Too Much Drake?; Thomas Dolby Plans Cloud-Based Concert; TuneCore Adds Facebook Monetisation for DIY Artists

Like Apple giving everyone a U2 album no one asked for, Spotify strongly suggesting its users engage with Drake undermines listeners’ sense of ownership.

Thomas Dolby has played lots of venues over his career. Now he can add the cloud.

The feature is for Echo speakers and the Sonos Beam and lets people alter the bass using their voice.

The Austrian music market is being boosted by the dynamic growth of streaming services, with 2.5 billion songs streamed in the first half of 2018 (compared to 1.5 billion songs in the first half of 2017).

Qobuz, a Paris-based online music streaming and download service for music lovers, has been named the Official High-Resolution Streaming Service for the upcoming 15th Annual Rocky Mountain International Audio Fest (RMAF), the largest high-end consumer audio show in North America.

“Up to this point, if you were to summarise the industry’s marketing message around hi-res music, it’s ‘will you pay more for better sound quality?’ That’s a losing marketing message.

A new study from Consumer Intelligence Reports Partners has revealed Spotify has a much higher churn rate in the US than the rest of the world.

Musical.ly has begun redirecting users of its Live.ly app, which it decided to kill off last month, to a competing app called LiveMe.

DIY music distribution firm TuneCore last week announced that artists using its platform worldwide can now get access to some of that new fangled Facebook monetisation. It will allow DIY artists to get paid when their music is used on both Facebook and Instagram.