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Need a little action this coming long weekend? Well, as of Tuesday (May 23) you can officially own John Wick: Chapter 4 digitally, which means collectors and fans of the series can finally own the full saga. After dominating the box office, we can return to our seats (or, in this case, couches) and relive the last installment.
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This isn’t just the last installment of the Keanu Reeves hitman series; it’s also Rina Sawayama’s feature-film debut. The singer takes on the role of Akira, a concierge at her father’s hotel, and a well-trained killer herself. When Reeves’ character enters the hotel seeking asylum, it’s up to him, his friend Shimazu Koji (played by Hiroyuki Sanada) and Akira (Koji’s daughter) to protect Wick and kill any assassins after him.
How to Stream John Wick: Chapter 4
First-time watchers and viewers who saw the movie more than once can purchase the film on Amazon Prime Video for $19.99. If you prefer to own the Blu-ray/DVD, then you can pre-order it here, but it won’t be released until June 13. Fulfill your John Wick marathon dreams and watch how the series comes to a conclusion by ordering the final chapter below.
Amazon Prime
$14.99/month after 30 days free
In order to watch Reeves and Sawayama in action, you’ll need an Amazon Prime account. Currently, the retailer has a free trial promo for 30 days, so you can test it out before committing. Afterward, you’ll pay $14.99/month (or $139/year). With a Prime membership you’ll be able to customize your viewing experience and add channels to Prime Video like Max, Paramount+, Starz and Showtime. That doesn’t even include the massive library of Prime Originals, including Citadel, Daisy Jones & The Six, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Boys, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Summer I Turned Pretty and many, many more.
Besides video content, you’ll be able to take advantage of access to Prime Music, Prime Gaming (not to mention the Gaming Week deals) and Prime Reading. Plus, as a Prime member you get free same-day, one-day or two-day delivery on millions of items, exclusive deals, groceries, savings on prescriptions and more. Amazon also provides 50% off Prime memberships for qualifying students and EBT/Medicaid recipients.
And, for more product recommendations, check out our roundups of portable phone chargers, the best record players and turntables and TV deals.
Check out the trailer for John Wick: Chapter 4 below.
Last year, Pandora started to get suspicious about the streaming activity of a prominent act. “This is a top artist by every measure,” George White, senior vp of music licensing at SiriusXM and Pandora, said during a panel at the Music Biz conference in Nashville on Wednesday (May 17). Some of the interest from Pandora users was clearly genuine. But at the same time, the platform picked up “abnormalities” — “lots of quick skips,” White noted, and “very unusual ratios of radio listening to premium listening” — along with “social media sites actively posting tutorials for how to game the Pandora system and teaching potential users how to drive those streams even higher.”
“This is challenging and more difficult to detect because it’s under a background of legitimate activity,” White continued. And he said that Pandora is seeing more of this type of behavior around “established artists.”
White was one of 11 different speakers across a two-hour, three-panel fraud extravaganza — which covered a lot of ground, jumping from bot farms all the way to thieves falsely claiming publishing ownership on songs to collect money that belongs to someone else — at Music Biz. The tone stayed upbeat, though the message was glum and occasionally paranoia-inducing, with lots of talk about cybercriminals hacking into the accounts of innocent unsuspecting users for nefarious purposes.
“We’ve been seeing lately that as technology advances, the fraud is supercharged,” said Mona Simonian, a partner at the entertainment law firm Pryor Cashman. It’s important that “people start really recognizing how much money is at stake here,” she added. And as Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s former “click fraud czar” (real title: head of global product for trust and safety), put it: “It’s always a little bit scary before you get your arms around the problem.”
While some panels stay general, these three sessions (an interview with Ghosemajumder about the ubiquity of fraud, “52 Flavors of Fraud,” and “Fraud Use Cases: What Can We Do?”) brought some hard numbers to a fraud conversation that often remains frustratingly diffuse, because the behavior is difficult to quantify. White had his Pandora case study. And Andrew Batey, co-founder and co-CEO of the fraud detection company Beatdapp, came armed with numerous examples and a boatload of graphs.
