News

African streaming service Mdundo aims for 50m users by 2025

Mdundo is one of the pan-African music streaming services that has been growing over the past couple of years. It ended 2021 with 13.3 million monthly active users, but in a strategy update published for investors yesterday, the company said it expects to have 19-20 million users by the end of this month.

Tencent Music launches new analytics for artists and labels

Tencent Music has just launched a new suite of tools for its industry partners. TME Business Intelligence for Artists will be updated “150 times a day” with data from TME’s streaming services, offering stats at an artist, album and track level.

Spotify buys music trivia game Heardle with discovery in mind

Spotify has snapped up Heardle, the Wordle-inspired music identification game that became popular earlier this year. Spotify says it will keep the web-based game “free to play for everyone”, although in the short term its availability will be restricted to the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Over 300 music videos are in YouTube’s ‘Billion Views Club’

YouTube is using the tenth anniversary of the release of Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ – 4.48bn views and counting – to put out some wider stats on the upper echelon of music videos on its platform.  YouTube has more than 2bn monthly music users; music is 25% of its global watch time; its annual payments to the music industry have topped $4bn; and it has more than 50 million people (as of last September) paying for a subscription that includes music