Composium Digest: Twitter on the journey to build the next creator ecosystem
Composium | March 9, 2021
Composium Digest is a newsletter-only addition delivered once a week. Get overviews of interesting stories happening in the music industry, stay informed of various opportunities music startups and companies offer, and catch up on some of the Composium articles you might have missed.
SoundCloud and its new payout model
Anouk Dyussembayeva, Composium CEO
With this new change, SoundCloud lets musicians get paid based on their fans’ total listening time, instead of calculating their share of the total number of streams in a specific month like other major platforms.
If you’re a SoundCloud user, your monthly subscription fee gets split between the artists you listen to and support. Other DSPs are built on a model where top artists receive revenue from listeners who haven't even played any of their songs.
“It means that most of your ten pound subscription actually goes to Ed Sheeran or Drake or Lady Gaga rather than the other musicians whose music you may have been listening to,” Wired writes.
This is amazing news for independent musicians, and we will see the first results when the model launches on April 1, 2021.
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Is anyone looking for a fast laugh?
Anouk Dyussembayeva, Composium CEO
You probably know Netflix. Maybe you watched at least one comedy on the platform. Well, Netflix decided to hop on the short-form video app trend (think TikTok) and launch its own.
On March 3rd, the streaming giant announced Fast Laughs, a “full-screen feed of funny clips” from its comedy catalog.
Inside the app, you’re able to watch videos, share the ones you like, and even jump straight to Netflix to start binging on a show that particularly caught your attention — all within a click of a button.
This isn’t surprising: with platforms battling for their users’ attention, it only makes it natural to create an app of such.
Keep in mind Netflix has applied social media features before, like implementing its own Stories before.
For now, it’s hard to predict how long this new feature will be around. If we look at TikTok, it offers a much, much wider variety of content — even if we take the music segment, we already have software tutorials, song covers, viral dance challenges, sea shanties.. and the list goes on.
But, the fact that other platforms will soon follow is inevitable.
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David Crosby Sells His Catalog
Sidney O’Gorman, Composium Ambassador
The music industry has presented artists with a plethora of challenges in the last decade. First, streaming services made it harder for artists to be fairly compensated for their music, and now the pandemic has prevented them from earning money off of live performances. Many musicians have had to adapt and find new ways to live off of their art.
We talked about how companies like KKR, Hipgnosis, and other major investment firms are buying out publishing rights to famous music catalogs.
David Crosby, among those musicians affected by streaming platforms and the pandemic, has sold his catalog in order to combat the modern fiscal challenges of the music industry. The recorded music and publishing rights of all his past projects are now in the hands of music executive Irving Azoff's Iconic Artists Group (IAG).
And since we’re on the topic of DSPs and direct fan payments
Anouk Dyussembayeva, Composium CEO
With the growing and much-needed trend of streaming platforms allowing musicians earn direct payments from fans, Ryddm is attracting a lot of attention.
The app is centered around the idea of connecting artists and their listeners closer together, or what the founder John Kane calls “a more fulfilling experience.”
As a user, you have impact on what music will be trending and have more engagement with musicians’ content (photos, videos, livestreams, and more).
As an artist, you can add your work for free, promote via in-app marketing, interact with fans, and grow your audience thanks to recommendations.
The beta version is soon to be launched.
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Did someone say NFTs?
Anouk Dyussembayeva, Composium CEO
There’s been a lot of talk around NFTs and how they can transform the music industry, among others.
First off, what are NFTs? Non-fungible tokens are cryptocurrency-adjacent virtual collectibles that rely on blockchain. Why are they so hyped up? They are offering new business models “for collectors and investors to buy, sell, and trade digital art,” and thus new income streams.
What’s really interesting about this concept is that, in a way, it can be compared to the stock market.
For example, let’s say you list your unreleased song at a specific price. Your fans, collectors, and investors will be able to buy it, aka obtain a unique token. If they wish, they can then trade their NFT, which affects the price of your song.
What is also appealing is that every time your work gets sold, re-sold, or traded, you still get a percentage from the deal, which is so unlike the current music business models.
There is something very magical and personal about having an “authenticated copy that is digitally signed by the original creator or artist, simply because that collector has a deeper, personal relationship with the song,” explains 3LAU, who earned more than $11 million by selling his crypto-album on the Ethereum blockchain.
It is also important to note that these tokens give a lot of room for creativity — you can offer unreleased exclusive music, auction rights, collaboration opportunities, and more.
Artists ranging from Deadmau5 and Shawn Mendes to Kings of Leon and 3LAU have been experimenting with NFTs, and it is expected that more will jump on the bandwagon. Whether the NFTs are here to stay, however, is a hypothesis yet to be proven.
Maestro Takes the Stage
Sidney O’Gorman, Composium Ambassador
A new live-streaming company, Maestro, has recently raised a funding round worth $15 million and reportedly tripled its revenue in 2020. Investors include Sony Music Entertainment, NetEase and others.
