Should Netflix offer music streaming too? Are YouTube view counts meaningless now? Is music blogging back (inside Spotify?) Which song would you remix? Christian Metal vs KPop Demon Hunters!

0:03Welcome to the price of music brought to you by music ally. And if you want an easy guide to what's going on in the music industry, and how it all works, then here we are every week, looking at the finances of the music industry, whilst also bringing you stories and comments from across the pop business. He's Stuart Dredge. I'm Joe Sparrow. And we're going to start as ever with Stu's big number. Stu, which big number has caught your eye this week?

0:23Stu:My big number this week is$9.2 billion, which is, I think, fairly big. That ticks the boxes for bigness. What is that? This is how much money TikTok made last year across just Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the UK. So essentially not in Asia, not in America, but everywhere else. It made$9.2 billion, and that was up 45.7 % new on year. So TikTok is making a shed load more money all around the world, essentially. For those of us who just perhaps doom-scrolled to TikTok, how does TikTok make money? Well, it's three ways. So it makes money from advertising, like all social media things. But it also makes money from people spending money on in-app purchases to tip the live streamers they like.

1:10Stu:So you can send tips and gifts to people. And it also makes money from shopping. So it's TikTok shop is becoming a booming kind of way of buying stuff online. So it has these three ways of making money now, which for social media is quite impressive. Traditionally, it's been advertising-only businesses, and really if the advertising takes a wobble, they're in trouble. But TikTok has got these. I suppose if I was a big tech mogul guy, I'd be saying it's the triple-engine economy of TikTok. Could you? Shopping, ads, and in-app spending. Okay. And of that 9.2 billion is a huge amount of money. Just as a reminder, how does that money, or does any of that money reach artists, songwriters, and musicians?

1:56Stu:Yeah, so TikTok has got licensing deals with labels and publishers. Every so often a fight emerges. I had a fight with Universal Music Group a few years ago and then made up. So yes, money is going towards music and the music industry is always saying we should be getting more money from TikTok and other platforms like it. So Instagram reels, YouTube shorts. So this is the kind of thing where, this is a financial filing. So it's not TikTok coming out and boasting about it. It's kind of, it has to file these financials in the UK where the bit of a company that controls these countries is. So you can bet that next time record labels, publishers are going back into TikTok saying, right, time to renew our deal, they'll probably be waving these figures around saying, I see your money's up 45%.

2:41Stu:Well, maybe let's talk about how much our licensing money should raise this time. Possibly by 45%, yeah. It shows growth. I mean, obviously, a lot of this growth has nothing to do with music in a sense, in that people buying stuff from TikTok's shop is not music-related most of the time. People paying a non-music TikToker through a live stream isn't. So not all this money is music-related, but yeah, it is a sense that this is a really good business growing fast. It's actually gone. So these bits of TikToks are not America, not Asia, but everywhere else. posted an operating loss of like just under$485 million in 2024.

3:21Stu:And last year it posted a$452 million profit. So it's becoming a really profitable business as well. And that, again, is something that labels would go in saying, we see profits are good, eh? Let's talk about our terms. Yeah, it's a lot of money, isn't it? Of course, artists are using these technologies like TikTok shop to sell stuff and make money. and that's all something that, again, exists outside of the licensing of music system. And I guess that if you're an artist who has merchandise, TikTok is a great way to flog it. Well, this is the thing, I think, that whenever we talk about TikTok and it's making more money from these other things, artists can do this stuff.

3:58Stu:They can sell their merch on TikTok shop. They can do live streams and they can accept tips and gifts. And that hasn't really been the focus for a lot of artists in the past. But I think now people are starting to wake up to, hang on a minute, there's a load of money being spent on TikTok, not just from advertisers. Why can't we get a share of that? And TikTok is quite keen to help and to give a artist's advice and say, here's how you can do your merch. I'm sure it is, as it takes a percentage of each of those sales. Let's go on to our big stories. Universal Music Group has signed a high-profile licensing deal with the remixing app called Hook.

4:36So what is Hook? and do people want fan-made remixes? Isn't Hook the band that Peter Hook formed

4:44Stu:after New Order with lots of basses in? I think that was The Light. That was The Light. No, no, the band that Peter Hook formed after New Order was Free Bass and had three bassists. One of which was Andy Rourke from The Smiths. I think Manny. I think it was a very Mancunian affair. That's a good trio of bassists. But yeah, anyway, so Hook. It's a... Which makes me think of Captain Hook and I just hear a crocodile TikToking. But yeah, Hook is a startup. It's like an app, basically, that lets you remix and speed up and mash up music songs. But it's all official, so it licenses the music from labels and it makes sure that everything in there that you can remix, you're allowed to.

