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The recording and publishing catalogs of late country star Toby Keith continue to bring in a combined $9 million per year in streaming and sales activity, according to Billboard estimates.
Keith, who died Monday (Feb. 5) at age 62, had slowed his output considerably over the last decade, releasing just two proper studio albums over that period: 2015’s 35 MPH Town and 2021’s Peso in My Pocket. But a vast stable of past smashes over the past 30 years, including the multi-platinum albums Pull My Chain, Unleashed and Shock’n Y’all along with 20 No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, including “Who’s That Man,” “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” and “How Do You Like Me Now,” allowed his catalog to remain lucrative up to the present day.
Over the last three years, Keith’s catalog has averaged nearly 475,000 album consumption units per year in the United States, according to Luminate. That consists of an average of nearly 61,000 albums (CDs, LPs, downloads) per year, as well as 152,000 tracks and about 570 million on-demand streams.
While streaming has helped country music begin to gain an international audience, some artists in the genre are racking up fans outside the United States faster than others, and Keith’s audience remained largely a domestic one. As it is, Keith’s U.S. streaming accounts for about 83% of the 686 million streams his music averaged on a global basis annually over the last three years. Likewise, his U.S. song downloads make up 91% of his annual average of 167,000 downloads over the last three years.
Overall, Billboard estimates that Keith’s album sales and streaming activity generated about $5.3 million in revenue on average over each of the last three years for his recorded music catalog, while his publishing has brought in about $3.7 million per year. However, since Keith has a stake in close to 50% of his songs, and because he likely owned the albums he released since he started his Show Dog Nashville label in 2005, he likely gets the bulk of that revenue as his take-home pay. Before Show Dog, he released music on Universal Music Group-distributed labels including Mercury, A&M and Dreamworks Nashville.
Keith was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2021 but didn’t publicly reveal the news until the following year. He died less than two months after he performed his final shows: a trio of December concerts at Dolby Live at Park MGM in Las Vegas.
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Get in, loser. Mean Girls is dropping a limited-edition collector’s DVD and it’s time to go preorder a copy. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the classic 2004 film is being released in 4K UHD, which means if you prefer not to watch the movie through its available streaming options, you’ll be able to grab a hardcopy of Mean Girls and relive every fetch moment in a high-definition picture.
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The 20th anniversary edition will be released on April 30 (sorry to those hoping it’d be Oct. 3), but Amazon has opened preorders so you can make sure you don’t miss out on snagging this limited-edition collector’s piece. Preordering it now will ensure you get a copy the moment it’s released, and you’ll only be charged the preorder price, which means if the price goes up on the release date, you won’t be charged extra.
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‘Mean Girls’ 20th Anniversary Edition
You can finally get a copy of your own Burn Book with the newest edition of Mean Girls. The limited-edition DVD is available in 4K UHD that will arrive encased in a special steelbook inspired by the famous Burn Book, and featuring a red lipstick pattern on the back. Each DVD will include the 4K disc as well as a digital code to stream it online and on the go.
The original Mean Girls is based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman, and has become a cult-classic movie that still dominates pop culture today.
Already, the collector’s edition has become the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon for movies and TV — and it hasn’t even been released yet. The film’s popularity even led to a Broadway musical adaptation that was recently turned into its own movie.
How to Watch Mean Girls (2024)
While the musical version of the film is still in theaters (which you can get tickets to here), you can preorder the new Mean Girls on DVD from Amazon — and for 22% off.
“Mean Girls” (2024) [4K UHD]
$27.96
$35.99
22% off
Just like the 2004 version, Mean Girls the musical version follows Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) as she navigates public school after moving from Africa to a suburb in Illinois with her zoologist parents. Through song and dance, she discovers the harsh reality of high school and finds herself in a web of lies after being welcomed into the elite social group known as The Plastics.
Where to Watch Mean Girls
If you’d rather watch the movie online at home, the original Mean Girls is available to stream for free on Paramount+. If you have a Paramount+ subscription, you can stream the film for no additional cost — just log in to your account and you’ll be able to find it under the “movies” category.
