Spotify's prices go up again; Which album's songs are in the wrong order?; Napster are being sued (is it 1999 again?); How easy is it to get a #1 album?; Steve's tip for getting into a sold-out gig

0:07Steve:Hello and welcome to The Price of Music brought to you by Music Ally, the show that's fascinated by the fun and games and finances of the music world. As explained each week by me, Steve Lemack, and him, Stuart Dredge, and we should start with an apology this week. If Stuart sounds just a little distracted at all, it's because he's been up most of the night searching for clues surrounding a new taylor swift album you can't help it can you i mean i just spend every night doing that but tonight tonight the search paid off um yeah there was so yesterday people

0:41Stu:got excited about a countdown on taylor swift website to 12 12 on the 12th of august and surprise surprise it turns out to be an announcement about 12th studio album so yeah but it's one of those things where it's going to literally every single tiny bit of this is going to be drip fed for maximum social impact so the title was announced overnight but the cover artwork has been blurred out and the release date hasn't been announced right um but she has announced she's appearing on a partner's podcast uh tomorrow where no doubt another announcement of an announcement will happen but yeah so like the race like the promo campaign started overnight and now i think every day we're going to see something new about it so yeah good times for swifties

1:24Steve:there is quite a lot of news to get through this week we will be covering amongst other things price rises for spotify subscribers headline grabbing profits for live nation and as everyone seems to be celebrating the noughties again napster are back in the news plus so many other businesses including badly track listed albums and crowdfunding festivals but first it is Stuart's big figure what's this week's big musical number? Okay 217.5 million

1:57Stu:217.5 million what? This is Streams on Spotify and it's the most popular song by all rock icons Pavement on Spotify but my little challenge here is which song is the most popular Pavement song on Spotify?

2:14Steve:With Pavement you'd have to probably what would your best guess be cut your hair it's not cut your hair that's got 49.4 million streams oh it's not

2:24Stu:cut your hair um range life not that either that's got 34.8 it's a song called harness your hopes which you'd be forgiven if you weren't a pavement super fan for not letting it was a 1999 b side but it's got 217 million streams so i actually yesterday besides getting excited with taylor Swift, I spent yesterday adding up pavement stream counts on Spotify because I really know how to live. Their five studio albums, the main albums, they've had just over 350 million streams on Spotify collectively. And then this B-side has more than 60 % of that on its own.

3:02Steve:Right, right. I mean, I do know the song, Harness Your Hope. It is a good song. I'm surprised though. Is there any particular reason for this? I mean, as I say, it's a good song, but was it i don't know was it used in a film um or a tv program or in an ad or or have the fans

3:17Stu:just spoken well not so much i mean so that you dig into it so sometime in the 2010s it started getting recommended to people by spotify's algorithm and no one seems to quite know why right but one theory is that it's kind of got all the right musical attributes you know uh to be played alongside other kind of popular indie rock tracks from the 90s and 2000s And the algorithm went, right, okay, if I'm playing someone the breeders' cannonball, say, this might go well after it. So the algorithm kind of almost on its own decided this was a pavement track that was worth putting into people's ears.

3:49Stu:And then what happened, people think, is that people didn't skip it because it's good and it's quite short and it's quite catchy. So people didn't skip it. And that was a big sign to the algorithm, this is good, if people don't skip it. And so then it became pavement's best performing track sometime later. and then again Spotify's album was like right okay this is clearly the pavement track I should play to people if I'm going to be playing the pavement so and then TikTok has picked up on it there were lots of TikToks using it that drove a new wave of streams and eventually the song was released as a single I think a couple of years ago by the band's label so it's had this weird afterlife yeah and originally it was just B-side.