5:25Stu:And apparently, they announced this deal with Universal Music Group, which is like the big dog to get licensing-wise. It's the biggest major label. Obviously, the other major labels are very big too. Not doing anyone down. And apparently, UMG and Hook spent like two years running 30 test campaigns with artists from various Universal labels. So this has been a long time in the coming, this deal. And essentially, it means that Hook will have loads of music from Universal to put into that and people will be able to remix it. So this isn't an AI-powered press one button and put a prompt in and a remix pops out.

5:58This is when you go to the app or the platform, you can pick a song by an artist you like and you're given the tools and the stems of the music to remix it where you want it.

6:08Stu:So it's a bit more kind of active in that, although still very accessible and easy. You don't have to be kind of, you don't have to know how to remix music. So it's very much mainstream targeted. But yeah, and I think the interesting thing about it is this is kind of an example of a startup together with a label and labels going, okay, all this stuff that's been happening unofficially, like all those sped up versions of songs for TikTok, all this, I mean, UGC is the word, user-generated content. All this stuff has been happening without labels approving it or making money from it. We're going to try and find a model where they can do both.

6:45Stu:And Hook is one of just a few examples. I think when I wrote the story, we talked about some of the AI stuff happening. So Spotify is working with labels on a way to remix and mash up songs, official songs. And Udio, the AI music thing, is doing the same. So this is a big thing. It's like this transition of going, okay, people have been speeding up songs, slowing them down, mashing things up, and we never got any money from it, and we never got to say yes or no. So we're going to find some companies who are going to give us that control, but also let us shape what can be done and how it can be done.

7:17Stu:So Hook is an example of that. And it's kind of interesting because it's a startup. So you've got Spotify doing this on one side, a very big streaming company. You've got Udio, which is kind of a startup in the AI space, and you've got Hook. So Universal and other labels are obviously saying, we want to have a few people doing this. A few examples and just see what works and see if people want to do any of this stuff. Because that's the other question here, I think. Do people want to remix songs, popular pop songs? And no one quite knows. We know they want to speed them up for TikTok. Well, people have been doing it for a long time, haven't they, as well, just on their own terms.

7:53They'll grab a song, stem split it in Logic, and then remix it their way. So there's a group of people out there who've been doing it fairly determinedly forever. Do you remember Peak Mashup?

8:06Stu:The Sugar Babes and Gary Neumann and then that whole period of... Blissfully forgotten Peak Mashup. Errol Alkan, wasn't it? He was the guy. He was the Mashup. Errol Alkan and was it Richard X who did some really good? Those two were the princes, the high princes of Mashups and also have had very successful careers since then. But they were pros. They knew what they were doing. I think the thing here is now, right, what if anyone could do this? But within tightly controlled, okay, you can't do something we don't approve of. And that's, it's kind of a bet, I think. Which isn't very cool, is it? Like, I think, isn't one of the fun parts about mashing up songs and remixing them, that you take it and you do what you want.

8:42It's not about a major label giving you permission to do it. I mean, there's like, doesn't that take some of the fun away?

8:48Stu:Yeah, but I suppose the way the labels are put it is actually, we're letting the artist decide what you can do. And I think part of this subject is this idea of like, the artists who are assigned to Universal can decide which features can be used with their music and what can be done with it. So I think if you were talking to Universal, they'd be saying it's not about a big corporate label saying you can do X and Y. It's about artists having the control and we are obviously the way they get that. But yeah, it's a fair point I think. I suppose the two questions are does anyone want to do it and will the results be good and exciting and will people want to listen to them?

9:20Stu:Because that is the other thing. I think some of those bootlegs that really did catch fire were really good but just mashing up one popular song with another doesn't mean it's going to be good even if they're as good individually you know that the whole what's called the sum of its parts ends up less than yes yeah yeah well we'll have a chat in the lock-in section later for you super fans out there and perhaps toss around a few ideas of songs that we would like to remix and see and see where we'd go with them and next big story then And Ariana Grande at the moment is doing a 10-show run at the O2 in London.

9:57And one of our team at Musical.ly went and said it was transcendently amazing. But 35 % of the people buying tickets for Ariana Grande's show run are from outside of the UK. So, okay, let's talk about that in terms of, A, what does that mean in terms of the modern sort of mega pop concert and how they're running them. But is there an environmental perspective as well? Let's start with this. She's doing a 10-show run. Harry Styles has done, I don't know how many dates at Wembley. The weekend has just moved out after being there for a month or whatever. This is what artists are doing now. Why?

