August Industry Wrap-Up

August 29, 2019

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 your career!

Get The Skinny on YouTube’s App Analytics
This month, our friends at MusicAlly.com broke down two parallel reports on YouTube’s metrics. SensorTower covered a more broad set of analytics, noting a $138m spend within the app last quarter; App Annie focused on YouTube Music, pointing to a 170% growth in active users YoY. Read more here.

Apple Music For Artists Comes Out of Beta
As announced here on the TuneCore Blog earlier this month, Apple unleashed its platform for artists to claim their profiles on Apple Music. This feature will allow artists with active releases on the service to customize their profile and check out deeper analytics – TuneCore artists can claim their profile quickly by authenticating in their dashboard. Read more here.

Deezer Boosting Its Latin Channel With ‘Originals’
In a move to bring subscribers closer to their favorite Latin artists, streaming platform Deezer rolled out it’s new “Originals” with exclusive Spanish-language content like commentary, unreleased recordings, and curated playlists. Deezer’s “Originals” sections per genre are mini-hubs for fans to consume content. Read more here.

MediaNet Hits 80 Million Tracks
MediaNet, a platform that TuneCore artists can distribute their releases to, surpassed an 80 million-track milestone in August. Acquired by SOCAN few years ago, MediaNet powers services such as MOG by providing access and integration of their massive music catalog. Read more here.

Bandzoogle Offers Fan Subscriptions for Artists
TuneCore Artist Service-partner Bandzoogle has been helping artists create beautiful, functional websites for years. This month, they announced the addition of direct-to-fan subscriptions via your Bandzoogle website (commission-free, no less). That means letting fans pay a monthly fee for access to exclusive items, content, etc. Read more here.

Apple Music Puts Shazam To Work – In Chart-Form
This month Apple rolled out a new weekly “Top 50 Shazam Discovery” chart to showcase what songs are being ‘Shazam’d’ the most. If you’re a TuneCore Artist, you know that distributing to Shazam puts you in the position to be discovered by fans who overhear your tunes – this chart is focused on breaking emerging artists who are getting fans’ attention! Read more here.

TIDAL Announces New Social Features
As the world’s leading streaming music platforms compete to give their subscribers the ability to share music with their friends digitally, TIDAL unleashed the ability to share tracks via Instagram and Facebook Stories. Additionally, TIDAL subscribers now have the opportunity to share playable video content on Instagram Stories. Read more here.

SoundExchange Aims to Solve the Podcast-Music-Problem
From the podcast origins all the way through the sharp rise in popularity, licensing music for podcast episodes has always been a sticky situation. SoundExchange announced it will launch PodcastMusic in 2020, a service that seeks to make it easier for both artists and podcast hosts/producers to not only find the right music for their show, but also ensure that creators are fairly paid. Read more here.

Tags: apple music deezer featuring music industry news shazam tidal YouTube