Hey all! Everything is slowly starting over after the lockdown period for the music industry, of course without live music shows. The sector is getting back on track, whether it’s Warner Music Group’s IPO or Midem, the main music industry conference, going online this past week, it feels like life is slowly picking up.
#1. Music industry engaging in Blackout Tuesday
First off, in the beginning of the week many actors from the music industry took part of the Blackout Tuesday movement, in reaction to police violence. The music streaming services took action online (Spotify launched playlists and help funds, Bandcamp will donate their shares…). And in more recent news, Warner Music Group set up a fund to help charitable causes (we might need more details than this). Hopefully more initiatives will follow!
#2. The biggest IPO of the year comes from the music industry
Weirdly enough, on the same day, Warner Music Group entered the market with their IPO. We told you about some details last week, now you should know the group reached a market cap value of $15.390 billion (estimations were betting on a market cap valuation of $12.774 billion).
Warner Music Group just realized the biggest IPO of the year so far. And this promising move certainly caught the attention of Tencent, potentially looking to keep making its way through the music industry.
#3. Rethinking the model of music streaming
Questioning music streaming model is not a new issue for the music industry, but it did come up a bit stronger during the pandemic as artists were more and more relying on it to get some revenues during lockdown (and they still are). Sammy Andrews, music industry specialist in the UK, took the time to give the core Issues we should be addressing as an industry.
This tribune has been published in the context of the #BrokenRecord campaign going on in the UK, to ask for a better model for streaming. If you want to go a little deeper on the topic, we gave you some highlights and links to the discussion that happened during a MusicAlly Weekly show 2 weeks ago!
#4. Music industry is meeting online with Midem Digital Edition
Speaking of discussions, Midem Digital Edition launched this week! You can register for free to watch conferences and keynotes, or to connect on their platform here.
We are happy to be the sponsor of one of the main conferences of this year’s keynotes with Fred Davis (The Raine Group), Justin Kalifowitz (Downtown Music) and Kerry Trainor (SoundCloud), discussing artist and label services. You can see the session moderated by Juliana Koranteng (Founder & Editorial Director, JayKay Media) here!
#5. Global music industry decline planned for 2020
Finally, we have news from MIDiA Research. Taking a step back and getting an overview of the sector, the music business is going to have a bad year (as we could have expected). MIDiA Research went through each aspects of the music industry (recording, publishing, live, merchandising, sponsorship) and broke down the trends.
