Worth Knowing: Kanye says he’ll buy Universal 

$33bn is pocket change for one of the “greatest product producers that ever existed”. Plus: a new Soundcloud feature for sharing music goes live, Glastonbury 2021 confirmed and the next money maker for the music industry... 

Beatchain at Mixmasters.live

Mixmasters.Live, a virtual electronic music summit aimed at inspiring and educating artists, is happening now! Beatchain is the headline sponsor for the event. Beatchain will host two panels discussing how to make the most of the platform, today and, tomorrow, November 1. 

Kanye says he’ll buy Universal

There’s no stopping Kanye West. Not tired from the campaign to own his master recordings, the artist has now ramped it up and said he will buy Universal outright, stating in an interview: “they're only a $33 billion organisation”. Where will he get the money? Well, he also said he was the new Michael Jordan of products. Make sense of it if you can in the video interview below. 


Soundcloud integrates with Snapchat

This week SoundCloud launched Sounds, an integration with Snapchat. From this week, Snapchat users can share any track, playlist, album or artist profile from SoundCloud’s full 200 million-track catalogue to Snapchat. SoundCloud also announced it will soon allow users to share through Facebook Stories. The Sounds integration will let users link through to play songs on Spotify. 

Glastonbury festival 2021 is on

Glastonbury organisers have said they are going ahead with a plan for a 2021 festival, with the build to begin in March next year. Vice reports that the festival’s lawyer Ben Challis told the Behind the Noise podcast: “The plan would be to rebook the 2020 bill; it will move everything, including our 50th-anniversary celebration to 2021.”

User content is worth $6 billion to the future industry

Anyone secretly hoping for the music industry to decouple from social media will be disappointed – Midia research group has highlighted that user generated content (like TikTok videos, for example) are the next big thing for the whole industry. The group values the “short-term opportunity” at $6bn, meaning use of songs on TikTok and other social platforms could be a mainstream income for some artists in the future, similar to getting your track on a TV ad.

Spooky sound recording studios

We enjoyed this round-up of the most haunted places to record music from NME, especially the ghost who likes to make the guitars out of tune. Happy Hallowe’en!

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