In addition to their live-streaming, they also provide monetization tools, giving their clients the opportunities to sell merchandise, set up subscription events, and shout-out their fans. They can even put on augmented reality concerts!
The platform has been used for events by companies and artists like Coachella, The Recording Academy, and Billie Eilish.
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Twitter on the journey to build the next creator ecosystem
Anouk Dyussembayeva, Composium CEO
Square, Inc., the financial services company led by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, announced its agreement to buy a majority stake in Tidal, Jay Z’s music streaming service.
The company will pay $297 million in cash and stock, with Jay Z joining its Board of Directors. The reason for the deal is what Square describes as its purpose to economically and financially empower musicians.
Although the announcement left many confused, it comes as no surprise — in the recent months, we’ve seen Twitter and Square acquiring companies to help creators in different industries.
For instance, Twitter bought Revue, one of the leading newsletter platforms (and a big competitor to Substack), in hopes of offering “new ways for [writers] to create and share their content, … help them grow and better connect with their audience.”
Jay Z had the same intentions when Tidal was founded, but the promises quickly fell short: the platform couldn’t gauge enough users to be able to rival with its competitors.
Time will only show whether the streaming service will be able to offer competition to other major DSPs.
Anghami to list on Nasdaq
Anouk Dyussembayeva, Composium CEO
Anghami, one of the most popular streaming platforms in the Middle East, announced plans to list on Nasdaq stock exchange (New York). To do so, it’s merging with Vistas Acquisition Company Inc., Singapore special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
SPACs, also dubbed “the Silly Bandz of 2020” by Morning Brew, are shell companies whose goal is to merge with another company. Through this process, the acquired/merged private company, also known as the target, becomes public.
The reason SPACs have caught the eyes of so many startups is that they are less costly and time-consuming compared to an IPO.
Founded in 2012, the streaming platform now offers more than 50 million songs to more than 70 million users. Using AI and machine learning algorithm, the app can enhance its recommendations, attract new listeners, and predict user behavior.
This deal could value Anghami at over $200 million, and the founders plan to use the funds to “invest more in R&D” and expand into areas in entertainment and media.
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Grammy partner with Berklee and ASU to study women’s representation
Anouk Dyussembayeva, Composium CEO
Finding that only 23% among its 853 nominees for this year’s Grammys identify as women, the Recording Academy decided to do a study on female creators in the music industry.
Being criticized for many years about the issue, the academy does admit that the imbalance between the amount of male musicians compared to that of female is “one of the most urgent issues in the industry today.”
Teaching in Conversation: Dr. Dorothy Hindman
Sidney O’Gorman, Composium Ambassador
Education is an invaluable field of work. It is because of our schooling that we are able to learn how to properly interact in society, problem solve, as well as discover our own professional ambitions and how to pursue them. In my interview with Dr. Dorothy Hindman from the University of Miami’s (UM) Frost School of Music, I asked her about her experiences on the teaching side of the education of music composition.
Ultimately for Dr. Hindman, “it was more about the teaching, than the teaching composition.” Studying at Miami Dade Community College in the hopes of becoming a rock keyboardist, she discovered her passion for education quite accidentally when one of the faculty members told her “I’m expecting you to come back and take over my job.” After later graduating with her doctorate she gained adjunct experience at both the University of Miami and Miami Dade before her eventual tenure at Birmingham-Southern College and ultimately at UM.
Although, the path of a music educator is not an easy one, as she had (and continues) to face challenges on the road to success. When talking about her time on the search for a job, she said “weirdly, being female – especially at the time when I was first applying – you get a lot of shortlists for the jobs […] but rarely would you get the job.” She continued, saying that search committees would consider women for a position more as a means to appear inclusive than as a way to find a qualified candidate.
Dr. Hindman has also struggled to balance her time as a composer and as a professor. She talked about the difficulty in wanting to commit completely to both, as the two titles “should be full time job(s).” Her solution: a “seasonal” approach; primarily dedicating her time during the school terms to teaching while spending every break she has composing.
Of course, there are things about a teaching position that help with compositional ambitions. For instance, Dr. Hindman has access to performers willing to play her works as well as the school’s music library. According to Dr. Hindman, while in some situations she is the one approaching performers to work on her pieces, she will occasionally have people (sometimes that she has not yet met) approach her about performing her music. The title of professor comes with a sense of “prestige” in that sense.
Among her upcoming projects, Dr. Hindman is coordinating a collaboration between her composition studio, Duo Sequenza (guitar and flute), and the Lowe Art Museum. The result will be a collection of works based off objects in the Lowe and performed by Duo Sequenza. Dr. Hindman is also working on pieces for the Percussion Collective quartet and for pianist Matthew McCright.
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