Year: 2019

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel Tuesday announced a foray into music video streaming with focus to tap 200 million potential users in tier-II and III towns. “There is a large population in tier-II and III towns and villages who wants to listen to music as well as watch videos. We have developed Wynk Tube to reach out to 200 million users. This includes both Airtel and non-Airtel customers,” Bharti Airtel Chief Executive Officer (Content and Apps) Sameer Batra said while announcing the launch. The music platform of Wynk claims to have 100 million users. “With Wynk Tube, users will have option to switch to video of song that they want to watch and switch back to audio only,” Batra said. Wynk Tube will focus on vernacular content to reach out to users in small towns and cities. “The app will be available to users in 12 Indian regional languages including Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Bhojpuri,” Batra said. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

Bharti Airtel on Tuesday said that it proposes to sync its music and video apps with its direct-to-home (DTH) offering, so that the content can be watched through television as well. “We will eventually get there (streaming on television through DTH). We have only had Wynk for the last 4-5 quarters, so I don’t think this is a big issue. Technology-wise, any model will work,” Sameer Batra, CEO, Content and Apps, Airtel, told BusinessLine. However, there are no plans for a ‘Live TV’, he said, adding that the company does not have any rights for it. Wynk Tube launched After the success of its over the top (OTT) music streaming app Wynk Music, Bharti Airtel on Tuesday launched its new music streaming app Wynk Tube, which has a collection of 40-lakh songs and related videos. The company is offering a free trial for the first 30 days and then charge Rs 99 from non Airtel customers. For Airtel subscribers, it will remain free. The app will be available to only Android devices right now, and the company would think of iOS devices later. With this Airtel has further expanded its fast growing content portfolio, especially keeping in mind the needs […]

In a Beats 1 interview with Zane Lowe, Philadelphia R&B singer Pink Sweat$ laid out his ambition: “I’m trying to expand people’s palettes of black music.” To achieve this, Pink leans on lonely guitar and natural beats (“Listen to Bobby McFerrin and you’ll understand,” he adds). The spare accompaniment allows his voice to blossom across this five-song EP. The backyard strummer “I Know” shows his ability to get to the heart of a matter without being overcome by it. The genesis and aftermath of a love hangover plays out in the two-parter “Coke & Henny”—”Pt. 1” is playful and strutting, “Pt. 2” is solemn and regretful. “Your Side” and “Body Ain’t Me” reveal the old-school R&B soul—he’s from Philly, after all—underneath those comfy pink sweats. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/volume-2-ep/1457267889?app=music

There’s one moment critical to understanding the emotional and cultural heft of Lemonade—Beyoncé’s genre-obliterating blockbuster sixth album—and it arrives at the end of “Freedom,” a storming empowerment anthem that samples a civil-rights-era prison song and features Kendrick Lamar. An elderly woman’s voice cuts in: “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” she says. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé’s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her blackness, her husband’s infidelity) and make for Beyoncé’s most outwardly revealing work to date. The details, of course, are what make it so relatable, what make each song sting. Billed upon its release as a tribute to “every woman’s journey of self-knowledge and healing,” the project is furious, defiant, anguished, vulnerable, experimental, muscular, triumphant, humorous, and brave—a vivid personal statement from the most powerful woman in music, released without warning in a time of […]

It isn’t just us curled up on the sofa binge-watching Game of Thrones in our trackies; it’s also your favourite artists, cradling a bowl of snacks, streaming away on the tour bus. As this compilation of Thrones-inspired songs makes clear, their fascination with the fabled, now-iconic drama runs deep. On “Too Many Gods”, A$AP Rocky and Joey Bada$$ mull over false prophets while dropping in a GoT reference (“Playing with fire but I’m no Targaryen”). Singer-songwriters like Jacob Banks, Lennon Stella, Chloe x Halle and ROSALÍA imbue their tributes with stern keys and an existential dread that’s so familiar to the show’s fans. And it’s especially fun to hear a pop singer like Ellie Goulding tap into a sinister ruthlessness on “Hollow Crown”: “Making a noose out of your hollow crown/I hold a match up to your paper castle/And watch it all burn down, down, down.” https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/for-throne-music-inspired-by-hbo-series-game-thrones/1458925215?app=music

