Audiokinetic Strata sound effects collection Strata is a new sound effects library which offers all of its content in multitrack project files that allow users to customise the sounds for their specific use case. 

The music industry is at a tipping point [MIDiA’s Mark Mulligan]Artificial intelligence, underpaid artists, and tens of thousands of new tracks released daily are just a few of the major problems facing the music industry. “There is still time for. Continue reading
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The MLC Issues Quarterly ReportIn June, The MLC's CEO Kris Ahrend, testified in Nashville before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet, at a field hearing entitled “Five Years Later — The Music Modernization Act.” In addition to answering questions about The MLC’s work from the Committee members in attendance, Kris provided an update on The MLC’s operations, including the growth to more than 28,000 rightsholder Members and the distribution of more than $1 billion in royalties to date. The MLC is grateful for the Subcommittee’s time and for the participation of all of the other stakeholders who testified, to address the work of The MLC and all those across the industry working to ensure that rightsholders receive the royalties they are due under the blanket mechanical license. To read Kris’s full written statement, click here.

The MLC’s 2022 Annual Report is now available on our website. The report offers a look into our second full year of operations, key performance metrics from 2022, a financial summary and more.

Read Our 2022 Annual Report

On May 23, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) issued its initial rate determination for the Phono 3 rate period. This initial determination and the publication of the corresponding regulations that accompany the initial determination represent the next important step in the CRB’s process of finalizing the rates for the Phono 3 rate period.   Once the rate determination is finalized and published in the Federal Register, DSPs will have 6 months to deliver revised data and any royalties they may owe under the final Phono 3 rates — both for the historical unmatched usage previously reported (for 2018, 2019 and 2020) and for usage under the blanket license previously reported (for 2021 and 2022). The MLC has already begun working with DSPs to prepare for their delivery of this revised usage data. For more information, you can read more and check out our timeline here. 

In May, we completed running our final set of historical unmatched data files through our internal matching process. During the Congressional Field Hearing in Nashville, we announced that we had matched nearly 70% of the historical unmatched royalties transferred to us by DSPs. That means that nearly $300 million in historical royalties will be eligible to be distributed to Members provided they have claimed their shares of the works that we’ve matched to those historical royalties. Members can use our Claiming Tool to search for — and claim — any missing shares of their songs that other Members have registered with The MLC, and Members can use our Registration Tools to register any songs that have not yet been registered with us.   Members can also use our Matching Tool to search for uses of their works in the remaining unmatched data we have for those historical royalties. (The one exception is the historical data we received from FanLabel, which contains issues that FanLabel has not been able to rectify.) By providing our Members with full visibility into all of our remaining unmatched sound recording data, we have fully illuminated the "black box" for digital mechanicals for the first time in history and given Members the ability to help us eliminate the black box by proposing matches to their registered works. We’ve already reviewed and approved matches for more than 800,000 previously unmatched groups of recordings that our Members submitted using the Matching Tool. Once we approve a proposed match submitted by a Member, they will be able to receive any previously unmatched historical royalties we received for their song and any unmatched blanket royalties we have received since The MLC launched full operations.

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Billboard: How’s the Music Modernization Act Working? Congress Gives Landmark Legislation 5-Year Review Music Row Magazine: The MLC Crosses the $1 Billion MilestoneBillboard: Songwriters’ Streaming Royalties Have Been Determined (Finally)Music Tectonics Podcast: Inside The MLC With CEO Kris AhrendMusic Connection: The MLC Announces Events for Pride and Black Music Month

TikTok’s parent has launched an AI music making app. What might this mean for the video platform’s music licensing talks?How might the launch of Ripple, an AI-powered music making app, play into the short-form video platform's future licensing negotiations
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Recent Classical Highlights for June 2023Epic listening is what you get with this month's classical reviews, in more than one sense. If only we all had the energy of Garrick Ohlsson (pictured), who, with conductor Donald Runnicles, performed the heroic feat of playing all of Beethoven's piano concertos over the course of one week.

