Spotify

Spotify’s video podcast publishing tools expand to creators worldwide • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, Media & Entertainment, podcasts, Spotify, streaming, Video, video podcastsNo Comments

Spotify today is expanding its video podcasting capabilities to creators in more than 180 markets worldwide, which means the functionality is now available in nearly all the markets where Spotify’s podcast creation software, Anchor, is currently available. The feature, first entered wider testing last year, then officially launched in April to a handful of key markets, including the U.S., before rolling out to half a dozen more countries this summer, including parts of Europe. The move puts Spotify in closer competition with YouTube, where video podcasts have been growing in popularity. Last year, YouTube hired a podcast executive, Kai Chuk, to lead its efforts in the space and was said to be been offering cash to popular podcasters to film their shows, Bloomberg reported. This August, YouTube took another big step into this space with the launch of a dedicated podcasts homepage in the U.S. Meanwhile, though Spotify is happy to talk about the expansion of its video recording functionality, the company wouldn’t share any sort of metrics about the traction its video podcasts are seeing — either in terms of creation or viewership. Instead, the company only responded to our inquiries by saying it’s “excited about the growth” as the format is adopted. So far, the adoption of video podcasts on Spotify has included both Spotify Originals and other, independent shows, like “Call Her Daddy,” which became a Spotify exclusive in July 2021, plus “Diary of a CEO,” and the “Always Sunny Podcast,” among others. Spotify also couldn’t confirm if its video podcasts have managed to increase the time users spent directly watching the shows on their phone or laptop, for example. However, the company did note that creators don’t necessarily have to switch to video entirely to leverage the new format. Rather, they can choose to diversify their content types by publishing some visual episodes alongside their traditional audio podcasts. For example, the episode “An Abortion Story” from “Call Her Daddy,” encouraged listeners to pull out their device at various parts to watch the video. With today’s expansion, Spotify says video podcasters can now use Anchor’s tools to reach Spotify’s audience of 456 million monthly listeners, while listeners can take advantage of features like the ability to switch between watching the video and playing the video in the background. Notably, background play is a feature YouTube charges for through its YouTube Premium subscription. But on Spotify, it’s available to all users — including non-subscribers — for free. If Spotify’s video podcast market share grows, this could become a competitive advantage. Spotify has been heavily focusing on podcasting, video and non-video alike, after spending more than $1 billion on podcast-related acquisitions. During the company’s 2022 investor day event, CEO Daniel Ek said that while the company is still in investment mode for podcasts, it believes the vertical has the potential for a 40-50% gross margin. The video feature is not without its challenges, however. Reports this fall indicated Spotify creators were using the podcast tool to illegally pirate movies. Several TikTok videos at the time showed the problem in action. Spotify said it uses technology to discover and remove this sort of infringing content. Piracy isn’t a problem limited to Spotify, of course. In fact, TikTok’s own LIVE feature is often used for finding a movie to watch, as users live stream directly from their TVs. Previously, Spotify had rolled out video podcast publishing to Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It’s now available to most of Anchor’s markets, including Sweden, Netherlands, and regions like SEA (Indonesia), MENA (UAE, Saudi), LATAM (Chile, Argentina, Colombia) and others.

ByteDance’s music app Resso offers hints about TikTok Music’s launch • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in Apps, bytedance, resso, Spotify, TikTokNo Comments

