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Spotify has been prepping music fans for their personalized Spotify Wrapped playlist for weeks, and the end of year rollout appears to be right around the corner.
The teases started way back in mid-October, when the streaming giant tweeted, “We want to see your Wrapped Top Artist predictions,” garnering responses from fans eager to guess the artist they had streamed the most throughout the bulk of 2022. (One week later, Spotify launched its new ‘Your Wrapped Soundcheck’ feature for artists on the platform.)
In years past, Spotify has collected data regarding each user’s listening habits through Halloween (Oct. 31) with Wrapped dropping either Dec. 1 or 2 — which in 2022, would mean this Thursday or Friday. And while the company has yet to confirm an exact date for the 2022 iteration of the madness, they’ve ramped up anticipation for the big day since that first tweet.
On Nov. 22, just a few days before Thanksgiving, Spotify promised, “All will be revealed soon” when it came to Spotify Wrapped. One day later, they roped Lizzo into the conversation by posting a gif of the singer beneath another tweet which read, “Turn up the music… it’s almost about damn time for #SpotifyWrapped” — a point-blank reference to her Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit, and lead single off 2022’s Special.
On Sunday night (Nov. 27), the streamer sent out the latest alert to anxious fans, tweeting, “Want to be the first to know when #SpotifyWrapped is here? [Heart] this tweet and we’ll remind you!” Based on hints and history, it seems the annual drop of Spotify Wrapped is imminent.
Check out everything Spotify has shared about the latest Spotify Wrapped below.
We want to see your Wrapped Top Artist predictions 👇— Spotify (@Spotify) October 12, 2022
The popular Arab-language music and content streaming service Anghami became the latest music company to cut staff as growing global economic uncertainty forces companies to cut costs in order to maintain profitability.
The Abu Dhabi-based company said in a statement last week (Nov. 15) that it was reducing full-time employee headcount by 22%, or roughly 39 employees.
“Given the impact of challenging macroeconomic conditions, we had to take some cost disciplinary measures to improve our bottom-line performance,” Eddy Maroun, Anghami’s chief executive and co-founder, said in a statement announcing the company’s third quarter earnings.
Several music companies have let go of staff or cut investment budgets in recent months as they prepare for a possible economic downturn. This summer, Spotify said it would cut hiring by 25%, SoundCloud laid off 20% of its staff and BMI said it was cutting just under 10% of its total workforce, through a combination of letting 30 people go and leaving certain jobs unfilled.
Launched in 2012, Anghami is the most popular streaming and content company focused on Arabic-language music, with about 58% of the Middle East’s market share and around 20 million active users, according to company filings.
Since going public on the NASDAQ in February, Anghami’s stock has declined by more than 73% to close at $2.70 on Monday. The company’s low stock price and growing investor interest in music companies based in the Middle East and Africa has fueled market chatter about the company’s future. Earlier this month, the German magazine Frankly reported that Spotify was considering buying Anghami.
In an email to Billboard, Maroun said the cuts were necessary as the company worked to reduce operating expenses and focus on profitability. Maroun declined to answer a question about whether the company was preparing for a possible sale.
In its third quarter earnings, Anghami reported that its revenues grew by 29% to $31.7 million, up from $24.5 million in the year-ago quarter. The company’s gross profit rose 13% in the quarter ending Sept. 30 from the year-ago period, helped by a reduction in cloud computing costs by 19% and a 15% increase in music traffic in the quarter.
Additional reporting by Alexei Barrionuevo
BERLIN – Subscription streaming services have ushered in a recorded music business boom, but the medium’s focus on hit singles has boosted genres like hip-hop and Latin more than some others. Starting today, Universal Music Group’s Deutsche Grammophon is offering its own service, Stage+, which will offer music from its own archive and that of sibling label Decca Records, plus video programming and a new live performance every week — at a cost of $14.90, or €14.90, a month.
Universal Music has no plans to remove its classical recordings from mainstream music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. Rather, the idea is to offer a specialist service that can appeal to classical music fans and create a more favorable business structure for a genre that hasn’t been well-served by mainstream services. Since many artists and orchestras record some of the same compositions, it can be difficult for aficionados to find the recording they’re looking for — and the mainstream streaming services tend to curate music for a general audience.
“There’s the urge of consumers and artists to have everything in one place, with all the right data,” says Deutsche Grammophon president Dr. Clemens Trautmann. “You can punch in a work or a recording or an artist and you’ll see the next livestream, the archive, the albums, and if there’s a documentary, behind-the-scenes footage or interviews.”
