Gaming
The Score: Mapping Epic Games’ future music strategy
March 28 2023

It took nearly one whole year for the independent music community to see some initial fruits from Epic Games’ acquisition of Bandcamp.

Starter Packs
Starter Packs: Digital music curation
March 20 2023

If the music industry is an orchestra, curation is like its conductor — arranging and guiding otherwise disparate artists, scenes, and styles into a dynamic, narrative whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Starter Packs
Starter Packs: Music in virtual worlds
March 06 2023

Music’s potential in virtual worlds is much more than just a game.

Starter Packs
Starter Packs: Digital music marketing
February 20 2023

In today’s crowded landscape, the best moat you can invest in as an artist is a strong, memorable brand — which comes downstream of good marketing.

Gaming
The Score: More game studios experimenting with virtual K-pop groups
February 15 2023

Following the growing interest in music and gaming, we’re excited to announce a new format for The Score: A monthly newsletter distributed for free to all Water & Music newsletter subscribers. Each issue will round up and analyze the biggest music and gaming stories of the month, through Water & Music’s unique industry lens — forever curious about the latest tech innovations and eager to dive into the weeds, while also pulling out actionable insights grounded in music-industry needs and challenges.

Starter Packs
Starter Packs: New music communities
February 06 2023

The concept of community has risen to a new level of prominence in the last few years as a critical source of social and commercial resilience in artists’ careers.

Starter Packs
Starter Packs: Music/Web3 data
January 23 2023

Data literacy is table stakes for making smart decisions about how to grow music careers and brands, and Web3 shouldn’t be any different.

Web3
Web3 and music rights: Our community weighs in
January 15 2023

2022 closed with a dynamic debate in the #web3 channel of the Water & Music Discord server about the role of aggregation and traditional IP law in the music NFT landscape.

Starter Packs
Starter Packs: New tech, old rights
January 09 2023

A new series unpacking essential foundational concepts for navigating music and tech.

Gaming
The most underrated music and gaming collaborations of 2022
December 15 2022

Highlighting the most impressive music and gaming collaborations you might have missed in 2022 — including the key features that made these collaborations so remarkable, how they were activated and monetized, and what you can learn from them.

Web3
Sidechain: Music NFT streaming apps under fire, FTX fallout impact, and songwriter challenges in Web3
December 11 2022

Capturing the W&M community’s unique, early-adopter, critical pulse on the music/Web3 landscape, backed by ongoing reporting from our Web3 research team that you won’t find elsewhere.

Gaming
The Score: How Beatstar generated $73M in revenue — including $16M to rightsholders — in year one
November 21 2022

In September 2022, Space Ape Games announced that its mobile rhythm game Beatstar had generated $73 million in revenue — and shared over $16 million of its income with rightsholders, in a revenue-share model that is almost unheard of in the video game industry.