👋 The Knowledge #250 🎉: 'Majority' of under 45s listen to AI music; music marketing predictions; a look at Canada's market; and juggling onions

View this email in your browser  MUSIC MARKETING TIPS, MUST-KNOW SKILLS & ESSENTIAL NEWS Need more Knowledge? Music Ally Pro will teach you all the skills you need! Hi , and welcome to The Knowledge – Music Ally's weekly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ at the modern music industry. This is the email that regrets choosing "onion juggling" as its new year's resolution. Below are highlights of the news, tips, analysis and learning that make up our industry-leading subscriber services.  Please forward this signup link to anyone who'd like a FREE Music Ally account – and for this newsletter to juggle into their inbox each Friday. (And hit reply if you have sympathy for Mr Beast, who, we are sad to report, is apparently "cash poor".)   Knowledge is power!   This week's Knowledge – in-depth and at-a-glance: 📬 BULLETIN NEWS: Report claims' majority' of young people listen to AI music 🎧 FOCUS PODCAST: Liam James Ward talks music marketing in 2026 😵‍💫 SOMETHING 4 THE WEEKEND: Weekly, week-ending music, in time for the weekend 🇨🇦 COUNTRY PROFILE: Canada - more than just a steady, mature music market 🤔 A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA... Our favourite unusual stuff found online this week Note: Ⓜ️ = link to Music Ally subscriber content     ×       Music Ally LinkedIn @MusicAllyFB Instagram 🎧 The Price of Music Podcast is your weekly music biz explainer! It's hosted by the BBC's Steve Lamacq and Music Ally's Stuart Dredge. Each week they discuss the hot stories and important trends in the global music business – and answer listeners' questions (including the ones you've always been afraid to ask...) Listen now! Spotify / Apple / YouTube / Other 📬 BULLETIN NEWS: Report claims' majority' of young people listen to AI music Morgan Stanley has been conducting its annual survey of Americans' audio habits, and this year's is the first to ask them questions about AI music. The answers will certainly make some waves in the music industry. "What we found surprised us, with 50-60% of listeners 18-44 reporting 2.5-3 hours per week of AI music listening," wrote analyst Benjamin Swinburne The accompanying graph reveals that 60% of 18-29 year-old respondents reported listening to AI music, averaging three hours a week.  The figures then drop to 55% and 2.5 hours for 30-44 year-olds, and 25% and 1.1 hours for 45-64 year-olds. YouTube and TikTok were flagged as the most popular sources for the AI-music being listened to, according to the report - which may explain one way thse findings contradict previous data on such listening... 👉 Read the article in full here:  ⚡ TROLLEY: Powering Fast, Compliant Payouts for the Music Industry     Paying artists and rights holders shouldn't be a hassle. Whether you're a label, distributor, DSP, or publisher, Trolley simplifies the entire payout process: ✅ Automate global royalty payouts with flexible payment options—direct to bank, PayPal, Venmo, and more—to get artists worldwide paid quickly and accurately. ✅ Streamline tax reporting with built-in W-9/W-8 collection and automated tax form production, cutting down year-end admin work. ✅ Verify artist identities, reduce risk, and stop fraud—all while staying compliant. 💡 Make payouts effortless. Schedule your free demo now → 🎧 FOCUS PODCAST: Liam James Ward talks music marketing in 2026 In this episode of Music Ally Focus, our editor Joe Sparrow talks to Liam James Ward, CEO/co-founder of content strategy studio Something Something - named Agency of the Year in the Music Ally 2025 Music Marketing Awards They take a look at the key changes and surprising developments in digital and social music marketing that emerged in 2025, and what you can do in 2026 - whether you're a big budget high-flyer or a scrappy and ambitious DIY-er. Other topics of conversation include fan accounts, the atomisation of content, and crafting fun and sticky videos that stretch the idea of authenticity into exciting new places. Liam also digs into clipping, communities and crafting constellations of content, and how marketers already instinctively know what strategy they should take for their artist and that artist's audience. 👉 It's ideal for anyone who is marketing something this year (i.e. most of us) - listen here.  