So far, no big label has managed to build its own streaming service, and it’s hard to know how many consumers will be interested in one that only offers certain recordings. But Deutsche Grammophon, with its iconic yellow logo, has culturally significant repertoire going back more than a century, as well as significant stars like Lang Lang, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Max Richter. It also has enough brand equity to get streaming rights to major live events, and its first streamed performance will be Víkingur Ólafsson’s presentation of his album From Afar in the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík, Iceland. (Some of the live performances featured on Stage+ will be time-delayed for various reasons.)
For Universal Music, Stage+ also offers business advantages. The price is higher than the current cost of mainstream services, although it includes high-fidelity audio as well as livestreamed events. The core classical repertoire is in the public domain, which means it will not have to pay publishing royalties on about three-quarters of the music it streams. The service can also operate in a way that makes sense for the genre, and it plans to divide up the royalty pool according to the time consumers spend listening to certain recordings, rather than paying a royalty on each track, which advantages shorter songs in a way that’s arguably unfair to genres with varied or longer track lengths, like jazz and classical music.
Stage+ faces competition — from livestreaming video services like Medici TV and Carnegie Hall+ on one hand and specialist streaming services like Berlin-based classical-focused Idagio on the other. And since so many households in the U.S. and Europe now subscribe to a mainstream streaming service, in many cases Stage+ will need to have enough appeal to succeed as a second service. Apple also seems to have plans that involve a classical music service; last summer it purchased the streaming service Primephonic, whose website says, “We are working on an amazing new classical music experience from Apple for next year.” (Apple did not respond to a request to comment.)
Trautmann says that Stage+ grew out of DG Stage, which was established during the pandemic and offered ticketed livestreams of performances by Deutsche Grammophon artists. A little over a year and a half ago, he started working to develop the service with Deutsche Grammophon vp of consumer business, Robert Zimmermann, under Frank Briegmann, Universal Music chairman and CEO, Central Europe, who also serves as chairman of Deutsche Grammophon.
“DG Stage is simple and very effective, but we realized that the artist community and consumers were looking for a service where everything our artists create can be presented holistically in one place and audiences can follow their journey,” says Trautmann, who is himself a Julliard-trained musician who plays classical clarinet.
It’s hard to imagine that Stage+ will ever have enough subscribers to rival the mainstream players, but its premium price could potentially allow it to make money with a number of subscribers in the low six figures. It also offers an interesting model for genres that don’t fare as well in the streaming world as pop music — especially if they have fans who can afford a premium price.
And although no major label currently runs a streaming service, there’s no reason that Stage+ couldn’t also offer music from other labels or rightsholders — and it could potentially offer them better deal terms as a more appealing cultural and commercial environment than Spotify and Apple Music. “We’d be open to enlarge the content offering, provided it’s the right match for our curated approach,” Trautmann says, although there are no immediate plans to do so. “It might be better coming from potential partners instead of us.”
In early October, Lil Yachty uploaded the 83-second track “Poland” to SoundCloud along with a grumpy message: “STOP LEAKING MY SHIT.” “Poland” consists of two keening hooks and some slack rhymes; a veteran publishing executive calls it “an idea, almost a tweet,” more than a song.
Either way, it’s a hit — it reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and it’s part of a larger trend: The average length of popular songs has been shrinking steadily for years. A 2018 study by San Francisco-based engineer Michael Tauberg concluded that songs on the Billboard Hot 100 shed around 40 seconds since 2000, falling from 4:10-ish to roughly 3:30. The average length of the top 50 tracks on Billboard‘s year-end Hot 100 in 2021 was even less, a mere 3:07. (Though this is a simple average, whereas Tauberg’s calculation was weighted by weeks spent on the chart.)
“Everyone’s aware of it — it’s a reaction to the culture of soundbites that we moved towards,” says Vincent “Tuff” Morgan, vp of A&R at the indie publisher peermusic. “I have producers in the studio this week just going through and making songs shorter.”
In this climate, writers are increasingly willing to ditch a third chorus and a pre-chorus — the musical alley-oop that sets up the hook’s slam dunk — according to the analytics company Hit Songs Deconstructed. And the portion of sub-three-minute top 10 hits ballooned from just 4% in 2016 to 38% so far in 2022. “Over the last two years, as I get demos back from artists, they’re consistently down to two minutes and 30 seconds or even two minutes,” says Caterina Nasr, senior manager of A&R at Elektra Entertainment. “Artists feel like they can express themselves quicker.”
