Spotify was launched in 2008 as a Swedish startup and grew to over 10 million users by 2010. It allows free streaming of music with ads or premium subscriptions without ads. Some artists do not allow their music on Spotify. Kobalt Music Group is an independent music publisher founded in 2000 that represents over 40% of top songs and albums in the US and UK, ensuring fair payment in the digital world. Sentric Music specializes in emerging songwriters and artists, signing bands like Catfish and the Bottleman and Bastille. It publishes works in the UK and has a sub-publishing deal in the US and Canada. Downtown Music Publishing represents successful artists like The Beatles and Ellie

1. Research Into Broadcast Platforms:
Spotify
Spotify was first launched in October 2008 by a Swedish Startup. It grew its popularity rather
quickly reaching over 10 million users by 15th of September 2010, and 2.5 million of these were
paid premium users.
Spotify has recently become an extremely popular website/app that provides all types of users
(free or premium) with commercial music streaming. Anyone who has access to Spotify is able to
use it, however, if one decided to go ‘premium’ by paying around £10 a month they are then able
to remove all adverts, stream whilst they are offline and have an unlimited amount of skips,
therefore are able to listen to any song they want at any time. Whereas, ‘free’ users are only
allowed to skip songs up to 6 times within an hour, are faced with multiple adverts between
songs and need an internet connection in order to listen to the music. The publishing platform
allows music to be searched by specific artist, album, genre, playlist or record label. However,
some particular artists do not put their music on Spotify, such as Taylor Swift, due to the fact
that she believes it is not fair to give away her work for free.
Spotify also gives digital rights management-restricted content from multiple record labels and
media companies including BBC, EMI, Warner Music Group, Universal and Sony.
Kobalt
Kobalt Music Group is an independent publishing company that was first founded in the year
2000 by CEO Willard Ahdritz. This company represents multiple famous artists such as Gwen
Stefani and Kelly Clarkson. It is also known as one of the largest music publishers in the world
and ​it now represents on average over 40% of the top 100 songs and albums in both the
US and UK.
Kobalt is an innovative company that helps all aspects of the music industry such as,
labels, publishers, songwriters etc, and makes sure that even in the advanced digital world
all parts are paid fairly.

2. Sentric Music
Sentric music is a British independent music publisher which in fact specialises in emerging both
songwriters and artists in order for them to be able to work with one another. The company was
first founded in the year 2006, where the company's headquarters were located in Liverpool.
Sentric Music publishes their writer’s work in the UK via PRS for music and the MCPS collection
societies and in the year 2010 signed a sub-publishing deal with ‘Downtown music publishing’
which covered both the USA and Canada.
This company has signed famous artists such as: Catfish and the Bottleman and Bastille, which
happen to be two very popular and successful bands.
Downtown Music Publishing
Downtown music publishing is a music rights management company that was first created in the
year 2007 by Justin Kalifowit. It has gone onto representing a large cluster of very successful
artists and bands such as: The Beatles, John Lennon (as an individual artist), Yoko Ono and Ellie
Goulding.
The company’s headquarters is located in Soho district of New York City and now represents a
catalogue of more than 80,000 titles.
A little later on in 2013, the company opened a second office located in Los Angeles, and then a
year later in 2014, opened office internationally in London and Amsterdam, therefore
exemplifying the company’s success rate.