10:37Stu:Well, it's various reasons. Residency's idea is essentially, it's partly about putting on a great show so you can just basically set up your ambitious visuals, concert staging and that, and you haven't got to pack them away again and schlep up the motorway to Sheffield or Glasgow. So that's one thing. It's kind of the, if we stay in one place, can we do more? Which says a lot about the expectations of people when they're paying these huge amounts of money for tickets, right? So these tickets are expensive tickets, right? So people have a very high expectation of the production value. Multiple stages, visuals.

11:12Yeah, multiple stages, all this stuff when you're paying two three four five hundred uh dollars for a ticket they want to see a big show and it's it's more expensive to move it around so that's it's sort of in it's a also a result of just the expectations of people when they pay that much money isn't it

11:31Stu:um interesting they they still go to london and then i like i was saying glasgow and sheffield the cities those places might lose out because like we'll go to london everyone here um as a well-being aspect to this. I think artists are saying actually we don't want to be constantly on tour on the road. We'd rather stay in one place. And that's something that's quite important. So artists saying we're going to make the touring life more workable for us on that side. And obviously Ariana Grande has been in the news recently for she's taking a break after this tour. She's reached a point where she needs to kind of step back from being a touring pop celebrity.

12:06Stu:So there is that. But then there is like you say the environmental aspect. So I think that the thing here was this was presented by the O2 as like, this is a great, look at the gig tourism is a wonderful thing. Look at the money coming into London's economy. Look at, this is exciting. But, and this is where I'm not going to be having a go at the O2 because they've been a really pioneering venue and AAG, the owner, in terms of running reports on what is the sustainability of concerts. How can we make them greener? How can we cut emissions? They've done a lot of work on that. And so part of the result of that work is we know that fan travel, it's anywhere from like 70 % to 90 % of a big concert's total carbon emissions is fan travel.

12:48Stu:So whatever you do with the power there, however many veggie burgers you serve, whatever you do to make it green in that sense, if your fans are flying in from across Europe on Ryanair, then there's a challenge there. And it's not even that, is it? I mean, it's even more local travel. If people are driving down from, you know, London is in the corner of the country, and of course the UK is frustratingly London-centric. And if you live in Glasgow, you've got to travel all the way down to London to engage with this. And that means your carbon emissions are much higher than if you were just popping into the center of Glasgow on the train or whatever.

13:27um so like there is something to consider here that you know we we often talk about the carbon emissions of a venue or of taylor swift's private jet you know all these these things that we like to sort of rattle our rattle our cage about you know but actually if you are a venue and you're you know people are coming to you it's yeah okay yes all the emissions come from the people traveling to you to the venue don't you so if you're an artist and you book yourself a residency for 10 gigs at one place, you are pushing those carbon emissions onto the fan base and they are going to travel to one place.

14:05And there is a difference. Your catchment area becomes the whole continent. It's all over Radiohead when they did their stuff.

14:12Stu:And that was like, we're going to do 10 dates in the same place. I understand how it's better for the artists, right? But if there is, I mean, maybe there's a piece of work to be done here maybe this research has been done please contact us if so but i'd be interested to see what the carbon emissions are for a let's say a five date stadium tour that moves around the uk to the five cities you'd expect to go to versus doing five dates in london and expecting everyone you're switching a crew and trucks moving between cities for you but it's interesting because i think the the o2 has done work on this and i think they they did they did the first carbon remove gigs was in 1975 a couple of years ago.

14:56Stu:I think there was something, and I'm trying to remember it right, I think they added 90p a ticket to cover audience travel emissions as well. They've been thinking about this. So it's not that they're kind of blissfully going, hurrah, residencies are great, who cares about the planet? I think actually the opposite. But it's that weird thing, isn't it? I don't want to be the person telling Ariana Grande, no, you have to go into every city to the point when you're knackered and want to have some time off. but it's one of these contradictions in the modern live music industry where we're thinking about the impact on the planet but we're also thinking about the quality of the show and the well-being of the artists and I'm not sure what the easy answer to this is well the thing is this is sort of the ongoing complication with environmental issues which is they are complicated there are no easy answers and of course there should not be an expectation that we as people in the world should live this entirely virtuous life where we don't travel we don't use planes, we don't go on holiday, we don't do anything because we're desperately trying to minimize our carbon footprint, particularly in the context of the world where all these enormous businesses are pumping carbon dioxide into the air all the time.

