Music Business Roundup: Apple Music Subscribers, China’s Fight With Piracy, & More

Each week on Songwriter U, Songspace recaps the top stories in the world of music business. Here’s everything you need to know from the week ending on August 7th.

Apple Music Reaches 11 Million
According to new numbers released, Apple Music has a total of 11 million subscribers: 9 registered for their regular tier of $9.99 a month, and 2 million for the $14.99 family plan. Of course all users are still within the three month free trial, so they have not started paying for the service. The real test will be when the trial expires – how many users will convert to paying subscribers for Apple Music?
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China’s Fight With Piracy
China has started a “Sword Net 2015” campaign to combat the music piracy problems in the country. They started with a warning to all music services to have illegal music down by July 31st, then actively took down 2.2 million songs from major services. This effort will hopefully make it clear that Chinese music services need to license music legally.
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UMG Invests In Streaming
Universal Music Group announced the hiring of Jay Frank for a new role titled Senior Vice President of Global Streaming Marketing. This recently created role will be instrumental in helping all artists with getting onto playlists and demonstrates UMG’s commitment to exploring streaming. Frank owns and founded DigSin and DigMark, Nashville based marketing analytics companies.
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Beatport Can’t Pay Artists
The EDM service Beatport has reportedly not been able to pay all the rights holders that are a part of the site. The mess up is due to Beatport’s parent company SFX going through a rough process of trying to go private with a stock buy back program. Royalties due to rights holders have been “trapped” in the process.
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Spotify Artist Report
Billboard released a case study about how Spotify can significantly help an artist – specifically the cases of Hozier and Major Lazer. The article details how Spotify decided to work with each of the artists, how important data can be to provide insights, and how their Spotlight program can help give a song exposure.
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