Apple’s deal is the latest move by a major music company to bolster the struggling business.
Apple Music is the latest company to offer industry relief amid the coronavirus pandemic. It told independent record labels Tuesday that it is launching a $50 million advance royalty fund to make sure their artists get paid.
Read the full article and email at RollingStone.com
Spotify subscribers rose 29% year-on-year during the final quarter of 2019, reports the company. It now has 124M premium members, compared to Apple Music’s last reported number of 60M.
Spotify is gaining ground, however, last year adding a Your Daily Podcasts playlist designed to surface shows likely to be of interest to individual subscribers.
It was recently revealed that Amazon Music has a subscriber base somewhere close to that of Apple Music. However, Apple tends to only announce each 10M milestone, so the company could potentially now be closer to 70M.
Read the whole article at 9to5mac.com
Lil Nas X, Billie Eilish, Post Malone, and Ariana Grande were among the most popular streaming artists of the year
In 2019, U.S. listeners passed the trillion-stream mark for the first time, according to Nielsen’s annual year-end report on the music industry. There were 1.15 trillion audio and music video streams in 2019—up 29.3% from 887.4 billion streams in 2018. Read the full report via Billboard here.
Read the article at Pitchfork.com