KVR Developer Challenge 2023 Now Live With 21 FREE Plugins
KVR Developer Challenge 2023 is now live! Everyone interested can download 21 freeware VST plugins. KVR Audio forum members can now vote for their favorite entries. This is the ninth edition of the KVR Developer Challenge. Audio developers were invited to submit new plugins or sound libraries for a chance to win one of the [...]
View post: KVR Developer Challenge 2023 Now Live With 21 FREE Plugins

Melda Production’s MDynamicEq currently free To celebrate their 15th anniversary, Melda Production are giving away their versatile MDynamicEq plug-in for a limited time. 

Canva inks deals with Warner and Merlin to let creators use songs in their contentCanva has built a user base of around 135m
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The music industry’s tipping point is Right Here, Right NowStreaming is buckling under its own weight. The economics and structure that served it well in its first decade are not the ones that will get it through the next ten years. You might say that streaming is going through its ‘start up to scale up’ phase. AI is the disruption lightning rod of the moment, but transformational as it may prove to be, it is simply catalysing pre-existing disruptions. ‘Fixing’ the problems thrown up by AI would be dealing with symptoms rather than causes. The music industry is at a tipping point. There is still time for the creators and businesses within it to help shape what comes next, but that window of opportunity is both small, and closing.

Is anyone earning what they want from streaming?

When streaming first emerged, artists were worried it would not pay them enough; then the debate moved on to whether too much value lay with the biggest artists and labels; now with the superstar artist production line stuttering, the majors want a new royalty system to protect their income. Meanwhile, Spotify still struggles to generate a consistent profit. So the long tail, the majors, creators, and streaming services all think that streaming isn’t paying them enough. Which begs the question: just who or what is streaming paying enough?  Whatever the answer may be, the clear takeaway is that a royalty and remuneration system designed when albums, charts, downloads, and radio still ruled the roost, is failing to adapt to today’s much changed music world.

Remuneration pains are a symptom of consumption

A host of potential innovations are vying to be the solution to streaming’s remuneration woes (fan powered / user centric, two-tier licensing, etc.) but royalty challenges are the output, not the input. Streaming has shifted the majority of music behaviour from active listening to lean-back consumption, using algorithms to push consumers towards niches. The result is a consumption landscape shaped by fragmentation and passivity. There is a lot more consumption than before, with more consumers monetised, but the previous, finite artist economy has been replaced by an in-effect infinite song economy. Consumption needs ‘fixing’ before remuneration. 

While there are encouraging shifts towards monetising fandom, those tools will never have full effect if audiences are simply spending their time listening passively. There will, quite simply, be no fandom to monetise.

Machines on all sides

These are the two key sets of market dynamics that AI, and some other emerging technologies, will make worse, not better. Lean-back consumption is where AI will have the biggest, near-term impact. Context based playlists deliver music that is good enough. It is all about the overall soundscape rather than individual tracks, and even less about the artists. Production music libraries, like Epidemic Sound, have already shown that their music is plenty good enough for such playlists. Generative AI is waiting to pick up the baton, and may be able to do it even better if the music is specifically designed for the hyper-specific music that algorithms have taught consumers to expect. What is more, generative AI can get even more specific by evolving to the listener’s use case (i.e., like Endel). And if DSPs were to generate AI music themselves, then they could a) improve margins; b) stuff playlists; c) push users to the music. They who control the algorithm, control the listener.

And if that wasn’t bad enough for traditional labels and artists, a rising wave of virtual artists is hitting the market, such as K-pop acts Mave, Plave and Eternity, building on the foundations laid by the (now almost heritage) trailblazers like K/DA and Aespa. And even if these virtual artists have humans behind them, they are still a machine-centred challenge to wholly human artists (slightly crazy we even have to think in those terms these days!)

So, machines are opening a two-pronged attack on traditional labels and artists: 1) AI is competing for lean back, while 2) virtual artists compete for lean in (fandom).

Choose your poison

The industry’s strategy is to compel DSPs to take down problematic AI music and to keep the long tail in check with lower royalty rates. But that is unlikely to be enough. For example, why wouldn’t superstar virtual artists be eligible for the same royalty rate as superstar human artists? Regardless of whether the superstars are virtual or human, arguments that superstars deserve higher rates for pulling people to DSPs in the first place becomes less convincing every day, as consumption becomes ever more fragmented and ever less reliant on superstars.

