Amuse Introduces Amuse Pro - For the Growing Sector of Independent Artists, Collectives, Labels and Managers

Offers upgraded features for the independent music sector, which grew by 25% in revenue in 2019.

Amuse, the reimagined record label giving free music distribution and empowering tools to artists across the globe, today announces the launch of Amuse Pro, a new tier of their digital music distribution service. Amuse Pro is an open subscription service offering more functionality to help artists and their teams grow their careers independently.

Amuse Pro complements Amuse’s free distribution service by providing technology-driven solutions to a growing set of needs among independent artists and their teams. The upgraded service includes features like royalty splits, team accounts, multiple artist profiles, quicker releases and support. Amuse Pro users can also distribute their music to social media platforms including TikTok and Instagram.

The new service builds upon the company’s mission to offer artist friendly tools and subscription plan artists keep 100% of their royalties and music rights. Amuse Pro starts at $7.99 a month or $59.99 a year. Any artist, producer, manager or label can join Amuse Pro, and there are no prerequisites to qualify.

– Modern artists have the ability to create their own virtual labels, but they can’t do it alone. Artists and their teams still face so many time consuming administrative tasks and financial pain points, says Diego Farias, co-founder and CEO at Amuse. With Pro, we’re giving our users more features to accelerate their careers, at an accessible price. Artists and managers will simply be able to focus on their creativity instead of the admin parts of a music career.

In addition to insights from Amuse’s own user base as well as artist teams and collectives around the world, Amuse has collaborated with UK-based MIDiA Research on a report titled, “The Changing Nature of Music Creation,” which outlines contemporary trends within the music industry. Findings include that the independent artist sector is growing at a fast pace, with an estimated revenue of $821 million for 2019 - a 25% increase since 2018. The estimated base of 3.7 million independent artists is highly diverse, encompassing rising artists who will build bigger audiences and progress to label deals, former label artists who are maintaining independent latter-stage careers, enthusiasts with small audiences and established independent artists who have found their global niches.

– Traditionally, being signed to a label has been seen as the ‘next step’ of an artist's career, but the development of digital tools like Amuse Pro has made building your own team and career a very viable option. But this collective tendency doesn’t really stop in the emerging or independent artist sector. Our research shows that when it comes to creating hit songs, the teams sizes creating those songs is increasing, through featured artists, producers, writers and other collaborators – up and coming artists will need to compete with this, says Mark Mulligan, Chief Analyst at MIDiA Research.

The Amuse and MIDiA report also found that:

• Artists are releasing more tracks in a three-year cycle. Back in 2005, artists might release 20 separate tracks across a 3 year release cycle, whereas now that number is more like 30, due to larger album sizes, EPs and different versions. 

• Faster release cycles require that artists and their teams constantly collaborate on marketing and promotion to break through the noise and stand out. They are also distributing their music across a growing number of channels including TikTok.

• With the growth of direct distribution, as many as 85% of Artists Direct (3.1M artists) do not have management representation and handle their career admin on their own.
• Of those estimated 600,000 independent artists that have managers, 310,000 have part-time management, meaning they juggle the management of their artists along with a full or part-time job.
  

  Amuse Pro addresses these evolving artist needs by providing tools to manage royalty payment splits among collaborators and to work together to release music faster, while also offering enhanced features for people managing multiple artist brands.

  Amuse worked with artists, managers, and labels in a closed beta to develop Amuse Pro including Jubel, a hybrid between an indie label, a live booking agency and an advertising agency that works with some of Sweden’s most exciting and successful up and coming artists.

  – I started Jubel in 2016, and we’ve been collaborating with Amuse since 2017. Our philosophy has always been to give artists back the control of their own music and release process, and it feels very exciting to leave the 2010’s and walk into a new decade. Suddenly independent music is as big as major label releases on Spotify’s Top 50 in Sweden, and for the first time it’s actually possible to reach the #1 spot as an independent artist. Being able to try out Amuse Pro and get more tools to change the music industry is very inspiring, says Erik Ohlsson.