The Digital Music Week In Review 20 5 16

This is first in a semi-regular round up of what’s caught our eye in digital music over the last week:

Facebook’s Slideshow could kill off Flipagram but I wouldn’t be so so worried if I was Musical.ly, and certainly not concerned if I was YouTube. Musical.ly, and Dubsmash too, have built highly audiences around very young females (young teens and below). Not exactly the core audience for the ever aging FacebookSpotify hired high ranking music licensing lead, and generally all round nice guy, Francis Keeling from Universal. Its not the first label licensing exec to jump client side recently, Sony’s Sam Sawyer having joined MusicQubed earlier this year. Keeling is a great catch for Spotify and along with BBC Radio 1’s George Ergatoudis also having recently jumped ship, Spotify appears to be set on becoming the future of the UK music industry by hiring itPandora finds itself in the spotlight once again with shareholder Corvex’s Managing Partner Keith Meister sending an open letter to Pandora CEO Tim Westergren. The letter essentially says ‘stop spending money on strategic investments and start returning value to your investors’. Pandora is stuck between rock and a hard place with investor relations. It is building a solid, sustainable digital msusic business that can actually make decent money. But it is also a mature business in the US, and without a SoundExchange model elsewhere in the world Pandora can’t roll out its core business internationally. Hence the Rdio and TicketFly acquisitions. Pandora needs a growth story for Wall Street but Wall Street doesn’t appear to have the patience to wait for Pandora to build it.The BPI announced the one in five albums sold globally are by UK artists, giving it a 17.1% global market share, though Adele’s 17.5 million units shipped played no small role.