The past year has seen Spotify embark on a series of acquisitions to beef up its service, particularly on podcast content. Now it is the turn of SoundCloud, another European music startup — albeit one that had lost its way in recent years — to go deal-making: the Berlin-based company has picked up Repost Network.
The culture of planned obsolescence in electronics produces a huge amount of toxic waste unlikely to go anywhere but a landfill for the next millennium or so. Nature produces some of the strongest and most versatile substances we’ve ever encountered, so why not use them instead? That’s what Finnish design house Aivan has attempted with this concept pair of headphones made from fungus, bioplastics, and other natural materials.
Without a record label, independent artists are often tasked with the tedious but essential minutiae of managing self-distribution, collecting royalties from across multiple platforms, accounting, and performing general administrative tasks. Artist services platform Stem makes all of that a little bit easier for unsigned artists, and now Stem Direct offers tools geared specifically for unsigned artists with established teams behind them.
Metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there’s no need to verify the accuracy of a song’s metadata before it gets released, and there’s no one place where music metadata is stored. It’s a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table unpaid to musicians.
Twenty years ago, the idea of free music was so compelling that up to 80m users downloaded Napster and broke the law. The aftershocks are still being felt today
Co-Founder and CEO of record label and music distributor Amuse, Diego Farias, explains how his company can predict a hit song, find stars in the making and why they advance royalties.
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