Apple has been growing its music business in Africa for some time now, from Apple Music and Shazam to its Platoon artist-development team. This week, the company has been talking about some of the progress it’s seeing across the continent. It told Billboard that streams of African DJ mixes have grown by 500% in the last year, including a whopping 3,000% increase in Nigeria (which the article notes makes it “one of the top 10 countries for DJ mixes” on Apple Music)
Streaming service Audiomack is launching a new feature that will enable the keenest fans of artists to hear their new music first. It’s called ‘Premiere Access‘, can be used for new tracks or entire albums, and is based on the ‘Audiomack Supporters‘ initiative that the company launched in late 2021. That’s a tips economy where fans can buy ‘support badges’ tied to specific tracks or albums, paying between $1.99 and $249.99 (!) to show off their fandom, and contribute directly to their favourite artists. Audiomack takes a 15% cut of those revenues, and artists the other 85%, with the company saying that 25,000 artists have tried it so far.
Through the sheer weight of on-platform promotional power, YouTube has driven its Shorts format to 30bn daily views. Now it’s ready to start pulling the levers to make money from that through advertising.
“Since 2020, the portion of our Global Weekly Top Songs Chart represented by catalog has increased by 155%,” explained the streaming service. “As of 2022, almost a third of charting songs are catalog.” That’s up from 13% in 2020 and 23% in 2021.
The company says that it analysed 77.6m Instagram posts to compare their performance. It found that Reels were 22.1% of those posts, compared to 42.2% that were images, 26.2% that were carousel posts, and 9.6% that were non-Reels videos. However, Reels accounted for 35.4% of the likes for all this content, and 33.8% of the ‘estimated reach distribution’.
Triller has now raised a total of $400m. “Given past controversies around the company’s public statements on user figures, there will be plenty of interest in its S-1 filing and/or prospectus,” was Music Ally’s thoughts about any upcoming IPO at the start of July; the IPO filing was a confidential one and we’re still keen to see its contents.
Which brings us to the second Triller story of the day: Sony filed a lawsuit yesterday claiming that Triller has not only failed to make “monthly payments […] totaling millions of dollars,” but has also continued to provide Sony’s music catalogue for use on the platform, despite SME terminating their deal on August 8th
