It’s South Asian Heritage Month, and Spotify and Chartmetric have been talking about the global growth of music from that region.
Tag: Pakistan
Posted inNews
Snapchat expands Sounds library with new licensing deals
Snapchat has announced a slew of new music licensing deals, which will add more music to the Snapchat Sounds library
Posted inNews
Google search’s top trending song of 2022 may surprise you
The same names are popping up in the various streaming and social services’ end-of-year lists, with Bad Bunny particularly prominent.
Posted inReports
Music Ally Quarterly Report :: International Focus 2022
Welcome to our second annual Music Ally International Focus report, where we zoom out and dig into the last 12 months of Music Ally’s Country Profiles. This is an utterly essential guide for the internationalised music industry pro – packed with data, interviews, local strategies, and insight from the people who count in each country. We have split our focus between […]
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Posted inCountry Profile
Country Profile – Pakistan 2022
A few years ago, the music industry in Pakistan was seen as dead on its feet. Streaming is helping to address this. But there remains a considerable distance to travel.
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Posted inNews
Coca-Cola is taking its Coke Studio music initiative global
Coca-Cola has been involved in music for a long time, from the obvious ad syncs to beat-making tools and full-blown branded music services.
Posted inNews
Spotify ended Q3 2021 with 381m listeners including 172m subscribers
Spotify has published its financial results for the third quarter of 2021, revealing that it ended September with 381 million listeners and 172 million subscribers.
That’s up 19% year-on-year in both cases, and means that in Q3 this year Spotify added 16 million listeners and seven million subscribers.
As for revenues, those grew by 27% year-on-year to just over €2.5bn (around $2.9bn) in Q3, with a notable 75% spike in ad-supported revenues to €323m, while subscription revenues grew by 22% to €2.18bn.
Posted inPartner Content
Big Bang Reads: How a Canadian Punjabi hip-hop song became Spotify India’s biggest hit
Big Bang Music is writing a series of guest columns for Music Ally’s readers to help you understand the latest trends in India. In this latest piece, Music Ally contributor Amit Gurbaxani explains how a Canadian Punjabi hip-hop song became […]
Posted inNews
Independent music, not Bollywood, may be India’s global crossover
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek recently told Music Ally that he believes “100% that we’re going to see a rise of Bollywood and new types of Indian music making it into the global scene in the very near future”.
As an Indian journalist who’s been covering Bollywood and other types of Indian music for two over decades, I only half-agree with Ek. I don’t believe Bollywood is going into the global charts any time soon, and I’ll tell you exactly why. But first…
Indian pop quiz time!
Q1. Who’s the most streamed artist on Spotify in India?
A1. Hindi film playback singing superstar Arijit Singh.
Q2. What’s Arijit Singh’s rank on Spotify overall?
A2. At the end of January this year, his 8.78 million monthly listeners were enough to place him at No.500 in the world.
Spotify doesn’t display artist rankings below that position and last month, even though Singh’s listenership grew to more than nine million users, he fell out of the top 500.
Posted inNews
Liveblog: Spotify ‘Stream On’ event
Spotify is holding an online ‘Stream On’ event today, to announce… well, we’re not quite sure what the company is announcing, but we’re expecting some new product features; updates on how its tools for artists and ‘two-sided marketplace’ is evolving; plenty of podcasts talk and… well, we’ll find out.
Stick with us, and you will too (and you can watch along via the embedded video below). We’ll be updating this post in reverse-chronological order during the event, then flipping it back to chronological afterwards.
Posted inNews
Pakistan telco regulator bans ‘immoral/indecent’ TikTok
The ban on TikTok in India, which started in June, started a boom in rival short-video apps scrambling to fill the gap – in the most successful cases, racking up tens of millions of downloads.
Could a similar thing happen in neighbouring Pakistan? We’re about to find out: the country’s telecoms regulator the PTA has just blocked TikTok in Pakistan “in view of number of complaints from different segments of the society against immoral/indecent content” on the app.
This has been a while coming though: in July, the PTA gave TikTok a ‘final warning’ after similar complaints. “TikTok has been informed that the Authority is open for engagement and will review its decision subject to a satisfactory mechanism by TikTok to moderate unlawful content,” it says now.
Posted inNews
TikTok mulls its options to avoid being banned in the US
TikTok hasn’t been banned in the US, but some of the noises coming out of the White House have been distinctly menacing in recent days.
What’s more, this week the US House of Representatives voted to bar federal employees from downloading TikTok to their government-issued devices, as part of a wider defence policy bill – complete with politician Ken Buck describing the app as a “serious national security threat”.
How is TikTok responding? Well, yesterday it briefed news site Axios on its plans to add 10,000 jobs in the US over the next three years, having already grown from 500 staff there at the start of 2020 to nearly 1,400 now.
“It’s supporting the tremendous growth in the country and follows our strategy of building out teams where we have users,” said spokesperson Josh Gartner. Axios noted that TikTok has also hired more than 35 lobbyists to press its case that it is operating independently from its Chinese parent company ByteDance.