Music revenue growth is slowing as subscribers increaseIt's not really the headline most musicians or label heads want to read: music revenue growth is slowing even as subscribers are increasing. To put it another way, more people are paying to listen to music, but on average they are paying less and less for it.
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Native Instruments Claire: Avant Piano PluginNative Instruments describes their new piano virtual instrument Claire: Avant as an “avant-garde instrument, developed in collaboration with Galaxy Instruments, [which] transforms the sounds of a 10-foot Fazioli concert grand piano into a canvas for experimental soundscapes, featuring unconventional techniques that bring out the raw textures and hidden harmonics of the instrument. A piano like no other, Claire: Avant is a bold reimagination of the piano, capturing the character of a 10-foot Fazioli F308 concert grand, one of the world’s most revered and sonically rich pianos. Known for its exceptional craftsmanship, extended resonance, and powerful low end, the Fazioli F308 delivers a depth and clarity that few instruments can match. Recorded with the lid off, Claire: Avant unveils the intricate resonances, overtones, and percussive textures often lost in traditional sampling. From metallic hits to delicate droplets, deep basses to high-grit tones, it invites artists to explore new sonic territories with scraped, struck, plucked, and dampened articulations.”The next evolution of their sampling capture of the Fazioli Grand Piano Claire, Claire: Avant is not designed to be a standard capture of a Grand Piano. Optimum for film scores or any music where a different piano sound is desired, many of the timbres available would fall into the category of prepared piano. Claire: Avant is designed to be expressive and unconventional. Claire: Avant introduces nine distinct articulations and preparations, including: brushed textures, Flageolet harmonics, damped una corda, soft, rubber and metal mallets, muted strings, wooden and ivory plucks. All these unique articulations are very malleable, which multiple mic variables and tonal combinations of textures that make Claire: Avant an enormously powerful and deeply variable sonic palette. Claire: Avant features the NI’s Particles engine, enabling each note to evolve with dynamic harmonic textures that change over time. The Particles Engine aims to inject dynamic and organic elements into your music by triggering and processing additional samples, or "particles," in response to your keyboard inputs. Combined with 40 custom presets for Kontaktʼs Pattern Tool, the instrument creates organic sequences and randomized textures.Native Instruments is one of the top leading companies in sampling. The innovation and depth of Claire: Avant is remarkable and not something that can be explored in one day. Featuring 122 presets, the sonics are top notch and unusual sounds are in every patch. The presets sound incredible and can be further edited substantially. This is an instrument that will continue to provide textures and inspiration for those inclined to explore it. Claire: Avant works both as a standalone application or as a plugin within Kontakt 8 and requires the very latest version of Kontakt 8.2.Claire: Avant $99; Special Bundle Offer: Claire: Avant and the Claire grand piano $199For more, visit native-instruments.comThe post Native Instruments Claire: Avant Piano Plugin first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Dua Lipa wins copyright lawsuit over hit song Levitating (with a little help from Ed Sheeran)Warner, Sony, and Universal were all co-defendants, as were Lipa's co-writers on the global smash
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Bastille’s Dan Smith on how scalpers hurt artists and fansBastille frontman Dan Smith is not the first artist to call out predatory ticket resellers. But he has done a particularly effective job of articulating how scalpers hurt artists and fans.
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Music subscriber market shares 2024: Slowdown? What slowdown?Record label streaming revenue growth slowed to 6% in 2024 but there was no such slowdown in subscriber growth. In our just published ‘Music subscriber market shares Q4 2024’ report, we reveal that the 85 million net* new subscribers added in 2024 was only two million less than in 2023, resulting in 818 million subscribers and growth of 12% i.e., around double label revenue growth. 

So, just what is going on? How could subscriber and revenue growth become so de-coupled? Normally, the answer for music industry questions like this is ‘it’s complicated’ –but this time it is not. It can be boiled down to two key things: Global South and incentivised growth.

