analysis

The music industry is intensely interested in the growth of the market for smart speaker devices: Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other speakers controlled via voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant and...

Could the next keynote speaker at A2IM’s Indie Week or AIM’s Indie-Con be Doug Morris? Don’t laugh: the Sony Music chairman is reportedly leaving the world of the majors at the end of March to launch an independent...

The 'Bulgarian scam' on Spotify, revealed earlier this week by MBW, allegedly involved an entity uploading a collection of sub one-minute tracks to Spotify; then arranging them into a few playlists. Devices tied to Premium...

Pandora published its latest quarterly financial results last night, with some positive figures to report around its premium subscriptions business, and some more concerning stats around its overall listenership. The streaming...

How did Chance the Rapper, Lil Uzi Vert and other artists have such success building an audience on SoundCloud? Because they saw it as more than just a music-streaming service. That’s according to SoundCloud’s director...

As we suggested last time the ‘Spotify making hardware’ speculation bubbled up, it would be surprising if the company *wasn’t* mulling physical products, given its current reliance on devices from Apple, Google and...

Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, has told Music Ally that 2018 will be “the year of music for YouTube and Google” and suggested the animosity between the video platform and the music industry will soon be...

A new report published by a lobbying coalition called Re:Create – we’ll get to who that is in a bit – is trying to put some numbers to the independent creative economy in the US. The report is deliberately narrow...

FastForward prides itself on doing things a bit differently from other music-industry conferences, from its diverse speakers and youthful audience to its now-traditional alcohol-fuelled closing panel, with its promise of...

From the recent open letters from women working in the Swedish and Australian music industries condemning harassment to the ‘step up’ storm currently engulfing Grammys organiser the Recording Academy, diversity is a huge...

Forget big-budget TV ads, billboard campaigns and radio promos. How can labels and other music marketers capitalise on new technologies to run the most effective advertising campaigns for their artists? And how will these...

From merchandise and ticketing to crowdfunding, modern music artists have more options than ever to go ‘direct to fan’ and build a sustainable income to complement their recordings. But how can they make the most of...