There was the account that recorded 33,500 plays in one week. (“The average user has a few hundred to a thousand plays a week,” Batey said.) There was the user with 96 devices “playing from 47 cities in 17 countries in the same week,” a geographical impossibility for even the most devoted jet-setter. There was the group of thousands of accounts all targeting the same songs with 155-ish plays a week, and the batch of 53,000 accounts playing around a dozen acts to camouflage the one artist whose numbers they’re actually trying to inflate.
If this behavior continues undetected, it represents “billions [of dollars] that are being sucked out of this industry,” Batey said. This sentiment was echoed by Christine Barnum, chief revenue officer of CD Baby: Fraudsters are “diluting the pool for everyone.” (She spoke about ways for companies to improve their fraud detection capabilities on a budget, including using ChatGPT to help write programs that can detect anomalous activity.)
Why the upbeat mood, despite the grim news? For years, many music executives, especially in the United States, were unwilling to publicly acknowledge that fraud was a problem. The fact that there was a 120-minute block — enough time to watch two episodes of Succession, quipped Beatdapp co-founder and co-CEO Morgan Hayduk — devoted to the topic at a major music business conference is indicative of an attitude shift. “I’m so happy there’s a room full of people talking about fraud,” Barnum said.
White was similarly optimistic. While recent studies have concluded that around 80% of fraud is financially motivated — grifters running bot networks to white noise recordings, for example, rather than the work of actual artists — White said, “We’ve seen enormous strides in identifying that [activity] really early.”
“I won’t say that’s in control; it’s an issue that requires ongoing investment,” he added. “But it’s at least something we feel like we have a handle on.”
In a presentation at the Music Biz conference in Nashville on Wednesday (May 17), MIDiA Research’s Tatiana Cirisano revealed the company’s predictions about the future of music streaming. Namely, the firm suspects that music streaming revenue growth, which has been in the double digits for years, will slow to the single digits, eventually cooling off from about 10% growth in 2024 to 3% growth in 2029.
“We’re in a crazy time for competing for consumer attention,” said Cirisano during the presentation, titled Where Does Streaming Go From Here? She noted that after the pandemic subsided, content providers of all kinds — from music to gaming to video — have had to accept that more traditional, in-person activities are absorbing large amounts of time for consumers once again. “The era of build it and they will come is starting to come to a close,” she continued. “You need to give people reasons to spend time on your platform.”
As part of the return to in-person experiences, MIDiA Research has found that background consumption of entertainment is on the rise, with 18.1 hours of background consumption in the first quarter of 2021 having escalated to 20.6 hours in the second quarter of 2022.
Traditional streaming services — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and other competitors — also face competition for users’ attention from “non-[digital service provider] streaming,” or platforms where music is part of the experience but not its sole focus, such as Peloton and TikTok. “We are starting to learn that non-DSP streaming is not just additive, it might actually also diminish the cultural capital of [traditional] streaming,” said Cirisano.
While the cultural capital of streaming reached a fever pitch as Spotify editorial playlists, like Rap Caviar and New Music Friday, became many listener’s go-to source for music suggestions, MIDiA’s data suggests that that “soft power” is starting to wane, giving way to sites like TikTok which promote what Cirisano called “lean-through” music consumption.
This can be a positive thing, she explained. While “lean back,” or background, consumption — such as pre-programmed playlists and radio play — is on the rise, young people are also more likely than ever to not just “lean forward” (meaning they program what music they listen to themselves) but to “lean through,” which Cirisano defined as creating social content, curating content and re-creating content with music. MIDiA has found that the average 16 to 19-year-old spends 3.7 hours per week creating content as of the fourth quarter of 2022. More than ever, young people want to be actively playful and interactive with their music, not just listen to static playlists on streaming — though that form of listening will still surely persist.
