Economics News

Help Wanted! - FMC Artist Revenue Streams Project

Source: HypeBot
February 5, 2011

The Future of Music Coalition has launched a project that seeks to assess if and how musicians revenue streams are changing. They're looking to conduct in-person interviews with a small but diverse set of musicians and composers to collect information about the ways that they're currently generating income from their music, performances or brand, and whether this has changed over the past ten years. If you're interested in participating, click here to take a 14-question qualifying survey so we can ...
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AARP Says Old People Are Online Too! PS: These Are the People Still Willing to Pay for Music

Source: HypeBot
February 5, 2011

The American Association Of Retired Persons (AARP) has created a short video to remind us (and advertisers) that those 55 years old and over are online too. In fact, those 65 and older makeup the fastest growing age group on Facebook which, according to the AARP, totalled more than 65 million on the social network as of May 2010. This is a huge and underutilized opportunity for music marketers. And older music lovers are far more likely to click the ...
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You Don't Say: Rdio's Latest Round Was $17.5 Million...

Source: Digital Music News
February 4, 2011

Someone really, really loves the concept of cloud-based music streaming—despite a very rough history so far. Just last week, we reported that Mangrove Capital Partners had finalized a financial round with Rdio. Well, early this morning, Rdio not only confirmed the round to Digital Music News, they offered a figure: $17.5 million.

Actually, Mangrove is joined in the round by co-founder Janus Friis (through various investment arms), as well as Atomico and Skype itself. Of course, Friis was one of ...
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$33.8 Million Has Already Been Invested in Music Startups This Year....

Source: Digital Music News
February 4, 2011

But will anyone be getting rich this time around? Take a look at the latest investments—and these are just the ones we know about. Rdio, $17.5 Million. (Mangrove Capital Partners, others, announced February 3rd.) X5 Music, $9.1 million* (NorthStar Ventures, January 6th.) FanBridge, $2 million (various, including First Round Capital, Grape Arbor VC, announced January 18th). RootMusic, $2.3 million (official SEC filing December 26th, discovered early January) trueAnthem, $2.9 million (official SEC filing December 28th, part of a larger, $4.6 ...
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How To: Invest Tax Return into Your Music Career

Source: HypeBot
February 4, 2011

This post is by Robin Davey of The Hoax and The Bastard Fairies.  Interview. Those who watched the State of the Union may have caught wind of the President's plan to help small businesses with certain tax breaks. To clarify, it allows businesses to write off the full amount of qualifying equipment or software for the years 2010 and 2011. Normally these capital expenditures would be deducted gradually year by year, but this time you can write it all off in one go. If there ...
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Are You Right for the Future of Music Coalition's Artist Revenue Streams Project?

Source: We All Make Music
February 2, 2011

Nobody can dispute that artists' access to fans has improved over the past decade. But as we've written many times (yesterday, even!), artists' compensation has become a huge issue. Our friend at the Future of Music Coalition are looking to learn about the impact of these changes. Yesterday, they announced the full-on launch of something called the Artist Revenue Streams Project, a wide-reaching look not only at where artists are getting their money from today, but how that has changed ...
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Does Spotify Pay Major Labels More Than Indies?

Source: HypeBot
February 2, 2011

The utopian dream of the Internet is that it makes artists equals. Each can have their music available on iTunes and have a webpage to call their own. But do major label artists make more money per stream on Spotify than the indies like the xx? New reports hint that this may be the case. It's not that Lady Gaga may get paid more than an indie artist just because she's Lady Gaga. Rather, it's that the Universal Music Group—the label ...
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Is the Format Replacement Cycle Over?

Source: HypeBot
February 2, 2011

When the CD format came out, fans upgraded their LP collections, igniting a boom in sales that lasted from 1984 to 2000. When the MP3 format trickled up from the tech-geek community, fans ripped their CDs to their computers and downloaded free digital files of the web, causing a decline in sales that has lasted from 2000 until present day. Oops. Some fans have re-bought their music collections several times now. The Beatles are a great example of this. Most ...
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