Streaming
Page: 50
Slacker, the music streaming service owned by LiveOne, called off its planned merger with Roth CH Acquisition V Co., a special purpose acquisition company, the companies announced Monday (Oct. 30).
LiveOne CEO Robert Ellin attributed the move to a poor market climate for small companies. “Market conditions for micro-cap stocks, for stocks under $1 billion, are just decimated this year as a whole,” he says. Companies that go public through SPAC mergers also face a difficult time, he adds. A SPAC is a blank-check company created and funded for taking a private company public. SPAC funding and mergers peaked in 2021, according to SPAC Research.
The SPAC market has softened considerably since 2021. Many SPACs failed to close a deal and returned their funds to shareholders. Music Acquisition Corp. returned funds to shareholders in Dec. 2022. Liberty Media closed down its SPAC in Nov. 2022 after a fruitless search for a takeover target. A record 123 SPACs liquidated in the first half of 2023, compared to just seven in the prior-year period, and the average redemption rate — SPAC shares redeemed for full value before merging with a target company — increased in the first half of 2023, according to Kroll. “It’s a tough market to come out in,” says Ellin.
Additionally, LiveOne believes Slacker has gained in value since it agreed to merge with Roth. LiveOne previously announced it had signed a letter of intent to merge Slacker with Roth and put a pre-money valuation of $160 million on the music streamer. But on Monday, LiveOne raised its revenue guidance for Slacker to the range of $63 million to $66 million for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2024. The company expects adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $17 million to $19 million.
“I think it’s worth $200 million at a minimum,” says Ellin, “and probably way higher than that when you’re looking at what Tidal sold for at $400 million and change, where Deezer trades at 300 million [euros, or $317 million]. We’re the only one that’s profitable. We make money every month, every quarter, every year.”
The market currently puts a far lower value on Slacker, however. LiveOne — including Slacker — has a $92 million market capitalization. That includes an 81% stake in PodcastOne, a podcast company LiveOne spun off in September that currently has a market capitalization of $70 million. LiveOne said that prior to the spin-off, PodcastOne was valued at between $230 million and $274 million by third-party valuation firm ValueScope.
Slacker was founded in 2007 and acquired by LiveOne — then called LiveXLive Media — in 2017 for $50 million. Many of its subscribers come from a white-label service that powers other brands’ digital radio. For example, nearly every new Tesla automobile sold in the United States comes with a subscription to Tesla Radio that’s provided by Slacker and paid for by the automaker. LiveOne says it added over 300,000 new paid Tesla subscribers in the first five months of its fiscal year, a 30% year-over-year increase. The company expects to add over 800,000 new subscribers this fiscal year.
With the SPAC merger off the table, Ellin sees numerous potential avenues for Slacker. “There’s an opportunity today to roll up multiple other companies in the space,” he said during an investor call on Wednesday (Nov. 1). “We have four to five potential acquisitions in the audio business alone that would fit in very nicely with the company and be extraordinarily accretive to revenues and bottom line. We also could explore a sale or a strategic investor, including some of our current customers or investors. We also will explore a direct IPO as the markets change and fair market value for the numbers that we’ve delivered are available.”
Roth “is currently exploring opportunities with other potential merger candidates in order to complete its business combination,” according to Monday’s press release.
SoundCloud and veteran music executive Sickamore have partnered to launch IIIXL STUDIO, a Brooklyn-based enterprise devoted to signing and developing New York City artists, it was announced today (Nov. 1). The union between SoundCloud and Sickamore (born Randall Medford) will join the streaming company’s proprietary data and the executive’s eye for talent to scour through […]
Audius, a blockchain-based streaming platform, launched its music marketplace in beta on Wednesday (Nov. 1), meaning that its user base — which has ranged between 4 and 7 million in recent months — can now send direct payments to their favorite artists.
“We were a marketplace for engagement and attention,” Roneil Rumburg, co-founder/CEO of Audius, tells Billboard. “But talk to any artists — what’s top of mind for them is, ‘How am I going to pay rent next month?’ This feature allows them to make the following they have a financial asset. There’s a structure to monetize via Audius now rather than just building a fan base.”
More than 40 acts, including RAC, Matt Ox and Cheat Codes, will participate in the beta program, which Audius hopes to roll out widely in the first quarter of 2024. Artists can set prices for fans to stream a previously unreleased demo or download stems to participate in a remix competition, for example. And fans can pay artists more than that price if they’re particularly excited about an offering.