To Mark Mulligan, MIDiA’s founder, this is a repeat of history, said Cirisano. Prior to recorded music, live bands’ music would be impacted by the audience in front of them. Now, this has taken on a new form in the age of social media, AI and at-home recording technology, signaling a return to interactivity present throughout the long history of music — and marking a change in appetite from the “isolating” and “hyper-personalized” nature of today’s popular music streaming services. “This new generation wants to be more actively involved in music… I think you’re going to have an advantage if you’re an artist that is comfortable engaging with your fans,” said Cirisano.
MIDiA Research has also found that with the emergence of hyper-personalized algorithms on streaming and social platforms, listenership fragments significantly. This leads to superstars having less of an impact, making it harder for that class of artists to earn a fruitful living from just streaming alone. In tandem with creating content and forging brand partnerships, however, these bigger names can capitalize on their fandom. This atomization of the mainstream is also pushing DSPs to differentiate themselves by, for example, focusing on genre, like Apple Music Classical, or targeting audiophile listeners, like Tidal.
In the future, MIDiA’s data suggests that next-generation platforms will create three-sided marketplaces that operate as self-contained virtuous circles. Audiences will consume music, some fans in the audience will also create using the music, and that consumption and participation will signal the algorithm and distribute the music to new fans.
UPDATE: This story was updated May 17 at 7:59 p.m. ET to note that music streaming revenue growth — not music streaming subscription growth, as incorrectly stated in a previous version of the story — is expected to fall to 3% by 2029. It was also updated to note that background consumption of all entertainment, not just music, is on the rise.
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.
Wednesday (May 17) marks the 11-year anniversary since Billboard Hot 100-topping singer Donna Summer died. In honor of the Queen of Disco, a new HBO documentary titled Love to Love You, Donna Summer looks to honors her legacy while shining a light on her life off the stage.
You’ll be able to watch the full thing once it’s released Saturday (May 20) on HBO and HBO Max. Until then, you can enjoy snippets of what to expect from the trailers the streaming service has released to tease its upcoming release.
Rewinding the Charts: In 1975, Donna Summer Debuted With ‘Love To Love You Baby’
05/17/2023
The documentary was directed by Oscar- and Emmy-winning director Roger Ross William and Brooklyn Sudano (Summer’s daughter). Audiences can expect both intimate footage of the star combined with interviews from those who were closest with her.
Read on for details on when and how to stream the documentary for free.
How to Stream Donna Summer’s Documentary Online
Love to Love You, Donna Summer premieres Friday at 8 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max. If you’re not subscribed to HBO Max, plans start at $9.99/month, but you can land a free trial through Prime Video (find more ways to get free HBO Max here).
HBO Max
$9.99/month
Considered the pioneer of the disco era, Summer landed 14 top 10 Hot 100 hits with singles like “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls” and “MacArthur Park” all claiming the No. 1 spot. If you thought you had “No More Tears” left to cry over the singer, you may want to think again after checking out the documentary’s emotional trailer.
Within the first few seconds, fans will see Summer glittering onstage while posing a polarizing question to the audience: “Do you love somebody?”
One of the most notable aspects of the upcoming documentary is not only the legacy she leaves behind, but the inside look of who she was outside performing. Within the footage, we’ll be able to get a closer look at the relationships she developed throughout her life, including her bonds with her children. In the trailer, she actually points out that she has “a secret life. You’re looking at me, but what you see is not what I am.” Summer further explains that onstage, she isn’t just singing, but acting too.
Watch the trailer for Love to Love You, Donna Summer below.
Beatdapp co-founders and co-CEOs Morgan Hayduk and Andrew Batey were not initially focused on fighting streaming manipulation. Batey spent years in digital marketing, while Hayduk formerly worked as a lobbyist for the Canadian music industry in the area of copyright protection. At first, they teamed to build an auditing tool that would enable labels to evaluate inconsistencies between their sales reports and streaming services’ server logs. Conversations with label executives indicated that “there were pretty often material discrepancies,” Hayduk says.
