Music Business Worldwide Paywall: How to Read MBW+ Articles for Free

Music Business Worldwide is the trade site that record-label executives, managers, publishers and streaming analysts read first thing in the morning. Founded in London in 2015 by Tim Ingham, a former editor of Music Week, MBW built its reputation on reporting the numbers behind the industry: label earnings, catalogue deals, streaming payouts and the lawsuits that follow all of them. Its biggest scoops get picked up by the general press within hours, which is why a music fan following a story about Spotify or an AI copyright case often ends up on an MBW page, and sometimes at a subscription box. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the Music Business Worldwide paywall works

MBW runs a premium tier called MBW+ on top of a free news site. Day-to-day news stories, job listings, podcasts and the email newsletters are open to everyone. MBW+, which costs about 185 dollars a year for the digital plan, adds unlimited access across the site, the full archive, the MBW Database of industry figures, the MBW Explains series and the printed MBW magazine. Pieces marked for MBW+ show an opening passage and then a prompt to join.

The gate is enforced in the browser. MBW publishes its articles with the text in the page so that search engines and social previews can read them, and a script then checks whether you are logged in as a member before deciding what to display. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters. The reader shows whatever text the publisher serves, so a piece that MBW withholds on its own servers would come back short, but that is not what we found.

Our tests on 23 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 609-word Music Business Worldwide report on Latin America catching North America as Spotify's second-biggest subscriber market, with more than one in ten people there now paying for it, loaded in full, all 28 paragraphs.
• A 1,280-word Music Business Worldwide report on Suno admitting it has not deleted all the recordings used to train its AI, in its answer to the UMG and Sony lawsuit, loaded in full, all 39 paragraphs.
• A 1,050-word Music Business Worldwide report on Chad Hugo accusing Pharrell Williams of trying to erase him from The Neptunes as he fights a bid to throw out his lawsuit loaded in full, all 41 paragraphs.

Read a Music Business Worldwide article in full

• Copy the article link. MBW links look like musicbusinessworldwide.com/ followed by the full headline as a hyphenated slug.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

MBW articles are dense with links to company pages and earlier stories, and the reader keeps the text while dropping the sidebars, the job board and the membership prompt.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. MBW sends free daily and weekly email bulletins that summarise the day's stories and link to them. The links behave like any other visit.
• Company filings. Much of what MBW reports comes from public sources: quarterly results from Universal, Sony, Warner and Spotify, court dockets and regulatory filings, all of which are free to read at the source.
• Podcasts. MBW's own podcast and Tim Ingham's interviews are free, and often cover the same ground as the written analysis.
• Group subscriptions. MBW offers discounted group plans for companies, so if you work at a label or a publisher it is worth asking whether your employer already has one.

How it compares with music press

MBW is a trade publication, so it sits apart from the consumer music press. Rolling Stone, which meters its site and runs its own premium tier, also loads in full through the reader. Both are on the full list of sites that work, which is kept current as tests are repeated.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Music Business Worldwide is a small newsroom that breaks stories the rest of the press follows, and MBW+ is what pays for the reporting, the database and the magazine. If you work in or around the music industry and read MBW every day, a membership is the right way to keep it going, and it is the only way to get the database and the archive properly.