18 Things I'd Love to Pay Musicians For

I don't think there's anything that new on the following list but there it is anyways:

18 Things I'd Love to Pay Musicians For

Elisa

"Mix, Listen, Share"

This sounds like fun!!!

Mixaloo is a service that rewards music fans for creating digital mix tapes which will be shared and embedded in blogs and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook using one of many available Mixaloo widgets. The site is free and users earn half the profits from every mix sold while sharing their favorite music across the Web.

The site is updated continuously and has an extensive music library of over three million songs in which every major label and numerous indie artists can be found.
(http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mixaloo)

Mixaloo

I guess profit-sharing is one of the key terms at the moment. And Mixaloo (and also imeem -playlists etc) makes music interactive, fun and dynamic, as it should be.

Elisa

4 steps to take to market yourself as an independent artist

Martine

Three Major Record Labels Join the 'Choruss'

Three Major Record Labels Join the 'Choruss'

"U.S. universities are getting a glimpse at a plan that would build a small music-royalty fee into the tuition payments they receive from students. If successful, the model — proposed by digital music strategist Jim Griffin on behalf of Warner Music Group — could be expanded to make ISPs the collector of such micropayments, eliminating some of the most irksome and contentious issues dividing the music industry and its customers......A Wired.com poll showed that approximately 70 percent of readers would pay $10/month for legal access to all of the music on the internet, and we understand that Choruss would call for a significantly lower fees than that. Its detractors might be underestimating the consumer appeal of an inexpensive, unlimited and unrestricted music network."http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/...-music-gr.html"Is The RIAA Afraid to Sue Harvard Students?The RIAA sued its way into the new year, issuing 407 pre-litigation letters to students at 18 colleges and universities, including Bowdoin, Duke, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UConn, and UCLA......Those professors are just way too sharp. They say things like, "there are seven parts of the answer to your question; I'm going to take the fourth part first -- here's why."......And pretty much across the board, they supported online innovation while continually questioning the utility of copyright. Many of them see today's copyright laws as a far cry from what the founding fathers intended when they set the term to expire after 14 years (today's copyright term lasts 95 years after a work's publication by a corporation).

Martine

Pure Problem for Record Labels

Everyone seems to have it in for Puretunes these days. From unknown to industry pariah in less than a week, this little-known Spanish company is on everyone's lips these days.

Rather than giving away music files, like peer-to-peer services do, Puretunes has been selling them –- and that's got the major record labels all fired up. Arista Records, BMG Music, Capitol Records and Sony Music are suing the company, seeking up to $150,000 per song, along with other damages.

Even though the site is based in Madrid, Spain, the server hosting it is actually in Washington, DC. That's how a suit was filed in the US, earlier in July.

Although Puretunes opened for business in May and closed in mid-June, it made a major impact on the already volatile world on online music retailing. The site offered music from almost every major artist, including some not available from any legitimate online music retailer. Puretunes charged $3.99 for eight hours of unlimited music downloads and $24.99 for a month.

How could a supposedly legitimate company set up shop like this? According to Puretunes parent company, Sakfield Holding Co., they had obtained licenses from Spanish music publishing companies to sell the music under Spanish copyright law. The fact that people from other companies could also access the site was secondary –- according to them.

Javier Siguenza, a Madrid-based lawyer representing Puretunes, told Reuters in May that the new company abided by Spanish copyright laws. The company even said it was collecting royalties for artists and would distribute them.

The record labels weren't buying it, and part of the lawsuit they filede states, "At all times, defendants knew that they were not authorized by the copyright owners, or by law, to distribute, copy or in any way exploit," these songs.

Martine

The Record Industry's Decline

Record sales are tanking, and there's no hope in sight: How it all went wrong
By: Brian Hiatt and Evan Serpick


Sales figures courtesy of Nielsen SoundScan


This is the first part of a two-part series on the decline of the record industry. Today we're including Brian Hiatt and Evan Serpick's report on where the music business went wrong, from the current issue of Rolling Stone, as well as an interactive graphic illustrating the industry's slide. Tomorrow, check back with
RollingStone.com for interviews with industry leaders on the future of the music business.