“Hurts 2B Human was sort of a pebble that rolled downhill and became this boulder,” P!nk told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “It just kept steamrolling.” In 2018, while touring her seventh album, Beautiful Trauma, the singer found herself in spontaneous recording sessions with musicians she’d never worked with before (Beck, Sia, Chris Stapleton, Cash Cash, Wrabel, Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds and many others). Eventually, she realised she’d made album number eight—a lightly political package of sentimental ballads and pre-game bangers that feels like like classic P!nk. The topical numbers speak to the times. “The news will try to make you believe that everybody hates each other, and it’s just not true,” she said about the inspiration behind the title track, which features Khalid and was written by Teddy Geiger (best known for authoring some of Shawn Mendes’ biggest hits). “I am a woman, Khalid is a man, he’s African American, I’m Jewish… Everybody has their own experience and is going through something, so it’s all about the circle you create around you to get through all the bulls**t in this world. That’s where this song came from.” In the EDM-inspired “Can We Pretend” featuring Cash Cash, she asks rhetorical […]

“Jacknife took our brains for a walk,” Catfish and the Bottlemen’s Van McCann tells Apple Music about working with Killers and U2 producer Jacknife Lee. “You’d be surrounded by music all day. Every other day, you’d get a knock at the door and it would be new vinyls he’d ordered to show you new stuff. You’d be buzzing off his excitement.” These brain strolls have helped bring extra adventure and exploration to the band’s third album. The Balance still contains the key ingredients that have taken Catfish from indie-rock tyros to arena-fillers in a few years: exhilarating choruses, pin-sharp melodies and relatable lyrics (on “Basically”, McCann even sings about doing housework). “Don’t write anything that isn’t worth a place on a set list some night,” says McCann. “By the end of the year, we would have done every arena in the [UK] and probably sold them all out. Where’s it go from there? It has to go outdoors, and you’ve got to start writing songs that are big enough for those occasions. It was always about pushing it.” Here, McCann and guitarist Johnny Bond take us through the album track by track. “Longshot”Van McCann: “This is the first one we […]

Universal Music Group has become the first major international label to license its catalog to uduX, a Nigeria-based music streaming service. The service is currently available as part of subscription with music and lifestyle company Habari, but will soon have its own stand-alone app. Effective immediately, uduX will distribute music from UMG’s extended family of labels, giving subscribers access to both Nigerian and global artists including Bob Marley, Maroon 5, Tekno, Lady Zamar, Post Malone, Eminem, Nicki Minaj, Brenda Fassie, World, J. Cole, Mr. Eazi, Lil Wayne, Hugh Masekela, Tamia and others. “This partnership extends our reach and makes our artists’ music even more accessible to Nigerian music lovers,” said Ezegozie Eze Jr., general manager, Universal Music Nigeria. “We are delighted to be the first global music company to partner with uduX and look forward to bringing the extraordinary creativity of our artists to as many Nigerian users as possible.” UMN launched in July 2018 and is based in Lagos. In November the label became the first major to license its catalog to Africa’s biggest streaming platform Boomplay, which recently announced it has raised $20 million in Series A funding to continue its rapid expansion on the emerging continent. In […]

MUMBAI: Even as global biggies like Spotify and YouTube Music have made their entry in India this year, Gaana, the music streaming service owned by Times Internet, has cemented its position on the leader board as the country’s top ondemand music streaming service. The service clocked 80 million monthly active users (MAUs) in February, out of the total market of 150 million users, said Prashan Agarwal, CEO of Gaana. The service, which hosts 2.7 billion songs across genres — Bollywood, non-film, regional and English music — has witnessed 100% year-onyear jump in terms of both, revenue and paid subscribers. “We continue to lead the space with a clear majority. Now we are focusing on taking the product to the next level to give our users best experience. Last year, we launched voice assistant, which is now used by 24% of our users for a lean-back experience,” Agarwal said. The company’s investments in new age technologies have also paid off. A voice assistance service powered by Google’s text-to-speech allows users to search and play music or playlists based on singers/ actors/ mood/time of day and more. “Our machine learning algorithms have now started predicting user behaviour and almost 17% of songs […]

It is easy to get nostalgic for the era when most music lovers bought LPs. They would save their pennies for a Saturday trip to the local record store, before heading home clutching their glorious new vinyl in a plastic bag to drop the needle on the turntable and listen on repeat. This anachronistic ritual will be resurrected on International Record Store Day on Saturday April 13, as consumers queue to buy exclusive limited edition vinyl releases from their favourite artists. Launched a decade ago, this annual event is an industry drive to boost ailing independent record stores in an age when most people stream music online. Ah, the good old days. pxhere, CC BY-SA But is it actually true that earlier generations placed a greater value on recorded music than music fans in the present day? We are loath to succumb to the mythology of a “golden age” for music and lend credence to baby boomers moaning of bygone days when music somehow mattered more than it does now. We decided to investigate the numbers to see if they told a different story. As it turns out, they do – and it’s far worse than we expected. We conducted […]

