Hypebot • new music industry, music marketing & music tech news from across the web

 NetCredit has analyzed publically available Spotify play data to calculate highest-earning songs on the service, country by country. The result is a lot of data and a glorious array of detailed infographics. 

A song featuring AI-generated vocals purporting to be Drake and the Weeknd has been pulled from streaming services by Universal Music Group (UMG) after going viral over the weekend. The label condemned the song, called Heart on My Sleeve, for “infringing content created with generative AI”.

The track was originally posted on TikTok by a user called Ghostwriter977 and shared on streaming services under the artist name Ghostwriter. By the time it was removed yesterday afternoon US time (17 April), it had racked up 600,000 Spotify streams, 15m TikTok views and 275,000 YouTube views.

AI-powered speech and music recognition company SoundHound has closed a new $125 million loan facility, with what it says is, “$100 million fully-funded” at closing.

The credit agreement also allows SoundHound AI to potentially tap into additional capital of up to $25 million. 

SoundCloud has teamed up with Israel-based music marketing platform Feature.fm to provide independent artists with marketing tools and resources as they launch their careers.

Feature.fm‘s services include shareable and trackable pre-save and smart links, campaign and artist landing pages, real time-analytics, and a self-serve ad platform, among others.

The company claims that it created more than 1 million links for 300,000 artists last year.

Utopia Music is moving through a period of intricate change: it has bought and then subsequently sold both Sentric and Rostr; announced layoffs in November 2022; held a reorganisation that included the departure of its CEO in January 2023; and was sued by SourceAudio, a company it didn’t acquire but allegedly had promised to, in February 2023.

How about that – you wait for one story about a famed older music industry brand relaunching itself as a modern creator-focused subscription platform, and then two come along at once.

Yesterday we wrote about Winamp’s new in-app “Fanzone” subscription platform, and now LimeWire, the one-time filesharing brand, is announcing its continued rebirth with a new subscription-based platform.

“Designed to empower content creators and offer fans exclusive content that is fully ownable,” is how LimeWire puts it, and to demonstrate the desirability of their new offering, platinum recording artist and songwriter Lauren Jauregui has announced her departure from Patreon and a transition to LimeWire.

Concord has announced what it calls a “planned transition” at the top of its international music publishing business.

Longtime executive and Concord’s President of International Publishing, John Minch, will step back from his day-to-day managing of international publishing operations to refocus on the rights held by Concord and to advocate for the songwriters and composers represented by Concord.

He will do this under the title of Executive Director, Publishing.

Record Store Day: Spin Your Attention To Indie Stores, Artists, Labels - Across America, US - Record Store Day celebrations include performances, meet-and-greets with artists and record releases on independent labels.

There’s no question that the most-talked-about performance of Coachella weekend one was Frank Ocean’s festival-closing, wildly uneven set. But that’s unfortunate seeing as the desert gathering, often seen as a state-of-pop-music coming out party, had an enormous amount of interesting and often great stories and sets over the course of three days.

The biggest takeaway, trend-wise, is that international music has clearly cemented its place in the pop stratosphere; Friday night’s headliner Bad Bunny performed nearly his entire Friday headline set, including the intros and interstitials, in Spanish, while K-Pop superstars Blackpink blew away haters with a tightly choreographed, jaw-dropping Saturday night performance.

Veteran music player Winamp continues its revamp by launching mobile and online versions of its music player to go alongside its traditional desktop app. They will all be able to aggregate, it says, “any audio services” – which means, “podcasts, radio stations, and – coming soon – the ability to play local files and connect to streaming services.”

TikTok’s heavy focus on user-generated video content means that those users are increasingly generating more advanced content as they become more skilful at creating it. They are now turning to external apps to make slicker, or more complex videos, using advanced editing features.

Artists spend months rehearsing for — and years dreaming about — headlining the Coachella festival, the biggest in North America. So the fact that Frank Ocean’s festival-closing performance — his first in nearly six years — was so shambolic left many concertgoers distressed, depressed, annoyed and other similar emotions (and left exponentially more people feeling similar kinds of ways when his set was unexpectedly not livestreamed).

Montana could soon join Afghanistan and India as the only jurisdictions in the world with a complete ban on TikTok, after lawmakers in the US state voted in favor of the move on Friday (April 14).

The state House voted 54-43 in support of the measure, sending the bill to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte, who would have to sign the bill for it to become law.

Roxi, a music streaming service for television, has attracted £7 million ($8.7m) in new funding.

The investment comes as Roxi, based in the UK, prepares to launch the service in the US, The Daily Mail reported Saturday (April 15).

According to The Daily Mail, The startup raised the funds from existing investor comedian Alexander Armstrong, as well as U2 guitarist Adam Clayton and the band’s ex-manager Paul McGuinness.

Myxt, an audio file management platform for creators, has raised $2 million in a seed funding round led by Accel Ventures and Quiet Capital.

The firm was founded in 2018 by Chris Wetherell and Sheena Pakanati, early engineers for tech companies including Google, Stripe, and Twitter. 

Coachella has reportedly been fined $117,000 (£94,000/€106,000) for breaking its curfew on all three days of weekend one. 

AEG Presents has been tackling ticket scalpers for an upcoming performance from DJ Skrillex, by reclaiming tickets and reselling them to fans through the Fair AXS ticketing platform. 

The platform is AEG’s own fan verification system and requires fans to register in advance for tickets in order to discourage scalpers.

After spending years and hundreds of millions of dollars in building up an in-house suite of paywalled podcasts on its streaming service, Spotify is now re-evaluating that exclusivity and has revealed to employees that Gimlet Media podcasts will start being licensed to other platforms.

Universal Music Group Nashville (UMGN) has tapped Lori Christian and Rob Femia to join its executive board. Christian has been upped to executive VP of marketing, while Femia has been named executi…

Vicky Cornell, on behalf of the Estate of Chris Cornell, and the surviving members of Soundgarden — Kim Thayil, Matt Cameron and Ben Shepard — have settled a contentious legal battle that will allow the release of new music the band had been working on up to the time of the singer’s death from suicide in 2017.

One common critical question lobbed towards web3 projects is: “yes, but why do you need the blockchain to do that?” The answers, of course, are multifarious and nuanced, and there are plenty of good reasons to use web3 tech. But it’s often the case that ideas don’t *need* to use web3 to work.

A fan club, for instance, can work very well without it being a DAO, and – as Roblox has apparently decided – limited edition virtual items don’t need to be NFTs.

Eric Clapton announced Monday that his recurring Crossroads Guitar Festival will take place in Los Angeles this fall, with a roster of 41 guest musicians or bands set to take the stage across two nights at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles Sept. 23-24.

Musicians due to perform one or both nights include Santana, the War on Drugs, the John Mayer Trio, ZZ Top, Sheryl Crow, Gary Clark Jr., H.E.R., Buddy Guy, Los Lobos, Vince Gill, Stephen Stills, Jimmy Vaughan, Robbie Robertson, the Del McCoury Band and Joe Bonamassa.

SM Entertainment’s artists will be joining Weverse, the mobile app and web-based superfan platform built by rival K-pop company HYBE.

The platform brings together artist-related content such as music videos, teasers, movies and live streams. It also has a merch platform known as Weverse Shop.