In March last year, Epic Games, maker of hit video game Fortnite and Unreal Engine acquired online music store and direct-to-fan platform Bandcamp.

In a statement published by Epic at the time, the company said that Bandcamp will play an “important role” in its “vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more”.

Since then, Epic Games has been fairly quiet about its plans for Bandcamp, but on Friday (February 17), its flagship game Fortnite revealed that the music platform is curating its ‘Radio Underground’ radio station until Wednesday, March 8, 2023 (for the rest of its Battle Royale Chapter 4 Season 1).

The curated station includes music from 11 acts, including New Zealand rock band The Beths, Californian noise pop band Starflyer 59, and pop punk band Gladie.

It also includes, amongst many others, ‘Post disco’ duo De Lux, producer Ronnie Martin, and New York disco, rock and soul act, POW WOW!

The world’s three major label groups — Universal, Sony, and Warner — are finally partnering with a new streaming service to ensure artists are paid when DJ edits are played

Producer says that teaching aspiring musicians via his new Splice course ‘is way more impactful than putting out another couple big records’

From the use of generative AI for lyric writing, to the use of voice-mimicking AI in songs, the use of artificial intelligence in music has become one of the industry’s key talking points of 2023.

Now music streaming giant Spotify is throwing its hat in the ring, with a new feature powered by its own personalization tech, as well as by voice and generative AI.

The company is launching a ‘DJ’ feature, which it says is like an “AI DJ in your pocket” and adds that it serves as “a personalized AI guide that knows you and your music taste so well that it can choose what to play for you”.

This feature is first rolling out in beta, and Spotify says it will deliver a curated playlist of music alongside commentary around the tracks and artists it thinks you will like.

We expected streaming subscription growth to slow in 2022 – but not this much.

That’s the key takeaway from MBW’s analysis of stats released by the Entertainment Retailers’ Association in the UK yesterday (January 10), and discussed by MBW founder Tim Ingham on the latest Talking Trends podcast.

As Ingham explains on the Talking Trends podcast, annual growth in the money spent on subscription streaming services in the UK last year was less than half the size it was in 2021… and less than a third of the size it was in 2018.

Such numbers highlight the urgency for major rightsholders, suggests Ingham, of Spotify in particular raising its prices in key markets.

You can read an abridged transcript of this episode of MBW’s Talking Trends below, and/or listen through here:

On-demand song streams in the US grew 12.2% in 2022, driven by superstars like Bad Bunny, Harry Styles and Taylor Swift.

That’s according to US market monitor Luminate (formerly MRC Data / Nielsen Music), which published its Year-End report for 2022 on Wednesday  (January 11, 2023), which you can download here.

That 12.2% growth translated to 1.3 trillion on-demand (Audio + Video) song streams in the US last year.

Globally, total on-demand song streams (Audio + Video) grew 25.6% in 2022 to reach5.3 trillion in total, compared to 4.2 trillion on-demand song streams in 2021.