As he and Batey tried to understand those inconsistencies, it became clear that streaming manipulation was causing some of them, and Beatdapp embarked on developing a tool to detect fraudulent streams — which Hayduk defines as the leveraging of “bots, stolen accounts or manipulated platform features” to steal streaming income — and prevent them from impacting payouts.
According to a recent report from the Centre National de la Musique (CNM), a government-backed organization that supports France’s music industry, in 2021, over 1 billion music streams — between 1% and 3% of all streams generated in the country that year — were fraudulent. “The methods used by fraudsters are constantly evolving and improving,” the report noted, “and fraud seems to be getting easier and easier to commit.” If that percentage was applied to IFPI’s estimate that global streaming revenue totaled $17.5 billion in 2022, fraudulent streams would amount to $350 million in potential lost income for legitimate rights holders.
Beatdapp’s software sifts through massive amounts of data from partners — including labels, distributors and streaming services — to identify and investigate suspicious patterns. In one case, it identified 10,000 accounts all playing the same 63 tracks. The pair say the company now analyzes hundreds of billions of streams, and while they declined to identify partners, they recently started working with SoundCloud and Napster, according to two sources.
“If we can make this industry less attractive for financial fraudsters, that will make a positive difference for everybody who’s working on music,” Hayduk says. “That’s what animates us.”
Why is streaming fraud an important issue?
MORGAN HAYDUK: It hurts everyone who makes a living in the music industry and, left unchecked, creates this promotional race to the bottom where everyone believes they have to cheat to succeed. In cybersecurity terms, it’s important to shrink the attack surface of the industry.
ANDREW BATEY: In an industry where it’s already hard to make something and then promote something and then get paid, you should at least get paid correctly.
How much data is Beatdapp analyzing at this point?
HAYDUK: We’re looking at about 320 billion streams now. That’s about 13 trillion individualized streaming data points when you account for all of the metadata associated with each of those streams. We expect to add data in the neighborhood of another 50 billion streams in [the second quarter] and about another 2 trillion data points on that.
BATEY: It’s not just the individual stream. You might make 12 decisions in an app, such as how you search — if you clicked on the artist first and then you looked at their song list. We’re capturing all of that, anonymized across users. All of that context helps us because if somebody consistently hits, let’s say, the exact 11 things for every song they play, that’s a pretty obvious case of fraud if they’ve done that 3,000 times in a week.
How has the industry’s perception of streaming fraud changed since you started Beatdapp?
HAYDUK: Just hearing people acknowledge the issue is probably the biggest shift. It used to be verboten to speak publicly about streaming fraud. It was all behind closed doors. But I don’t think you can fix a problem until you accept its existence. We’re starting to get there now and [are] seeing a more widespread willingness to put in place solutions.
How has your perception of the problem changed as your data set has expanded?
HAYDUK: The biggest revelation to us has to be that this is way closer to death by a thousand paper cuts than it is a top-of-the-market problem. If you asked us where most of the fraud came from 18 months ago, we probably would have pointed the finger at bigger artists because we would have thought they had the most to gain. But we were missing the point of most of this activity. It’s not about changing perception; it’s about making money. This isn’t a phenomenon that’s driven by major labels and major independent label artists or their top artists. The overwhelming majority, like upwards of 80% of what we see is fraud, is coming from — call it non-music content. It’s not being released for popular consumption or because these are artists who are trying to get noticed. These are releases that have no commercial purpose except as [instruments of] fraud.
BATEY: When we first started, we genuinely thought fraud would be 1% to 3%. Now we think it’s closer to 10% [though some of this is caught]. Also we would have guessed that most of the fraud would occur on the platforms where people were — Spotify, Apple, YouTube. But because it’s a lot of financially motivated fraud, what we actually see is that it’s easier for the fraudsters to attack all the mid- and long-tail [digital service providers] as well, where they’re less likely to get caught and they’ll get a similar or better per-stream payout. Why not target all of these smaller DSPs with zero protections in place and get paid across all of them?
