“It’s hard to overstate the importance of songwriters to the music-making process. They’re responsible for the lyrics, melodies, beats and chords that make up the songs we love,” is how Spotify opened its blog post yesterday about the service’s new songwriters hub. An intro that we suspect will have set off a klaxon somewhere in the National Music Publishers Association headquarters’ rapid-response rebuttals department.
CRB rates appeal awkwardness aside, what is a songwriters hub? “A new place on Spotify for listeners to find Written By playlists from both established and emerging songwriters, listen to podcasts about the craft of songwriting, and discover a rotating cast of featured songwriters and cultural moments each month,” according to the streaming service.
It’s building on the company’s work this year on features for songwriters, including on-platform pages and playlists, and video series on Instagram. Optimists as ever, we’re hoping for a resolution to the US rates battle in 2021 that, if it doesn’t completely satisfy both sides, at least enables them to move on and focus even more on features and partnerships that help songwriters.
The songwriters hub launched yesterday, but one launch a little further away is Spotify’s debut in South Korea. Long rumoured in 2020, it’s now confirmed to be happening “in the first half of 2021” – although the streaming service didn’t give any specific date beyond that period.
As the sixth biggest recorded music market globally, not to mention the home of a genre (K-Pop) that has been taking western markets by storm for some time now, South Korea is one of the biggest tick-boxes on Spotify’s geographical expansion to-do list.
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