Variety, reporting on the RIAA’s 2024 data:
For the first time, paid streaming subscriptions hit the 100 million mark in the U.S. last year, while vinyl sales continued their nearly two-decade resurgence with $1.4 billion in sales, according to Recording Industry Association of America’s annual recorded-music revenue report.
Despite that milestone, streaming growth continues to slow — it was up just 4 million for the year, continuing a slowing trend over the past five years.
And:
Meanwhile, vinyl’s 18th straight year of growth scored nearly three-quarters of physical format revenue at $1.4 billion — the highest since 1984. For the third consecutive year, it outsold CDs, shipping 44 million vinyl records compared with 33 million CDs.
Blink-182’s smash single “One More Time” has been certified Gold by the RIAA.
Read More “Blink-182 Grab Another Gold Single”Devin Coldewey, writing for TechCrunch:
Like many AI companies, music generation startups Udio and Suno appear to have relied on unauthorized scrapes of copyrighted works in order to train their models. This is by their own and investors’ admission, as well as according to new lawsuits filed against them by music companies. If these suits go before a jury, the trial could be both a damaging exposé and a highly useful precedent for similarly sticky-fingered AI companies facing certain legal peril.
The lawsuits, filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), put us all in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the RIAA, which for decades has been the bogeyman of digital media. I myself have received nastygrams from them! The case is simply that clear.
The RIAA have released the 2023 mid-year report:
In the first half of 2023, recorded music revenues continued to set new milestones and reflect the results of more than a decade of industry transformation. Total revenues grew 9.3% at estimated retail value to an all-time first half high of $8.4 billion. At wholesale value, revenues grew 8.3% to $5.3 billion. Paid subscriptions continued to be the strongest driver of revenue growth, increasing by more than $550 million and averaging nearly 96 million subscriptions during the period.
The RIAA has sent a letter to the music NFT website that pissed off everyone this week. The press release is below.
Read More “RIAA Attorneys Go At HitPiece”Paramore’s Riot! is now three times platinum. And yep, it’s still catchy as balls.
Congrats to All Time Low for nabbing another Gold record for “Monsters.”
All Time Low’s “Remembering Sunday” has been certified Gold by the RIAA.
The commercial appeal of emo and punk records is undeniable. In this article, I dove into the most commercially successful albums of the past three decades in our scene. First, I wanted to provide a couple of quick notes about how I pulled this data. I took a look at the most popular pop-punk and emo albums from a Wikipedia article and cross-referenced it with other bands that I knew would be in the vicinity of receiving a Gold (500,000 albums sold) or Platinum (1 million albums sold) RIAA certification. From there, I used the Wikipedia articles on the individual album pages to see if they mentioned any certifications of Gold or above. I then confirmed those totals on the extremely helpful RIAA website. In some cases, I either rounded up or down on the number of albums sold to make the organizing of this list a little bit easier to follow, and these totals are for US sales only. I have organized this list into the three different decades of the 90’s, 00’s and 10’s, and I found it interesting that the vast number of eligible albums occurred during the 00’s era. I hope that you will find this information as enlightening as I did, and there are plenty of surprises to be found in these lists as well.
Read More “The Most Successful “Scene” Records Over the Past Three Decades”