Et Tu Metallica?

Napster busters Metallica may be having a change of heart. A report in The Age cites a Rolling Stone interview (I know, I know) which suggests that they may be happy exploring the ways of Radiohead and NIN:

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Ulrich said Metallica's contract with Warner Music expired after their next album.

"We want to be as free a player as possible," he said.

"We've been observing Radiohead and [Nine Inch Nails frontman] Trent Reznor and in 27 years or however long it takes for the next record, we'll be looking forward to everything in terms of possibilities with the internet."

We'll see..

RIAA Retail Stats

From Coolfer: The RIAA has released its shipment statements for 2007. Some interesting stats. CDs are down, no surprise there, but vinyl is up as are kiosk downloads and mobile downloads. Digital music subscriptions are nominally up but the dollar value has fallen through the floor.

Full PDF here.

Try not to laugh.

iTunes

On a self-indulgent note . . . yay! My remixes are on the front page of iTunes Australia this week :)

MP3Tunes vs EMI

MP3Tunes CEO Michael Robertson (who is bit of a personal hero) sent an email out today to all MP3Tunes users informing them of EMI's attempts to argue that storing Mp3 files online (at MP3Tunes) is illegal. MP3Tunes is a storage facility (and not any form of file-sharing in disguise):

Files are not MP3tunes' possessions any more than the contents of a safety deposit box are owned by the bank that houses them. The storage provided by MP3tunes is the user's own space. A Locker is empty when someone opens an account and that customer decides what files are placed into their Locker. All files are stored at the request of the user. People who choose to utilize remote storage should be guaranteed the same level of privacy they have for the files stored on their local hard disk.

As you may be aware, the major record label EMI has sued MP3tunes, claiming our service is illegal . . . Much is at stake — if you don't have the right to store your own music online then you won't have the right to store ebooks, videos and other digital products as well. The notion of ownership in the 21st century will evaporate. The idea of ownership is important to me and I want to make sure I have that right and my kids do too.

The Problem with DRM

Microsoft shut down its MSN store when they launched the Zune. Now they're shutting down the authorisation servers for that store. So people who legitimately paid for music won't be able play that music on any new computers they buy. Or upgrade. And they wonder why bittorrent is so popular. Good thing this only affects about six people :-)

Game On

Motley Crue will, according to a SMH story, become the first band to release a single in a videogame. "Saints of Los Angeles" will be available via XBox Live Marketplace and Sony's Playstation store for the game RockBand.

MySpace neglects Indie Artists

Three of the four major labels have become partners in MySpace Music, which will extend MySpace's current musical offerings to merchandise, song downloads, concert tickets and more.



A while ago Listening Post expressed concern for aggregators of Indie music, The Orchard in particular, as they are currently being left out from the MySpace Music deal.

Which means: revenues generated from advertising in indie band’s pages will flow in part to major labels pockets.

Yesterday Wired published an interview with MySpace co-founder Chris De Wolfe about the deal. On the topic of dividing shares with digital aggregators, like The Orchard, he declared:

“We're open to extending our equity deals to the right partners, but at a certain point, you can't extend equity to everyone. What we originally set out to do was create a platform where every artist in the world would not only have a free promotional platform like they do right now — we're providing a free service — but also to create additional revenue streams for them”

Which probably means that only bigger aggregator will be considered but is not clear if they will become equity partners or they will be given just a portion of advertising revenues.

Things get even worst for unaffiliated artists and unsigned bands which will be completely left out.

“Wired: Will unsigned bands on MySpace Music have a way to participate in the ad revenue?



DeWolfe: We don't really have the mechanism right now to develop an affiliate program or a payout structure for millions and millions of bands.... We started with the major music companies, and we're talking to the consortiums because the indie bands are really the heart of MySpace — it's how MySpace Music started. We value their contribution, and one of our initial missions was to help artists that didn't get signed by major labels to create a living based on their art.We first did that by creating this free platform where they could get fans from all over the world that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to reach; and provide a platform for those fans to become friends with those independent artists. And when those independent artists go on the road, they can sell out their shows and make money through touring and merchandise and tickets and all of that. We're trying to extend those revenue streams to the independent artists. This is all meant to be a very, very positive movement for them.”