Shorter songs aren’t exactly a new trend. Back in the early 1960s, little miracles of concision like The Chiffons “He’s So Fine” (1:52) topped the Hot 100 and The Beatles rose to international fame by releasing a series of snub-nosed pop missiles. More recently, Piko-Taro’s “PPAP (Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen)” made history as the shortest Hot 100 entry ever (45 seconds) in 2016. The following year, XXXTentacion‘s 17, which cycles through 11 songs in just 21 minutes, became a streaming sensation. In 2018, Travis Scott effectively mashed three 90-second songs into the massively successful “Sicko Mode.”
If the focus on brevity in the early 1960s was driven by the pace of AM radio, the streaming economy imposes its own pressures on song length. One theory holds that a concise track is more likely to spur multiple listens. “There’s charm to a short song because the person hits repeat — play it again, play it again,” according to Mitch Allan, a longtime writer-producer (Demi Lovato, Kelly Clarkson).
The other side of the same coin: “People are acutely aware of skip rates and how that relates to success on streaming services,” says Talya Elitzer, a former Capitol Records A&R who co-founded the indie label Godmode. Tracks with lower skip rates are prioritized by the platforms, and Elitzer believes that “a short song is less likely to be skipped.”
Most importantly, song snippets resonate with a generation of listeners used to short-form video apps. “To me this really started with the Vine era and Instagram,” says writer-producer David Harris (H.E.R., Snoh Aalegra). Brief clips have achieved a new level of commercial resonance in the music industry thanks to TikTok, where users repeatedly seize on fragments of unfinished singles and incorporate them into videos, making a mockery of the idea that a popular track must include a verse and a hook.
“Generally a song that pops off on the platform is based around a little moment,” says Elie Rizk, a writer, producer and multi-instrumentalist (Mazie, Remi Wolf). “Subconsciously you think about that: ‘Let’s pack a track with moments and try to hit the jackpot.’ I don’t feel the need to repeat a section three times — they’ve already heard that part; it doesn’t matter.”
What’s the difference between an explosive moment and a song? Since 2020, if not before, a heap of young acts have gone viral with the former and then scrambled to transform them into the latter — to build a full track around the snippet that captivated TikTok. Examples include Will Paquin’s flashy “Chandelier” (85 million), David Kushner’s woebegone “Miserable Man” (73 million), and Avenue Beat‘s goofy “F2020” (54 million).
As singles get shorter, though, the gap between a song and a hooky fragment begins to lose meaning. “To a lot of people, I think the snippet [they encounter on TikTok] is the song,” says Bart Schoudel, a longtime engineer and vocal producer (Pop Smoke, Selena Gomez).
Kuya Magik, a producer and DJ with more than 11 million TikTok followers, agrees. “If you go to a club and you watch people dance, they only dance to the 15 seconds of a song that’s famous on TikTok,” he says. “For the rest of it, they just sit there.”
For now, platforms like Spotify count 30 seconds of listening as a full play that triggers a royalty payout, so it makes sense to expand a musical idea to that length. But a generation native to TikTok may not require even 30 seconds to engage with the music. With that in mind, it’s easy to imagine that the length of singles will continue to shrink.
When a short verse goes viral on TikTok, “if that’s what the artist wrote and that’s what’s being used [on the platform], who’s to say that’s not the song?” asks Daniel Sander, chief commercial officer for the music-technology company Feature.FM. “The question is: How do you monetize that differently?”
Spotify’s quest to improve its margins has taken another step forward, as a pilot program for billing subscribers using Google devices expands to the U.S. and additional markets. Called “user choice billing,” the system allows app developers to provide Google Android smartphone users with the option of paying the developer directly — at a reduced fee — or through Google Play.
Last week, Google’s user choice billing pilot expanded to the U.S., Brazil and South Africa, and Google announced that dating app Bumble also joined the program. Spotify was the first developer to join the pilot program in March with test markets of Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan and the European Economic Area. With the additional markets, user choice billing will be tested in most of the world’s largest smartphone markets and most valuable music markets.
With user choice billing, prospective Spotify subscribers are presented with two payment options side-by-side in an Android app: Spotify and Google Play. Choosing Spotify will take the user to a form to fill out credit card information to sign up for a subscription. Importantly, it all happens within the Spotify app, not Spotify’s external website. Choosing to pay with Google Play prompts the user to enter a password to pay with the credit card on file with Google.