France’s CNM recently came to the conclusion that fraud is getting easier to commit.
BATEY: I 100% agree with that. There are so many ways to exploit platforms. If your job is to deliver the best user experience possible, it often means making it easy for them to access that content and creating really cool ways for them to experience or engage with that content. [When that happens,] there are more ways to manipulate that content for the purpose of exploiting it for a payout.
HAYDUK: And the tools that you need to commit fraud effectively and at scale are easier to access now than ever before. The tools that facilitate fraud in e-commerce or ticketing or financial services are also repackaged and repurposed to commit streaming fraud. You can generate fully automated online bot farms using cloud computing in a way you couldn’t 10 years ago.
How do you avoid generating false positives when you’re hunting for fraud?
HAYDUK: We know that a false positive is worth considerably more in the loss column than a false negative, so we adjust our models to account for the fact that they need to be conservative in the right ways.
BATEY: You can’t get it wrong. If you miss a fraudster, it’s OK. We hope we catch them later. If we call something fraud that’s not, that’s way worse.
Some have suggested that a user-centric payout system might mitigate fraud.
HAYDUK: Our view is that it’s not going to make that big a difference. It’ll change the tactics, but it won’t change the motivation. It’s a big pot of money on the internet, and generally speaking, the DSPs are still fairly soft targets. A different payout structure will just change the tactics that fraudsters use to aggregate money and divert it their way. Obviously, there’s a whole different case for the merits of payout systems if you’re an artist or you’re a label.
There’s a lot of industry concern about artificial intelligence right now. To what extent does AI make it even easier to commit these types of fraudulent activities?
HAYDUK: It’s a tool. We work for some good AI companies that care about not being a tool for fraudsters. That said, the new models are incredibly powerful, and you can create content at scale. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle when some of these tools emerge. The tougher we make it to get away with fraud, the less valuable the tool becomes in the hands of someone who’s wielding it for a bad purpose.
How incentivized are DSPs to care about fraud?
HAYDUK: Their biggest partners care, especially in light of what we said earlier: Market share shifts matter to the partners and, therefore, it matters to the DSPs. I think consumers also care because bad recommendations on the DSP side make for bad user experience. And given that every platform is offering roughly the same catalog to the consumer, if your recommendations are substandard, that makes consumers more inclined to choose your competitor.
Some music industry executives worry that public discussions of fraud undermine user confidence.
HAYDUK: How many times a week does your bank email you about the extra efforts they’re taking to protect you from fraud in the financial sector? It doesn’t make me want to boycott my bank when they tell me that. Fans probably want to hear that, as an industry, we’re taking steps so that the artists they care about are paid correctly.
BATEY: If you’re the consumer, your account was hijacked, and now you’re getting a bunch of recommended songs that don’t make any sense, you’re not blaming the fraudster — you’re blaming the platform.
What is your dream scenario for fraud mitigation in the industry?
HAYDUK: Our view is there are some things you can’t do in a vacuum. DSP A can’t look at the data from DSP B to help inform its own detection models. It’s way too competitive between the platforms to give up the level of data required to do fraud detection at the highest levels. Having a platform in the middle acting as Switzerland, working for the collective benefit of everyone without minimizing the level of competitiveness between the platforms, is the right approach. And it’s also an approach that we’ve seen play out in other verticals with similar dynamics.
The Foo Fighters are gearing up for a summer of major shows by putting on a major show. The group announced on Wednesday morning (May 17) that they will preview songs from their upcoming 11th album, But Here We Are (June 2) during a free global streaming event they are calling “Foo Fighters: Preparing Music For Concerts.”