Don’t have Paramount+? The streaming platform offers a weeklong free trial for new users who sign up, which means you can watch the movie for free. Once your free trial is over, you’ll be charged the normal subscription fee based on the plan you choose. Click here or below to start your free trial.
You’ll be able to choose between two membership plans: Paramount+ Essential or Paramount+ with Showtime. The Essential plan is the cheapest at $5.99/month and includes limited ads, thousands of episodes and movies as well as exclusive and original content, NFL on CBS, UEFA Champions League and 24/7 news on CBS live.
For an ad-free streaming experience, you can choose Paramount+ with Showtime for $11.99/month, which includes everything in the Essential plan as well as exclusive and original programming from Showtime, live TV on CBS, college football and the ability to download content to watch offline.
Prime members can also add Paramount+ to their Prime Video library through the premium channel storefront.
The musical version of Mean Girls has yet to receive a streaming date, but once it does, it will most likely drop on Paramount+ since that’s the official distributer of the film.
Besides Mean Girls on the streaming service, you’ll also be able to watch content such as Survivor, Big Brother, Jersey Shore Family Vacation, Frasier, Mixtape, Family Legacy, I Wanna Rock, Hip Hop My House, Behind The Music, Yellowstone, Fatal Attraction, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, 1923, iCarly, The Good Fight, Mayor of Kingstown, Seal Team, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Why Women Kill and Before I Forget. With Showtime, you can stream original shows and movies such as Yellowjackets, The 12th Victim, Dexter, Dexter: New Blood, George & Tammy, Homeland, Ziwe, Penny Dreadful, Buried and more.
Watch the trailer for the original Mean Girls below.
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More than one third of the songs — at least 17 tracks — on Billboard’s TikTok Top 50 chart are no longer available for use on the app after Universal Music Group‘s negotiations with the platform fell apart last week. UMG said the Bytedance-owned company refuses to pay “fair value for the music.”
The missing tracks include several of the most popular songs on TikTok: Muni Long’s “Made for Me” (No. 2 on the TikTok Top 50), Xavi’s “La Diabla” (No. 7), Drake’s “Rich Baby Daddy” (No. 9), and Lana Del Rey’s “Let the Light In” (No. 11).
The absence impacts both recent releases — Ariana Grande’s “Yes, And?” along with a pair of songs from Nicki Minaj’s December album — and catalog: Lesley Gore’s “Misty,” originally released way back in 1963, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor,” which came out in 2002 but charted on the Hot 100 for the first time recently due to a synch in the film Saltburn.
Users still appear to be able to still make videos with an official “orchestral version” of “Murder on the Dancefloor” — likely because it’s licensed to a different label. And even though UMG and TikTok’s licensing agreement expired, 10k.Caash’s “Aloha,” which was released by the UMG label Def Jam in 2019, is available to soundtrack TikTok videos as of Thursday morning.
In addition, TikTok has long had a vibrant bootleg scene, which means that in some cases, users have uploaded their own versions of UMG songs or made remixes in place of the official sounds. Those bootlegs were also a source of frustration for the record company, which said last week that “TikTok makes little effort to deal with the vast amounts of content on its platform that infringe our artists’ music.” It’s worth noting, however, that labels often encourage remixers to rework their artists’ songs without the proper clearances in the hopes that it starts a viral trend.
TikTok has been a dominant force in the music industry since 2019, transforming both marketing and signing strategy. “We fully immerse ourselves in the diverse subcultures of TikTok,” said Alec Henderson, vp of digital at the independent label APG, in December. “We have weekly meetings dedicated to sharing things that we’re seeing there. We view the TikTok viral chart with a competitive mindset. And we put a high emphasis on working with artists that are native to the platform.”
As the industry became increasingly focused on TikTok, it also became increasingly uneasy about the platform’s power. The app became increasingly saturated — brands, movies, videogames, cats, ASMR, you name it — which made marketing music both more expensive and less effective. Labels are used to having some level of influence over promotional levers; TikTok proved frustratingly hard to leverage.