Billing is an under-appreciated but important issue in the subscription music business. Because music streaming is inexorably tied to smartphones, and because consumers have come to expect simplicity when engaging in e-commerce on smartphones, in-app billing helps a company like Spotify sign up subscribers. The problem for a music service like Spotify operating on thin margins, though, is that app stores run by Apple and Google have traditionally demanded a cut of these in-app purchases. That’s left music companies either paying the app store fees themselves, without raising prices, eroding each subscription’s profitability, or raising the price to compensate for the fee, which could turn away potential subscribers. Prior to 2016, Spotify charged users 30% more for an in-app upgrade to Premium to offset Apple’s 30% fee.
There’s one other option, of course: To save on fees, a music service may disallow in-app subscriptions and encourage a customer to take a few extra steps and subscribe at its website. That process risks losing potential subscribers along the way, but nevertheless, Spotify has gone this route and not allowed in-app purchasing on its Apple app since 2016.
Companies have faced this quandary for years. In 2019, for example, Pandora raised the price for subscribers who used Apple’s in-app purchasing premium subscription service from $9.99 to $12.99 to offset the fees. Pandora reported paying $50 million in fees to Apple and Google in 2015 – 3.7% of its annual revenue.
“It certainly puts independent music services at a disadvantage where we’re paying 30% of the economics out to the platforms that distribute our apps, who also happen to be competing with us, and for the same users, and the same economics,” Pandora’s then-CFO Mike Herring told investors in 2016.
Apple typically charges a 30% fee for in-app purchases during the first year of a subscription and 15% thereafter, according to Apple’s website for developers. Neither Apple nor Spotify have said publicly what fees are paid for Spotify subscriptions. The fees that Spotify pays Google are also private.
“We’re not going to comment on the terms of our agreement with Google because they are confidential,” a Spotify spokesperson tells Billboard, “but it’s safe to say that our [user choice billing] partnership is based on commercial terms that meet our standards of fairness.”
Generally, subscription services such as Spotify pay a 15% fee for in-app purchases, but the fee can go lower. App developers in Google’s Play Media Experience Program, which integrates apps into Google’s ecosystem of wearables and other hardware products, can pay less than 15%, for example. For subscription-based services with significant licensing costs — such as music, video, books and audiobooks — fees “can be as low as 10%,” according to a Google spokesperson.
User choice billing provides additional savings for app developers on top of any other program or discount. If an Android user presented with user choice billing opts for the app developer’s payment system, Google lowers the fee by 4%. So, if an app developer were paying a 10% fee to Google, user choice billing would reduce the fee to 6%.
Small improvements to gross margin are crucial to a music service that pays more than three-quarters of its revenue to rights holders. Spotify’s gross margin on its Premium subscription service was 28% in the third quarter of 2022, meaning that Spotify paid out 72% of its subscription revenue for licensing fees and some smaller costs of sales. Every percentage point of revenue represents about $100 million in subscription revenue in 2022, based on past earnings and Spotify’s fourth-quarter guidance. If Spotify can move its gross margin by a small amount, it would greatly impact the company’s free cash flow. To put it in perspective, Spotify’s net cash flow from operations for the first three quarters of 2022 was $109 million.
While Google seems willing to consider alternative approaches to in-app billing, Apple does not. Prominent app developers, including Spotify, have been fighting for better terms for years. In 2019, Spotify filed a complaint against Apple with the European Commission for anticompetitive behavior alleging that Apple “continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn.”
Additionally, Apple is currently involved in a lawsuit brought by Epic Games regarding its control over the App Store. Although the judge in the case has mostly sided with Apple, the judge did order Apple to allow apps to provide links to payment alternatives outside the App Store. The lower court’s requirement has been delayed until the appeals court rules on the case. The two sides began oral arguments in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday (Nov. 14).
Apple’s strict rules are particularly meddlesome to Spotify’s latest attempt to improve its margins — audiobooks. In September, the streaming service began selling 300,000 audiobook titles following its acquisition of audiobook distributor Findaway in June. The plan makes sense: Audiobook purchases on its platform can provide Spotify with 60% gross margins — about twice the margin in music streaming – and audiobooks are a natural addition to its burgeoning podcast business.
But Apple’s rules for in-app purchases would make audiobooks purchased through an iOS app far less profitable — and a less straightforward process. Whereas the Google app provides “a beautiful experience,” CEO Daniel Ek said during the Oct. 25 earnings call, the process of buying an audiobook through Apple “is inherently broken because Apple decided it wanted it to be broken.” Spotify had lawyers “in the room” working with developers, but Apple rejected Spotify’s app multiple times, according to Ek. “It holds developers back and holds creators back,” he said. “And it’s bad for consumers.” Plus, there’s the added element here that Apple happens to be Spotify’s leading competitor for music streaming.