On to those in a bit, but first market shares:

Spotify continues to set the pace: Spotify’s market share (32%) is around where it was in 2015 and has remained relatively stable in all the intervening quarters. That might sound like stasis, but it is anything but. Between 2015 and 2024, the global base of music subscribers grew by more than 850%. So, to maintain market share, Spotify has had to grow at a similar rate. During 2024, Spotify added 28 million subscribers in 2024, that is more than the combined total number of subscribers added by the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th largest DSPs (Tencent, Apple, and Amazon). The simple arithmetic is that when you command a strong market lead, you have to add a lot more subscribers than the rest to maintain your market share. It is easy to take Spotify’s success for granted. Don’t! This is what a highly effective company that retains an obsessive appetite for growth looks like

Tencent Music Entertainment: Even though it operates in China, Tencent  is the 2nd largest DSP globally, with 120 million subscribers. What is more, it grew so strongly that it slightly increased global market share in 2024. Though its key competitor NetEase Cloud Music grew even faster and so gained China market share at Tencent’s expense

Apple Music and Amazon Music: Apple and Amazon held onto 3rd and 4th spots respectively, but both had underwhelming 2024s, adding just six million subscribers between them

YouTube making up ground, fast: In percentage terms, YouTube was the fastest growing global DSP in 2024, growing market share and only missing out on knocking Apple off 4th spot by a margin in the low hundreds of thousands. Spotify and YouTube are the ones setting the global pace and though YouTube is far behind Spotify globally, it is the top DSP in a number of key Global South markets, including India

Now, on to why subscriber growth is so much faster than revenue growth:

1 – The Global South

The Global South (by which we mean regions that are not North America and Europe) is now the music industry’s growth engine. Last year we entitled our music forecasts report ‘Rise of the Global South’ and our view was borne out in 2024, with these regions accounting for 78% of all subscribers added in 2024. Let that settle in for a moment: four fifths of all subscriber growth came from outside of Europe and North America. Of course, those two regions still account for the majority of revenues, but as subscriber growth slows in those markets, it is lifting off elsewhere. This is nothing less than a rebalancing of the global music industry.

Which creates a major uncoupling of growth metrics for Western rights holders. Global South markets have lower ARPU and Western repertoire share is low there. So, Western rights holders see a double discount on subscriber value compared to Western markets.

2 – Incentivised growth

In the first phase of streaming growth, ad supported users acted as the key means of converting subscribers. In mature Western markets, most people on free tiers are there because they like free stuff rather than being prospective subscribers. This is why free trials have become the key tool for driving conversion. In saturated Western markets, it seems that these trials are being used liberally to try to squeeze out the last pockets of subscriber growth. In turn, denting ARPU. 

Consider the case of the US: According to the RIAA’s figures, subscription revenue grew by 5.3% and ARPU growth was 1.9%. Meanwhile US inflation was 2.9% but the streaming price ‘inflation’ rate was 9.1%. So, a $1 price increase resulted in ARPU decreasing by one percentage point in real terms (ie inflation adjusted).

Foundations for more growth

2024 was a great year for global subscriber growth and was a particularly good year for Spotify, YouTube, Tencent, and NetEase. The divergence between revenues and users is clearly cause for concern, but it is better for the long term to be growing subscribers as once you have them monetised you can start focusing on growing monetisation. Hello supremium.

*All growth figures refer to net additions i.e., the difference between the total number of subscribers one year to another. They do not account for churn. The total (gross) number of subscribers added is significantly higher. The net figure thus refers to the total after churned out subscribers have been removed from the totals.