Tension over the platform’s low payouts started to grow as well. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, “doesn’t view music as a value add,” one senior executive told Billboard in the fall of 2022. “They just view music as a cost center they have to limit as much as possible.”
“The [payout] numbers are horrifying,” said a manager at the time. A marketer who oversaw the campaign for a single that was used in roughly half a million TikTok videos, earning billions of views, found that his artist took home less than $5,000 from the platform. It was no surprise when UMG CEO Lucian Grainge fired a warning shot late in 2022, noting pointedly at an industry conference that a value gap was “forming fast in the new iterations of short-form video.”
Last week, Universal Music Group said that its license agreement with TikTok was set to expire on Jan. 31. “TikTok proposed paying our artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of the rate that similarly situated major social platforms pay,” UMG said in an open letter. The record company accused TikTok of trying to “intimidate us into conceding to a bad deal that undervalues music and shortchanges artists and songwriters as well as their fans.”
After UMG issued its statement, TikTok hit back, accusing the record company of promoting a “false narrative.” It’s “sad and disappointing,” TikTok added, “that [UMG] has put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.” These comments elicited yet another response from UMG.
If the standoff between the two companies continues, it will start to affect even more music: At the end of the month, TikTok will have to take down any song that Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) has a stake in. Many UMPG songwriters collaborate with artists signed to other labels (or are signed as artists on other labels). This means that the number of songs that become unusable on TikTok could balloon.
Artists can market their music elsewhere, of course — TikTok has competitors in both YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. However, neither of those apps have demonstrated the ability to break a song with the speed and intensity of TikTok.
Spotify’s revenues for 2023 grew 16% year over year, reaching 3.67 billion euros ($4.05 billion), as a surge in both monthly active users (up 23% to 602 million) and premium subscribers (up 15% to 236 million) beat expectations. After a third quarter in which the streaming company turned a profit for the first time in […]
A year into SoundCloud’s fan-powered royalties, a departure from the traditional “pro rata” method of calculating streaming royalties, artists have a better understanding of their fan bases and a better chance to monetize their listeners, according to a new report by author, podcaster and economics professor Will Page.
Fan-powered royalties — known more broadly as user-centric royalties — is a method for calculating streaming payouts to independent artists based on individual fans’ listening on SoundCloud. The traditional, pro-rata model divvies up a large revenue pool based on a track’s total number of plays. In that scenario, an up-and-coming artist shares the same royalty pool as the biggest superstar.
User-centric royalties turn a big pool into smaller silos by splitting a listener’s subscription or advertising revenue based on only the tracks they streamed. If a listener streams only independent artists, most or all of the user’s subscription or advertising revenue will go to those artists. Since SoundCloud first announced fan-powered royalties in 2021, Warner Music Group and Merlin have agreed to use the calculation approach for their artists.
SoundCloud singles out an artist’s biggest fans and gives artists the tools to engage with those supporters through person-to-person messaging. With the help of tools that help artists engage directly with their fans on the SoundCloud platform, a small number of what SoundCloud calls “true fans” will provide an “outsize” share of an artist’s royalties. (Page did not define “true fan” or explain the threshold that separates them from less passionate ones.) The combination of the engagement tools and the fan-powered royalties “make this true fan game the most desirable to play,” wrote Page.
The promise of fan-powered royalties is a more sustainable business model for up-and-coming and working-class musicians. For SoundCloud, a well-known springboard for young musicians’ entry into the big leagues, a model that benefits independent artists over major-label superstars would help cement that platform’s credentials in the creator community.
So, Page offered three case studies that examined artists in different stages of their careers. In 2022, Rapper Lil Uzi Vert opted into fan-powered royalties and gave SoundCloud an exclusive on the track “Space Cadet” from his Red & White EP. As a result, according to Page, “more of Uzi’s listeners became true fans, and those true fans made up an even greater proportion of the overall revenue.” With fan-powered royalties and insights from the platform, true fans accounted for 6.5% of the rapper’s audience in July 2022, up from 5.2% in the previous month, as well as 71.8% of his revenue, up from 54.6%. The audience he gained was engaged: 6% of them were true fans, 69% were classified as engaged and only 9% were passive listeners.
