Owning & Growing A Music Business

In the digital age, where streaming reigns supreme, getting your music onto popular Spotify playlists has become the holy grail for artists looking to expand their reach and engage new fans. Spotify playlist pitching is an art form that, when...

Imagine you've just landed an awesome job at a hot new record label. Your first task is to launch the debut single of a new artist and ensure that it crosses 100,000 streams. What do you do? This track might...

In a move that has sent ripples across the music industry, Spotify has announced a new royalty rule set to take effect early next year. The streaming giant will implement a 'minimum annual threshold' of 1,000 streams for tracks to...

The great Italian composer, Claudio Monteverdi declared, "Music is spiritual. The music business is not".  This was way back in the 16th century! We frequently encounter musicians who're great at the music part, but struggle when it comes to the...

In the 2016 single, “Pain”, Snoop Dogg raps, “I’m into public relations”. Of course, when you’re Snoop Dogg, you probably don’t need to worry about public relations. But as an independent artist who’s building your career, paying attention to PR...

A recent study showed that artists get paid $0.004 on average, per listen on Spotify. Effectively, you’d need a quarter of a million streams just to make a thousand bucks. To survive in this scenario, bands need to know how...

In 1962, when successful record store owner Brian Epstein heard a local Liverpool band called The Beatles perform in a local pub, he decided that they had talent and charisma worth promoting. Though locally popular, the band had failed to...

Late in 2021, fans of UK alt rock band Don Broco were shocked when the band’s Instagram account was apparently taken over by soccer celebrity David Beckham. Twenty-four hours later, the mystery cleared up: Don Broco released a new single...

Lady Gaga has her ‘Little Monsters’, Justin Bieber’s got ‘Beliebers' and Beyonce has her ‘Beyhive’. In the digital age, a lot of people can make music, but very few know how to build a fanbase. So, an up-and-coming artist, how...

Wynton Marsalis, one of the most celebrated contemporary jazz musicians, got his start playing with his family's jazz band, with the likes of Miles Davis, Clark Terry, and Al Hirt. Not every aspiring jazz musician has a family band with...

In November 2022, rappers Drake and 21 Savage embarked on an extravagant campaign to promote their latest collaborative album, “Her Loss”, which included distributing fake copies of Vogue magazine featuring the artists on its cover, as well as broadcasting a fake Tiny Desk Concert...

Billie Eilish made $82.3 million from her "Happier Than Ever" tour, and  Dua Lipa makes $1.2 million per show on average. Live Nation, one of the world’s top live entertainment companies, earned a revenue of more than $5 billion from...

By 1969, rock musician David Bowie had been a part of seven unsuccessful bands and released eight flop singles. Then, on 11th July, 1969, he released ‘Space Oddity’, just five days ahead of the launch of USA’s first manned spaceflight,...

Of the ten rising rappers unanimously cited by Billboard, Complex magazine and Ranker as artists to watch out for in 2022, only one – Kali – had her commercial debut single (Do a Bitch) go viral. The other artists had...

Music Business Worldwide (MBW) estimates that over 80% of all songs on Spotify have fewer than 50 monthly listeners. This is not so surprising, considering that industry leaders have been quoted as saying that up to 100,000 songs are being...

Photo by Billetto Editorial on Unsplash One of the most crucial and exciting periods for any musician’s career is the launch of new music, whether a single or an album. It’s not difficult to see why! The successful release of...

What do Lorde, Andrew WK, and Lana Del Rey, all have in common? They’re all successful artists who aren’t very active on social media. But also, they’re all artists who are already fairly well-known, and who’ve been signed on by...

More than 43 million minutes of video is uploaded on YouTube every day. So, within just a couple of weeks of you uploading your five-minute music video, it’s competing to stand out amongst over a billion minutes of newly-uploaded video, not to...

When Ice-T rapped about having 99 problems, he might as well have said, “I got 99 problems, but video promotion ain’t one of them”. When you’re just starting out as an independent musician, promoting a video can be tough —...

There are two questions that every growing musician asks themselves at some point. One, what is the secret to eternal happiness? And two, does Spotify promotion actually work? The good news is, we’re working out the answer to the first...

What Prince Can Teach Artists About Record Contracts “Let the baker make the bread.” It’s a simple statement that carries the weight of the entire recording industry and all of the litany of problems that come with it. For anyone...