Videos by American Songwriter
Each week on Songwriter U, Songspace recaps the top stories in the world of music business. Here’s everything you need to know from the week ending on January 9th.
Music Sales Down, Streaming & Vinyl Up
Continuing its downward trend, overall music sales reached a record low in 2014, as reported in the Nielsen Music year end report. Streaming numbers increased significantly – by 54.5% over 2013 – while vinyl had its best year in recent memory, increasing by 51.8%.
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Universal & Havas
A new partnership between Universal Music Group and Havas Media Group demonstrates the growing importance of advertising and brand strategy in the music industry. The venture, called Global Music Data Alliance, will help UMG collect data and use it to look for new opportunities.
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Google Reveals Cast
To help integrate music systems and devices, Google has launched Google Cast. It enables you to send music to different speakers when you’re using one of the apps such as Google Play or Pandora (Spotify is not available yet), similar to the service Apple offers with AirPlay that was released ten years ago.
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Music Projects Backed With Kickstarter
Throughout 2014, music projects were the most backed projects on Kickstarter, as 4,000 of the 22,000 projects funded were music related.
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Patreon Supports Creators
Kickstarter wasn’t the only platform where artists received support in 2014: Patreon’s year end numbers showed $10 million given to musicians and other creators over the year. Only in its second year, Patreon is a subscription based service that allows fans to “subscribe” by donating as little as $1 per month directly to a creator.
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