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AEG Europe has announced the appointment of Lynsey Wollaston as Vice President and General Manager for European Festivals. In her new role at AEG Europe, Lynsey brings over 16 years of commercial and operations experience to oversee the European Festival team's day-to-day operations and play a key role in developing and supporting the strategic vision

A 10-part limited series from Wondrium has the celebrated performer exploring the little-recognized historical roots of the banjo... and its tangled journey as the quintessential American instrument

After the acrimonious takeover battle between BTS-backer Hybe Corp. and tech giant Kakao for control of SM Entertainment, Korea’s financial regulators are probing the deal-making that eventually led to Kakao’s victory.

 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.”

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is lobbying against "Apple's stranglehold" on app stores, speaking with lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

In an unusual move that seems intended to eliminate age-discrimination in music releases, BMG, one of the world’s largest music companies, announced Tuesday that it will abandon the “outdated” industry distinction between “frontline” — a.k.a. new releases — and older catalog recordings.

The company, which notes that older catalog recordings account for up to three quarters of revenue in the streaming era, will fully integrate its new release and catalog recordings businesses. It is the first major company in the industry to do so.

Instagram has been famously restrictive when allowing users to post links to external websites: only one link was allowed, and that was only possible in your bio at the top of the profile, not in text accompanying posts; hence the endless pleas to “see link in bio”. Now that’s changed: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news that Instagram (which is owned by Meta) will support up to five links via his Broadcast Channel (Instagram’s public messaging tool).

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.