With audiobooks, Spotify currently sells titles on its website rather than inside the app to avoid fees (the user can listen using the Spotify app after the title is purchased). But just getting people to its website isn’t straightforward. As Spotify claimed on a website called Time to Play Fair, Apple does not allow Spotify to explain how to purchase an audiobook outside of the app, include a link to direct the user to a Spotify audiobook page, request or receive an email with instructions on how to purchase an audiobook or reveal an audiobook’s price in the app or in an email. Spotify’s Android app does not sell audiobooks, but the app allows users to receive an email with a link to Spotify to purchase a title.
In its June investors’ day presentation, Spotify management looked beyond music, podcasts and audiobooks. In the next ten years, Spotify will add sports, news and education to the platform and double the current average revenue per user, said Gustav Norström, chief freemium business officer. The user choice billing pilot program can only help with that goal.
LONDON — More people around the globe are listening to licensed music services than ever before, but piracy continues to have a harmful impact on creators’ careers, according to a new report from international trade body IFPI measuring global consumption and listening habits.
IFPI’s “Engaging with Music 2022” study reveals that music consumers are spending on average 20.1 hours listening to music weekly, a 9% increase from 18.4 hours in 2021.
The London-based organization found that 46% of the 44,000-plus music fans it surveyed for the report listen to their favorite artists through a premium subscription streaming service such as Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music, either using their personal subscription or via a shared account. That number rises to 74% when ad-supported music streaming is factored in alongside paid subscriptions.
Those streaming service numbers are slightly down from IFPI’s 2021 figures — when about 47% of respondents used a paid subscription service and 78% of people said they used either ad-supported or paid streaming – but IFPI says any decreases are the result of a change in accounting methodology, rather than a drop in real terms.
In this year’s report, the adoption of subscription streaming services is highest among younger listeners, with 54% of 16–24-year-olds and 56% of 25-34-year-olds surveyed saying they use subscription music platforms. Usage drops to 26% in the 55-64-year-old age bracket.
The top five countries where people spent the most time listening to music through a subscription streaming service were Sweden (56% of people surveyed), the United Kingdom (52%), the U.S. (51%), Germany (51%) and Mexico (50%). (Overall, IFPI reports a 10% rise in time spent listening to music on paid streaming services compared to the prior year.)
The IFPI report was compiled by surveying internet users aged 16-64 between June and September across 22 countries, including the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, Brazil, Canada and Mexico. Collectively, these markets accounted for more than 89% of global recorded music revenues in 2021, according to this year’s IFPI Global Music Report.
Writing in the study’s foreword, IFPI chief executive Frances Moore says the report’s findings show “how music engagement is thriving, driven by new genres [and] new formats,” as well as the global value of music, “and the need to protect and support it.”
Video-Based Music Consumption Dominates
Of those surveyed in the “Engaging with Music 2022” report, more than three-quarters say they consume music in multiple formats. On average, people use more than six different methods to engage with music, the most popular being video streaming, says IFPI.
Of the people surveyed, 82% said they regularly consume music through video streaming services like YouTube. Audio streaming was the second most popular listening format, followed by radio listening, and then short-form video formats such as TikTok. Meanwhile, 32% of respondents said they had watched a music concert livestream in the last month with more than half (58%) having recently watched a music-focused TV show or film.
Driven by the huge global popularity of TikTok, which says it has over one billion monthly active users, half of those surveyed said they use short-form video apps with 63% of respondents saying music is a key factor in choosing what content they consume on the platforms. South Africa and Mexico were the countries with the highest percentage of short-form video app users (both 78%), followed by Brazil (71%) and Argentina (66%), reports IFPI.
Pop was named as the most popular music genre globally, followed by rock, hip-hop/rap, dance/electronic, and Latin. When it comes to physical music, 12% of the people surveyed had bought a CD within a month of submitting their responses and 8% had purchased a vinyl record.
Survey data from China and India is not included in the main report’s global figures because IFPI says the size of the countries would have a “considerable impact on the weighted average figures used.” The listening study contains separate reports looking at music consumption in China, India, Indonesia and Nigeria. Results from Indonesia and Nigeria were also not included in the global round up as they were included in the survey for the first time this year.
In China, 96% of people surveyed use licensed music streaming services with 94% using short form video platforms. In India, 88% of respondents use music streaming services with 65% consuming short-form video.
