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Hello and welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide Podcast, supported by Voly Music – now known as Voly Entertainment. On this podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham discusses a crisis that's rapidly deteriorating the UK live music scene. The Music Venue Trust is a trade body representing the interests of a vital collective of British live music venues. It’s just released a bunch of shocking statistics in its annual report – including the fact that in 2023, an average of two of the UK’s live music venues were shutting their doors every WEEK. Amongst the venues that Music Venue Trust represents are what it calls Grassroots Music Venues, or GMVs. It surveyed 835 of these GMVs for its 2023 annual report. These venues have an average capacity of 309 people, though that can range to a capacity over 650 people.  As mentioned, the Music Venue Trust’s latest report shows that two GMVs are shutting down per week in the UK.  But perhaps the most shocking data point in the new report is that 38.5% of GMVs reported an annual financial loss in 2023. To repeat that: Over a third of ‘club’-sized music venues in the UK are currently operating at a loss. On this podcast, Tim Ingham is joined by Mark Davyd, founder and CEO of the Music Venue Trust. Davyd explains how his organization intends to solve this issue – likely via a levy placed on ticket sales in larger venues like arenas and stadiums. He also explains why this is a more complicated scenario than merely being the free market in action – and suggests that it’s only a matter of time before the UK’s live music venue crisis reaches a similar point of desperation in the United States… The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

On this episode of the Music Business Worldwide podcast – supported by Voly Entertainment – MBW founder, Tim Ingham, is joined by Rasty Turek. Rasty is the founder and CEO of Pex – which, amongst other things, tracks and analyses copyrighted content on digital services. According to Pex's tech, over a million tracks on audio streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and TIDAL, are not what they appear to be.  These million-plus tracks are what Pex calls “modified audio” – which means an original track has been sped up, slowed down, or otherwise manipulated, and then uploaded as an entirely new recording. The main issue for the music industry? Unless these million-plus tracks have legally licensed the original recording on which they’re based, they’re infringing copyright.  More than that, they’re pulling royalties away from the original artists in question. Pex has provided a number of examples of ‘sped up’ tracks on audio streaming platforms that aren’t attributed to a recording's original artist.  There’s a version of Halsey’s 'Without Me', for example, with over 6 million streams on Spotify. There’s also modified version of Coldplay and The ChainSmokers’ ‘Something Just Like This’ that has over 12 million plays.  It’s not hard to find more: I took a cursory search through Spotify before recording this and discovered a sped-up version of Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj’s Beauty and a Beat with over 8 million streams, and a sped-up version of Lady Gaga’s Bloody Mary with over 25 million streams. In all of these cases, the credited artist on each track – and therefore, presumably the artist account collecting royalties – is not the original artist in question. As you can hear in our interview with Pex’s Rasty Turek, he thinks this is an industry failing – and something of a sibling to streaming fraud… The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Hello and welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide Podcast, supported by Voly Entertainment. On this 'cast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by two people who know all about music 'superfans': Alexander Seidl, the CEO of Aviator, and Lindsay Jones, the COO of Aviator. Aviator, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, specializes in serving these superfans rare content from the artists they love – often with archive video that has long gone undiscovered and has been gathering dust. It’s worked with artists including Mark Knopfler, James Taylor, Cliff Richard, Cher, James Brown and Olivia Newton-John. Aviator also specializes in rights clearance and rights management. You can see how that expertise marries with its archive content business – Aviator finds, say, the long-forgotten content from a French TV performance in 1986, clears the rights, smartens up the audio and video using hi-tech tools, before finally releasing it to... superfans. This expertise in serving superfans, especially superfans of catalog artists, puts Aviator squarely in the center of one of the defining questions of today’s music business: Is the industry getting enough money from superfans – and is it serving them adequately? The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Hello and Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music. On this podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Anthony Davenport, the CEO and founder of New York-headquartered Regal Credit Management. Regal Credit, as the name suggests, helps high-profile and high-net-worth individuals with their credit – both in terms of building it and protecting it. Regal Credit, which was recently named on the Inc. 5000 list of companies in the US, counts many clients from across the music business The particular reason we invited Davenport on this podcast was to