To show that fan-powered royalties can help a mid-tier, independent artist, Page offers the example of Kelow LaTesha, a rapper with about 14,000 SoundCloud followers. LaTesha used fan-powered royalties to reach more listeners. True fans’ share of her revenue jumped to 45.7% in July 2022 from 32.2% in June 2022. The number of true fans increased, but because she gained a greater share of passive listeners, LaTesha’s true fans accounted for 1.4% of her listeners, down from 1.7%.
The do-it-yourself case study, focusing on EDM producer/DJ ShortRound, improved both his true fans and his revenue from those fans. From June to July 2022, true fans’ share of DJ ShortRound’s SoundCloud audience climbed from 3% to 4.4% and their share of his revenue jumped from 77.7% to 82%.
SoundCloud’s adoption of fan-powered royalties pre-dated a larger effort to make streaming more financially viable for labels and artists. Universal Music Group partnered with streaming service Deezer in 2023 to improve payouts to professional musicians while reducing payouts to background noise and other types of audio content that arguably provide less value to listeners. In Europe, politicians are calling for “fairer models of streaming revenue allocation” for artists.
SoundCloud’s approach might not be the best approach for all streaming platforms, but the handful of case studies is evidence that the approach works for SoundCloud. The combination of fan-powered royalties and creator tools “opens a new path to prosperity that the entire music industry should understand,” wrote Page.
SiriusXM added 131,000 self-pay subscribers in the fourth quarter and beat its full-year guidance for earnings and free cash flow while only slightly missing its revenue goal, the company announced Thursday (Feb. 1). The satellite radio giant lost 445,000 self-pay subscribers for the full year, however.
Full-year revenue declined 0.6% to $8.95 billion, slightly below last quarter’s guidance of $9 billion. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) declined 2% to $2.8 billion, coming in a little above guidance of $2.75 billion. Free cash flow of $1.2 billion was down about 23% but beat guidance by $50 million.
SiriusXM, built on a satellite radio service favored by older consumers, is in re-building mode. The company launched a new app in November and a $9.99-per-month streaming-only subscription service aimed at younger audiences who don’t listen primarily in their cars. The app houses Sirius’ 400-plus channels in addition to an audio library and a growing stable of podcast content that includes such brands as Smartless, which earlier this week left Amazon’s Wondery after striking a $100 million deal with SiriusXM, and Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco, which SiriusXM acquired in 2022.
The strategy isn’t likely to produce results this year, though. “While early indications are showing signs of positive impacts of our business investments, it will take time for these to fully reflect in our subscriber and financial metrics,” said CEO Jennifer Witz during Thursday’s earnings call.
While SiriusXM expects “roughly level” subscriber numbers in 2024, new streaming-only subscribers pay less than satellite radio subscribers and will result in a lower average revenue per user. Those factors, along with an advertising market Witz called “uncertain,” leads the company to expect two of its key financial metrics to fall in 2024. Full-year revenue guidance of $8.75 billion would be a 2.2% decline from $8.95 billion in 2023, while adjusted EBITDA guidance of $2.7 billion would mark a 3.3% year-over-year decline. Free cash flow is expected to remain at $1.2 billion.
Investors appeared to have baked the rebuild process into their forecasts and did not react negatively to Thursday’s earnings results. Shares of SiriusXM rose as much as 5.1% on Thursday morning and closed at $5.23, up 2.8%.
SiriusXM’s satellite radio service generated full-year revenue of $6.8 billion, down 1% year over year. Self-pay subscribers grew 131,000 in the fourth quarter after falling 96,000 in the third quarter. For the full year, self-pay subscribers fell by 445,000 to approximately 34 million. Paid promotional subscribers dropped by 225,000 in the fourth quarter but increased by 15,000 for the full year.
Pandora revenue increased 1% to $1.6 billion, while its subscribers fell 3% to 6.0 million, down from 6.2 million at the end of 2022. The music streaming service finished the year with 46.0 million monthly active users, down 3.4% from 47.6 million in the prior-year period. Total ad-supported listener hours of 10.48 billion in 2023 was down 4% from 10.88 billion in 2022. Pandora’s gross profit dipped 3% to $638 million.