According to a release, the event will feature the debut performances of songs from their new album — their first since the shocking death of drummer Taylor Hawkins last March — as well as exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and some surprises during the show from their 606 studios.
“Shows like this don’t happen every day. To take this moment to gather fans worldwide, to give people an opportunity to share in the experience no matter where they are, is a gift,” said Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden, CEO and founder of Veeps, the streaming platform hosting the gig. “Having a place to make these moments accessible is why we built Veeps and we’re honored to be trusted with delivering this incredible show for Foo Fighters and all of their fans. The show will premiere on Sunday (May 21) at 3 p.m. ET here.
In addition, the Foos released the second single from the album on Wednesday, the Greg Kurstin-produced mid-tempo rocker “Under You,” on which singer/guitarist Dave Grohl sings the wistful lyrics, “I woke up and walk a million miles today/ I’ve been looking up and down for you/ All this time it still just feels just like yesterday/ That I walked a million miles with you.” He later alludes to the loss of someone dear in the gut-punch verse, “Someone said I’ll never see your face again/ Part of me just can’t believe it’s true/ Pictures of us sharing songs and cigarettes/ This is how I’ll always picture you.”
While the band has not yet officially announced a replacement for longtime drummer Hawkins — who died at 50 while on tour with the Foos in South America — they are slated to make their road return on May 24 at the Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion in Gilford, N.H. They have a very full summer planned, including more than a dozen festival appearances at Boston Calling, Sonic Temple, Rock Am Ring, Bonnaroo, Ottawa Bluesfest, Harley-Davidson Homecoming, Fuji Rock, Wildlands, Outside Lands, Jazz Aspen Snowmass, Riot Fest, Sea.Hear.Now, Louder Than Life, Ohana and ACL as well as a number of North American and international headlining dates.
Produced by frequent collaborator Kurstin and the band, But Here We Are was described in a press release as “the first chapter of the band’s new life… a brutally honest and emotionally raw response to everything Foo Fighters endured over the last year… a testament to the healing powers of music, friendship and family. Courageous, damaged and unflinchingly authentic.”
“But Here We Are is the sound of brothers finding refuge in the music that brought them together in the first place 28 years ago, a process that was as therapeutic as it was about a continuation of life,” it promised.
Listen to “Under You” below.
The three major label groups have been in talks with the big music streaming services to find a way to get them to remove recordings with AI-generated vocals created to sound like popular artists, Billboard has learned. The idea under discussion with Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music would operate much like the one laid out by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act but would cite violations of rights of publicity, rather than copyright, according to sources at all three majors. Unlike the DMCA, however, this arrangement appears to be voluntary.
The 1998 DMCA gives online services that use, store or transmit copyrighted works a “safe harbor” from secondary liability for copyright infringement as long as they abide by a notice-and-takedown system that allows rightsholders to ask them to remove copyrighted content. That law would not apply to most AI-generated soundalike tracks because they do not infringe protected elements of copyrighted recordings or compositions but rather a trademark or a right of publicity, the protection celebrities may be able to receive to protect their names and likenesses from unauthorized commercial exploitation.
Songs that imitate the voices of big-name talent have become a trend over the past month, reaching widespread attention in mid-April when the track “Heart on My Sleeve,” which apparently used AI to mimic the style and tone of vocals by Drake and The Weeknd, was uploaded to streaming services and then swiftly removed. (The song did not credit those artists, although they were referred to in social media posts about it.)
Citing rights of publicity can be more complicated than copyright, because they are matters of state law in the U.S., backed by limited legal precedent. Rights vary by state, protections for deceased artists vary even more widely, and the use of soundalike vocals for creative purposes may in some cases be protected as free speech. Further complicating matters, these rights almost always belong to artists, not labels, which would presumably file notices on their behalf with authorization. Right now, however, this is the most obvious legal argument with which to keep AI-generated soundalikes off major streaming platforms.
