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‘User-centric’ licensing is where the royalties from a streaming subscription only go to the artists who that subscriber listens to, rather than into a bigger pool split by overall share of all the streams on the platform. There...

Jaak is one of the startups exploring the potential that blockchain technology has for the music industry. The company is working on a number of pilot schemes, and its CEO Vaughn McKenzie has been a regular speaker on blockchain...

Musical VR is creatively exciting but commercially nascent: key startups are still in their early days, while there’s no clear path for artists and labels to make decent money (or even a return on their investment) in virtual...

ASCAP and BMI are fielding criticism for not including other US performing rights organisations (PROs) in their partnership to create a new database of song rights. Sesac and Global Music Rights are both currently not...

While Amazon’s Echo, Google’s new Home and established firm Sonos tend to get most of the headlines around connected speakers, new models and companies are emerging too. French startup Devialet has been winning praise...

Apple’s latest partnership to promote Apple Music is an interesting one: it’s with ‘Indian Uber’ Ola. It’ll see Apple’s music-streaming service made available to people hailing a ride with Ola, via its in-car...

(This is a sponsored feature) Where are your fans? It’s one of the most important questions in the modern music industry. Not just in terms of which social networks they’re following you on, but also the hunt for the...

2016 has been a stellar year for Drake, and the milestones keep coming for his ‘Views’ album and its singles. The album has just passed 3bn Spotify streams – it’s on 3,043,873,801 at the time of writing – since...

The lawyers for alleged KickassTorrents operator Artem Vaulin are using the Google defence in their efforts to prevent his extradition to the UK for trial. “Websites like KAT are devoid of content files. Instead, KAT is...

The business models around digital distribution have been evolving in recent years: for example, flat-fee services that let artists keep 100% of their royalties. New player FreshTunes is trying to find a new angle on the...

A year ago, the Music Managers' Forum (MMF) published its initial Dissecting the Digital Dollar report, exploring the impact that digital music in general – and streaming in particular – is having on the musician and...

One of the most-discussed aspects of how blockchain technology could work for the music industry is ‘smart contracts’, setting out who did what on a particular work, and automating payments and permissions. There’s...