SiriusXM laid off 8% of its staff in March 2023, which resulted in approximately $140 million in cost savings, CFO Tom Barry said on Thursday. This year, the company is targeting nearly $200 million in additional savings, he added, that will be “reinvested” in “more targeted and more performance-oriented marketing on the streaming side.”
SiriusXM’s full-year 2023 financial metrics
Total revenue of $8.95 billion, down 0.6%.
Adjusted EBITDA of $2.8 billion, down 2%.
Free cash flow of $1.2 billion, down 23%.
SiriusXM revenue of $6.8 billion, down 1%.
Pandora revenue of $1.6 billion, up 1%.
SiriusXM satellite radio self-pay subscribers of 34 million.
Pandora subscribers of 6 million.
After a string of pivots, rebrands, upgraded offerings and expanded plans, YouTube Premium and Music has passed the magical 100 million subscribers mark, counting users in trials, the company announced Thursday (Feb. 1).
That’s up from the 80 million Premium and Music subscribers around the world (including trials), reported in November 2022, and a jump from 50 million users at the end of 2021.
The milestone is cause for great celebration at the company, notes Lyor Cohen, global head of music at YouTube, in an open letter to the industry issued today (Feb. 1). “This 20-million-member growth in just over a year underscores the strength of our twin engine of advertising and subscriptions revenue,” writes Cohen.
The Alphabet-owned business unveiled its subscription offering, YouTube Music, back in October 2015, and launched its dedicated app the following month.
The streaming landscape then was littered with naysayers. “Many doubted a subscription model could thrive on YouTube,” Cohen notes. “They said the market was crowded and our platform was too different. Today – 100 million subscribers later – our distinctiveness is precisely what drives our success and why I still see so much room for growth.”
Later, in June 2018, YouTube announced the launch of YouTube Premium, formerly known as YouTube Red. Since then, notes Cohen, the Premium service’s global expansion has ramped up and is “now thriving in over 100 countries and regions” with “more on the horizon in 2024.”
By crossing the 100 million mark, “we’re delighted and humbled,” comments Adam Smith, vice president of product management at YouTube, in a separate statement.
Along the way, “we learned a lot, made a few pivots (and even rebranded), expanded our offerings and plans, and made YouTube Music and Premium available in over 100 countries and regions,” adds Smith.
In a matchup of streaming heavyweights, Spotify, the market-leading music platform, holds the advantage. The Sweden-based business came to market early, in 2008, and boasted 226 million premium subscribers worldwide in Q3 2023.
Though Apple rarely shares updates on subscriber numbers, in June 2022, J.P. Morgan estimated Apple Music could hit 110 million subscribers by 2025. The last time the company reported subscriber numbers for Apple Music was in 2019, when it reported 60 million paid users.
As YouTube hangs the decorations, captains of the industry are lining up to thank their tech partner — including a former YouTuber now leading a major label.
“Having been at YouTube when we conceived of the subscription service, 100 million customers felt like a distant possibility,” says Robert Kyncl, who was chief business officer at YT before joining Warner Music Group as CEO. “Today, it’s yet another signpost on a journey of extraordinary growth. The fact that YouTube continues to go from strength to strength isn’t just good for them, it’s healthy for the entire music ecosystem.”
Lucian Grainge, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, says the team led by Cohen and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan deserves credit for “continuing to grow and drive innovation while making significant contributions to the global music ecosystem. Our partnership demonstrates that if you start from a foundation of respect for artists and songwriters, there are limitless opportunities to create thriving businesses that benefit artists and fans alike.”
Adds Helen Smith, executive chair of pan-European independent music companies’ trade body IMPALA: “YouTube has a unique place in the music ecosystem, is a valued member of IMPALA’s Friends scheme and a great partner of our 100 Artists to Watch program.” She continues, “We look forward to continuing to work together across the whole European market where there is so much potential for digital services who see diversity as an asset.”
According to Cohen, YT’s businesses have contributed $6 billion in the past year.