😵‍💫 SOMETHING 4 THE WEEKEND: Weekly, week-ending music for the weekend Isn't it a funny how in the music biz we spend so long yakking about strategies and platforms and budgets and stuff, and the actual music can sometimes feel a bit relegated to "oh yeah, and that too" status? This is the bit of The Knowledge that rights that wrong – and gives you something good to listen over the weekend. This week: look, it's probably clear by now that The Knowledge HQ is staffed exclusively by people with an unhealthy interest in mid-90s jungle records. We make no apologies for this fact, simply because our obsession ticks so many good boxes: fast noisy music, absurdly colourful artwork, and the opportunity to dig into  online archives marked "stuff recorded off pirate radio onto C90 cassette in 1994." Thus, behold! It's the crackly YouTube powerhouse that is Take Me Back: Pirate Radio Archives, which is home to over 750 recordings from 90s UK pirate radio. Who could resist the charms of this recording of the Lick Wood Rewind Junglist '94 Mix, complete with babbling MCs, radio interference, shout outs to the "painter and decorator crew", and spoken adverts for upcoming jungle nights across London. There's a lot to love in this huge archive, even if you're not a fully-fledged junglist: these decent-quality tape recordings of MC Det & MC Ryme Tyme on Kool FM 94.5 from April 1994 or DJ Red Ant & MC Fearless on Rush FM 92.3 from January 1994 ("Big up the Atari Lynx II crew"!) are wonderful glimpses into a pre-internet DIY underground culture finding its feet, shouting out its buddies, and having a lot of noisy illegal radio fun. 🇨🇦 COUNTRY PROFILE: Canada - more than just a steady, mature music market Our Country Profile reports are based on speaking to the people on the ground, and are packed with info you need to know, including local marketing insight and suggestions of agencies and collaborators, giving you everything you need to understand – and engage with – music markets around the world. Canada has a reputation as a steady, mature music market; dig down a little, however, and a more interesting story emerges. According to Music Canada, overall revenue increased 1.5% in Canada in 2024 while the same huge Canadian acts dominated, notably Drake and The Weekend. The 1.5% bump took the Canadian music market to an overall revenue of US $660.3m in 2024, with streaming being the obvious driver. Streaming revenue increased 4.2% to US $520.1m, with subscription streaming accounting for a hefty US $422.7m of that, up 6.2% year-on-year. Spotify increased its prices in Canada in October 2024, which undoubtedly helped streaming revenue to grow.  But Elizabeth Phipps, lead of artist and label partnerships, Spotify Canada, says that "that's secondary to service adoption, engagement and retention. […] Put simply: people didn't just pay a bit more – they listened more". 👉 Subscribers can read the full profile here Ⓜ️ 💼 Music Ally Jobs - The latest and best jobs for the global music business, trusted by both top music industry companies and experienced professionals on top of their game.  Are you looking for a job? Click here to see the full list of vacancies! 🤔 A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA... And finally… our daily Bulletin newsletter is loved by subscribers for its instant industry analysis - but secretly, the part they like most is the 'A Little Something Extra' section at the bottom of the email. Here's a few of the best recent links and a couple of Knowledge extras: We've found our favourite 1982 interpretive-dance TV music-show performance so far. Great for fans of random bodybuilders, people-carrying and TV-hosts swinging their pants in the background. About that famously-secret Coca-Cola formula... A YouTuber claims to have perfectly replicated it (although it took him a year). A cautionary tale on why it's not a good idea to have ChatGPT write your wedding-ceremony speech. All hail the world's fastest wheelie-bin! 🧠 Music Ally Subscribers get so much more Knowledge! Have you got your FREE Music Ally account yet? Our free account lets you access up to 10 Music Ally News and Analysis articles from our premium paid service every month – and it only takes 30 seconds to sign up. Click here and dig in! But wait! There's more! Our paid premium subscriber account gives you unlimited access to news and analysis, Sandbox digital marketing guides, Behind The Campaign deep-dives, big-picture Insight Reports, Country Profile reports... all with the music marketing, tech, and industry focus that makes Music Ally a must-have resource for key decision-makers in the music industry. Check it out here! Music Ally Pro is our powerful new platform consisting of an integrated suite of knowledge and skills tools, a responsive AI AllyBot that draws from our full insight resources, and a unique marketing campaigns database. We also offer in-house learning and development as well as marketing strategy and implementation for labels, managers, artists and publishers.  Talk to Anthony to find out more!

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