In an April 26 earnings call, UMG CEO and chairman Lucian Grainge seemed to signal this approach to investors. “The recent explosive development in generative AI will… create rights issues with respect to existing copyright law, in the US and other countries, as well as laws governing trademark, name and likeness, voice impersonation, and right of publicity,” he said. “Further, we have provisions in our commercial contracts that provide additional protections.” It is not clear if takedowns issued by the majors would rely on these provisions, state law, goodwill, or some combination.
Some executives have raised concerns that AI soundalikes that imitate the voices of popular artists could result in consumer confusion. Still, a few artists like Grimes and Holly Herndon have embraced the technology, training their own AI voice models and making them available to the public.
Meanwhile, companies like Uberduck, Supertone, Lingyin Engine, and Covers.ai are marketing models with which to replicate voices. Covers.ai, which launched last week, has said that it received over 100,000 sign-ups in anticipation. Tencent Music Entertainment executives announced in November that with the company’s Lingyin Engine they had created and released over 1,000 songs containing synthetic AI voices already, one of which amassed 100 million streams.
This stance taken by the leading streaming services counters a recent announcement from the blockchain-based music platform Audius, which announced that artists can now “opt-in” to allow AI-generated works on their artist page. To organize this new music and avoid confusion, Audius would create a separate tab on the artists’ page especially for user-generated content.
Representatives for Universal, Sony, Warner, Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music did not respond to requests for comment.
As Spotify continues in its quest to remain top dog among streaming music brands, the business adds 11 new languages and dialects to its mobile app — bringing the total number of languages on its platform to 74.
With immediate effect, Spotify’s mobile app now also supports Spanish (Argentina and Mexico), traditional Chinese (Hong Kong), Arabic (Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco), Basque, Bosnian, English (U.K.), Galician and Macedonian.
The latest rollout follows Spotify’s initial launch with 27 languages, and a second major expansion in March 2021 with 36 languages.
“This expansion will unlock an even more personal experience for our users,” reads a corporate statement, “giving them the ability to access Spotify in their native or local tongue.”
And the “more people who can use Spotify,” the message continues, “the more connections we can foster between creators and their audiences.”
Spotify already connects hundreds of millions of music fans with its catalog.
The Sweden-originated tech company ended 2022 with 205 million subscribers, up 5% from 195 million in Q3, with 295 million ad-supported listeners, up 8% from 273 million in the previous quarter.
Annual revenue for 2022 came in at 11.7 billion euros ($12.4 billion), up 21% from the previous year.
During an earning call with investors late January, CEO Daniel Ek admitted some shortcomings in the company’s strategy, and admitted that matters would “change” with regards to investment in podcasting and its recent “tightening” of spending.
“In hindsight I probably got a little carried away and over invested relative to the uncertainty we saw shaping up in the market,” he explained. “So we are shifting to tightening our spend and becoming more efficient.”
Click here to see all the languages supported by Spotify and head here to change your Spotify language settings.
SoundCloud chief content & marketing officer Lauren Wirtzer-Seawood has departed the company after nearly two years, Billboard has confirmed. There is no word yet on her next moves.
Wirtzer-Seawood joined SoundCloud in June 2021 from UnitedMasters, where she served as president for more than two years. Prior to that, she worked as head of music partnerships at Instagram for over three years and head of digital at Beyoncé‘s Parkwood Entertainment for over two years; she has also held senior roles at Def Jam and Zynga.
“I came to SoundCloud to help transform the company and set it on a path toward success,” says Wirtzer-Seawood in a statement sent to Billboard. “After nearly two years of building teams, processes, priorities — and hiring some really stellar people — it was time to move on. I have no doubt that Eliah and the executive team will drive massive success for SoundCloud.”
