Billboard industry survey finds love for Taylor Swift and Apple, not so much for Tidal

Billboard conducted an anonymous survey of music industry leaders, gathering expert opinions on everything from the sector’s business outlook to favorite artists. The business questions also revealed intriguing insights, including a view of which music companies are the industry darlings and which are not. Continue Reading

Interim CEO steps down from Tidal

Tidal has had another changing of the guard, with interim CEO Peter Tonstad leaving the top position. Tonstad was CEO of Aspiro, which was Tidal’s parent company prior to the buyout by Jay-Z. Tonstad stepped in to replace Tidal’s previous CEO Andy Chen, who stayed only two weeks with the company following the change of ownership. Tidal is also in the news today as a tangent to the latest activities of the current queen of the music scene, Taylor Swift. Continue Reading

Taylor Swift gets Apple Music to reverse policy on free trial royalty payments

We recently reported that Taylor Swift’s latest album would not be available through Apple Music. Yesterday, Swift published a Tumblr post explaining why. She questioned Apple’s decision to not pay any royalties to artists, songwriters, or producers for song plays during listeners’ three-month free trials. “These are the echoed sentiments of every artist, writer and producer in my social circles who are afraid to speak up publicly because we admire and respect Apple so much,” she said. Continue Reading

Taylor Swift’s “1989” album won’t be on Apple Music at launch

Taylor Swift made waves in the music industry when she opted to remove her entire catalog from Spotify. She explained at the time that she didn’t want to support “the perception that music has no value and should be free.” So it’s a bit of a surprise to learn that her latest album won’t be available on Apple Music. Both Apple and Swift’s label told BuzzFeed News that her popular “1989” album won’t be available at the launch of the new streaming service. Continue Reading

Taylor Swift added 819,000+ new YouTube subscribers in November

When Taylor Swift and her label chose to remove the pop singer’s latest album and back catalog from Spotify, they unintentionally sparked the emergence of some fascinating data about online music listening habits. First came Nielsen’s discovery that Swift’s YouTube streaming counts ballooned from the moment her audio streams dropped. Second, we now have data showing that she added the most subscribers on the video network during November. Continue Reading