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WavMaker, a new music licensing platform dedicated to video creators, has launched with $5 million in seed funding led by Vicky Patel, a principal at Nashville record label Wavy Records and co-founder of Monarch Media.  The startup says it seeks to help video creators streamline the process of finding high-quality music for video projects by […]

MBW’s Stat Of The Week is a series in which we highlight a data point that deserves the attention of the global music industry. Stat Of the Week is supported by music data analytics firm Chartmetric.   A new report from Spotify sheds light on just how quickly music culture is globalizing, and shifting away from the English-language content

YMU, the UK-based talent agency representing celebrities like Simon Cowell, Graham Norton, and Nicole Scherzinger, has been acquired by Permira Credit for GBP £60 million (approx. USD $76 million). The news, reported by Deadline on Monday (March 18), comes after YMU reportedly explored financial restructuring in June 2023 as it owes £70 million in debt to current lenders. Sky News reported at the

Social media giant TikTok is seeing stalled growth in the US for the first time as it faces a wave of challenges including a licensing dispute with Universal Music Group, growing competition from Instagram Reels, a potential forced sale of its US operations, and a lukewarm foray into e-commerce. That’s according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter as

Just four months ago, Kobalt announced a partnership with investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value to invest more than USD $700 million to acquire music copyrights over the next few years. As part of its joint venture with Morgan Stanley, Kobalt will manage the creative, synch, licensing, administration, and investment services for these copyrights. Now, Kobalt has

Olivier Chastan’s acquisition vehicle Iconoclast has acquired the catalog of legendary singer and artist Tony Bennett. Included as part of the deal, according to Iconoclast, are rights to Bennett’s sound recordings, sound recording royalties, NIL (name, image & likeness) and archives/memorabilia. The value of the transaction was not disclosed by the company, but sources tells

The Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) “abused its position” as the country’s dominant collective management organization (CMO) to prevent members from switching to a competing agency, a court in Barcelona has concluded. The ruling marks a victory for UNISON, a Barcelona-based private music rights management company set up in 2017 as a competitor to

Vocal cloning service Jammable – formerly known as Voicify.ai – has been on the music industry’s radar for some time, and for good reason: It’s among the most popular services out there allowing users to clone voices of famous artists, without permission, and use them to create their own musical deepfakes. As of last count,

The integration of music and gaming – and the monetization of music superfans – has taken another leap forward, with Universal Music Group (UMG) and one of its frontline labels, Republic Records, launching a new product in Roblox that will enable players to stream music in-game. Dubbed Boombox, the new product is an ad-supported portable music player embedded in