“The music industry is at a critical juncture,” he writes. “Together, we can harness technological innovation to drive unprecedented value for artists and fans, building on our momentum that contributed $6 billion to the music industry in 12 months.”
That future, one where the music industry “thrives,” he insists, would see both sides leveraging AI to enhance creative imagination, seamlessly bridging short-form and long-form content for maximum artist exposure, and more.
Read Cohen’s thank you letter here.
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ARMY has taken over television as the ever-growing popular Korean drama Marry My Husband keeps slipping references to BTS into episodes. Multiple scenes have incorporated hit songs from the K-pop group’s album Dynamite — becoming a great show for ARMY to indulge in. If you’re looking for streaming options to begin watching the current episodes released, Prime Video has got you covered.
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Adapted from a web novel, the series follows Kang Ji-won (Park Min-young), a terminally ill cancer patient, who, after discovering her husband and best friend are having an affair, is murdered by the two of them. In a strange twist of fate, she awakens to find herself alive, but 10 years in the past, leading her to reclaim her fate and seek the ultimate revenge against her husband.
Other cast members include Na In-woo, Song Ha-yoon and Lee Yi-kyung.
Keep reading to learn how to stream the show at home.
How to Watch Marry My Husband
Marry My Husband is a tvN series, which you can watch for free with a Prime membership through Prime Video. New episodes premiere weekly, with the first 10 episodes available to binge right now, and episode 11 slated to drop on Monday (Feb. 5). If you’re already a Prime member, then you can watch the show for free when you log into your account and head to Prime Video.
Don’t have a Prime membership? Amazon offers a 30-day free trials that’ll allow you to watch Marry My Husband and more for no extra cost. Once your free trial is over, you’ll be charged $14.99/month or $139/year.
If you’re a student, you can take advantage of a student membership, which comes with a six-month free trial and 50% membership fee. For those who are part of a qualifying government program, you can snag an EBT/Medicaid membership that has a 30-day free trial and half-off membership. Click here or the button below to start your free trial.
Outside of Marry My Husband, a Prime membership will give you access to the entire Prime Video library, including original and exclusive content such as Expats, The Underdoggs, Saltburn, Invincible, Red, White & Royal Blue, The Summer I Turned Pretty, I’m a Virgo, Citadel, Daisy Jones & The Six, Gen V, Invincible, The Boys, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Fleabag, The Wheel of Time and more.
You can also add premium channels to your membership to expand your content offerings such as Max, Paramount+, Starz and more.
Outside of entertainment, Prime members can take advantage of other member-exclusive benefits such as one-day free shipping, Prime Day, member-only discounts, grocery delivery, Prime Premiere, Prime Try Before You Buy, Prime Reading, Amazon Music Unlimited and more.
If you’re outside of the U.S., you may be able to watch the series through a VPN from ExpressVPN or NordVPN.
Check out the trailer for Marry My Husband below.
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LONDON — Record labels, publishers and streaming services in the United Kingdom have signed up to a voluntary code of good practice that requires them to provide clear and transparent information to artists and creators about how their streaming royalties are calculated.
“The UK Code of Good Practice on Transparency in Music Streaming” was published Wednesday (Jan. 31) by the U.K. government’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO).
It obliges key players in the British music industry to supply musicians, songwriters, composers and producers with “timely, accurate and clear royalty accounting information,” as well as detail any deductions that have been applied.
Signatories include representatives of major and independent record labels, publishers, creators, collecting societies and streaming services.
Trade bodes BPI — which represents more than 500 labels, including the U.K. arms of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group — and the Association of Independent Music (AIM), which acts on behalf of U.K. independent record labels and music companies, are among the music groups backing the pledge.
The U.K. government says the agreement forms a “significant point” in improving transparency around licensing deals and music streaming royalties that will build greater trust between record labels, streaming services and creators.
“This pioneering code, designed by the music industry with Government backing, has trust at its core,” said Viscount Camrose, minister for AI and Intellectual Property, in a statement.
The cross-industry pact, said Camrose, will “help ensure artists get the royalties and protections they deserve when their music is played on streaming platforms.”