4:28Steve:That's a good stat to start the program as always as well we I mean we've spent spent quite a lot of time sifting through all the stories emerging from the music industry over the past few days to try and find what we hope are the most important or most interesting to you or the ones we think will be relevant to yourself so here's our top three stories for this week uh starting with this which i mean comes with a headline that sounds like it's from the year 2000 uh sony music is suing napster uh for what this for what yeah what have naps but why the ghost of that how has this happened

5:04Stu:well so yeah so i mean obviously back in the day napster was a the most famous peer-to-peer file showing service wasn't it and it was used to download free and it got sued out of business by labels at the time around 1999 2000 but the brand lived on and like over time and like several owners it's been owned by a whole range of people over the intervening 25 years it became a streaming a legal streaming service that had licensing deals and you know you could use it and it was legit um but yeah so last week sony music is suing it for more than 9.2 million dollars of unpaid royalties and it said basically napster stopped paying royalties about a year ago sony terminated its license in june this year and said right you can't have on music anymore and this lawsuit claims that not only has the music been unpaid the royalties been unpaid but the napster is still offering sony's music illegally now at its site so there is still like a throwback copyright infringement aspect to this but essentially they stopped paying us a year ago

6:00Steve:and now we're suing them for it okay so so it's less the because the thing about napster in the early days it was it was i think they were portrayed as i mean they would always be described as some sort of pirate service weren't they when there was something you know quite anti-establishment about them but this this appears to just be we we don't have the money to pay you well yeah and

6:23Stu:And the weird thing is, so Napster, and it seems in January this year, there were some reports that Napster was late with royalty payments. And so there was kind of some assumption that there's something going on there. But the weird thing is, and we talked about this at the time, in March, Napster was bought for$207 million by this company called Infinite Reality, who are this tech company that kind of involved in the metaverse. And they own the Drone Racing League, which is kind of one of my favorite stats about that. They own this thing called the Drone, where people go and race drones. It's like a sport.

6:54Stu:And that company had recently raised like$3 billion of funding. So you'd think that settling Napsa's debts would have been a drop in the ocean, really, but they haven't. And so there's a weird kind of thing of like, okay, you've been bought by this company that seems flush with cash. What's happened? Napsa did put a statement out and said, we remain committed to rebuilding Napsa's relationships with all of the major labels and are hoping for a swift and amicable resolution, which actually my little journalist censor pinged there because I'm like, all of the major labels so maybe it sounds like there's some issues with the other labels too not just sony but we'll

7:28Steve:find out i guess i mean rebuilding is just building would probably be a good start uh next week universal take down myspace uh story two uh now here i mean here's another company who've had the fair share of headlines uh over over the years but live nation's latest financial results are in Live Nation, who, of course, are the massive global promotions firm. Live Nation, I mean, we looked at this. I'm told by Young Stewart that the correct fiscal term for describing their profits is absolutely stonking. the company here's the figure the company made more than seven billion dollars in the last quarter which is eye-watering and and down to what or who how have they generated this has it just been a particularly busy time on the live circuit is that one of the reasons it has been yeah i think they

8:27Stu:said 44 million fans attended their concerts so that's up 14 percent year on year sold over 130 30 million tickets up 6%. And I think their operating profit was$487 million. So that's just the profit. And yet they talked about, they actually pulled out stadium shows as one of the big factors. So apparently stadium attendance tripled in the second quarter of this year compared to last year for Live Nation, which just suggests that there are all these big tours underway around the world. They've got their kind of finger in. Apparently more than 40 % of those stadium shows sold 95 % of their tickets in the first week.

9:03Stu:Really? Again, it's a lot of stadium shows selling out quickly.

9:07Steve:That is really interesting, actually, because the fear for a promoter at whatever level of gig is that you put these big shows on sale. And some of them obviously will stiff, but it seems like they're on a very good run. Did you say as well that the profit is up, but actually the number of tickets they've sold is marginally down? Or did I make that up?

9:30Stu:uh no tickets up six percent and the but the revenues are up 16 because oh i see right okay because i think that a lot of the money came from the promotion and the the excellent but the other thing i thought was interesting they had their earnings call because they're a public company and they talk quite a bit on that about other parts like parts of the world like latin america japan india they sort of alluded to africa and singapore and thailand and they talked about the demand in these countries for big shows by big artists right uh travis scott was the one they talked about quite a lot saying he is a kind of artist now who can fill stadiums for multiple nights in india which a few years ago wasn't really on the touring circuit for that kind of artist so i think in a way we've talked you know we talk about how the big labels are starting to put a lot of focus and investment in other parts of the world um because they've become big streaming that seems to be happening in live and live nation saying yeah we're looking at these countries and saying right what venues are there we can book our big stars into but also do we need to build venues there or we fit venues there so that seems to be like so now you might say it's all about Coldplay and the big stars but they seem to be putting a lot of effort and thought into these new parts of the world for the western touring business as well right I'm interested

