Music Publishing News Roundup 11.13.15: YouTube Music App • ASCAP Database Change • Apple Music To Android
YouTube’s long-awaited music application has finally arrived after years of development. Unlike typical music streaming applications, YouTube Music simultaneously offers users the world’s largest video library and a music streaming service with a catalog of over 30 million songs .
With numerous new features such as playlist curation, offline playback, and tools to track trending music, YouTube Music comes as the company’s attempt to monetize what's become the world’s largest streaming music service and second largest search engine. The new application is priced competitively at $9.99 per month.
ASCAP is changing it’s ACE Database to now include the percentage share of public performance rights it represents for over 10 million songs. This makes ASCAP the first PRO in the United States to go public with licensable share data. The move comes in an effort to increase transparency in the intellectual property rights that ASCAP represents in order to support market value payments to their songwriters and publishers. ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews stated “If public performance rights societies are going to survive and thrive in a global music economy driven by data, then we must be willing to be fully transparent regarding what shares of songs we are licensing.”
Apple Music is now available on Android devices for the first time since launching on June 30th. While previously only available on iOS devices which make up 43.6 percent of the smartphone market, Android comprises over 1.4 billion people and equates to 52.3 percent of the market. Despite being only available on iOS devices prior to this week, Apple Music has already become the second most popular streaming service behind Spotify. Needless to say, making the service available to over half of the market expands the possibilities moving forward.
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