16:02But there is also at the same time this thing about a shared responsibility towards this. And this is a good example of how that is complex and the cake gets sliced. So the venue is doing work to A, reduce its own carbon emissions. That's obviously a good thing. And it's working for innovative ways to make innovative ways to work with artists to, you know, let's say offset the emissions of the people who travel to the gig. Of course, that opens up a whole debate about carbon offsetting and whether that's useful or worthwhile or it works or not, but you could go out there. You know, you could go out and plant a load of trees for every single show and literally build a carbon sink.

16:43You could do that as well. But then there's also the, where does the responsibility end? Okay, so it then becomes a conversation about public transport. Is there a good enough public transport network connecting to that city that allows people to travel to and from that city and to the venue on the lowest carbon producing, least environmentally bad systems possible? And that's generally trains and things like that and incentivizing people to do that rather than driving in their car and you know which is worse and then that becomes a local government issue and then when you start talking about people traveling globally as 35 of the people visiting areola grande did from across i presume europe then it that's really complicated because it's then we're talking you're talking about the airline industry you're talking about governments across europe and it's sort of a snapshot of how we need to think about environmental issues, even around something like this, which is, well, it's a bit of everything, and it's about getting all those things aligned, which is where environmental problems come from, which is there not being this cross-cultural alignment between what we need to do, isn't it?

17:54It's not Ariana Grande's fault that people are traveling further to come and see her.

17:58Stu:Or her fans. She's not playing in your country. She's playing in London. I understand why a fan would go, I want to get on a plane and see how I might not get a chance for, you know, who knows. It's interesting because it's also in the future. This is going to be something which, like, what impact does that have on your fan base? Let's take the environmental thing out of the question. If you're saying to your fans, you need to come to me, that's a big, big, it's a bit much, you're putting the responsibility all the way over to them, and you've got to make sure that that doesn't erode that that quite, that really important trust layer and the enthusiasm lay with your fans because in the past that's not how it was it was we're coming to you and you come and join in and now it's it's kind of inverted and i wonder if i wonder how much goodwill there is for all artists of all types you know how long are people going to say yes i will i will invest 500 pounds in transport accommodation and tickets and food and blah blah blah blah to go and see the weekend which in turn i suppose ups that pressure on the show has to be big and amazing and the kind of show that maybe you couldn't just pack into a truck and take to the next city so it's it's almost circular isn't it but yeah i mean as soon as people aren't willing to spend those kind of ticket prices the pressure to put that show on will come down and maybe they'll start hitting the road again i mean it'll be interesting to see how cyclical this is in terms of um a sort of behavior that they do okay um final big story this week there's that stew for people who like geeking out about music, you can now add notes to your Spotify playlist for you and the world to read.

19:35Why?

19:40And is there a, I'm going to say, sinister question mark side to this as well? Well, yeah.

19:46Stu:So this is an existing feature that was called user notes. Now it's become playlist notes. So it basically lets you, yeah, Yeah, basically write text captions for songs or podcast episodes or audiobooks you've added to playlists. Now, one news for this is that Spotify's own editors are using it. So when you go to Today's Top Hits at Rap Caviar, they can write stuff there saying why we picked this song or what we think about the song. That is interesting, right? I want to be guided by experts. Yeah, and that's part of the wider thing where actually those editors are getting more profile on Spotify saying, actually, here is our head of this.

20:17Stu:And they think that they're becoming more public figures. So that's kind of interesting. And you can see why they pick things. But anyone can do it. So you can say, and I think the way it was pitched was like, hey, you can write your memories. Why did you like this song at the time? What did it make you think of? What were you doing at the time? Or if you're, I mean, I think, weirdly, the way Spotify has grown is I don't expect anyone else to listen to my playlists. Like, there's not really easy for me to promote them. No one's interested. They've got their own playlists. Black Crows fans would be interested in your playlists.

20:50Well, but the other people,

20:51Stu:everyone's got their own Black Crow's playlist. He's a Black Crow's fan. So I don't really think my playlist is something public-facing, even though they probably are all public. I don't even know if they're public or not. That setting probably changed at some point without me knowing. So it feels like a personal feature for you, and I'm thinking, I don't think I really need to write. Maybe when my memory starts to fail, I will want to know why I put that song on a playlist in 2026.

21:15Stu:So that's from the user's point of view. I'm sort of thinking, well, if that's something you like to do, if you like to attach your own context, that's cool. And if you're making playlists and you're trying to get other people to see them, that's cool. And maybe if an artist, artists have playlists of their inspirations and you could now put a note to that saying, this is why... Yes, I'd be interested in hearing my favourite artist talk me through their playlist of favourite songs. I would be... Or their influence. And that is really interesting. Yeah, I'd like that. But here's the thing. I mean, it's not sinister as such, but Spotify is these terms of service.