![]() This is issue 224, dated September 3, 2019. Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. ![]() Potentially, Amazon could mold itself into a destination for merchandise - and, of course, drive more downloads of Amazon Music overall.Editor’s note: Hot Pod is a weekly newsletter on the podcasting industry written by Nick Quah we happily share it with Nieman Lab readers each Tuesday. ![]() If Amazon’s latest effort is any indication, “Amazon is creating a marketplace to shop exclusive merch” from artists, he said. Yet, according to Samadpour, “there has been no real central hub for artist merch.” Until now, he said, most artists sold only through Shopify stores on their own sites. It’s difficult to say exactly what percent merchandise sales now comprises of overall music revenues, but in 2019, the last year figures were reported, tie-in products brought in $3.66 billion for the music business, according to a survey from Licensing International (the industry group IFPI estimated that global music industry revenue going to labels and artists hit $20.2 billion that same year). ![]() According to the Wall Street Journal, when the singers Brandy and Monica competed in a high-profile Verzuz battle, the duo - through the platform NTWRK - managed to sell $230,000 of “Brandy vs. During lockdown, music streaming has led to a merch boom, and Eddy Richman, CEO of the independent artist promoter WMR Music Group, told Modern Retail that merch “is especially crucial at this current moment where tours and live shows are on hold.” Whereas people used to buy a large share of artist products at concerts and events, now streaming - plus online events - are powering those purchases. Meanwhile, from the music industry perspective, Amazon Music’s product expansion seems well timed. As some television experts previously told Modern Retail, it isn’t difficult to imagine that Amazon might soon start selling sports memorabilia directly on its platform. This week, Amazon landed exclusive rights to stream the NFL’s Thursday Night Football on Prime Video. Amazon Music has remained the fastest-growing of the major streaming services since 2019.įor Amazon, adding merch to Amazon Music might be a sign of much more to come in the streaming space. Still, Amazon’s dominance in the audio space, especially thanks to the growing popularity of Alexa devices, has helped it make up for lost time. At the same time, Amazon Music also added podcasts to its platform, a move that culminated with the acquisition of podcast maker Wondery at the end of last year.Īmazon Music first launched in 2007 as a MP3 store in the vein of iTunes, but it didn’t add in a streaming service until 2016 - far later than most of its competitors. In the last few months, as Amazon Music continues to surge, the company has continued to integrate other aspects of its business with it: in September, for instance, Amazon added livestreams from Amazon-owned Twitch into the Amazon Music app, so that artists can do live performances or streams with fans. According to research published by Counterpoint last year, Amazon Music claimed 12% of all streaming revenue - still below Apple (25%) and Spotify (30%), but above both YouTube Music (9%) and Pandora (5%). In terms of size, Amazon Music remains a third-place competitor to Apple Music and Spotify, but it isn’t as distant of a third as it once was. Although Spotify and YouTube each partner with Merchbar, “they don’t have the exclusive merch deals that Amazon now has,” Samadpour said. Instead, he said, the biggest draw for Amazon may be the existence of exclusive products - which adds another reason to subscribe to Amazon Music. According to Samadpour, the ease of sale of merchandise on Amazon Music could help some artists move more products, but he said that those sales were unlikely to drive big enough revenue numbers to matter to a behemoth like Amazon.
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