But the scale of this problem is about to erupt like a volcano. Because the existential threat will come from AI in the hands of humans. AI will accelerate the consumerisation of creation trend that has been harnessed by artists and fans alike on TikTok, Snapchat, BandLab and a host of other places. Throw simpler-than-simple generative AI into social platforms and suddenly you have the potential for consumers creating ‘music’ at the same rate they create photos and videos. 

Millions of new ‘songs’ every day would break streaming royalties. So, labels would just get DSPs to keep those tracks off streaming, right? Not necessarily. These would be tracks made by people, so they would bring with them ready-made audiences of friends, family, colleagues and connections. Everyone becomes a fan of everyone else. It is the zenith of the network effect. And AI creations do not need to have millions of streams to disrupt streaming economics; millions of them only need to have at least one stream each.

And if friends can’t listen on DSPs, then they’ll listen on the social apps. Which means less time spent on streaming and further cultural dilution for DSPs. As one investment analyst put it to me: labels are faced with a ‘choose your poison’ choice, i.e., lower royalties now (due to dilution) or lower royalties later (due to smaller user bases).

Build a better train?

The entirely understandable temptation is to make what we have, work better. But sustaining innovation is unlikely to be enough. Just in the same way that it wasn’t enough for train companies to build better trains when Henry Ford’s new-fangled Model T car came to market. 

To be clear, building a better train is a not a bad option. Today, nearly a century on from when the last Model T rolled off the production line, trains still play a pivotal role. But for music, everything points to making streaming work better AND building something new.

Streaming fixed the problems of piracy and tumbling music sales. In doing so, it had the unintended consequence of commodifying music consumption. Without a new fork in the road, generative AI will simply hasten the utter domination of convenience. Pop will eat itself. AI will bring huge amount of value right across the music business, but portions of it will also hasten a reductive race to the bottom for convenient consumption.

Which is why, the time is now to start building plan B. To elevate a music world centred around fandom, identity, creativity, and exceptionalism. These are the fundamentally human elements of music that can (at least for now) clearly demarcate what is inevitably going to become a two-track music world. 

Five years ago, it would have been crazy to be thinking about how machines will shape the near future of both the business of music and of music itself. Just imagine what we might be discussing five years in the future?…..

GearFest UK Update: Panel Talks Programme A programme of 10 Panel Talks taking place across both days at this year's GearFest UK has now been announced. 

Register For The 20th Annual IAMARegistration is now open for the 20th Annual IAMA (International Acoustic Music Awards), which provides an opportunity for acoustic artists everywhere to get prominent radio and web exposure and compete for awards in eight categories including Best Male Artist, Best Female Artist, Best Group/Duo Folk, Americana/Roots/AAA, Instrumental, Open (any musical style or genre), and Bluegrass/Country, as well as an Overall Grand Prize award worth over US$11,000.00, which includes radio promotion on over 250 radio stations in the U.S. and Canada.

Sponsored by New Music Weekly, Loggins Promotion, Airplay Access, Sirius XM Radio, Solid State Logic (SSL), Ditto Music, Acoustic Café Radio, Paige Capo, Make Music Matter, Kari Estrin Management & Consulting, and Sonicbids, IAMA has a history of winners getting signed and moving up the Billboard charts. Past awardees include Meghan Trainor, Zane Williams, Jeff Gutt, Charlie Dore, Bertie Higgins & Bellamy Brothers, Ryan Sheridan, Pat Byrne, and Deidre McCalla. Entry deadline is November 20, with details at: inacoustic.com/The post Register For The 20th Annual IAMA first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

5 common Music Marketing MistakesA look at common music marketing mistakes and many misconceptions that are holding musicians and the people that help market them back. by CRISTINA CANO of CD Baby’s DIY Musicians. Continue reading
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Casio Sessions singer-songwriter competition Casio Sessions is a new competition aimed at piano-playing artists which will see finalists invited to perform at an intimate live event at Casio’s G-SHOCK store in Carnaby Street, London on 21 September 2023. 

5 free and affordable tools for independent musiciansThese five tools have been proven by users to be integral in a successful independent music career. Keep reading to see how they can help you. By Sara-Lena Probst of BlackbirdPunk. Continue reading
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Acoustica Mixcraft 10 released The latest version of Mixcraft aims to make creating music easier and more enjoyable for all users, with a range of new features focusing on inspiration, ease of use and stability.