Through the sheer weight of on-platform promotional power, YouTube has driven its Shorts format to 30bn daily views. Now it’s ready to start pulling the levers to make money from that through advertising.

“Since 2020, the portion of our Global Weekly Top Songs Chart represented by catalog has increased by 155%,” explained the streaming service. “As of 2022, almost a third of charting songs are catalog.” That’s up from 13% in 2020 and 23% in 2021.

The company says that it analysed 77.6m Instagram posts to compare their performance. It found that Reels were 22.1% of those posts, compared to 42.2% that were images, 26.2% that were carousel posts, and 9.6% that were non-Reels videos. However, Reels accounted for 35.4% of the likes for all this content, and 33.8% of the ‘estimated reach distribution’. 

Triller has now raised a total of $400m. “Given past controversies around the company’s public statements on user figures, there will be plenty of interest in its S-1 filing and/or prospectus,” was Music Ally’s thoughts about any upcoming IPO at the start of July; the IPO filing was a confidential one and we’re still keen to see its contents.

Which brings us to the second Triller story of the day: Sony filed a lawsuit yesterday claiming that Triller has not only failed to make “monthly payments […] totaling millions of dollars,” but has also continued to provide Sony’s music catalogue for use on the platform, despite SME terminating their deal on August 8th

More tech company wagon-circling as economic woes begin to bite harder: a report in The Verge claims that Snap is about to lay off around 20 percent of its 6,400 employees – that’s around 1280 people.

Investigative website ProPublica claims that Spotify and Apple Music’s artist profile systems have been exploited in order to gain coveted Instagram verified profiles.  The alleged scammers would create fake artist profiles, upload music (“often nothing more than basic looping beats”), and then illicitly boost the streaming numbers of those tracks, as well as buying articles promoting those artists on legitimate websites. This mix of streaming numbers, the presence of a “verified artist” check on the artist’s Spotify profile, and external media coverage was then used as  “proof” in applications for a Instagram verification checkmark.