“What we heard [from users] is they were looking for a deeper way to engage with artists,” Romburg explains. He likens allowing them to tip extra on top to “the behavior pattern you see from the folks who buy vinyl even though they don’t have a record player at home — they want to support that artist.” (Users are further incentivized to support artists via a matching program: If an act sells access to a track for $1, for example, that act and the purchaser each get 1 $AUDIO tokens, which helps them gain more voting power on the community-run platform.)
Implementing a monetization option has also allowed Audius to build new bridges to the traditional music industry for the first time. “This monetization feature set saw fairly broad buy-in,” Rumburg says. The platform is partnering with DistroKid, allowing a large number of independent acts the option to put their music on Audius, and Beatport, an important hub for the dance music community. In addition, Audius is announcing its first set of label partners, a group that includes EMPIRE, Nettwerk Music, Circus Records and Anjunadeep, among others.
Rumburg cautions that “the way the deals with the labels coming on are structured, it’s not like their whole catalog gets shoved into Audius.”
“Uploading the same music that’s available everywhere else probably wouldn’t work,” he continues. “Where we’ve had the most success is when artists are sharing weird, different things that they probably wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing with their broader fan base. Something like sharing early draft versions of future content to get feedback — the most highly engaged part of the fan base loves that s—.”
But under the new deals, Romburg adds, “When content is shared on Audius that’s owned by a label, the payments will flow correctly.”
In the TikTok era, homemade remixes of songs — typically single tracks that have been sped up or slowed down, or two tracks mashed together — have become ever more popular. Increasingly, they are driving viral trends on the platform and garnering streams off of it.
Just how popular? In April, Larry Mills, senior vp of sales at the digital rights tech company Pex, wrote that Pex’s tech found “hundreds of millions of modified audio tracks distributed from July 2021 to March 2023,” which appeared on TikTok, SoundCloud, Audiomack, YouTube, Instagram and more.
On Wednesday (Nov. 1), Mills shared the results of a new Pex analysis — expanded to include streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, and Tidal — estimating that “at least 1% of all songs on [streaming platforms] are modified audio.”
“We’re talking more than 1 million unlicensed, manipulated songs that are diverting revenue away from rightsholders this very minute,” Mills wrote, pointing to homemade re-works of tracks by Halsey or One Republic that have amassed millions of plays. “These can generate millions in cumulative revenue for the uploaders instead of the correct rightsholders.”
Labels try to execute a tricky balancing act with user-generated remixes. They usually strike down the most popular unauthorized reworks on streaming services and move to release their own official versions in an attempt to pull those plays in-house. But they also find ways to encourage fan remixing, because it remains an effective form of music marketing at a time when most promotional strategies have proved toothless. “Rights holders understand that this process is inevitable, and it’s one of the best ways to bring new life to tracks,” Meng Ru Kuok, CEO of music technology company BandLab, said to Billboard earlier this year.
Mills argues that the industry needs a better system for tracking user-generated remixes and making sure royalties are going into the right pockets. “While these hyper-speed remixes may make songs go viral,” he wrote in April, “they’re also capable of diverting royalty payments away from rights holders and into the hands of other creators.”
Since Pex sells technology for identifying all this modified audio, it’s not exactly an unbiased party. But it’s notable that streaming services and distributors don’t have the best track record when it comes to keeping unauthorized content of any kind off their platforms.
It hasn’t been unusual to find leaked songs — especially from rappers with impassioned fan bases like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert — on Spotify, where leaked tracks can often be found climbing the viral chart, or TikTok. An unreleased Pink Pantheress song sampling Michael Jackson’s classic “Off the Wall” is currently hiding in plain sight on Spotify, masquerading as a podcast.
“Historically, streaming services don’t have an economic incentive to actually care about that,” Deezer CEO Jeronimo Folgueira told Billboard earlier this year. “We don’t care whether you listen to the original Drake, fake Drake, or a recording of the rain. We just want you to pay $10.99.” Folgueira called that incentive structure “actually a bad thing for the industry.”
In addition, many of the distribution companies that act as middlemen between artists and labels and the streaming services operate on a volume model — the more content they upload, the more money they make — which means it’s not in their financial interest to look closely at what they send along to streaming services.