Despite the growth in global music listening, the availability of unlicensed repertoire continues to pose a serious threat to the future health of the record industry, says IFPI. It found that almost one in three respondents (30%) admitted to using unauthorized or unlicensed methods to listen to or download music.
Stream-ripping sites remain the most popular way for consumers to access copyright-infringing music, IFPI found, with 40% of 16-24-year-olds confessing to using them. Almost one in five people (17%) said they had used an unlicensed mobile app to illegally download music.
Responding to its findings, Moore said IFPI will continue to fight against all forms of music piracy “to ensure that those seeking to profit from unlicensed and unauthorized music cannot threaten the vibrancy of a music ecosystem that is essential to artists and fans.”
As job applications go, Tim Hinshaw’s wasn’t quite traditional.
While angling for a position in the hip-hop & R&B division of Amazon Music in 2018, Hinshaw recruited a few old friends to record themselves hyping him up. “Oh, hey. This is Donald Glover/Childish Gambino saying you should probably hire Tim,” the multihyphenate star says, winking at the camera. Cut to Anderson .Paak: “I’m telling you, he’s the one. You need him on your squad.” “Tim is a good dude, and he knows what he’s doing!” Scarface adds before noting that he himself is an Amazon Prime member. The video closes with the late Mac Miller playing a white grand piano, then turning to the camera to implore: “Hire Tim. I know I would.”
Hinshaw edited the clips together, then passed the supercut to Amazon — an effort, he says, “to show the breadth of my relationships, from the current generation to the legends.” The promo worked: Within a few weeks, Hinshaw was hired as Amazon Music’s senior manager of hip-hop artist relations and within a year, he was promoted to head of hip-hop & R&B. But it was also an apt advertisement for the talents that would help Hinshaw succeed long term at the company. The close relationships and credibility he has within the artist community — developed over the course of 13 years working in management and artist relations roles — along with a penchant for innovation and a personality that Amazon Music vp Steve Boom calls “super smart, genuine and incredibly humble” have all allowed Hinshaw and the team he has built to elevate Amazon Music’s hip-hop & R&B division into a global leader in the genre.
“Tim has put Amazon Music into the conversation in the hip-hop and R&B community in a massive way,” says Boom, “and in a way, frankly speaking, we were not.”
“When I thought about the landscape, it was like, ‘Amazon is already in everybody’s homes,’ ” says Hinshaw of his initial strategy. “I knew if I could authentically bridge the gap between company and artist and tell that story to consumers in an authentic way, I could help Amazon be a major player in this entertainment space.”
Thanks to his efforts, in the past year hip-hop and R&B have become the leading genres for Amazon Music livestreams, with the platform’s three most-viewed livestream events featuring Kanye “Ye” West, Drake and Tyler, The Creator. “Tim’s trajectory is so amazing to watch,” says Tyler. “I love him so much.”
Tim Hinshaw photographed on October 27, 2022 at Harun Coffee in Los Angeles.
Kathryn Boyd Brolin
Last December, Drake and Ye’s #FreeLarryHoover benefit concert at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum streamed in 240 countries on Amazon Music’s Twitch channel and the Amazon Music app. Just weeks later, Amazon Music partnered with The Weeknd for a livestream event promoting his new album, Dawn FM, and the platform livestreamed J. Cole’s Dreamville festival in April.
Hinshaw has also been instrumental in securing talent for the just-launched Amazon Music Live. Airing after Thursday Night Football, the weekly livestream program, which launched Oct. 27, is hosted by 2 Chainz and has already featured performances from Lil Baby, Megan Thee Stallion and Kane Brown. In late October, Hinshaw and his 12-person team — “a bunch of young, hungry Black and brown executives,” as he describes them — touched down in Paris to produce a livestream of the second of Kendrick Lamar’s two shows in the city on his current The Big Steppers Tour. That 65-date run is sponsored by Amazon Music’s flagship hip-hop and R&B Rotation playlists — an idea Hinshaw originated and oversaw. (Hinshaw also led the 2019 development and launch of Rotation itself, which encompasses the R&B Rotation and Rap Rotation brands.)
“For me to be on a business-class flight to Paris with arguably the world’s biggest hip-hop artist,” says Hinshaw, “it was like, ‘Wow, we’ve come a long way from Compton.’ ”
Tim Hinshaw (right) with Kendrick Lamar in October 2022 in Paris.
