ForTunes Users Can Now Track Their Content on Twitch

ForTunes, the music data analytics app created by artists for artists, is announcing the addition of Twitch as a trackable platform on its app. The biggest video game and video streaming platform in the world, Twitch offers infinite opportunities for musicians and artists to share their content and gain followers.

SoundCloud Announces Fan-Powered-Royalties

In an industry-first move, SoundCloud, the next-generation music entertainment company, announced today the introduction of fan-powered royalties, a more equitable and transparent way for emerging and independent artists to earn money on SoundCloud.

Fan-powered royalties are a new model of payouts that is driven directly by an artist’s fan base.

Bandzoogle Debuts Exclusive Merch to Benefit Musician Mental Health Services

Musician website and direct-to-fan platform Bandzoogle is celebrating their 17th anniversary by giving back to artists in need. Using their newly launched integration with print-on-demand provider Printful, the company has created exclusive merch for sale, donating all proceeds to the Unison Benevolent Fund, a charity focused on providing emergency relief to the Canadian music community.

T-shirts, hoodies, and more are now available through a Bandzoogle-powered store. Profits from all sales of this 17th anniversary merchandise will go directly to Unison’s Emergency Mental Health for the Music Community campaign, with Bandzoogle matching donations up to $5000 CAD.

CD Baby Introduces New Interactive Ad Tool

CD Baby’s marketing and promotional platform Show.co has found that its new interactive ads get 4x the engagement compared to static ads.

This new offering in the Ad Builder tool lets you create an ad automatically from Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, or YouTube links, making it easy for a busy artist to jump in and get the word out about their latest release or weekly livestream. These ads reach real music fans targeted based on genre interests.

Deepr Boosts Music Streaming Discovery with Innovative App, Platform

Atlanta-based music discovery app Deepr® offers music fans a new way to discover more of the music they love. Launched in 2019, the innovative technology platform designed by Deepr® also offers new opportunities for mainstream and indie artists, writers, producers, engineers, and those behind the music to get the attention and credit they deserve.

Co-founded by Austin Webster, following a successful career in product and software development, and Darrell Thompson, an entertainment attorney and former Motown Records executive, the duo’s music discovery tool works with Apple Music, Spotify, and/or YouTube accounts. The Deepr® audio recognition technology allows users to quickly identify the song playing around them.

From here, users can immediately discover more of this sound, more from the artist, and more from the writer and team behind the song.

SyncFloor Partners with Captivate to Simplify Music Licensing for Podcast Creators

SyncFloor, the search and discovery site for music licensing and maker of SongsForPodcasters, has teamed up with podcast hosting platform Captivate, to simplify music licensing for growth-oriented podcasters.

Surround Invests in Music Finance Startup Vezt

Surround, the music and entertainment division of Bitfury, is announcing a recent investment in and partnership with Vezt, the mobile app that allows fans to participate in the royalties of their favorite songs – allowing artists, songwriters, producers, labels and publishers to immediately monetize their work in a meaningful way. Vezt will be a cornerstone in the Surround marketplace launching later this year.

Synchtank Unveils IRIS, a Royalty Accounting and Valuation Platform

Synchtank is unveiling its latest platform to its software suite, IRIS. It promises to change the game of royalty accounting and unlock real value for rights holders and rights administrators—and for anyone considering investing in publishing.

IRIS (International Repertoire Information System) can transform tedious, time-sucking tasks that can take days into the work of mere hours, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs. IRIS helps organisations devote more time to value-add tasks than reports and repetitive data inputting. It’s the kind of large-scale, secure, smart innovation the industry expects from a media and music enterprise software platform that counts many of the biggest media conglomerates in the world as clients.

The system was originally developed by global independent music publisher, peermusic.

Bandpay Set for March 2020 Debut; Milestone-based Payment Platform Guarantees Trust Between Collaborators

A singer with a vision for a new single is looking for a producer. She asks around, finds a guy who’s a friend of a friend and sounds promising. They come to terms, she pays him–only to get ghosted. She’s got no track, and now she has to raise money from scratch, doubling the cost of the single.

This story and its like happen regularly to artists, managers, and other music professionals. “A shared scene or network implies trust, but that trust is too often broken, either explicitly or due to misunderstandings,” says DeCarlos Garrison, a music business veteran and serial tech entrepreneur. “I’ve experienced this problem first hand. We knew there was a way to solve it.”

The solution is Bandpay, a fully customizable payment platform that allows two parties to establish milestones in a project, assign payments to each milestone, and guarantee that funds are available to complete a transaction.

Synchtank Brings Powerful Solutions to Large Companies Grappling with Metadata, Royalties, Asset Management

Rights holders with large catalogs of entertainment assets face the daunting prospect of asset management, revenue maximization, and collecting fully on royalties, often measured in penny fractions. The scale is huge, the data messy, the payments complex.

Rights users, on the other hand, face enormous compliance challenges when licensing content for use in production. Challenges that are further exacerbated by the ever-growing content landscape and the sheer volume of licenses required, pushing many major systems to breaking point. Synchtank has spent the past decade creating cloud-based software to tackle the specific needs of entertainment companies, untangling the threads of metadata and money.

New Project From Teosto, Revelator, and BMAT Focused on Faster Payments for Music Rights Holders

In an industry-first partnership, Revelator, BMAT, and Teosto, have demonstrated a new standard for paying rights holders (songwriters and music publishers) faster by processing near real-time monitoring of BMAT radio performance royalties in conjunction with Teosto’s proprietary data set and using Revelator’s Data Management Platform & Original Works’ smart contract-powered Artist Wallet.

Avid Brings Music Distribution to a Quarter Million Avid Link App Users

Avid has introduced AvidPlay, a new music distribution service for its Avid Link app that enables artists, producers and music labels to easily and affordably get their music heard on the world’s most popular streaming services.

With AvidPlay, artists can distribute their music tracks and albums to hundreds of streaming services worldwide, including Spotify, Pandora, Google Play Music, Amazon Music, NetEase, Gaana, Anghami, Deezer, iHeartRadio, and many more, and keep 100 percent of the rights and earnings.