German collection society posts increased streaming revenue, but critiques royalty rates

GEMA, a German collection society, announced that its 2014 global revenue was €893.6 million euros (about $950 million). Streaming revenue accounted for €44.8 million, up from €26.4 million in 2013, but GEMA came out with a strong statement against the current royalty split between rights holders, songwriters, and publishers. Continue Reading

Internet Radio Rewind #038: When exclusives aren’t exclusive; banking on a music label

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An eight-minute blast of news you need to know in streaming audio.

THIS WEEK: Streaming exclusives don’t stay exclusive; Webcast listening reaches new record; when a music label and a bank hook up; milestone moment for 8tracks; Pandora pays more than half of all webcast royalties Continue Reading

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How Misunderstandings about Big Numbers Distort the Debate over Songwriter Digital Music Royalties

by David Oxenford

Barely a day goes by without seeing some article about a songwriter whose song was played a million times on a digital music service like Pandora or Spotify, with the artist only receiving a relatively small amount of royalty revenue from that seemingly large number of plays. A number of issues are misunderstood — especially about big numbers. Continue Reading

AdLarge signs exclusive ad-repping of RotoWire fantasy sports podcasts

AdLarge added another podcast deal to its growing portfolfio of exclusive ad-representation agreements for on-demand audio, this one with RotoWire for its line of fantasy sports podcasts. RotoWire produces daily podcasts for fantasy sports players in football, baseball, and basketball, plus weekly shows in audio and video. Continue Reading

Larry Rosin: The Little Machines that Built Pandora

by Larry Rosin

Our Infinite Dial studies have been tracking usage of online radio since 1998, and we have asked about ‘monthly usage’ since 2000. In a recent meeting I made the comment that if one superimposes the graph showing growth of smartphone ownership over the monthly online radio usage one can see a strong correlation. Continue Reading

SoundCloud teams up with the company behind YouTube’s Content ID

SoundCloud has entered into a partnership with content identification service Zefr. The deal appears focused on monitoring what tracks get played and when. Although neither SoundCloud nor Zefr have disclosed much detail about the nature of their new partnership, it’s likely a step in SoundCloud’s push into monetizing its platform. Continue Reading