TikTok owner ByteDance is moving towards a launch its music streaming service TikTok Music, rivaling Spotify and YouTube Music, reports have stated. In addition to recent discoveries of TikTok Music trademarks in global markets, ZebethMedia has now discovered newly added references regarding a “TikTok Music” service in the Resso streaming app, owned by TikTok’s parent ByteDance. The code appears to suggest that user activity may sync between the Resso app and TikTok Music, and specifically refers to a “music.tiktok.com” URL, as well. ByteDance today already operates the streaming music service named Resso in markets including in India, Brazil, and Indonesia. But the references to TikTok Music in the Resso app hint that the China-based company might sync user activity between the two apps. In addition, the code refers to TikTok Music as part of TikTok. Image Credits: ZebethMedia It’s unclear whether TikTok will test its music service under the Resso moniker globally, or launch a separate app for that. The company has also launched a site “music.tiktok.com” for certain regions — references of which were also found in the code — suggesting that the service may launch first in Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Malaysia, and Singapore. You can’t download the client yet, and if you try to click on the download button a pop will tell you “We are working hard to bring you the desktop version. Check back soon.” The mobile version of the site suggests that the download button will take users to the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Image Credits: TikTok The site’s terms of service also uses the brand “TikTok Music,” we found. “Welcome to TikTok Music! TikTok Music, one of our Services defined under the TikTok Terms, is a music streaming service that allows users to listen to music,” the term page reads. Many of the pages on the site have placeholder text indicating that it is still under development. This could mean that ByteDance is preparing to start testing the service in certain geographies. The code references aren’t the only hints that a TikTok Music brand is in the works. The company has also recently registered verified “TikTok Music”-branded social media handles on Twitter and Instagram, as well as region-specific handles for areas like Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, and Asia, and countries like Singapore, and Malaysia. These accounts have posted similar creative teasers saying “Welcome to a new way to experience music,” “discover your new favorite song,” and “stay tuned” between April and May. These moves fall in line with information a former ByteDance employee told ZebethMedia earlier this year. They told us ByteDance had previously considered bringing the Resso service to more markets under a “TikTok Music” branding. More specifically, it had been weighing launches in mature markets like the U.K. and Australia, the source had said. Last month, The Wall Street Journal also reported that ByteDance was in talks with notable music labels to expand its streaming service to global markets. A TikTok Music service would make sense for ByteDance as many hit songs first become viral on TikTok and drive streams on Spotify and YouTube. A report released by the company last year suggested that 175 songs that trended on the short-video platform ended up on the Billboard 100 chart. If ByteDance launches its own music service, it could drive these streams toward its own app — whether that’s Resso or TikTok Music — allowing it to earn advertising and subscription revenue. ByteDance has shown interest in furthering its music investments. Earlier this year, it launched its own music distribution solution called SoundOn. With this service, the company pays 100% royalties to the artists for the first year, then 90% royalties from the second year. The platform also allows artists to drop teasers on TikTok to get early feedback. TikTok Music’s popularity will depend its ability to score deals with major labels, allowing it to offer users access to popular songs in addition to the original songs that launch first on TikTok. This could prove difficult. In September, Sony Music pulled its catalog from Resso, resulting in user backlash, for example. TikTok didn’t reply to requests for comment on this story.

Shopify acquires Remix to bolster its storefront design tools • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in acquisition, Apps, Commerce, Dev, react, Spotify, Startups, web developmentNo Comments