Greg Noire
Like Lamar, Hinshaw, 32, was raised in the South Los Angeles neighborhood where so many of hip-hop’s legends started out. With his father serving a 20-year prison sentence for nonviolent drug-trafficking charges while he was young, Hinshaw was raised by his mother. Once he was a teenager, she enrolled him 30 miles away at the tony Palisades High School, driving her son 60 miles round trip so he could experience life outside the three blocks in which he had grown up.
After graduation, Hinshaw nearly joined the U.S. Coast Guard, but was talked out of it by his brother, the singer-songwriter Prince Charlez, who encouraged him to pursue music instead. Hinshaw co-managed his brother to a joint-venture label deal with Island Def Jam before landing management jobs in the artist relations and music marketing divisions at Fender and Vans, respectively, and through them forging the relationships that have proved invaluable in his current role.
“I can’t tell you the number of meetings I’ve been to with Tim and an artist or manager where the level of respect and love they have for him is transparent,” says Boom. “It leads to very different, more productive and more collaborative meetings that benefit the artist and Amazon Music.”
In genres where authenticity is paramount, the trust Hinshaw has developed in the hip-hop and R&B community has also helped bridge the gap between a massive corporation and the artists it hopes to work with. Most crucial are honest conversations about “getting what we want out of said deal without making the artist feel like they’re a walking commercial,” says Hinshaw. “You’re not going to put a logo on Kendrick Lamar’s forehead.”
Tim Hinshaw photographed on October 27, 2022 at Harun Coffee in Los Angeles.
Kathryn Boyd Brolin
That straightforward approach has led to collaborations with A-list figures like H.E.R. and Kid Cudi; Summer Walker; Chance the Rapper; Tyler, The Creator; DJ Khaled; LeBron James and Mav Carter, co-founder/CEO of James’ entertainment company, SpringHill. But Hinshaw’s team’s cred also extends to emerging acts, which it supports with Rap Rotation. Since its 2019 launch, streams on the playlist have doubled — just one indication of overall demand for the genre exploding on Amazon Music since Hinshaw’s arrival. Global customers asked Alexa to play hip-hop and R&B tracks over a billion times in 2021 alone.
The ripple effect of Hinshaw’s work extends across Amazon Music. Boom calls his artist merchandise collaborations “instrumental” in the growth of fashion initiatives like The Showroom, a collection from Amazon Music and Hypebeast creative agency Hypemaker that paired rising artists like Flo Milli, Lucky Daye and Fousheé with rising streetwear designers. Philanthropy initiatives Hinshaw and his team have carried out — like sponsoring 21 Savage’s 2021 and 2022 back-to-school drives in Atlanta — build different kinds of bridges, Hinshaw says, “open[ing] doors for kids in communities like the one I grew up in.” And his team’s work with Prime Video through livestreams has, Boom adds, “allowed us to expand our ambitions as a company.”
Those successes are the product of 11-hour workdays that begin after Hinshaw and his wife drop off their two kids (Sadie, 5, and Tim Jr., 4) at school. If he’s not in back-to-back meetings, he’s cold-calling managers to follow leads about forthcoming projects he wants to get involved with — efforts Hinshaw says are still crucial in determining next steps for his already accomplished team.
As Hinshaw’s sphere of influence keeps expanding, however, its core remains the same as when he wrangled his superstar pals to help him land the job. He’s still in close and constant contact with artists and their teams (his email alert dings roughly 30 times during our interview), knowing that, as details can get lost in translation, the ability to get an artist or manager on the phone is essential to keep things in motion. And as always, he knows those relationships aren’t just about business: Hanging with artist friends for birthday parties and casual dinners, or just sending a text to check in, could be the key to making the next big project happen.
“Continuing our artist-first vision,” he says, “is always going to put us in the place we need to be.”
This story will appear in the Nov. 19, 2022, issue of Billboard.
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Neil Young got candid about why he asked that his music be removed from Spotify earlier this year on a Wednesday morning (Nov. 16) interview with SiriusXm’s Howard Stern. The rock icon who has staked his reputation on doing things his way explained to Stern that his objection to being on the streamer was two-fold: the famously exacting guitarist/singer thinks Spotify audio quality is not up to his standard, and he was angered by the COVID conspiracy theories spouted by Spotify’s allegedly $100 million podcast star Joe Rogan.
“I woke up one morning and I heard somebody saying there was some scientists saying something about COVID, or some doctors and they were saying something about COVID and how many people were dying in hospitals and misinformation,” Young said, adding that he immediately thought about the nurses and medical professionals who were “distressed” by what they’d heard on Spotify; Young never specifically mentioned Rogan by name in his comments.
