Music Business Roundup: SoundExchange Payouts, YouTube Music Key, and 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 January 30th.

SoundExchange Payouts
Last year was a record year for royalty payouts for SoundExchange, as they paid $773 million in total. The payouts from the company, which pays artists and labels performance royalties from internet and satellite streaming, are catching up to those of ASCAP and BMI which handle the songwriting performance royalties.
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YouTube Music Key Followup
Last week we told you about Zoe Keating’s debate with YouTube’s Music Key. It now appears the terms are at least somewhat clearer, stating that Keating can choose to keep her music off the service and still keep her original Content ID account, and she can also choose to have exclusive contracts with other companies like Bandcamp – two points that were not made clear to Keating originally.
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Tom Petty & Sam Smith
A very popular news story this week focused on Tom Petty and bandmate Jeff Lynne suddenly getting songwriting credit on Sam Smith’s hit “Stay With Me” due to its similarity with “I Won’t Back Down.” Petty cleared up the concern in a statement, saying he has no idea how the press got word of the issue and that the word ‘lawsuit’ was never even considered since it was just a simple ‘musical accident.’
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Jay Z Getting Into Streaming
Hoping to get into the music streaming market, Jay Z has put in a bid to purchase Aspiro, a company that owns TIDAL (specializes in high quality audio streaming) and WiMP (a Spotify competitor with 500K subscribers vs. Spotify’s 15 million). The sale for $56.2 million will go through pending shareholder approval.
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SnapChat Discover
In an effort to diversify their content, SnapChat has released a “discover” portion of their app which contains curated news from outlets like Spotify, Warner Music Group, and others.
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