[UPDATED] A look at some key music business numbers that are shaping the direction of the industry, including Apple’s 400 million dollar acquisition of Shazam, 200,000 verified users on Spotify for Artists and more.
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Guest post by Brant David for Midem
As autumn starts to glow, so do exciting events in the global music industry. Apple’s acquisition of Shazam, Spotify figures and more featured in our latest round-up.
$400 million USD is how much Apple shelled out to acquire the UK-based Shazam app and service. The deal has now been sealed after some jumping through EU regulatory hoops, and the excitement arises with the possibility that Apple and Shazam merged could revolutionise the whole music streaming industry. Salient points: Apple now has acquired a massive and detailed global music listener database; Shazam’s engineers and R&D records now belong to Apple, which could in turn enable Apple to finally build a competitive smart speaker; Apple is going to put out an ad-free version of Shazam; and, Apple could now get competitive in the in-car music entertainment niche. Whoa!
200,000 verified music artists were counted amongst Spotify’s “Spotify for Artists” platform user base as of the end of June. This is quite meaningful as Spotify has now officially made it possible for music artists to upload tracks directly, at no cost, to that platform. There will no longer be any need for any third party, including a record label, to authorise or moderate a music artist’s upload. Spotify also now ingests 20,000 new music tracks per day on average. According to CEO Daniel Ek, “We’re really building a two-sided marketplace that provides tools and services for labels and artists.” This is intended to benefit all concerned—including Spotify, which intends to leverage such a “marketplace” to improve its own gross profit margins.
With 2 million listens monthly on Pandora in comparison to less than one-eighth that on Spotify, Atlanta rapper Li’l Donald is just one living example of the significance of music-streaming service Pandora’s analytics division, called Next Big Sound, opening up its data to public consumption in an attempt to provide Pandora metrics a higher and meaningful profile within the music streaming industry. Next Big Sound senior product manager Dan Wissinger writes, “In an industry where stream counts are an important measure of an artist’s success, the inaccessibility of this data publicly has meant that Pandora’s important role in many artists’ career trajectories has gone unnoticed.”
42 million international travelers are expected to have visited Bangkok and Thailand by the end of this year. That’s why AEG and the Mall Group, the latter of which is the leading retail and entertainment complex developer in Thailand, have announced a strategic partnership to build two new facilities in Southeast Asia, called The Bangkok Arena and EM Live, to anchor two new entertainment districts which will be capable of hosting major concerts by international music stars. EM Live will have a seating capacity of more than 6,000 people, while The Bangkok Arena will have a seating capacity approaching 16,000.
James Martin is Head of Social Media for Midem organisers Reed MIDEM. This includes defining and rolling out Midem’s social media strategy, editing midemblog, influencer outreach, developing Midem’s fanbase of 75,000+ music professionals and more.