American rapper and musician Jay Z has removed most of his music from the streaming service Spotify, leaving behind only a few early albums and collaborations with other artists. Among the remaining Jay Z albums on Spotify are his 1997 records In My Lifetime Vol.1 and Reasonable Doubt, as well as 1998’s Vol. 2 Hard…

  Apple Music today announced it is throwing its considerable weight (well-over 20 million subscribers at last count) behind developing artists with a new program called Up Next. The initiative kicked off today with artist 6lack (aka Ricardo Valdez), a 24-year-old rapper from Atlanta. As part of the program 6lack will appear on tonight’s (April 20) The…

  Did you know that Amazon owns the world’s biggest paid-for music streaming service? Cards on the table.. that claim relies on a bit of a technicality. Based on Amazon’s $6.4bn revenue in 2016 from ‘retail subscription services’, the latest estimates suggest that the company has around 65m Prime members worldwide. These Prime subscribers – who pay an annual fee for…

When Universal Music Group announced in February that it had completed a recorded-music deal with Prince’s estate, one sentence stuck out. Not only would the company license the majority of the artist’s recordings since 1996, but also, “beginning [in 2018], UMG will obtain U.S. rights to certain renowned Prince albums released from 1979 to 1995”…

  Canada’s top music interviewer and passionate music fan George Stroumboulopoulos has signed on with Apple Music to bring his House of Strombo concert series to the streaming service, via YouTube. The shows are filmed at his downtown Toronto home in front of a live audience, crammed into his living room. The 10-part series, co-produced by Anonymous…

  In November, SiriusXM was scheduled to go to trial in a class action lawsuit for publicly performing pre-1972 sound recordings when days before jury selection, the satcaster arrived at a proposed settlement with independent musicians worth between $25 million and $99 million. Observers may have thought at the time that Flo & Eddie of The Turtles, the named plaintiffs, got…

All of Jay-Z’s solo albums have been removed from the Apple Music and Spotify streaming services. According to a statement made to the Verge by Spotify, the removal came “at the request of the artist.” Jay-Z’s solo work is also almost entirely absent from Amazon Music’s streaming catalog, with just four tracks from mixtapes offered….

  Few things make a record executive happier than kicking off a new year by landing the No. 1 single in the country. Doubling up with a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, as Migos did with their lead single “Bad and Boujee” and sophomore release Culture already in 2017, was welcome ­vindication for 300 Entertainment co-founder/CEO Kevin Liles. The one-two punch couldn’t have…

  Warner Music Central Europe is to sell its Zebralution digital distribution operation to a consortium of industry executives, including its original founders. The consortium is comprised of experienced music industry executives including City Slang boss Christof Ellinghaus, owner of the Embassy of Music label Konrad von Loehneysen, as well as Zebralution founders Kurt Thielen…