Qobuz (pronounced koh-buzz), an audiophile-oriented music-streaming service based in Paris, launched in the U.S. today after being exclusive to Europe for the past 10 years. I’ve been enrolled in the closed beta for the past few days, and I absolutely love it. In addition to using the service, I also spoke with Qobuz USA’s managing director Dan Mackta at CES in January, so I’ll sprinkle some quotes from him throughout the review. There are lots of things about Qobuz that make it different from other streaming services, but the most important differentiator is that you can stream high-resolution FLAC files: Up to 24-bit resolution and sampling rates as high as 192kHz. The service validates such tracks with the familiar Hi-Res Audio logo from the Japan Audio Society. That level of fidelity doesn’t come cheap, though, and I was surprised to find some albums bearing the logo that would only play in 16-bit/44.1kHz resolution. I’ll get into the four service tiers later. Qobuz delivers information galore No matter which level of service you sign up for, you’ll get all the rest of the features that render Qobuz tailor-made for music lovers. Chief among these is the metadata and other documentation attached […]

click to enlarge My first car was a silver 1990 Buick Park Avenue handed down from my grandmother, and like all early ’90s cars, it came equipped with a tape deck. It always had a cassette loaded. Most were homemade: I’d buy blank Maxell cassettes, hook up a CD player to my parents’ tape deck and dub my favorite albums — Ziggy Stardust on one side, Hunky Dory on the other. The convenience of digital soon came calling, and I spent my first-ever tax return to swap out that tape deck for a stereo with a CD player. Every paycheck from my first job went almost exclusively to CDs, and I don’t think I’ve listened to a cassette since. In the last few years, though, I started to wonder if I’d been too hasty in throwing them out. I saw touring indie bands selling tapes during their Spokane stops, and fans actually buying them. Friends are proudly posting pictures of their thriftstore cassette finds on Instagram. Artists are collaborating on limited-run cassette releases. But this is not just a local trend. The popularity of vinyl records has been increasing over the last decade: Per Nielsen Music, vinyl sales increased in […]

There it was again, playing through my laptop. It sounded … well, not as good as I remembered it on the radio in the days when music meant listening to a radio. It sounded soppy. I regretted paying a few dollars to discover that. I also retrospectively regretted quoting its lyrics in a tortured note I sent to the poor girl at the time (who sensibly never replied). Many of those early downloads ended up on an iPod, something which – like that first smartphone – was given to me rather than bought. Well-meaning family members nudged me towards technology they thought I would end up embracing. They were right. I hadn’t wanted one. Hadn’t thought I needed one. Why, I still had my portable CD player, a great leap forward from the Walkman it superseded. (Hmm … I still have that also; so, too, the cassettes it played, including the carefully crafted mix tapes, each of which represented hours of play-and-pausing on a tape deck linked to a record player.) That portable CD player used to travel everywhere with me. A crucial prelude to any trip was selecting the six or so discs to bring, perhaps a couple more […]

Major music labels are making millions per day  from streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify. The artists? Not so much. Image: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images By Matt Binder2019-02-25 19:56:22 UTC Streaming services are now paying out big money to the music industry’s gatekeepers. According to a new report by industry news outlet Music Business Worldwide, the three major music labels made $6.93 billion combined from streaming in 2018. The publication poured through recent investor filings from Universal Music Group’s parent company Vivendi, Sony, and Warner and found that the companies are totaling $19 million in daily streaming revenue.  Broken down even further, the trio of labels generate nearly $800,000 per hour just from music streaming services. As Rolling Stone points out, when looking at the combined revenue for the three labels across all formats and commercial endeavors — $13.14 billion — streaming revenue accounts for more than half of that. That’s more than a 10 percent jump when compared to how much streaming revenue accounted for in 2017. Universal (UMG) saw its streaming revenue jump the most with an increase of $864 million a year, or $2.4 million a day, when compared to the year prior. UMG’s 2018 […]

“This album is an open diary of someone in their early twenties,” Nina Nesbitt tells Apple Music. It’s been five years since her folk-pop debut Peroxide (inspired by her on-off relationship with a certain Ed Sheeran), leaving the Edinburgh singer-songwriter a lot of time to reflect. “I wrote a lot of the first album when I was 17, 18 and I didn’t really know who I was or what my sound was or what I wanted,” she says. “I think you can hear that in that album—not in a bad way—but it just represented where I was. I really wanted to make an album with a cohesive sound to it.” This is a follow-up dripping with lush vocals and synth textures across songs on self-discovery (“The Moments I’m Missing”) to sassy odes to singledom (“Somebody Special”). “In a lot of the songs on the first album, I’m a victim,” she says. “Whereas in this album I wanted to take control and give my music an empowering feel to it.” Part of that empowerment was taking a step back from writing about love. “I often hear songs just about relationships, and that’s cool, but I want to cover a lot of […]