However, the drive to improve this system has taken on new urgency this year. Rights holders and streaming services are going back and forth over how streaming payments should work and whether “an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof,” as Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl told financial analysts in May. As the industry starts to move to a system where all streams are no longer created equal, it becomes increasingly important to know exactly what’s on these platforms so it can sort different streams into different buckets.
In addition, the advance of artificial intelligence-driven technology has allowed for easily accessible and accurate-sounding voice-cloning, which has alarmed some executives and artists in a way that sped-up remixes have not. “In our conversations with the labels, we heard that some artists are really pissed about this stuff,” says Geraldo Ramos, co-founder/CEO of the music-tech company Moises. “They’re calling their label to say, ‘Hey, it isn’t acceptable, my voice is everywhere.’”
This presents new challenges, but also perhaps means new opportunities for digital fingerprint technology companies, whether that’s stalwarts like Audible Magic or newer players like Pex. “With AI, just think how much the creation of derivative works is going to exponentially grow — how many covers are going to get created, how many remixes are gonna get created,” Audible Magic CEO Kuni Takahashi told Billboard this summer. “The scale of what we’re trying to identify and the pace of change is going to keep getting faster.”
Apple TV+ announced a new three-part documentary series delving into the 1980 murder of late Beatle John Lennon. With narration from 24 star Kiefer Sutherland, John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial promises to present exclusive eyewitness interviews and previously unseen crime scene photos that will shed “new light on the life and murder” of the […]
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
Nickelodeon’s Nick at Nite is honoring the late Matthew Perry with a special tribute titled Matthew Perry: Thanks for Being a Friend. The 30-minute program is scheduled to air Sunday (Nov. 5) at 10 p.m. ET/PT and will be followed by “fan favorite” episodes of Friends with Perry as his hilariously sarcastic character Chandler Bing.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
Viewers will have the opportunity to watch never-before-seen interviews with Perry as well as behind-the-scenes footage from his time on Friends. The channel will also be running reruns of the hit sitcom leading up to the tribute special so you can revisit some of your favorite moments from the series.
You can tune into the live special through your cable provider — just go to the Nickelodeon channel, which you can find through your TV provider’s guide.
Don’t have cable? We recommend trying out DirecTV Stream, which has the Nick channel and offers a five-day free trial. Plus, right now you can take advantage of the platform’s $30 off promo that’ll take $10 off your plan for the first three months. Click here or the button below to start your free trial now.
HBO’s streaming platform Max also plans to put a tribute to the 54-year-old actor at the start of each episode of Friends that will read “In memory of Matthew Perry.”
Keep reading to learn the streaming options to watch the Nick at Nite tribute and rewatch Friends.
How to Watch Friends & Matthew Perry: Thanks for Being a Friend
If you don’t have cable, then an HD antenna like these ones here on Amazon might be able to stream Nick at Nite live. If not, then DirecTV Stream will give you a 5-day free trial to watch reruns of Friends and Matthew Perry: Thanks for Being a Friend without having to spend hundreds of dollars on cable.
Looking for more affordable options? FuboTV offers Nickelodeon as one of its channels as well as 7-day free trial, which means you can watch the special and more for free. After the trial is over, you’ll be charged the normal subscription price based on the plan you choose. Plans start at $74.99/month and offer a variety of live news, sports and entertainment channels, DVR storage and the ability to watch on at least 10 screens at a time.
Hulu + Live TV is the best option if you’re looking for the most programming for a fraction of the cost. Not only will you have a 30-day free trial, but you’ll also get access to the entire Hulu library and hundreds of live TV channels including Nickelodeon. If you’re a fan of bundling you can save even more money by adding ESPN+ and Disney+ to your plan for $81.99/month.
How to Watch Friends
The best way to rewatch episodes of Friends as well as the 2021 reunion special is through Max, HBO’s streaming service. Right now, you can take advantage of Prime Video‘s 7-day free-trial, which will give you access to all the content on Max as well as everything the Prime Video library has to offer. Once the free-trial is over you’ll be charged the normal subscription price of $15.99/month.
You’ll need to be a Prime member in order to get the 7-day free-trial. If you already have a subscription you just need to add the channel to your subscription under the Prime Video channel store.
Not subscribed? Amazon offers a 30-day free trial that’ll give you access to Prime Video as well as additional Prime member benefits like one-day free shipping, exclusive Prime member-only deals, grocery delivery, Prime Premiere and more. Click here to start your free trial now.
