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Producers and topliners have always had a particular dynamic: The producer usually sits behind the mixing board in the recording studio, acting as the song’s Svengali, while the topliner in the booth — the singer-songwriter who is responsible for layering lyrics and melodies over the beat — follows their lead. …

I t was the beginning of March when Don Smiley started planning for the worst. As the chief executive of Milwaukee’s Summerfest — which calls itself “the world’s largest music festival,” attracting 900,000 people over 11 days each year — Smiley was confronting a tidal wave of reports about the …

Backed by continually strong streaming growth, the recorded music business saw double-digit growth for the fourth consecutive yearin 2019, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America’s annual revenue report released on Tuesday. Streaming making up an entire 80% of the U.S. industry’s revenue. Recorded music revenue as …

Long-term investors in Spotify required nerves of steel in 2019. Last year saw Spotify’s public valuation on the New York Stock Exchange rise as high as $28.34 billion ($157.66 per share on August 8th) but sink as low as $19.65 billion ($112.52 per share, October 1st) during a tempestuous third …

At around 10 a.m. on Christmas Eve, Roy LaManna, who runs a music tech company named Vydia, got a call from Kanye West‘s management team. West had promised to release an album titled Jesus Is Born on Christmas Day; the project was almost complete, but now the rapper needed a …

In the span of six months, Las Vegas nightclub KAOS signed DJ Marshmello to an unprecedented $60 million two-year residency, abruptly dropped the deal, and then, on Tuesday, announced it would be shuttering entirely. KAOS Nightclub and Dayclub, which is part of the Palms Casino and Resort, signed Marshmello to …

Country-music management team Chris Kappy and Lynn Oliver-Cline are showing the Nashville establishment how to build an old-fashioned country-music career in a 21st-century way. With Luke Combs, they turned their focus away from the typical country-album-release models and radio promo cycles and toward social media and streaming. (Before Combs had …

There’s a fresh flow of cash in the record business these days. For an idea of how and why, look no further than the amounts that Sony, Universal and Warner pulled in from streaming services alone in 2018: a combined $6.93 billion in wholesale revenue, as reported in recent investor …

“I’m surprisingly nonconfrontational — you would not believe how much I hate conflict.” Taylor Swift,speaking to Rolling Stone in 2014 about her ongoing feud with an unnamed female pop star. Such a quote may, justifiably, lead you to presuppose that Swift lacks a certain steeliness — that, when it comes …

Two decades ago, Pandora launched the Music Genome Project, a.k.a. the backbone of its Internet radio service, and changed music discovery forever. No longer did fans sift through clunky physical or digital record stores to find new artists to love; Pandora’s meticulous recommendation engine served that all up effortlessly to …