For the better part of a year, a U.K. Parliamentary committee has been probing the economics of the modern music industry, questioning the entanglements of players like record labels and streaming services. At midnight British time on Thursday, July 15th, the group dropped the results of its inquiry: a massive …
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Spotify‘s free tier is one of the modern music industry‘s most controversial talking points — and one of the Swedish company’s strongest competitive advantages. Spotify has regularly proffered the following justification for its “freemium” model: In a world where YouTube and piracy sites allow any of us to access most …
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This is the first in a Rolling Stone series exploring the new business models of music’s rap- and streaming-dominated era. Record deals rarely let slip concrete numbers, but the rough figures reported around the most buzzed-about deals of the last year go something like this: Warner dishing out $8 million …
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