Prefer to own the series on DVD? Amazon is currently offering the complete series on sale for 41% off, which you can shop below.
Amazon
Friends: The Complete Series (25th Anniversary DVD)
Enjoy all 10 seasons of NBC’s award-winning sitcom series in a 25th anniversary collectors edition. Inside you’ll find 32 disc with every episode from the show, so you can rewatch and relive some of the most iconic episodes and scenes that still captivate audiences today.
Why are hip-hop and R&B still popular streaming-wise but less so on the live music front? How can superfans and generative AI help further music industry growth? Those are just two of the hot topics addressed in Trapital’s second annual report on major trends in music, media and hip-hop. Presented by the ticketing company DICE, 2023’s The Trapital Report is being released today (Oct. 31) in tandem with Billboard‘s exclusive first-look preview.
“This report is for the key decision makers in music, media and entertainment, the executives, founders and investors in the space,” Trapital founder Dan Runcie tells Billboard. “These are the people who are working actively to serve the artists that they work with. They’re working actively to provide an experience to the end consumers as well as fans. And to do that they need to be as close as possible to the current trends that are happening within the actual revenue. But looking fast forward, what are the things that they need to invest their time and money in? How do they better understand this audience? Our report is able to offer those insights.”
The report begins with a look at the slowing growth of streaming. While music streaming revenue was $17.5B in 2022 versus $15.7B in 2021, that only represents 11% growth. That percentage figure is down from 24%, 19% and 29% in prior years, per Trapital’s analysis of data from Luminate, MRC, Nielsen and the IFPI Global Music Report 2022.
Explains Runcie, “Streaming growth has started to slow down from a revenue perspective year over year, especially from the heights that we had seen in the pandemic. That has sparked a lot of industry discussions about how to split the pie like pushes to raise prices and increase the payouts to certain types of artists; reducing the noise and fraud. But I do think that the two big opportunities that the industry has to grow the overall pie is to look at the superfan and lean into generative AI.”
“I do think even alone on the streaming services, they have a lot of valuable data and understanding as to who the superfans are,” says Runcie. “And as well to all of the combinations of things that can be offered, whether it’s exclusive access to fans, community input … I think there are different ways to have different tiers to enable that.”
Acknowledging the intense discussions emanating over the use of generative AI, Runcie says the emerging technology represents another growth opportunity by increasing derivative work.
“Anytime in the history of recorded music, derivative work grows and that overall demand grows the pie,” he explains. “And it can do that because the underlying asset that a lot of popular derivative work comes from is work that the record labels already own. It’s what the rights holders already have. So being able to find the right attribution, being able to do it in a way that acknowledges both the safety and rights that the artists and the rights holders have, I think all of this is possible if you accept the fact that this isn’t necessarily a genie that’s going to go back in the bottle. It’s still very early, but no different than YouTube being able to figure out Content ID. The same can be possible for generative AI and allowing superfans to create making music, anything that enables that as that continues to grow, it only adds more value adds to the artists and the rights holders who have the valuable intellectual property.”
On the hip-hop front, the report notes the genre’s total global revenue rose slightly between 2021 ($2.72B) and 2022 ($2.78B). But its share of total revenue has dipped from 27.7% in 2021 to 26.8% in 2022. And while only three rap albums have hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2023 — Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape, Travis Scott’s Utopia and Drake’s For All the Dogs — hip-hop still reigns as the top genre. It accounts for 33% of all albums on the Billboard 200, more than twice pop and rock combined at 16% each.
However, in the report section titled “From URL to IRL” it points out the glaring fact that despite hip-hop and R&B’s popularity in terms of streaming and social media, pop and rock still command the live music front: 27% of concert revenue/33% of streaming revenue in the U.S. versus 11% of concert revenue/27% of streaming revenue for R&B/hip-hop according to Trapital’s analysis of stats from Pollstar and Luminate.
The report explains the disconnect is related to several factors. Among them: that hip-hop artists didn’t consistently begin touring on a global arena level until the 2000s; the hesitancy on the part of concert promoters to book rap acts owing to violence and safety concerns even though “rock acts often had worse violence issues”; younger fan bases; and the fact that many hip-hop and R&B acts “have clustered around larger festivals like Rolling Loud, the club circuit and other festival appearances” which are more economical than paying for expensive concert tickets.