“And I listened to it and they were saying he purposely is saying this stuff that he knows isn’t true about COVID and people were dying,” he said of the misinformation on Rogan’s show about medically dubious COVID therapies. “I just called up my management and said, ‘We’re out of there. Get me off.’ And we’ll be fine, and it was a little shocking because they know all the [streaming] numbers. Who cares? You know, who cares? What’s his name? [Spotify CEO] Daniel Ek? He cares about money.”
Young said he knew Ek initially had good intentions with his service, because they’d met and he [Ek] seemed to be “coming from a good place. But then it just turned into money, money, money, money,” he said. When Stern asked how much money Young left on the table by yanking his tunes from Spotify, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer said he didn’t know and didn’t care.
“I knew I was gonna do fine. There’s Amazon, there’s Apple, there QoBuz, those are three streaming services that play hi-res,” said Young, who has long fought against what he considers the low-quality fidelity of everything from CDs to digital files. “I think in the digital age we should be able to listen to great stuff, the best that we can get out of digital… Because you’re living off the music, why not pay it some respect and make it sound as great as it does.”
Young said he wasn’t surprised that more artists didn’t join his crusade against Spotify. After Young requested that his catalog be removed from Spotify in January — citing the spread of vaccine misinformation on the Joe Rogan Experience — he wasn’t entirely alone. A handful of artists including India.Arie, Nils Lofgren, Failure, his former CSNY bandmates Graham Nash, David Crosby and Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell eventually joined his leave-taking.
“The way I look at it, that just turned me off and I made an instant decision — I didn’t think about it at all — just take my music off, we don’t need it. We’ve got all these other places,” Young said of his request. “And it sounds better at the other places. Why would I want to keep it on Spotify when it sounds like a pixilated movie?”
When it came down to it, Young said, he made it very clear: you can have “that guy” or you can have me. “So they chose to have that guy because they’re making millions of dollars off of him and they’ve just given him a whole bunch of money and that I would just eventually roll over and be back,” he said of what he suspected the streamers’ fiscal calculus was. At press time Young’s music was not available on Spotify and he told Stern he’s “never going back there, or anywhere else like it. I don’t have to, I don’t want to. I don’t crave the airplay like that. I don’t really need it, I don’t want it.”
A spokesperson for Spotify had not returned a request for comment at press time.
In its third-quarter earnings report Tuesday (Nov. 15), China’s leading music streaming company Tencent Music Entertainment Group (TME) said quarterly net profits soared 39% to RMB 1.09 billion ($154 million USD) from last year as the number of online music subscribers reached a record 85.3 million.
TME, which owns streaming platforms QQ Music, Kugou and Kuwo, plus karaoke app WeSing, reported that music subscriptions rose 18.3% to RMB 2.25 billion (USD $316 million) for the third quarter ending Sept. 30 compared to the same period in 2021. The number of subscribers rose by nearly 20%, up from 71.2 million in the third quarter 2021.
“As we are employing a balanced approach to grow paying users…revenues from online music services increased at a healthy pace in the third quarter, driven by year-over-year gains in subscriptions,” Cussion Pang, TME’s executive chairman, said in a statement. “Meanwhile, effective cost optimization measures and improved operating efficiency led to increased profitability amid challenging macro conditions this quarter.”
Overall, online music services revenues rose by 18.8% to RMB 3.43 billion (USD $482 million), but that wasn’t enough to offset a 20% decline in revenues from social entertainment and services, the company’s other main business unit. TME’s total revenues fell by 5.6% to RMB 7.37 billion (USD $1.04 billion).
Media companies have reported widespread declines in mobile revenues for the third quarter, as increased prices for many and the worsening economic outlook globally has caused consumers to rethink everyday expenses. TME was not spared from the trend. The number of monthly active mobile music users fell by 7.7% to 587 million in the quarter, compared to 636 million in the third quarter last year — a decline the company attributed to casual listeners dropping off the platform.
Monthly average revenue per paying user of TME’s online music edged 1% lower, to RMB 8.8 million (USD $1.24 million) compared to RMB 8.9 million (USD $1.25 million) during the year-ago period.
The company bought back $800 million of its own stock in the third quarter, part of a $1-billion stock buyback program it announced last spring.
In September, TME launched a secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; it was already publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange in the United States. Its move to issue secondary shares in Hong Kong followed similar moves by other big Chinese companies seeking to safeguard themselves against potential ramifications of the geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S.