discuss a tool of Regal’s called CyberSweep. CyberSweep is a data removal service that either suppresses or outright deletes personal information from across the internet – whether on the dark web or more legitimate sites. According to Davenport, Cyber Sweep has been used by very high-profile figures in the music business including superstar artists - who are looking to protect themselves both from fraudulent online activity, and from stalking from fans. On this podcast Davenport discusses why he believes such activity is becoming a growing societal problem, and we also get time to dig into Davenport’s own interesting origin story that led to the birth of Regal Credit. The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music. Joining MBW founder, Tim Ingham, on this podcast is Scott Cohen, the CEO of JKBX. JKBX is a new platform that enables investors (including so-called ‘retail investors’) to acquire royalty shares in hit songs. It will, in future, also allow you to trade those royalty shares by selling them to others. JKBX launched in September and according to Bloomberg had over $1.7 billion -worth of music assets secured. Right now on the platform, JKBX is offering royalty shares in hit songs like Halo performed by Beyoncé, Rumour Has It performed by Adele, Welcome To New York performed by Taylor Swift, and many more. However, as you read this, you can only reserve your acquisition of royalty shares on JKBX. Before it completes any transaction, the company is in the process of attempting to secure regulated approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (aka the SEC). As well as its primary investor, Dundee Partners, JKBX has reportedly attracted strategic investors including Spotify, Live Nation, YouTube, Red Light Management and others.  Things to know about Scott Cohen before we get into the podcast? He is the co-founder of The Orchard – which he co-launched with Richard Gottehrer in the second half of the nineties, before selling it to Sony Music for a total of around $250 million, partly in 2012 and partly in 2015. Before joining JKBX, Scott was most recently Chief Innovation Officer at Warner Music Group, where he kept his ear close to the ground on tech such as artificial intelligence, the metaverse, and blockchain. On this podcast, we ask Scott about JKBX’s prospects, the changing nature of technology’s involvement in music, and the lessons he learned building the Orchard into a $250 million company… The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music. On this 'cast Tim Ingham, founder of Music Business Worldwide, is joined by Maria Egan, the Global Head of Music – as well as events – at Riot Games. Riot is home to a number of extremely popular online games, including League of Legends and Valorant. But it’s also a TV and movie producer: Riot made the award-winning Netflix animated series, Arcane. Today, Riot Games is owned by Chinese giant Tencent, which paid $400 million to buy a 93% stake in the company in 2011. Maria Egan joined Riot last year from music-making platform Splice, where she was Chief Music Officer. Prior to that, Egan was a highly successful President and Head of Creative at PULSE Music Group.   Egan's career so far has seen her work closely with talent including Kehlani, Tiesto, Run The Jewels, and more. She is also an alumnus of Columbia Records, where she was once Vice President of A&R. In addition to its work in games, TV, and film, Riot Games is taking music very seriously: It has previously worked with Imagine Dragons on the hit single from the Arcane soundtrack, Enemy, which has over 2 billion streams to date.  Each year, for the League of Legends World Championship, a different track is chosen as the official anthem of the tournament. In previous years, this honor has fallen to the likes of Imagine Dragons and Lil Nas X.  For this year’s tournament, the anthem comes from fast-rising Korean act New Jeans, who are signed to HYBE, with a track called GODS. The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music. On this podcast we dive head first into one of the most-talked-about topics in the music biz this year. That topic is generative AI music, but more specifically, the fact that vast volumes of music are now being produced by AI platforms and then uploaded onto various streaming platforms. There is arguably no one better placed to talk on this topic than Alex Mubert, founder and co-CEO of the self-titled platform Mubert.  That’s because, in July, Mubert announced that its AI platform had now been used to create more than 100 million music tracks, with an average length of over 4 minutes.  As it pointed out, Mubert’s 100 million created tracks were roughly the same size in volume as the entire catalog available on Spotify. Mubert’s sub-platforms include Mubert Render, for online content creators – YouTubers, podcasters etc. – looking to create royalty-free soundtracks for their productions. There’s also Mubert Studio, for artists and composers, which allows musical creators to earn money on tracks, samples and loops.  