Numlock News: May 20, 2024 • Royalties, Remixes, Broadway

May 20, 2024

By Chris Dalla Riva

Today’s guest writer is Chris Dalla Riva, who writes the absolutely brilliant music and data newsletter

Musi

The music industry has a Musi problem. Musi, one of the most popular music streaming apps, has completely flown under the radar despite making over $100 million since January 2023, according to Pixelate. The problem? They don’t seem to be paying royalties to any artists, labels, publishers or songwriters. Vevo, the world’s leading music video hosting service, said that “it plans to take action against the app.”

Kate Knibbs, Wired

MusAIc

Sony Music Entertainment, one of the three major music labels, has “started sending formal letters to more than 700 generative AI companies and streaming platforms prohibiting them from mining text or data, web scraping, or otherwise using any [Sony] content without explicit licensing agreements.” This warning is meant to cover recordings, compositions, lyrics, metadata and artwork.

Angela Yang, NBC News

Music

If you bought a CD in the last year, you were in the global minority. The silvery disc that drove the industry in the 1990s only accounted for 10 percent of recorded music revenues last year. No one told the Japanese, though; the compact disc still remains remarkably popular on the archipelago. In 2023, CDs accounted for 39 percent of Japanese recorded music revenues. Streaming is finally breaking through, however. In 2019, streaming only accounted for 18 percent of revenues in Japan. Last year, that percentage doubled to 36 percent.

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

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If you’ve been on TikTok at any point in the last few years, you’ve probably heard remixes of songs that are manipulated to be faster, slllloooowwweeerrr, pitched up or pitched down. Historically, these remixes were created by fans, but labels and streaming services have begun to take notice. Audiomack, for example, recently rolled out a new tool called “Audiomod” that allows listeners to “fiddle with tracks by changing the tempo, modifying the pitch, or swaddling them in reverb.” According to Audiomack CEO Dave Macli, uploads of modified songs have more than doubled in the last four years.

Elias Leight, Billboard

Musicology

Have you sung in the shower lately? Then you’ve participated in what Charles Darwin declared the “most mysterious” ability with which humanity is endowed. Recently, a team of scientists decided to see how this mysterious vocal ability differed from speech. Using two datasets composed of hundreds of recordings in over 50 languages, they found that, compared to speech, songs have higher pitch, more stable pitch and a slower tempo.

Carl Zimmer, The New York Times

Musicians

Spotify, the music streaming behemoth that consistently draws the ire of songwriters and artists, has again drawn the ire of songwriters and artists. This time it’s because songwriter royalties are alleged to decrease $150 million next year due to Spotify’s recent audiobook bundle. Under a 2022 settlement, “music publishers and music streaming services agreed that ‘bundle’ services ... are permitted to pay a lower mechanical royalty rate to publishers and songwriters than stand-alone music subscription services.” Spotify is claiming that their audiobook offering now makes them a bundle service rather than a stand-alone music service, therefore allowing them to pay the lower mechanical royalty rate. The Mechanical Licensing Collective, the body that administers these royalties, disagrees and is suing the Swedish streaming company.

Murray Stassen, Music Business Worldwide

Musicals

The 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun purported, “There’s no business like show business.” There are less risky businesses, though. Recouping an investment on a Broadway show has always been difficult — nearly 80 percent of shows fail to do so — but that difficulty has skyrocketed because of “two formidable obstacles: costs that have nearly doubled over a decade and an audience almost 20 percent smaller than it was pre-pandemic.” Even winning a Tony doesn’t seem to help. The last two musicals to take home the Tony for Best Musical were the first two not to break even since 2002.

Boris Kachka, Vulture

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