories have continued to be a powerful way to promote and connect with fans, and are also proving to be a great music discovery-driver. Read more here.
Finally: Music Consumption Data on YouTube
Analytics firm Pex released a lengthy study that breaks down who was watching what on YouTube in the past year. We’ve got good news for those artists who are working on their YouTube strategies: representing only 5% of the total video content on YouTube, music accounts for 20% of all views! Read more here.
Riding the Stream Into 2030 – All the Way To the Bank
One of the biggest names in, well, money, Goldman Sachs predicts a rise in streaming revenue all the way to $37.2 billion by 2030. That’s a pretty significant jump from their 2017 metric of $28 billion by the same year, but with an envisioned 690 million paid streamers by 2023, we’ve come a long way in how and how much artists are getting paid. Read more here
YouTube Announces More Control over “Up Next” Feature
Algorithms can make a big difference in how fans discover your music – this, we know. What gets recommended “Up Next” on YouTube matters, and this month the video streaming giant announced that they’re doing more to put users in the driver’s seat. This could spell benefits for artists who, as we mentioned above, are looking to get more out of YouTube in terms of discovery and promotion. Read more here.
“Fans Also Like” Feature on Spotify Explored
Speaking of algorithms, if you were ever wondering how Spotify’s “Fans Also Like” feature works, they put out a blog article in June all about it! “Fans Also Like” can send music fans down some serious rabbit holes, and it stands to benefit independent artists who are looking to capitalize on the discovery-friendly feature. Read more here.
Tags: CPP featuring industry music streaming tech yandex YouTube