Listening Post suggests to unsigned artists to start look around for aggregators which could possibly become part of the deal but I think indie artists should just use MySpace to divert traffic into their website.

Get PluggedIn!

A new Internet music company is looking to displace YouTube, MySpace and MTV.com as the hub for music videos on the Internet.

PluggedIn, a Santa Monica-based startup launching tomorrow, is backed by Overbrook Entertainment, the production and management company co-founded a decade ago by Will Smith.

IFPI 2008 Report

Via Coolfer (with some interesting commentary), a link (pdf) to the latest IFPI Report on Digital Music. Thanks Steve.

Slicethepie vs. Majors Label

According to a recent post from Listening Post, Slicethepie declared that in 2008 they are planning to fund 30 new bands which is more than what 3 of the major labels managed to sign last year

Artists... don't forget Wikipedia

This is a very interesting article about how people looking for bands information on Yahoo search engine prefer the link to Wikipedia rather than MySpace by a factor of more than 2-to-1...often the Wikipedia link is even preferred to the artist's web site...

It would be interesting to know why people do actually prefer Wikipedia's link rather than MySpace's or even the actual artist's web site....

And if we consider that Wikipedia holds probably only few thousands of entries, while MySpace has over 3 million, we can easily deduce how artists are missing out on that...

And now you can't throw 'em away...

From Boing Boing:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann sez, "In a brief filed in federal court yesterday, Universal Music Group (UMG) states that, when it comes to the millions of promotional CDs ('promo CDs') that it has sent out to music reviewers, radio stations, DJs, and other music industry insiders, throwing them away is 'an unauthorized distribution' that violates copyright law

.

Policing the Police

Following on from the Guardian piece about how download culture has permeated our youth (!), a quick link to a piece in the Australian which suggests that (at least in Sth Australia), its rife amongst the nation's finest. Check it out. Via techdirt

New Found Frequency

This is more of a mental reminder than an insightful blog post, but I met up with Reggie Ray and Juan from New Found Frequency in Sydney tonight for a good chin-wag about the current state of the recording industry. One interesting point was that like Sherm and I, they're also having problems getting responses from APRA :)

Feargal Sharkey is afraid

because according to a new study by the British Music Rights group: "95% of the 1,158 people surveyed had engaged in some form of copying, including taking the music contents of a friend's hard drive". The Guardian has more.

The New Music Equation

Maths ain't my strong point, so it'll take me a while to digest this, but in the mean time, if you figure it out let me know :P

Amazon Money

A preliminary insight into Amazon's MP3 payback structure. First impressions suggest that artists get pretty much the same deal as though they'd gone through iTunes.

Topspin Media

Topspin Media is a company just founded by ex Yahoo Music Ian Rogers together with Peter Gotcher and Shamal Ranasingh.

The aim of the company is "to build web applications that will help artists to earn a living through marketing and distributing their content directly to fans"

No other information have been released so far, but I think it is worthed to keep an eye it to see how the company will implement its mission in the next months ...

More on MySpace joint venture with major labels

If you want to know who will get the most benefit out of the deal and... who will be left out, check out Bruce Houghton forecasts from hypebot.com

Myspace goes corporate?

Well, apart from the fact that it already *is* corporate, here's a Techcrunch piece about how Rupert's social network plans to handle music...

Interesting article - an interview with the founder of Tunecore.

Maybe they *don't* get it...

Radiohead's innovation or lack of has been much discussed. Now, apparently they're asking fans to remix a long forgotten single, but requiring them to *buy* the various tracks to so do. See this techdirt piece. Maybe Steve's apology was premature :-)

More on bands and brands

After Santana launched his new "Carlos by Carlos Santana" line of women's shoes available at Macy's and, during a concert, state appreciation for the soulful qualities of Mariah Carey's signature fragrance, Groove Aramda just sold its soul to Bacardi, sigining a 12 months 360 degree with them.

Video on YouTube


Shame on them