Welcome to Music Business Worldwide’s weekly round-up – where we make sure you caught the five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days. MBW’s round-up is supported by Centtrip, which helps over 500 of the world’s best-selling artists maximise their income and reduce their touring costs.

This week, Spotify launched a new website called Loud & Clear, which tells us the number of artists who have generated over $50,000 in payouts from the music streaming platform (across records and publishing) annually since 2017.

Meanwhile, this week, Hipgnosis Songs Fund revealed how it values songs, and that its catalog is worth slightly more than it originally forecast.

Elsewhere, the audience for the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards fell 53% year-on-year to an all time low of 8.8m on Sunday night (March 14), according to time-zone adjusted national data from Nielsen.

Also, YouTube‘s TikTok rival Shorts has arrived in the United States, while Universal Music Group has expanded its licensing deal with music streaming service Boomplay from 7 to 47 countries across Africa…

1) HOW MANY ARTISTS ARE GENERATING $50K+ A YEAR ON SPOTIFY? OVER 13,000.

It remains one of the most fiercely fought debates in music: How much does Spotify pay artists?

Yesterday (March 18), the streaming company made a bold move to answer the question once and for all.

Spotify has launched a new website – Loud & Clear – that provides a plethora of information for artists (and their representatives) looking for solid facts about the money Spotify distributes to musicians and the music industry.

One section of the site tells us the number of artists who have generated over $50k in payouts from Spotify (across records and publishing) annually since 2017…

2) HIPGNOSIS REVEALS HOW IT VALUES SONGS (AND THAT ITS CATALOG IS WORTH SLIGHTLY MORE THAN IT ORIGINALLY FORECAST)

If you’ve been reading MBW closely this year, you’ll definitely know two things about Hipgnosis Songs Fund in 2021:

(i) It’s been buying major league copyrights at a rate of knots; and (ii) It’s been under some pressure to disclose more about the prices it pays for catalogs – and the calculations it uses to decide on those prices.

A dose of that pressure came from investment bank Stifel earlier this year.

Amongst other criticisms, Stifel questioned Hipgnosis’ practice of reporting estimated accrued revenue – i.e. the money the company believes it has coming down the pipe, but which isn’t yet in its bank account.

For a music publisher who could be waiting over a year for money collected abroad to arrive from PROs, suggested Stifel, this practice could cause investor concern over cash-flow….

3) NEARLY 98% OF 18-TO-49-YEAR-OLDS IN THE US DIDN’T TUNE IN TO THE GRAMMYS ON SUNDAY

The 63rd Annual Grammy Awards were watched by a live US TV audience of 8.8 million on Sunday night (March 14), down 53% year-on-year, according to time-zone adjusted national data from Nielsen.

Those 8.8m viewers were down by nearly 10m on the 18.7m live TV viewers that Nielsen counted for the Grammys in 2020.

The figures also mean that 2021’s edition of the ceremony, hosted this year by South African comedian Trevor Noah, was the least-watched Grammys of all time.

In fact, the 8.8m viewers pulled in for 2021’s show were nearly half the size of the audience for the Grammys’ previously least-watched edition in 2006, when 17m viewers tuned in…

4) YouTube’s TikTok rival Shorts arrives in the US

YouTube is expanding the beta of its TikTok rival Shorts into the United States.

According to YouTube, Shorts will be expanded into the US gradually over the next several weeks.

At launch, Shorts beta users will have access to millions of songs from over 250 label and publisher partners, including Universal Music Group’s labels and publishing companies, Sony Music Entertainment and Publishing, Warner Music Group and Warner Chappell Music, Believe, Merlin, 300 Entertainment, Kobalt, Beggars, CD Baby, Empire, Peer, Reservoir, OneRPM and others.

YouTube launched an early beta of Shorts in India in September with a handful of features aimed at “creators and artists who want to shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones”….

5) UNIVERSAL AND MUSIC STREAMING SERVICE BOOMPLAY EXPAND LICENSE TO COVER 47 COUNTRIES ACROSS AFRICA

African music streaming service Boomplay and Universal Music Group (UMG) have struck an expanded deal that will extend licensing of UMG’s global music catalog from 7 to 47 countries across the African continent.

Amongst the new markets are key territories such as South Africa, Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Senegal, with UMG’s catalog now also widely available across French-speaking territories for first time.

In 2018, UMG became the first major global music company to license music to the service, which now has 50 million monthly active users.

Boomplay’s catalog currently stands at more than 50 million tracks and claims to offer the largest repertoire of local African content globally…

Welcome to Music Business Worldwide’s weekly round-up – where we make sure you caught the five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days. MBW’s round-up is supported by Centtrip, which helps over 500 of the world’s best-selling artists maximise their income and reduce their touring costs.

 Music Business Worldwide