Wednesday’s transparency agreement is the latest in an ongoing series of government-led interventions into the U.K. music industry fuelled by artist discontent over low payments from streaming.
In 2021, a Parliamentary inquiry into the music streaming business called into question the major record labels’ dominance of the industry and branded the global streaming model as unsustainable in its current form, saying it “needs a complete reset.”
Numerous government-led working groups, investigations and initiatives spun out of the eight-month-long Parliamentary probe, including last year’s industry-wide pledge – also made at the behest and overseen by the IPO – to improve the digital metadata for song recordings.
The new transparency agreement further increases the obligations on rights holders and digital services to address long-standing issues in music streaming, but it does not constitute a regulatory change and it is not clear what, if any, repercussions a record label or DSP would face for breaching its terms.
Rather, the voluntary code is intended as a stimulus for music companies to lift standards and deliver more accurate returns to artists by following a number of agreed principles.
They include labels, publishers and managers making it clear to artists the terms of their contracts, licence deals and remuneration terms, including any recoupable costs.
Streaming services are required to provide to all relevant rights holders accurate and timely usage data. The code also states that artists and creators should have a contractual right to audit financial information, including royalty payments, from labels, publishers, distributors, collecting societies and, in the case of self-releasing artists, streaming services that they hold contracts with.
Other music groups backing the transparency code include the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA), whose members include streaming services; the Music Publishers Association (MPA); Musicians’ Union (MU); Featured Artists Coalition (The FAC); Music Managers Forum (MMF); Music Producers Guild (MPG) and U.K. collecting societies PRS for Music and Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL).
The code will come into force on July 31 with the IPO set to carry out a first review of its implementation early next year.
In the meantime, several other government initiatives looking into the digital music business will continue to operate in the background, including a new working group –made up of industry stakeholders — looking into artist remuneration from music streaming.
Details on membership of the remuneration working group, which was first announced last May, will be published shortly, said the government. A report into equitable remuneration commissioned by the IPO is due to be published in the coming months
Commenting on the new transparency requirements, BPI chief executive Jo Twist said the “landmark agreement… builds meaningfully on the recent progress around metadata and other significant measures addressing creator concerns around music streaming.”
U.K. trade group The Council Of Music Makers said that while the commitments contained in the code “are modest, it provides a framework that can be used to start tackling the “systemic lack of transparency” in music streaming. The organization said it will be launching a complaints mechanism when the code comes into force for artists and their managers to report non-compliance with its terms.
“The big music and streaming companies need to stop using ‘artist-centric’ as a hollow buzzword and actually put artists and other music-makers at the centre of their businesses,” said a Council Of Music Makers spokesperson.
Universal Music Group (UMG) says it will pull its entire music catalog from TikTok when its contract with the service expires on Wednesday (Jan. 31), accusing the platform of “trying to build a music-based business, without paying fair value for the music,” according to an open letter released Tuesday (Jan. 30).
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In the letter, addressed to UMG artists and songwriters, the company states that it’s particularly concerned about the rates that TikTok is offering to pay for its catalog. Other points of contention include the amount of content on TikTok that infringes its artists’ and songwriters’ works without providing “meaningful solutions” to help them combat it, the level of hate and harassment on the platform and TikTok’s stances on artificial intelligence (AI).
According to UMG, during the negotiations, the ByteDance-owned social giant “demanded a contractual right which would allow [AI] content to massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists,” which UMG states is “nothing short of sponsoring artist replacement by AI.”
If UMG pulls its catalog, it would affect all music distributed and administered by its recorded-music division as well as Universal Music Publishing Group.
The last deal UMG struck with TikTok to license both its recorded music and publishing was announced on Feb. 8, 2021. In July, WMG inked a multi-year licensing deal with TikTok that allows the company to use WMG’s music on its app as well as CapCut and its new “social streaming platform” TikTok Music, which is currently available in Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, and Mexico. At the time the deal was announced, WMG CEO/chairman Robert Kyncl and TikTok’s chief executive Shou Chew said the agreement would benefit artists.