It’s no longer possible to call Bring Me the Horizon a rock band. On their sixth album, the Sheffield four-piece draw on so many genres and ideas, they evade any attempt at categorisation. “I’ve always thought there’s too many borders, too many bridges, that people don’t cross in music,” frontman Oli Sykes tells Apple Music. “The real world has too much of that as it is. I guess that’s our crusade.” amo—Portuguese for “love”—stretches from bittersweet pop to electronic experimentalism, calling on an art-pop visionary, a legendary beatboxer and an extreme-metal icon along the way. Here, Sykes breaks down their crusade, track by track. i apologise if you feel something “We knew it was almost impossible to give anyone a heads-up of what this album was going to sound like. It was important for that first track just to be like, ‘Forget whatever you think it’s going to sound like, because you’re not going to be able to guess from anything we’ve shown you before.’” MANTRA “At the end of the writing process, I had a bit of a meltdown. Even though we did have a lot of stuff, we didn’t have that song where we were like, ‘This is […]

“Most of my mixtapes all had songs I’d written while I was in jail,” Fredo tells Apple Music. “This is all different. I was free the whole time and put a lot of time and thought into it. This is my first album, and my first piece of work I’ve been out here to do.” Third Avenue is a debut that marks a period of relative serenity for a London MC who’s overcome two prison spells and celebrated a UK No. 1 (2018’s “Funky Friday” with Dave). It’s a debut that also, crucially, pays tribute to his roots. “I’m from a place called Mozart Estate,” he says. “West Kilburn on the map. There are six avenues leading into the estate, and I grew up on the third one. I’m here today because of that place. If I had left, ain’t no telling what I’d be doing.” Take a guided tour of Third Avenue with Fredo. “Survival of the Fittest” “I had that song for, like, a year. We didn’t want to start with nothing too jumpy, or nothing too vibesy. We just wanted to start it with something more ‘core.” “Morning” “When it comes to individual songs, I never sit […]

A group of major music labels is seeking court orders that will force major telcos to block online services that they say represent an illicit challenge to streaming services such as Apple Music and Spotify. The application to block the four services is being coordinated by Music Rights Australia. The action has been brought in the Federal Court by the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA), Sony Music Entertainment Australia, Universal Music Australia and Warner Music. If the application is granted — and the Federal Court is yet to knock back a site-blocking injunction brought under Section 115a of the Copyright Act — then customers of Foxtel, Optus, TPG and Vodafone, as well as customers of the telcos’ subsidiaries, will be affected by the site blocks. The current legal action is the first time so-called ‘stream ripping’ sites, which allow audio from streaming services such as Spotify to be downloaded, have been targeted by a Section 115a action. Barrister Rob Clark appearing for the applicants this morning at a case management hearing acknowledged the action is “somewhat different” to past site-blocking cases “in so far as the online locations don’t themselves provide content or the means to get content [such as] […]

This year, the number of people paying for music over a streaming service will overtake people listening for free. That’s good news for the likes of Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music which have upset the traditional music model. Experts believe that streaming has made it fashionable to pay for music again, with the latest numbers from November 2018 showing 20.6% opting to pay, up from 18.3% the year before. At the same time, free streaming – either through services that use adverts, as part of a free trial or with a family license paid for by someone else – is gradually decreasing, currently standing at 21.5%, down from 21.7% previously. Apple Music is Apple’s answer to Spotify (Apple) The figures, based on a panel of 1,500 people quizzed by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), show a narrow 0.9% gap between paid and free, indicating a possible victory for paid-for services by the end of 2019. ‘Ten or 15 years ago popular opinion had it that it was all over for the music business and people would no longer pay for music,’ ERA chief executive Kim Bayley said. These figures are a striking vindication of the innovation and investment of digital […]

Spotify is about to try to become a podcasting giant with two new acquisitions — and we have some suggestions for that — but first, it’s crossing an important milestone with its music streaming business. Today, for the very first time, the company is reporting that it’s turned a profit. That’s right: some 13 years and 96 million paid subscribers later, Spotify is finally making money. Unless you count that one time a complicated tax situation technically threw it into the black. “[F]or the first time in company history, Operating Income, Net Income, and Free Cash Flow were all positive,” reads a portion of Spotify’s financial announcement this morning. Specifically, the company made an operating profit of €94 million, or about $107 million. It’s possibly a good sign for the entire industry, not just Spotify, because Spotify is arguably leading that industry today. Those 96 million paid subscribers add up to nearly double Apple Music’s 50 million subscribers, and Spotify announced it had 207 million monthly active users in total this past quarter. All that said, the profit may not last. The company is forecasting a loss of €50 to €100 million (about $57 to $113 million) next quarter and […]