An anonymous reader quotes CNN: The music industry was in crisis just a few years ago. Sales were cut in half from their peak as single downloads, YouTube and piracy made the CD album go virtually extinct. But music has found its white knight: streaming. Last year, recorded music revenues in the United States went up by 13% to $11.1 billion…
Tag: music streaming
Spotify Joins Twitter in Suspending Political Ads in 2020
An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Spotify announced Friday that it will suspend political advertising on its platform next year, making it the latest in a series of tech and social media platforms to publicly address how it will handle content targeting voters. The music streaming company said that its decision was made because it does not yet have the means…
Billboard Is Changing Its Albums Chart To Count Video Plays From YouTube
Billboard has announced that video and audio data from YouTube, along with visual plays from several music streaming services, will soon be factored into the Billboard 200 albums chart. In addition to YouTube, officially licensed video content plays from Apple, Spotify, Tidal and Vevo will be included in the album chart’s calculations. From the report: The inclusion of video data into…
Amazon’s Cloud Gaming Service Could Arrive Next Year With Twitch Integration
According to CNET, Amazon is planning to announce a cloud gaming service next year, and it may offer integration with Twitch and its other services. From the report: It’s begun recruiting people from large game companies like Microsoft to help with the launch, as well as hiring for jobs in a “new initiative” within its Amazon Web Services team, which sources…
ByteDance Launches New Search Engine in China
ByteDance, the owner of short-video app TikTok, has launched a new search engine in China, entering a sector currently dominated by Baidu. From a report: Beijing-based ByteDance is moving beyond its core businesses in news and video and into work-place messaging and music streaming, competing with Tencent and other Chinese tech firms. The domain for the new search engine, Toutiao Search,…
Amazon Becomes Fastest-Growing Music Streaming Service
The music app that is adding subscribers to its service at the fastest rate is not Apple Music or Spotify or Google Music, it is Amazon, Financial Times reported this week [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the report: The number of people subscribing to Amazon Music Unlimited has grown by about 70 per cent in the…
‘Genius’ Site Said It Used Morse Code To Catch Google Stealing Song Lyrics
“Genius.com says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music site,” reports the Wall Street Journal: Google denies doing anything nefarious. Still, Genius’s complaints offer a window into the challenges small tech companies can face when the unit of Alphabet Inc….
TikTok Maker Set To Take on Spotify With Free New Music Streaming App
Does the overcrowded and cut-throat music streaming business have room for an additional player? The world’s most valuable startup certainly thinks so. From a report: Chinese conglomerate ByteDance, valued at more than $75 billion, is working on a music streaming service, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The company, which operates popular app TikTok, has held discussions with music…
Why Play a Music CD? ‘No Ads, No Privacy Terrors, No Algorithms’
Ben Sisario, American author, academic, and journalist who covers the music industry for The New York Times, shares why he still likes to list to compact discs: I try to keep an eye on all the major platforms out there, which means regularly poking around on about a dozen apps. My go-to sources are Spotify, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Mixcloud, which has…