Welcome to Music Enterprise Worldwide’s weekly round-up – the place we make sure that you caught the 5 largest tales to hit our headlines over the previous seven days. MBW’s round-up is supported by Centtrip, which helps over 500 of the world’s best-selling artists maximize their earnings and cut back their touring prices.
This week, we received official phrase on the state of the recorded music enterprise in 2023. In keeping with IFPI‘s newest International Music Report, recorded music revenues hit USD $28.6 billion in 2023, up 10.2% YoY.
In the meantime, Kobalt introduced it had secured a $450 million revolving credit score facility to refinance its money owed, and had raised $266.5 million by way of its first-ever sale of asset-backed securities, backed by music royalties. Add to that its partnership with Morgan Stanley introduced a brand new months again, and the corporate says it has greater than $1 billion with which to purchase music rights.
Talking of huge numbers, social music creation platform BandLab has surpassed 100 million customers, having added 40 million over simply the previous 12 months.
We additionally received phrase this week that BMG‘s Chief Content material Officer, Dominique Casimir, is stepping down from her position. The announcement comes within the wake of some main modifications introduced in by CEO Thomas Coesfeld.
Lastly, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper in Sweden reported that it had uncovered the true identification of a musician on Spotify who has used 50 composer aliases and at the least 656 invented artist names. His 2,700 songs on the platform have been streamed some 15 billion occasions.
IFPI, the group that represents the recorded music business worldwide, has revealed its International Music Report, which reviews on international commerce revenues for the recorded music business in 2023.
The headline stat from IFPI‘s report: International recorded music revenues rose 10.2% YoY in 2023 to achieve USD $28.6 billion.
Final 12 months (2023) marked the worldwide music market’s ninth consecutive 12 months of development.
Subscription streaming revenues grew by 11.2% YoY final 12 months, accounting for 48.9% of the worldwide market, which in greenback phrases, signifies that subscription streaming revenues reached $14 billion in 2023.
Whole streaming revenues (together with each paid subscription and advertising-supported) grew 10.4% YoY to achieve $19.3 billion in 2023 and accounted for greater than two-thirds (67.3%) of the entire international market…
Simply 4 months in the past, Kobalt introduced a partnership with funding funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Worth to take a position greater than USD $700 million to accumulate music copyrights over the subsequent few years.
Now, Kobalt has executed two new transactions that it says, mixed with the Morgan Stanley partnership, present it “with greater than $1 billion to proceed to develop and execute on its strategic initiatives”.
First up, Kobalt on March 19 introduced a brand new $450 million Revolving Credit score Facility from a Truist Securities-led “syndicate”, which in response to Kobalt will probably be used to “absolutely refinance current indebtedness”.
As well as, Kobalt has confirmed the elevate of $266.5 million through its first-ever Asset-Backed Securitization (ABS) transaction, backed by music royalties from a catalog of greater than 5,000 works from 66 writers…
BandLab, the social music creation platform owned by Singapore-based BandLab Applied sciences, simply reached a major milestone.
The app has surpassed 100 million registered customers, which signifies that it has added 40 million customers since January 2023, when, as MBW reported on the time, the app confirmed that it had 60 million registered customers.
Talking with Bloomberg, BandLab Applied sciences CEO Meng Ru Kuok mentioned: “It’s humorous if you get to those massive milestones, particularly one thing like 100 million, which is barely exhausting to fathom when it comes to the dimensions of the quantity”.
In December, Meng Ru Kuok was named MBW’s Entrepreneur Of The 12 months award winner for 2023/2024. He advised us on the time that he predicts there will probably be 1 billion music creators “by 2030, probably even sooner…”
BMG Chief Content material Officer Dominique Casimir is stepping down from her position after 15 years with the corporate.
The information was introduced by BMG on March 21.
The Berlin-based exec, who first joined BMG in 2008, was named Chief Content material Officer (CCO) of the corporate in Might 2022.
BMG mentioned on Thursday that Casimir has “performed a key position within the early growth of BMG’s recordings enterprise”, noting that the exec steadily added larger tasks to her remit together with GSA (2016), Continental Europe (2019), Asia Pacific and Latin America (2020) BMG’s international synch operation (2021) and the UK when she was named Chief Content material Officer in Might 2022.
MBW reported in January that, since Thomas Coesfeld took cost final summer season, greater than 100 staff have been laid off at BMG…
The existence of pretend artists on Spotify is now a well known reality: Music launched by musicians beneath pseudonyms, who haven’t any actual on-line presence aside from their Spotify accounts and performs, and whose music may be discovered on lots of Spotify’s key playlists devoted to ‘temper music’.
On Tuesday (March 19), Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter revealed an expose on Spotify’s pretend artist downside (not the newspaper’s first on that matter), and reviews to have recognized the musician “behind the world’s most listened to community of faux artists on Spotify.”
DN reviews that this particular person is a composer from Sweden named Johan Röhr, whose music, it says, has been launched on Spotify beneath “50 composer aliases and at the least 656 invented artist names”.
In keeping with DN’s report, Röhr is behind over 2,700 songs which were launched beneath varied pretend artist names on Spotify. A few of these names embrace Minik Knudsen, Mingmei Hsueh, Csizmazia Etel, and Adelmar Borrego.
His music throughout all of those pseudonymous artist accounts on Spotify, in response to DN, has been streamed roughly 15 billion occasions…