“This is something I’ve been eager to dig into,” says Runcie. “And I’m glad we were able to do it with this report. When you transition from stream URL to in real life, hip-hop and R&B don’t necessarily dominate in the same way. Even though we’ve seen hip-hop and R&B artists that have done arena tours like Drake, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and SZA, other hip-hop/R&B artists who’ve had very popular music haven’t quite gotten to that same point on the live music side.”
To that point, the report includes a breakdown of which artists can sell out a tour at each venue level. The list encompasses 30+ stadiums (Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, The Weeknd, Lady Gaga), 10K+ arenas (SZA, Lizzo, Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar, Miley Cyrus), 5K+ amphitheatres (Lil Uzi Vert, Janelle Monae, Wiz Khalifa, Lil Baby, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie) and 2K+ ballrooms (Latto, Chloe Baily, Yeat, Denzel Curry, Glorilla).
Also of interest in The Trapital Report is a look at Latin music’s popularity, the largest DSPs and most valuable private companies, indie artist case stories, audience profiles, the most valuable songs streamed on Spotify and YouTube and the top 1% of artists in streaming. According to Runcie, the full reports features detailed analyses on streaming revenue, music genre trends, live entertainment, short-form video, chart analysis among other topics.
For more information, visit trapital.co/report
As part of our continuing efforts to serve the music industry and its creators, Billboard now features a royalty calculator for Spotify and Apple Music for readers. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Created by Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, a legal and consulting firm that specializes in […]
As part of our continuing efforts to serve the music industry and its creators, Billboard now features a royalty calculator for Spotify and Apple Music for readers. The calculator below was created by Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, a legal and consulting firm that specializes in music industry law; and is based on the firm’s analysis […]
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
Five Nights at Freddy’s popularity as a video game franchise has earned it a movie adaptation, which is premiering in theaters and on streaming on Friday (Oct. 27). You can still get tickets to see it on the big screen through Cinemark and Fandango. If you prefer to watch the horror movie with the lights on, Peacock has it available to stream online.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
The film stars Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games) as Mike, a security guard who begins working at the children’s pizza restaurant Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria. During the day, the cute animatronics seem harmless, but as Mike spends his first night on duty, he begins to realize more sinister things are at play.
Five Nights at Freddy’s comes from Blumhouse Productions and also stars Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Mary Stuart Masterson and Matthew Lillard. The animatronic characters were created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop
Keep reading to learn the streaming options.
How to Watch Five Nights At Freddy’s
Five Nights at Freddy’s is a Peacock original film that can be seen in theaters or exclusively on the Peacock platform. If you already have a Peacock subscription, then you can watch the new movie for no additional cost — just log into your account and find it under new releases.
Don’t have a subscription? Peacock may not have a free-trial, but it is one of the more affordable streaming platforms on the market with plans starting at $5.99/month. Click here or the button below to sign-up now.
Peacock has two subscription plans to choose from: Premium or Premium Plus. The Premium plan is $59.99/month and is the ad-supported subscription that includes over 80,000 hours of sports, TV and movies along with new, exclusive and original content, live sports and events, access to current NBC and Bravo shows and over 50 always-on channels. Premium Plus is $11.99/month and comes with everything in the Premium plan without ads, the ability to download and watch content offline and your local NBC channel live 24/7.
Looking for additional savings? If you sign-up for an annual plan you’ll save money by paying for the cost of 10 months instead of 12.
Besides Five Nights at Freddy’s, Peacock gives you access to library filled with hundreds of titles, live events and exclusives such as Bupkis, Mrs. Davis, Poker Face, Bel-Air, Poker Face, Yellowstone, The Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip, Vanderpump Rules, Queens Court, The Traitors, The Best Man: The Final Chapters, Sick, Based on a True Story, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and other Peacock Originals in addition to NBC and Bravo shows, sports and more.
Anyone new to the game can try it out for themselves through a complete set of the video game series for only $26.
Amazon
“Five Nights at Freddy’s: The Core Collection” $26.00 $39.99 35% off Buy Now On Amazon
Enjoy playing games 1-4 and delve into the lore of the original Five Nights at Freddy’s video games. You’ll be the main character this time as you fight to survive a night alone on guard. It’s available in three editions: Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One.
Check below to watch the trailer for Five Nights at Freddy’s.
[embedded content]