Most companies would die for 600,000 premium subscribers after 9 months; they’d pop champagne at near-20 percent conversion rates and 3 million active users.  Those are the US-based estimates floating around, though maybe Spotify doesn’t have a subscriber or user problem, it has an expectations problem.   And part of the reason is that the company…

Netflix now has a sizeable 23.4 million streaming subscribers, though investors are thoroughly unimpressed.  Shares of NFLX are tanking following the first-quarter results, despite softer-than-expected losses. Conferences: we’ve got a ton of them.  Here, shake a stick: the Future of Money & Technology Summit just splashed in San Francisco, while Berklee is currently hosting Rethink Music in Boston….

UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP has reportedly “received interest from companies including PROVIDENCE EQUITY PARTNERS and BERTELSMANN AG for music-publishing catalogs it’s selling,” reports BLOOMBERG, citing “three people familiar with the situation.” UMG is spinning off the catalogs as part of its deal to acquire EMI MUSIC. BLOOMBERG writes UMG “plans to reduce the number to about…

There were many responses from the Facebook (FB) – Instagram deal. One of the more interesting ones to emerge at the end of last week was Phil Schiller’s response via 9to5Mac. The SVP of Marketing for Apple (AAPL) has deleted his Instagram account and declared that Instagram had jumped the shark. Read more after the…

Full article below courtesy of [Digital Music News] Sure, you probably skip the credits at the end of a movie – in fact, most people leave the theater right when they start! But the credits – for every last contributor – scroll after every film, without exception. And top-level contributors are always included during the…

Columbia UK MD Mike Smith has left the company, Sony has confirmed. Nick Gatfield, Chairman and CEO Sony Music said: “ I want to thank Mike for his contribution to Columbia Records over the last six years. He is a strong creative executive and I wish him well in all his future endeavours. We are…

The mobile web is broken. Big time. This week at the Breaking Development Conference in Orlando, some of the smartest minds in web development gave presentation after presentation about missing APIs, unresponsive images and load times from hell. Just as Marc Andreessen has said that “Software Will Eat the World,” on the web, applications are eating content….