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 maximize their income and reduce their touring costs.
This week, we got official word on the state of the recorded music business in 2023. According to IFPI‘s latest Global Music Report, recorded music revenues hit USD $28.6 billion in 2023, up 10.2% YoY.
Meanwhile, Kobalt announced it had secured a $450 million revolving credit facility to refinance its debts, and had raised $266.5 million through its first-ever sale of asset-backed securities, backed by music royalties. Add to that its partnership with Morgan Stanley announced a new months back, and the company says it has more than $1 billion with which to buy music rights.
Speaking of large numbers, social music creation platform BandLab has surpassed 100 million users, having added 40 million over just the past year.
We also got word this week that BMG‘s Chief Content Officer, Dominique Casimir, is stepping down from her role. The announcement comes in the wake of some major changes brought in by CEO Thomas Coesfeld.
Finally, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper in Sweden reported that it had uncovered the true identity of a musician on Spotify who has used 50 composer aliases and at least 656 invented artist names. His 2,700 songs on the platform have been streamed some 15 billion times.
IFPI, the organization that represents the recorded music industry worldwide, has published its Global Music Report, which reports on global trade revenues for the recorded music industry in 2023.
The headline stat from IFPI‘s report: Global recorded music revenues rose 10.2% YoY in 2023 to reach USD $28.6 billion.
Last year (2023) marked the global music market’s ninth consecutive year of growth.
Subscription streaming revenues grew by 11.2% YoY last year, accounting for 48.9% of the global market, which in dollar terms, means that subscription streaming revenues reached $14 billion in 2023.
Total streaming revenues (including both paid subscription and advertising-supported) grew 10.4% YoY to reach $19.3 billion in 2023 and accounted for more than two-thirds (67.3%) of the total global market…
Just four months ago, Kobalt announced a partnership with investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value to invest more than USD $700 million to acquire music copyrights over the next few years.
Now, Kobalt has executed two new transactions that it says, combined with the Morgan Stanley partnership, provide it “with more than $1 billion to continue to grow and execute on its strategic initiatives”.
First up, Kobalt on March 19 announced a new $450 million Revolving Credit Facility from a Truist Securities-led “syndicate”, which according to Kobalt will be used to “fully refinance existing indebtedness”.
In addition, Kobalt has confirmed the raise of $266.5 million via its first-ever Asset-Backed Securitization (ABS) transaction, backed by music royalties from a catalog of more than 5,000 works from 66 writers…
BandLab, the social music creation platform owned by Singapore-based BandLab Technologies, just reached a significant milestone.
The app has surpassed 100 million registered users, which means that it has added 40 million users since January 2023, when, as MBW reported at the time, the app confirmed that it had 60 million registered users.
Speaking with Bloomberg, BandLab Technologies CEO Meng Ru Kuok said: “It’s funny when you get to these large milestones, especially something like 100 million, which is slightly hard to fathom in terms of the scale of the number”.
In December, Meng Ru Kuok was named MBW’s Entrepreneur Of The Year award winner for 2023/2024. He told us at the time that he predicts there will be 1 billion music creators “by 2030, potentially even sooner…”
BMG Chief Content Officer Dominique Casimir is stepping down from her role after 15 years with the company.
The news was announced by BMG on March 21.
The Berlin-based exec, who first joined BMG in 2008, was named Chief Content Officer (CCO) of the company in May 2022.
BMG said on Thursday that Casimir has “played a key role in the early development of BMG’s recordings business”, noting that the exec gradually added greater responsibilities to her remit including GSA (2016), Continental Europe (2019), Asia Pacific and Latin America (2020) BMG’s global synch operation (2021) and the UK when she was named Chief Content Officer in May 2022.
MBW reported in January that, since Thomas Coesfeld took charge last summer, more than 100 employees have been laid off at BMG…
The existence of fake artists on Spotify is now a well-known fact: Music released by musicians under pseudonyms, who have no real online presence other than their Spotify accounts and plays, and whose music can be found on many of Spotify’s key playlists dedicated to ‘mood music’.
On Tuesday (March 19), Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter published an expose on Spotify’s fake artist problem (not the newspaper’s first on that topic), and reports to have identified the musician “behind the world’s most listened to network of fake artists on Spotify.”
DN reports that this individual is a composer from Sweden named Johan Röhr, whose music, it says, has been released on Spotify under “50 composer aliases and at least 656 invented artist names”.
According to DN’s report, Röhr is behind over 2,700 songs that have been released under various fake artist names on Spotify. Some of those names include Minik Knudsen, Mingmei Hsueh, Csizmazia Etel, and Adelmar Borrego.
His music across all of these pseudonymous artist accounts on Spotify, according to DN, has been streamed approximately 15 billion times…