Google makes it easier to log more YouTube Shorts viewsGoogle is changing how it counts YouTube Shorts views and for once its good news for creators.
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Love’s Arthur LeeMarch 7, 2025 was the birthday of singer/songwriter Arthur Lee. Love’s co-founder.    High Moon Records has slated for 2025 release, Just to Remind You. It’s a compilation album sourced from Arthur’s trove of tapes, recorded during the last fifteen years of his life, most of these songs are being heard here for the first time ever. Arthur asked his wife Diane Lee to issue them after his death. Having been hospitalized for several months, Lee realized he was losing his fight with Leukemia, and asked Diane to oversee the release of a final record of his unreleased songs. Although many of the tracks were in various stages of completion, Lee left some specific musical notes to execute his vision. High Moon Records previously issued Love’s Reel-To-Real and Black Beauty. Guitarist Johnny Echols is the co-founder of Love.   In 2012 and 2017, I interviewed Echols about Arthur Lee and Love, and Johnny’s memories of Love’s Forever Changes.  Portions first appeared in my books Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972 and 1967 A Complete Rock History of the Summer of Love.   HK: How did the concept of Forever Changes begin? JE: We started with kind of an idea after hearing the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers. And we decided that we wanted to do something that had horns and strings and we knew from the very start how this album was going to be. And what we were going to do and that we were going to try to make this what we would consider our magnum opus. This was gonna be the thing that defined us. And it was either we were gonna take off and just go all the way or something was gonna have to happen. We were going to really leave the three-minute pop song format. We were getting bored of the three-minute rock tune and wanted to push it. We knew with Sgt Pepper’s there was a whole new sonic thing going on. Absolutely.  “The material and concepts of an outline of it were written before we went into the studio. Arthur was not very much of a guitar player. He could play a few chords and basically would sing the songs to me and basically play the outline of them and then I would get together with Kenny mostly and we would work out some structure for the song. Bryan had a way, kind of a counter point that he would do with his finger picking that would work against what we were playing. We would always have the rehearsals with Kenny and me first and then Michael Stuart. We would rehearse with acoustical instruments, or sometimes at a friend of ours who had a house, Joe Clark. He lived in the Valley and we’d go to his place. Sometimes we would rehearse in the daytime at the Whisky. But mostly at one of our houses.  “My role with Arthur and Bryan was basically an ombudsman to kind of keep these two personalities happening. “So, I knew that from the very start to keep. Because they would have been at loggerheads all the time. Because they liked the same chicks, if you listen to some of the songs. That is rock ‘n’ roll. That’s tight, of course, but there was always that strong tension between the two of them and I was always stuck there in the middle kind of keeping the peace but also drawing the best out of them that I could. Because otherwise, you know, Bryan was very much a show tune kind of guy and I knew we could not release show tunes so we had to do a lot of work on his songs to meld then into something that was acceptable to an audience that we were developing.”  For the full interview, visit https://cavehollywood.com/loves-arthur-lee/The post Love’s Arthur Lee first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

AI music remixing platform Hook raises $3m from Kygo’s Palm Tree Crew, The Raine Group and moreHook’s unique selling proposition is that it offers a remedy to the proliferation of unlicensed content on social media
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FKA twigs joins growing list of US Visa Related Tour CancellationsFKA twigs has joined a growing list of US visa related tour cancellations, pulling North American dates of her ongoing Eusexua Tour.
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UK poised to Ban Predatory Ticket Resale as US drags its feetUnlike US legislators, who are dragging their feet on comprehensive reform, the UK appears poised to move forward with substantive restrictions on predatory ticket resale.
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The Death of SubcultureSubcultures have historically been tightly intertwined with their associated music styles (psychedelic rock, punk, goth, metal), but in the age of bite-sized social media interactions and broad internet homogeneity, are music-driven subcultures doomed?

Audiomovers releases new MINIBUS plugin – a “virtual aux cord” for local collaborationAudiomovers has today released the new MINIBUS plugin, a “virtual aux cord” designed to unlock even easier collaboration. MINIBUS enables anyone to transmit and receive lossless multichannel audio to and from the DAW in real time, to any machines on the same network, with no additional hardware or software required.MINIBUS makes it easier than ever for studio visitors to get their DAW audio into a session, regardless of their setup. There’s no need for aux cords or interfaces; anyone can begin collaborating with just computers on the same network. MINIBUS does this by bridging the widely adopted NDI® connectivity standard, which enables multimedia systems to communicate with one another, wired or wirelessly over local networks.Cofounder and Head of Product Igor Maxymenko commented, “We are committed to working to remove the unnecessary barriers to audio workflows and collaboration, speeding up processes so audio professionals can concentrate on being creative and making great work.“With the integration of the supporting NDI transmission plugin MINIBUS into OMNIBUS 3, we’re doing exactly that – further empowering audio professionals to achieve seamless audio routing over networks, including wirelessly, on sessions and in studios.”MINIBUS is available as MINIBUS Lite, which is free (a stereo transmitter plugin), and MINIBUS, which retails for $49.99 (containing a 16-channel transmitter plugin and a 16-channel receiver plugin).Learn more at www.audiomovers.com.

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ASCAP warns US creative economy ‘will be undermined’ if copyright laws loosened for AI developers"The US can win the AI race without abandoning the strong copyright laws that have fueled creativity and entrepreneurship across the country for decades”
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Infinite Reality buys Napster, plots shift to interactive musicNapster, the platform that triggered the streaming revolution in 1999, has been acquired by Infinite Realty, a digital media and ecommerce company for $207 million.
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Join NITO’s Pay Her Respect fair pay for radio play campaignToday would have been Aretha Franklin's birthday and NITO (National Independent Talent Organization) is using the occasion to launch "Pay Her Respect,” a national day of action in support of the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA) which will guaruntee payment for the use of songs on AM/FM radio.
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