Two of China’s major businesses announced a new deal that will impact the country’s music landscape. Alibaba Group has acquired e-commerce platform Kaola from NetEase for about $2 billion. The deal will also see Alibaba invest about $700 million into NetEase Cloud Music. Continue Reading
The BBC has announced that it will cease operating the iPlayer radio app this month. Listeners have already started receiving notifications on the platform that it will be shuttering. Continue Reading
Pandora is also getting in on the social media support. The audio company announced that all Pandora users can share content from the platform to their Instagram Stories. Continue Reading
The Chinese podcast app Ximalaya, and the Himalaya offshoot app which mounted a presence at Podcast Movement last month, are both in the news recently. Ximalaya has stated that the app has “about 500-million users,” according to this report in Abacus News. Himalaya, which can be regarded as an English-language spin-off of Ximalaya, overstated its launch funding, according to reporting in Axios. Continue Reading
A teardown of the latest YouTube Music code updates reveal that Google may be adding a “retail mode” to the subscription service. It is currently testing a mode that appears to let people try out premium features while they’re buying phones. Continue Reading
Spotify has deepened its Facebook integrations. The social network now supports track previews when a song gets added to Facebook Stories. These 15-second snippets can play instantly, and followers can tap “Play on Spotify” to hear the full song. Continue Reading
Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web: Podcast review bombs at Apple. Audible landing blockbuster development deals. Growth for Ximalaya and China’s podcast audience. Continue Reading
Gimme Radio and Gimme Country, the free, genre-focused online radio and fan community platforms, are now letting listeners link their accounts with Spotify. The integration will let Gimme users save their liked tracks to a special Gimme-branded playlist on the streaming service. Continue Reading
Vevo entered a new deal that will see its app made available on smart televisions. The platform has partnered with Vewd, a smart TV OTT software provider based in Norway. Continue Reading
Japan has been an outlier when it comes to the global music trends. The country still remains anchored by CD sales, although streaming continues to grow its share of revenue. The Recording Industry Association of Japan released its second-quarter digital music sales, and all forms of streaming posted triple-digital increases over the first half of 2019. Continue Reading
DistroKid has added support for one of the most popular social networks. The company can now distribute to TikTok. The app’s popularity and power have also attracted attention from labels. Continue Reading
Audible has drawn a lawsuit for its upcoming Captions feature. The Captions tool uses machine learning to transcribe the spoken words in Audible recordings. This update sparked a lawsuit from several publishers based on claims that Audible has not acquired the needed licenses to reproduce the content of physical books and ebooks. Continue Reading