This is not the first time the music business has had issues with TikTok. In 2019, when the platform was just getting started, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) called on Congress to investigate TikTok for potential copyright theft. It was also reported around that time that TikTok was operating on expired deal extensions that were grandfathered in from when it acquired Musical.ly in late 2017. In March 2020, Billboard reported that all three majors had struck short-term licensing deals with TikTok.
Read the full open letter below.
Our core mission is simple: to help our artists and songwriters attain their greatest creative and commercial potential. To achieve these goals, our teams employ their expertise and passion to strike deals with partners all around the world, partners who take seriously their responsibilities to fairly compensate our artists and songwriters and treat the user experience with respect
One of those partners is TikTok, an increasingly influential platform with powerful technology and a massive worldwide user base. As with many other platforms with whom we partner, TikTok’s success as one of the world’s largest social platforms has been built in large part on the music created by our artists and songwriters. Its senior executives proudly state publicly that “music is at the heart of the TikTok experience” and our analysis confirms that the majority of content on TikTok contains music, more than any other major social platform.
The terms of our relationship with TikTok are set by contract, which expires January 31, 2024. In our contract renewal discussions, we have been pressing them on three critical issues—appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok’s users.
We have been working to address these and related issues with our other platform partners. For example, our Artist-Centric initiative is designed to update streaming’s remuneration model and better reward artists for the value they deliver to platforms. In the months since its inception, we’re proud that this initiative has been received so positively and taken up by a range of partners, including the largest music platform in the world. We’ve also moved aggressively to embrace the promise of AI while fighting to ensure artists’ rights and interests are protected now and far into the future. In addition, we’ve engaged a number of our platform partners to try to drive positive change for their users and by extension, our artists, by addressing online safety issues, and we are recognized as the industry leader in focusing on music’s broader impact on health and wellness.
With respect to the issue of artist and songwriter compensation, TikTok proposed paying our artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of the rate that similarly situated major social platforms pay. Today, as an indication of how little TikTok compensates artists and songwriters, despite its massive and growing user base, rapidly rising advertising revenue and increasing reliance on music-based content, TikTok accounts for only about 1% of our total revenue.
Ultimately TikTok is trying to build a music-based business, without paying fair value for the music.
On AI, TikTok is allowing the platform to be flooded with AI-generated recordings—as well as developing tools to enable, promote and encourage AI music creation on the platform itself – and then demanding a contractual right which would allow this content to massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists, in a move that is nothing short of sponsoring artist replacement by AI.
Further, TikTok makes little effort to deal with the vast amounts of content on its platform that infringe our artists’ music and it has offered no meaningful solutions to the rising tide of content adjacency issues, let alone the tidal wave of hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment on the platform. The only means available to seek the removal of infringing or problematic content (such as pornographic deepfakes of artists) is through the monumentally cumbersome and inefficient process which equates to the digital equivalent of “Whack-a-Mole.”
But when we proposed that TikTok takes similar steps as our other platform partners to try to address these issues, it responded first with indifference, and then with intimidation.
As our negotiations continued, TikTok attempted to bully us into accepting a deal worth less than the previous deal, far less than fair market value and not reflective of their exponential growth. How did it try to intimidate us? By selectively removing the music of certain of our developing artists, while keeping on the platform our audience-driving global stars.
TikTok’s tactics are obvious: use its platform power to hurt vulnerable artists and try to intimidate us into conceding to a bad deal that undervalues music and shortchanges artists and songwriters as well as their fans.
We will never do that.
We will always fight for our artists and songwriters and stand up for the creative and commercial value of music.
We recognize the challenges that TikTok’s actions will cause, and do not underestimate what this will mean to our artists and their fans who, unfortunately, will be among those subjected to the near-term consequences of TikTok’s unwillingness to strike anything close to a market-rate deal and meaningfully address its obligations as a social platform. But we have an overriding responsibility to our artists to fight for a new agreement under which they are appropriately compensated for their work, on a platform that respects human creativity, in an environment that is safe for all, and effectively moderated.
We honor our responsibilities with the utmost seriousness. Intimidation and threats will never cause us to shirk those responsibilities.