Category archives: Featured Story

Want better payouts from YouTube? Then stop accepting lower payouts from YouTube. It’s really that simple. The music industry is often accused of promoting ‘brain drain,’ constant infighting, offering wild overcompensation for underwhelming results, suing instead of solving business problems, and routinely getting out-strategized by smarter big tech interests.  But beyond these enormous handicaps, the industry is […]

The post How to Solve the Music Industry’s YouTube Problem (In 4 Easy Steps) appeared first on Digital Music News.

Apple is preparing to abandon music downloads. Apple is now preparing to completely terminate music download offerings on the iTunes Store, with an aggressive, two-year termination timetable actively being considered and gaining favor.  According to sources to Digital Music News with close and active business relationships with Apple, discussions are now focusing “not on if, but when” […]

The post Apple Terminating Music Downloads ‘Within 2 Years’ appeared first on Digital Music News.

Why Other Music, one of Manhattan’s legendary independent record stores, is deciding to close its doors. Just when we thought vinyl was creating a resurgence in independent record retailing, there’s this.  It turns out that one of the most legendary record stores in New York City, Other Music, has now decided to shut down this […]

The post Running My Record Store In New York Is Becoming a Nightmare appeared first on Digital Music News.

This is how you can hack your streaming royalties. Earlier this year, DMN starting asking artists and labels to share their streaming royalty statements, which unearthed a pile of incredible per-stream statistics.  That’s part of an ongoing data-sharing project to battle the incredible lack of transparency in the streaming music space (and, please send your […]

The post How to Quintuple Your Streaming Royalties In About One Hour appeared first on Digital Music News.

Over the weekend, Azealia Banks shocked fans by pledging her support for Donald Trump.  Now, the ‘Count Contessa’ rapper is blasting heavy vitriol at Hillary Clinton. As part of a string of abusive tweets, Banks blasted the Democratic front-runner as a ‘racist’ and a ‘murderous butch queen,’ while blaming the Clintons for wrecking black communities in […]

The post Azealia Banks Calls Clinton a ‘Racist’ Who ‘Decimated Black Communities’ appeared first on Digital Music News.

Smartphones are slowly supplanting desktops when it comes to almost every form of music piracy.  But this is a lot more complicated than just shifting screens. Last week, Digital Music News delved into the quickly shifting terrain of music piracy, one that now involves less torrenting and a lot more stream-ripping from YouTube.  It also involves greater amounts of […]

The post Turns Out Smartphones are Giant Music Piracy Machines appeared first on Digital Music News.

If your audience is getting bored at your shows, it’s affecting your ability to survive.  Here are the biggest reasons why, and what you can do about them. Most artists are earning a huge percentage of revenues from live shows, not recordings or publishing.  So why are so many artists slaving away to get the […]

The post 10 Reasons Why Your Audience Is Getting Bored appeared first on Digital Music News.

Stuck? Justin Bieber was the first superstar to come out of YouTube.  But since that point, millions of artists have been left stuck on the platform, recording endless covers and never crossing over.  Is that you?  It doesn’t have to be that way: according to a panel of top executives addressing the issue at Canadian […]

The post How to Go from YouTube Star to Actual Star (In 7 Easy Steps!) appeared first on Digital Music News.

Earlier this year, research group MusicWatch shared data with Digital Music News that showed 53 million Americans actively pirating music content.  But even more shocking was how they were doing it: instead of torrenting on the Pirate Bay, more and more piracy is now happening on YouTube via stream-ripping, with direct streaming piracy and storage […]

The post YouTube Is the New Pirate Bay, Study Shows… appeared first on Digital Music News.