10:45Steve:in that um ticket sales up by six thousand sorry six percent and but profits up by 16 percent which well there's two things from this story actually but that particular figure does i mean does that back up the trend of what what i'm calling um uh at the top end at stadium level a kind of ticket price inflation where you know it appears people are happy enough to pay more for a big event these days or if not happy at least are driven to shell out more money on the promise of being at a gig that they simply don't want to miss this seems to be what's this seems to be a trend well true and

11:26Stu:like you said that's six percent growth in the number of tickets sold not the revenue from them so clearly yeah it is and i think i guess as as your your mix if you're a live nation you obviously have a mix of shows from from clubs up to stadiums and if if more of your shows are in stadiums that quarter and i guess then your your revenues are going to be the impact which i mean it does you

11:48Steve:know wherever wherever the gigs are happening though point two is uh as with all promoters i mean your your profits though are at the mercy of whoever's touring you know it's the the touring schedules it will dictate how much money you make so so question what happens when there is no Beyonce tour or the Coldplay tour that never ends finally ends. The next Coldplay tour starts. But then you see, if they don't have shows out there, if they're not putting on shows, then they can't make any money.

12:24Stu:True. Is there a natural rhythm to this? Do you think? I would imagine if you are, I don't know, if you are Beyonce, do you sort of plan your next tour to try to avoid some of the big ones

12:33Steve:to make sure you have it like do they does is there a natural spacing out of the biggest biggest

12:37Stu:tours or do they all just go when they want to go and that's it i would i mean i would think people

12:43Steve:are aware of who's going to be um on tour at a certain time certainly live nation because they promote so many big acts will probably having be having conversations saying with management companies saying well if you the food fighters want to do this massive tour that's fine just to let you know somebody else is out there in some cases though it will come down less to the actual dates but when the tickets go on sale so that you can stagger the release of the tickets so that you know you put one big tour on sale one month and then when the paycheck comes in you put out another set of tickets for other gigs i think the other thing here as well is like that idea of going

13:20Stu:to these these new parts of the world for the western industry there could be artists coming from there as well so i was thinking actually about the k-pop acts so now blackpink are playing stadiums, BTS are playing stadiums. So I guess you maybe have a wider variety of artists who can do stadiums because you're, you know, there'll be someone from India who maybe can play stadiums in the US soon. I was thinking about, you know, we talked about that, that Netflix show, K-pop Demon Hunters recently, and that's now topping the charts in the UK and US and someone, people must be thinking down now going quick, what is the live show for this?

13:53Stu:Like, because there could be a guerrilla style animated characters like because i'm sure if you did a k-pop demon hunters tour you could probably go to a straight to arenas maybe even stadiums now yeah so i guess if you're live nation you're thinking right okay beyond those the the number of western acts who can fill stadiums right who are the new stadium players coming from make sure we work with them yeah i think we'll see like latin america bad bunnies playing stadiums now i think there's more where he came from so i think that maybe that's the answer that when coldplay and beyonce out into someone from Puerto Rico or South Korea or India might be.

14:27Steve:Coldplay by the way, I didn't realise with obviously all the noise around Oasis and their gigs, but I hadn't noticed. Coldplay are playing 10 Wembley stadiums. I mean 10 nights at Wembley stadiums. They're not doing 10 individual Wembley stadiums. 10 nights at Wembley, which I mean whatever you think of Coldplay, it's going to be very hard for people to match in the future, I think wherever they come from. Story three which it's not sort of it won't impact us uh just yet at least not financially uh although it might do in the future but this is a story though which appears to have made both the music industry and the good folk on wall street very happy uh spotify is raising its subscription rates in various countries around the world tell us about this it's not here yet is it but there is it parts of

15:16Stu:europe and asia it is yeah yeah so i think uk had a price raise a little while ago so we're not yeah i like that i like the good folk of wall street

15:25Steve:can you see how far my tongue was in my cheek as i was trying to trying to say that sentence