Remix, a startup developing an open source web framework similar to Next.js, has been acquired by Shopify, the companies announced in a joint statement today. The financial terms weren’t disclosed, but in a blog post, Remix CEO Michael Jackson said that Remix will receive “long-term backing and support” from Shopify that will allow it to “grow faster” and “sharpen its focus on performance and scalability.” “You’ll be seeing a lot more [of the Remix framework] in the wild, powering some of the largest commercial sites on the web,” Jackson said. “In addition, Shopify itself will use Remix across many projects, and you can expect to see more of Shopify’s developer platform include first-class support for Remix over time.” Remix was co-founded by Jackson — an ex-Twitter engineer — and Ryan Florence in 2020. The two worked together for years creating open source tools around React, a JavaScript library for building app UIs, before deciding to launch the eponymous Remix framework. One of Jackson’s and Florence’s best-known projects is React Router, a library for React, which has been downloaded almost a billion times. Not coincidentally, Shopify originally used React Router to architect Hydrogen, the company’s front-end web development framework for building custom Shopify storefronts. As for Remix, it’s a full-stack web framework that’s designed to leverage distributed systems and native browser features while abstracting away back-end server tasks. Compatible with public cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Workers, one of Remix’s key features is prefetching — the framework can prefetch elements of a web page in parallel, including buttons and forms, before a user clicks on a link to minimize page loading. Prior to the Shopify acquisition, Remix had raised $3 million in seed capital from OSS Capital and angel investors Naval Ravikant, Ram Shriram and Sahil Lavingia. In a post on the Shopify Engineering blog, Dion Almaer, VP of engineering at Shopify, said that the purchase of Remix will benefit both Shopify developers and merchants by bringing improvements to Hydrogen. “Remix will continue to be an independent and open-source framework,” Almaer said. “Remix will tackle challenges that developers building on Hydrogen have encountered around data loading, routing, and error handling … Shopify will use Remix across many projects where it makes sense, and you can expect to see more of our developer platform with first-class Remix support over time.” Remix is Shopify’s first acquisition since Deliverr, the fulfillment tech provider that the e-commerce giant purchased in May for $2.1 billion. Earlier in the year, Shopify snatched up Dovetail, which helps brands manage influencer marketing campaigns. The company also recently invested in Single, a music and video app used by many businesses on Shopify, following equity pledges in CMS developer Sanity and marketing automation startup Klaviyo. After a rocky Q2, there are signs that Shopify is beginning to better weather the economic downturn. The company posted smaller-than-expected Q3 losses last week, leading shares to jump as high as 17%.

Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ is the priciest digital album Tencent has sold • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in China, Media & Entertainment, music streaming, Spotify, Tencent, tencent music, tencent music and entertainment, tmeNo Comments

Taylor Swift’s latest album “Midnights” has dropped, and it might be setting a new standard for China’s digital music industry. Within a day of its release, the 13-track album, priced at 35 yuan or $4.83, has racked up nearly 200,000 copies on Tencent’s QQ, one of the largest music streaming platforms in China. While $4.83 doesn’t seem much — the album starts at $11.99 on the artist’s own online store — it’s the highest price ever set for digital albums in the market, which could indicate two things: the upstream cost of making albums has risen, or Chinese users are increasingly willing to pay for online music. China’s digital music industry has taken quite a different route from the Western one. For a long time, music piracy was rampant across online and offline media, so streaming platforms like QQ came up with a variety of perks to get people to foot the bill. A lot of QQ Music’s paid users are in effect signed up for bundle deals that give them access to other Tencent-affiliated products, such as video streaming, manga, or membership to Tencent-backed JD.com’s online mall. Subscribers get all sorts of value-added services within QQ Music’s platform as well, such as hi-fi streaming, access to online concerts, and customized app layouts. It’s hard to say whether the $4.83 pricing is the new pricing norm or simply a reflection of the fandom for Swift in China. After all, the American artist is one of the few foreign celebrities who reach 10 million followers on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. So far only Jay Chou, the mandopop (Mandarin pop music) king whose songs are known to everyone from my generation, has matched Swift’s pricing power at 30 yuan per album copy. In the wake of Beijing’s crackdown on internet monopolies, Tencent’s bargaining power on licensing deals might have weakened. For years, Tencent Music Entertainment, the firm’s music arm, bled money on securing exclusive rights from UMG, Warner Music, and Sony Music Entertainment. That’s no longer the case. Swift’s latest digital release is also available through QQ Music’s archrival NetEase Music, for instance. The good news is an increasing number of users are paying for Tencent’s music offerings, though the penetration rate remains modest. In Q2, TME reported 82.7 million subscribers across its three music streaming apps, up 25% year-over-year; a total of 593 million people use these services every month, meaning only 14% of them are paying. In comparison, 188 million, or 43%, of Spotify’s 433 million users are premium subscribers in Q2. Spotify also has a more profitable product. Looking strictly at their music services (TME is a more profitable business overall thanks to its more lucrative live streaming platform that lives off virtual gift sales), Spotify’s premium average revenue per user (premium ARPU) from Q2 was €4.54 ($4.48). TME’s average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) was 8.5 yuan or $1.17.