On this podcast, you’ll hear Music Business Worldwide editor - Murray Stassen – ask Alex Mubert all about that 100 million stat, and how AI music is going to change the industry in the years ahead… The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music. On this 'cast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Denis Ladegaillerie, founder and CEO of Believe. Paris-headquartered Believe is now well established as one of the largest recorded music companies in the world, both via its Believe-branded artist and label services operation, as well as its subsidiary, TuneCore, which announced the close of last year that it had paid out over USD $3 billion to independent artists to date. Believe currently is valued at around USD $1 billion on the Paris Euronext stock exchange, having turned over around USD $450 million in revenue in the first half of 2023. (Believe reports its revenues in Euros.) On this podcast, MBW's Ingham asks Ladegaillerie all about a number of key topics including: - How the music industry should deal with streaming fraud; - Why Asia is set to commercially explode in music in the years ahead; - What Believe’s strategy is to challenge the ‘major’ music companies; and - Yep... Artificial Intelligence. (AI is a particularly timely subject at Believe and TuneCore, which recently partnered with Grimes to distribute music created by other artists using an AI replication of her voice.) One other important point: Believe is no longer just a recorded music company. Since March it has also run its own global music publishing operation, housed under  TuneCore, following Believe's acquisition of the $51 million-valued Sentric Music. The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the latest Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music. On this 'cast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Lisa Yang, Managing Director of Media & Internet at Goldman Sachs’ Global Investment Research. Yang keeps a very close eye on the music business – and is the lead analyst on Goldman’s hugely influential ‘Music In The Air’ paper, a new and updated version of which is released each year. The latest iteration of ‘Music In The Air’ arrived in June 2023, and contained amongst its 72 pages financial and data analysis of all corners of the music business.  It also contained headline forecasts, including that the global recorded music industry will be generating over $50 billion dollars by 2030, from some 1.2 billion paying streaming subscribers worldwide. On this podcast we ask Lisa about her team’s latest forecasts in 'Music In The Air', while picking on her brains on other conclusions from the report, and asking more generally about how the global music business will change in the decade ahead of us…. The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music. On this 'cast, MBW founder Tim Ingham is joined by Travis Rosenblatt, founder of the SaaS platform for A&R research and scouting, Meddling. Rosenblatt is a particularly interesting person to speak to because, by his own admission, he spends a lot of his time NOT consumed in his day job. This allows him the bandwidth to think deeply about the music business, its challenges, and where it might be headed in future. Meddling is very clever, gathering data from multiple touchpoints on new artists for clients that have included the likes of  Republic Records, Kobalt, Columbia Records, and Atlantic Records. But as a SaaS platform, Meddling largely runs itself – enabling Rosenblatt’s mind to wander toward various crucial topics for the modern music industry. On this podcast, Ingham asks Rosenblatt about Meddling – a bit – but their conversation also dives into PROs, DIY distribution, music’s role on video platforms, and much more besides… The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music. On this podcast, one of the industry's sharpest minds, Will Page, joins MBW founder Tim Ingham to cover a range of topics including pricing, streaming, royalties – and why the global industry is more local than ever. Page is the ex-Chief Economist of both Spotify and UK collection society PRS For Music.  These days he’s a consultant and the author of the book Tarzan Economics (aka Pivot), which presents compelling principles for business owners facing uncertain and disruptive times. Will is also the co-author of a new paper published by the London School of Economics and Political Science that focuses on what he calls ‘Glocalisation’ of music. In other words, music has never been more global as an industry, yet when you dig into the most popular tracks in individual markets, they have a decidedly local feel. The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music. How big can an independent artist get without help from a major record label? It’s been a fierce source of debate at this point for 20 years ever since the likes of TuneCore launched in the early to mid-noughties. These days, though, we have the receipts to answer the question.  Take Bruno Major, a fully independent artist and our guest on this episode of the MBW Podcast. Major, who released his music via AWAL and owns his own recordings, has comfortably more than a billion streams on Spotify, with two of his tracks – Nothing and Easily – racking up over quarter of a billion streams each.  He recently released his latest singles, We Were Never Really Friends and Columbo, ahead of his third studio album – also called Columbo – which will be out later this summer. Major is a successful live act, with a tour of Asia, Europe and North America recently confirmed. He's previously toured arenas with Sam Smith.  He has a particularly interesting history with the record business: Major started out in the music industry by signing (and then leaving) a major label deal with Virgin Records, then owned by EMI, in Los Angeles. On this podcast, Major discusses his experience of being signed to that major record company as a young man, how that experience has help fuel his career ambitions ever since, and how he keeps himself creatively motivated as an independent artist… The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.