Earlier this year, the app TikTok — which allows users to create short video clips set to music — helped shotgun Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” into the pop stratosphere. That accomplishment alone is cause for the app’s creators to celebrate. But that is just one way that TikTok …
Read More »'Fake Artists' Have Billions of Streams on Spotify. Is Sony Now Playing the Service at Its Own Game?
Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? That classic line, delivered by Johnny Rotten in January 1978 during The Sex Pistols’ farewell show at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, remains the stuff of legend. The frontman appeared to hint that the Pistols – for many, the purest distillation of the punk …
Read More »Inside Garageband, the Little App Ruling the Sound of Modern Music
Patrick Stump was livid. On a lurching tour bus rigged with a wobbly Jenga tower of recording equipment, the singer and Fall Out Boy frontman had been trying to lay down demos for the band’s second album — it’d been hours, fiddling with rubber cords and finicky software — and …
Read More »Spotify Turns a Profit for the First Time — and Reveals Its Bigger Ambitions
Spotify‘s fourth quarter of 2018 saw the10-year-old Swedish music-streaming company posting an operating profit for the first time, adding 9 million premium subscribers, expanding into 13 new markets and positioning itself to be something much bigger than just a music service. The company posted its fourth-quarter earnings (pdf) before the …
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