Is there any country in the world where BTS aren’t big? They’re certainly big in Cape Verde: their ‘Black Swan’ track has gone to number one in the country’s iTunes chart.
Why are we writing about this? Well, this was the 103rd country where the track had topped the iTunes rankings, breaking Adele’s record of 102 countries with ‘Hello’.
FYI: Cape Verde is made up of 10 volcanic islands in the central Atlantic Ocean, with a population of just over half a million people.
Fancy starting the day with a sing-song? Come on then: “Ry’n ni yma o hyd / Ry’n ni yma o hyd / Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth…” Those are the […]
This time last year, Kanye West was working on a new album project called ‘Yandhi’, although it has since been renamed ‘Jesus is King’. This summer, some of the demos from […]
As predicted, Apple is breaking up its iTunes software into separate apps for music, podcasts and video. But also as predicted, this doesn’t mean the death of its iTunes music-downloads […]
Apple is killing iTunes! So said dozens of headlines this weekend, which all lead back to a single sentence in a Bloomberg article claiming that “The company is launching a trio of […]
A class action federal lawsuit filed in California is accusing Apple of selling on information of users’ iTunes purchases to third parties. It is being led by three plaintiffs from […]
Kris Wu had a big hit on Apple’s iTunes chart last week with his album ‘Antares’, but the Chinese artist swiftly fell foul of online rumourmongers suggesting that his sales success was […]
In the mid-2000s, Pete Downton had a PowerPoint presentation. It included a slide with a map of the world plotting Warner Music Group’s licensing partnerships with 40 mobile operators: a network with a theoretical reach of 1.8 billion customers.
“There was a certain amount of truth in that, because we had deals in place to do products with all of them. But none of them had the teams, expertise or frankly the business reason to focus on executing those relationships,” says Downton now.
With 2017’s focus on the rapid subscriber growth for music-streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Prime Music, it’s easy to forget that a decade and a half ago, telcos and mobile phone manufacturers were among the great hopes to turn around the music industry’s sales decline.
A track called ‘Why ‘A a a a a Very Good Song’ is 10 minutes of silence. Not in a John Cage conceptual way, but for purely practical purposes.
Samir Rezhami created the track in response to a bug (or feature!) that sees iPhones start playing a user’s music library in alphabetical order when the device gets plugged in to their car stereo.
Rezhami’s track, which is guaranteed to be the first song in line in this situation, provides a period of silence during which drivers can cue up the music they actually want to listen to.
This is an obvious point for Music Ally readers, but while we’re in a transition from sales to streams and ownership to access, that doesn’t mean sales and ownership of music are entirely dead concepts – particularly for independent artists.
Bandcamp has long been flying that banner, but now it has competition from startup Voltra, which pitches itself as “a digital music player and shop for people who want to own their music”.
It’s just as much an iTunes alternative then, with its desktop application for Mac, Windows and Linux, and a companion mobile app coming soon.
Country musician Garth Brooks has been talking about his evolving digital strategy, including his recent exclusive streaming deal with Amazon. “Out of the blue, here comes Amazon looking to start […]
UK music licensing firm PPL has two new board members from the artist and management community. Performer Roxanne de Bastion and manager David Stopps have been elected to join PPL’s […]
