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It’s Day 2 of the Bogota Music Market (BOmm), the annual music market/conference put together by Bogota’s Chamber of Commerce and which this year (Sept. 13-16) brought together more than 2,000 attendees, including more than 1,000 artists and 85 international music buyers.

The sheer size and reach of the confab, the second-largest in Latin America behind Brazil, is remarkable for an event that’s only five years old and started with just 420 attendees, 14 national buyers and four international buyers. The success is a reflection – and a motor — of Colombia’s current standing as perhaps the hottest supplier of Latin talent on a global scale.

At any given time in the last few months, Colombian acts have occupied four to five positions in the top 20 of Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, a phenomenal amount for a U.S. Latin market typically dominated by Puerto Rican and Mexican acts. That doesn’t even take into account the growing number of Colombian acts bubbling under the surface, like Bomba Estereo, ChocQuibTown and Monsieur Perine.

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Check out this amazing 5 episode story on Ibiza by Billboard.

Long revered as the world’s premier dance music destination, Ibiza faces a reckoning as top DJs exit their residencies, prices hit dizzying heights, government regulations mount and decadent tourist-clubbers usher in a new corporate era.

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(Henry Sarmiento featured on Episode 3 at 0:45 sec)

Getting a song on the pop charts takes big money. Def Jam started paying for Rihanna’s recent single, “Man Down,” more than 2 years ago. In March of 2010, the label held a writing camp in L.A. to create the songs for Rihanna’s album, Loud. Check it out here

TIDAL has been hit with a $5m class action lawsuit for allegedly failing to register – and pay – mechanical royalties to an artist in the US.

The lawsuit has been filed in the New York Eastern District Court by John Emanuele, who plays in the band American Dollar, as well as Yesh Music Publishing.

It claims that TIDAL failed to serve appropriate Notices Of Intent to obtain a licence to 148 musical recordings on its service from the plaintiffs – drawn from 118 copyrighted compositions.

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Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap mixtape was one of the great success stories of 2013. Self-released for free download in April, the tape featured the likes of Twista, Action Bronson, and his good friend Childish Gambino. Chance’s bittersweet portraits of druggy teenage life in the shittier parts of Chicago were an instant hit, and made him a household name for rap fans. It even got him in the studio with Justin Bieber. What Acid Rap did not do was sell a lot of records. There was no single, and the project is not on iTunes. (Incidentally, bootleg copies of Acid Rap sold well enough for it to reach #63 on the Billboard charts, but that was only about 1000 units.)

Acid Rap is a mixtape, not an album. The exact definition of a mixtape has grown and shifted over hip-hop’s several-decade history. They’ve come a long way from DJ-mixed compilations of hot tracks that complement radio and club play, over the years mutating into all-star line-ups of emcees spitting hot bars over familiar beats, then to a single crew spitting bars over familiar beats, then eventually to a single crew (or artist) spitting bars over unfamiliar beats. At that point, they became “street albums,” basically just full-length projects that didn’t go through standard record label vetting and distribution.

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Beggars Group boss Martin Mills has called on his fellow record labels to make some significant changes to their business practices – for an urgent reason.

Mills suggests that, if they don’t already, majors and indies should start paying catalogue artists a 15% minimum royalty on music streaming usage – as well as wiping clean artists’ unrecouped debt after they have been signed for 20 years.

So far, this probably sounds like predictable music biz fare: ethical indie godfather attacks corporate greed.

But, this time, there’s a little more to the story.

Speaking at the pre-Grammy Entertainment Law Initiative lunch in Los Angeles on Friday (February 12) Mills explained that a safe harbour victory was “within our grasp” in Europe.

A small statement, but a hugely significant one: Mills was referring to the industry’s attempt to overturn safe harbour laws in the EC – laws which currently help YouTube and others to host copyright-infringing material without fear of legal punishment.

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bout seven years ago I attended a digital distributor presentation hosted by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA). The distributor representative explained how one should fill out their form, row by row, when one submits a recording in order for them to put it on iTunes. “And this is the field for who wrote the song and their publishers,” he explained, “which is optional to fill out…”.

“Hold on a second,” I exclaimed incredulously, waiving my arm in order to get his attention to stop. “You do know what we in the audience do for a living, right?”

I was shocked that supplying that vital information was not a requirement. Now, seven years later –an eon, in digital years –I’m shocked (though perhaps not completely surprised) that things haven’t changed. Spotify is facing numerous lawsuits over not paying all those who wrote the songs that underpin the service, promptly. To which the streaming service responded: “we want to pay songwriters – we just don’t know who to pay.

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