The music business review of the year 2022: Part one

completemusicupdate.com:

As 2022 draws to a close, we’ve selected ten key events in music and the music business from the last year. The first five here coincide with the final edition of our Setlist podcast for this year, where we also summarise the same stories.So, here and in the podcast, we discuss the ongoing economics of streaming debate, the resurgence (or not) of the live music industry, the continued increase in song-theft lawsuits, the growing trend of interpolation in pop, and the licensing of music on social media platforms.Listen to the accompanying episode of Setlist here.Meanwhile, read on for our write up of each story, and be sure to come back tomorrow for five more. 01: Economics of streamingIn his annual review of the wider music rights sector, Will Page declared this year that “music copyright has never had it so good”, after his study estimated that global revenues for the record industry and music publishing sector in 2021 reached almost $40 billion on the back of the ongoing streaming boom.However, of course, many artists and songwriters argue that they are not seeing the benefit of that streaming boom – and the boost it has brought about in the music rights sector – because of the way the music streaming business is set up and how digital revenues are shared out between artists, record labels, songwriters, music publishers and the streaming services.Those arguments from the music-maker community became all the more vocal during the COVID-19 pandemic when other music industry revenue streams started to slide or stopped entirely, while streaming revenues continued to grow.

In the UK that resulted in the big Parliamentary inquiry into the economics of music streaming which saw MPs – in their final report in 2021 – call for a.