During Wirtzer-Seawood’s tenure, SoundCloud has made efforts to differentiate itself as a more artist-friendly alternative to rival streaming services. Chief among these efforts is the fan-powered royalty payment system, first unveiled in March 2021, which has since been opted into by both Warner Music Group and Merlin. Unlike the traditional pro-rata model, under which streaming services collect all subscriber revenue and then pay out earnings based on each rightsholder’s share of total streams, fan-powered royalties direct a portion of every listener’s subscription or advertising revenue to the rightsholders for the specific tracks they listen to.
“Fan-powered royalties give us the ability to have specific data around who those fans are,” Wirtzer-Seawood told Billboard last year, “and we can now unlock those relationships with the superfans and communicate with them, to sell them something or whatnot.”
On Monday, SoundCloud unveiled “Fans,” a new SoundCloud for Artists product that’s being billed as the next evolution of the fan-powered payment system. Now in beta, the tool allows music creators to tap into the platform’s proprietary data and sort their most engaged listeners based on factors like comments, listening behavior, sharing habits and location — and then directly message individual fans to share previews of upcoming releases; sell tickets and merch; and more.
SoundCloud is bringing music creators even closer to their biggest fans with a new product that gives artists access to granular user data and facilitates direct, one-on-one interaction with their most loyal listeners.
Dubbed simply “Fans” and now available on SoundCloud for Artists, the tool allows artists to tap into the platform’s proprietary data and sort their most engaged listeners based on factors like comments, listening behavior, sharing habits and location — and even identify who among their listeners are fellow artists. Using SoundCloud’s pre-existing messaging feature, they can also directly message individual fans to share previews of upcoming releases via private links; sell tickets and merch; and/or just say thanks. (SoundCloud notes there’s an opt-out option for users who don’t wish to be contacted by artists.)
Tracy Chan, svp of creator at SoundCloud, says there’s a special power in fans receiving direct acknowledgment from their favorite artists that can unlock “real revenue opportunities” for creators.
“[It’s] one thing to blast out, ‘Hey, come attend my concert or my show,’ but actually asking specific people, like, ‘Hey, I know you’re a super fan, will you come to my show?’ is a very kind of different way to ask,” Chan says. “You can imagine the possibilities of commerce that open up between artists and fans once the communication lines are open.”
Prior to Monday’s announcement, SoundCloud had been running a six-week test of the tool, which is currently in beta, with roughly 10,000 artists. Starting now, the platform is opening up the product to an additional 50,000 artists who are part of its premium Next Pro tier.
Chan describes the tool as “the next step” in SoundCloud’s fan-powered royalties payment system first unveiled in March 2021, which has since been opted into by both Warner Music Group and Merlin. Unlike the traditional pro-rata model, under which streaming services collect all subscriber revenue and then pay out earnings based on each rightsholder’s share of total streams, fan-powered royalties direct a portion of every listener’s subscription or advertising revenue to the rightsholders for the specific tracks they listen to. Some of the user data SoundCloud artists now have access to under the new tool derives from that fan-powered royalties system.
As part of the unveiling, SoundCloud noted several successful individual use cases among the 10,000 artists included in the previous phase of the tool’s beta period. These include Lil West, a hip-hop artist from Delaware who used the artist filtering tool on Fans to connect with fellow artists 100 gecs and nothing,nowhere., leading to collaborative track releases. After gaining access to the tool, Def Jam artist Armani White worked with SoundCloud and his label to set up a listening party/meet-and-greet with his top fans at SoundCloud’s Los Angeles office on Thursday.
Fans is the latest effort by SoundCloud to differentiate itself as a more artist-friendly alternative to rival streaming services. Chan frames the tool in opposition to the limited functionality offered by other major streamers along with ticketing and merch platforms, which don’t allow artists to identify their individual fans or connect with them one-on-one.
“When artists are like, ‘Cool, I want to go connect with my fans’ [on other streaming services] … they see lots of charts and graphs describing their audiences, but the platforms will not tell artists who their fans are…so that means you can’t market to them,” he says.
According to data provided by SoundCloud, the platform currently boasts more than 320 million tracks from over 40 million creators and operates in 193 countries.