15:33Stu:yeah but yeah so this came last week so it was funny actually because we talked about spotify's earnings call didn't we last show yeah and then they were saying there people saying when are you going to put prices up and they were like we put prices up when the time are right and only then and it seemed that the next day the time was right but it's yeah in europe and a few other places um other parts of the world it's by a euro in europe so the equivalent of by a dollar or by a quid um so kind of a small price rise and yeah this is what the music industry has been badgering spotify and its rivals to do for a while now you know they look at what happens with netflix who jack up their prices every couple of years and say why can't you do that like why can't it go up by a quid every couple of years um and what i think is interesting and like you said so wall street loved it so as a spot as a public company we see the impact on spotify's share price when it announces something i think it went up by five percent that day which is a couple of billion a few billion dollars of extra valuation of spotify so they liked it and this is this comes back to when i write about spotify normally there's often a tension between what investors like and what the music industry likes so if spotify finds a way to pay the music industry less money wall street goes hurrah that's great more profit and if it finds if it has to pay more money to music wall street goes oh hang on a minute that's your margins we're not keen on that so this is a rare example of both sides going we like this the price has gone up adds more value to the company

16:58Steve:pays more royalties to rights holders um it's hard to get a grip on it because spotify share price i mean it's been quite erratic over the past few years hasn't it i mean it's been up and down like bitcoin um you just so it's quite unpredictable really and that's it and a five percent rise is kind of in a scheme of things not you know it might go down five percent tomorrow it went down

17:22Stu:actually after the recent financials when they said oh advertising isn't doing what we thought so yeah it does go up and down i think the main thing here is i think we talked about investors and music industry, I guess the third group of people who might care about this is people who Spotify subscribers. And that's the big unknown is that how often and how far can you put the price up before people start saying, hang on a minute, I'm struggling for money and this is too much. And so far, and Spotify has talked about this, so far there hasn't really been any big surging cancellations for past price rises.

17:54Stu:People have gone, okay, it was 10.99 a month, now it's 11.99 but that's still a good deal which i guess to us too it isn't it's a magnificent deal isn't it the entire history of recorded music for 11.99 a month isn't but i think they'll really be watching closely every time they put the price up by a small amount to just check is there suddenly a way for people cancelling some trip to ones going back to free music so we'll we'll see i think but the other thing i think we'll see is when spotify does something as the biggest company it kind of opens the way for its rivals to do the same like well one big one goes and if someone else is thinking well i don't want to put my price up first but now i can because whatever has so we

18:32Steve:might see a little wave of price rises okay uh that's your news for this week any other business actually can i start with any other business this this is from this came out of a conversation which we had in last week's lock-in which is the the extra bit of the show for patreon uh super fans And it follows that news we covered last week about Hayley Williams, who released, instead of releasing a new album, released 17 individual tracks. So released 17 tracks, effectively, all as singles, which meant that you could then assemble them into an album if you wanted with your own track listing. And that ended up in a conversation about what is the most, what's the worst track listed album of all time?

19:17Steve:Badly track-listed albums or LPs where bands have clearly got the track listing wrong. And I looked this up online. People have posted about this, badly sequenced albums, including claims that amongst the badly track-listed albums out there in the history of rock, Let It Be by the Beatles, Revolver by the Beatles, badly track-listed. ACDC's Dirty Dees Done Dirt Cheap, badly track-listed. I wonder how well those albums could have done if they didn't properly track the team, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, it really held the Beatles' career back nowhere. Can I add one? Because I've been thinking about this and Tori Stewart.

19:58Steve:And in fact, I mean, obviously I love this band, but The Great Escape by Blur, all over the place, that album. Tell me then. Well, don't start with stereotypes. Don't let the universal languish in no man's land, you know, somewhere further down the album, which doesn't make any sense.

20:17Stu:I was thinking about this, not to argue against you, because I think you're thinking, do you think it's because, because it's stereotypes and Country House, isn't it, the first two? Do you think they're the most similar to the last stuff and it was a way of bringing those people in and then taking them through to the newer, more ambitious things? I just don't know if they knew what they were doing

20:38Steve:at the time. I mean, it was an era of confusion born out in the track listing of that record, I think. you know country house was all my fault do you know that well come on then how is how is how is this problem i mean be very careful because this could be the point where you get cancelled i was the one who well not me and me and me and a stadium full of fans not just uh yeah what the mile end gig they played it at mile end and we all went bananas yeah and they didn't i think they were