For the music industry, it was a rare bit of good news: Linkin Park's new album sold 623,000 copies in its first week this May -- the strongest debut of the year. But it wasn't nearly enough. That same month, the band's record company, Warner Music Group, announced that it would lay off 400 people, and its stock price lingered at fifty-eight percent of its peak from last June.
Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far -- and that's after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers' growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.
The major labels are struggling to reinvent their business models, even as some wonder whether it's too late. "The record business is over," says music attorney Peter Paterno, who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre. "The labels have wonderful assets -- they just can't make any money off them." One senior music-industry source who requested anonymity went further: "Here we have a business that's dying. There won't be any major labels pretty soon."
In 2000, U.S. consumers bought 785.1 million albums; last year, they bought 588.2 million (a figure that includes both CDs and downloaded albums), according to Nielsen SoundScan. In 2000, the ten top-selling albums in the U.S. sold a combined 60 million copies; in 2006, the top ten sold just 25 million. Digital sales are growing -- fans bought 582 million digital singles last year, up sixty-five percent from 2005, and purchased $600 million worth of ringtones -- but the new revenue sources aren't making up for the shortfall.
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More than 5,000 record-company employees have been laid off since 2000. The number of major labels dropped from five to four when Sony Music Entertainment and BMG Entertainment merged in 2004 -- and two of the remaining companies, EMI and Warner, have flirted with their own merger for years.
About 2,700 record stores have closed across the country since 2003, according to the research group Almighty Institute of Music Retail. Last year the eighty-nine-store Tower Records chain, which represented 2.5 percent of overall retail sales, went out of business, and Musicland, which operated more than 800 stores under the Sam Goody brand, among others, filed for bankruptcy. Around sixty-five percent of all music sales now take place in big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy, which carry fewer titles than specialty stores and put less effort behind promoting new artists.
Just a few years ago, many industry executives thought their problems could be solved by bigger hits. "There wasn't anything a good hit couldn't fix for these guys," says a source who worked closely with top executives earlier this decade. "They felt like things were bad and getting worse, but I'm not sure they had the bandwidth to figure out how to fix it. Now, very few of those people are still heads of the companies."
More record executives now seem to understand that their problems are structural: The Internet appears to be the most consequential technological shift for the business of selling music since the 1920s, when phonograph records replaced sheet music as the industry's profit center. "We have to collectively understand that times have changed," says Lyor Cohen, CEO of Warner Music Group USA. In June, Warner announced a deal with the Web site Lala.com that will allow consumers to stream much of its catalog for free, in hopes that they will then pay for downloads. It's the latest of recent major-label moves that would have been unthinkable a few years back:
In May, one of the four majors, EMI, began allowing the iTunes Music Store to sell its catalog without the copy protection that labels have insisted upon for years.
When YouTube started showing music videos without permission, all four of the labels made licensing deals instead of suing for copyright violations.
To the dismay of some artists and managers, labels are insisting on deals for many artists in which the companies get a portion of touring, merchandising, product sponsorships and other non-recorded-music sources of income.
So who killed the record industry as we knew it? "The record companies have created this situation themselves," says Simon Wright, CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group, which operates Virgin Megastores. While there are factors outside of the labels' control -- from the rise of the Internet to the popularity of video games and DVDs -- many in the industry see the last seven years as a series of botched opportunities. And among the biggest, they say, was the labels' failure to address online piracy at the beginning by making peace with the first file-sharing service, Napster. "They left billions and billions of dollars on the table by suing Napster -- that was the moment that the labels killed themselves," says Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of management company the Firm. "The record business had an unbelievable opportunity there. They were all using the same service. It was as if everybody was listening to the same radio station. Then Napster shut down, and all those 30 or 40 million people went to other [file-sharing services]."
It all could have been different: Seven years ago, the music industry's top executives gathered for secret talks with Napster CEO Hank Barry. At a July 15th, 2000, meeting, the execs -- including the CEO of Universal's parent company, Edgar Bronfman Jr.; Sony Corp. head Nobuyuki Idei; and Bertelsmann chief Thomas Middelhof -- sat in a hotel in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Barry and told him that they wanted to strike licensing deals with Napster. "Mr. Idei started the meeting," recalls Barry, now a director in the law firm Howard Rice. "He was talking about how Napster was something the customers wanted."
The idea was to let Napster's 38 million users keep downloading for a monthly subscription fee -- roughly $10 -- with revenues split between the service and the labels. But ultimately, despite a public offer of $1 billion from Napster, the companies never reached a settlement. "The record companies needed to jump off a cliff, and they couldn't bring themselves to jump," says Hilary Rosen, who was then CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. "A lot of people say, 'The labels were dinosaurs and idiots, and what was the matter with them?' But they had retailers telling them, 'You better not sell anything online cheaper than in a store,' and they had artists saying, 'Don't screw up my Wal-Mart sales.' " Adds Jim Guerinot, who manages Nine Inch Nails and Gwen Stefani, "Innovation meant cannibalizing their core business."
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Even worse, the record companies waited almost two years after Napster's July 2nd, 2001, shutdown before licensing a user-friendly legal alternative to unauthorized file-sharing services: Apple's iTunes Music Store, which launched in the spring of 2003. Before that, labels started their own subscription services: PressPlay, which initially offered only Sony, Universal and EMI music, and MusicNet, which had only EMI, Warner and BMG music. The services failed. They were expensive, allowed little or no CD burning and didn't work with many MP3 players then on the market.
Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. "That's when we lost the users," Rosen says. "Peer-to-peer took hold. That's when we went from music having real value in people's minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value."
In the fall of 2003, the RIAA filed its first copyright-infringement lawsuits against file sharers. They've since sued more than 20,000 music fans. The RIAA maintains that the lawsuits are meant to spread the word that unauthorized downloading can have consequences. "It isn't being done on a punitive basis," says RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol. But file-sharing isn't going away -- there was a 4.4 percent increase in the number of peer-to-peer users in 2006, with about a billion tracks downloaded illegally per month, according to research group BigChampagne.
Despite the industry's woes, people are listening to at least as much music as ever. Consumers have bought more than 100 million iPods since their November 2001 introduction, and the touring business is thriving, earning a record $437 million last year. And according to research organization NPD Group, listenership to recorded music -- whether from CDs, downloads, video games, satellite radio, terrestrial radio, online streams or other sources -- has increased since 2002. The problem the business faces is how to turn that interest into money. "How is it that the people that make the product of music are going bankrupt, while the use of the product is skyrocketing?" asks the Firm's Kwatinetz. "The model is wrong."
Kwatinetz sees other, leaner kinds of companies -- from management firms like his own, which now doubles as a record label, to outsiders such as Starbucks -- stepping in. Paul McCartney recently abandoned his longtime relationship with EMI Records to sign with Starbucks' fledgling Hear Music. Video-game giant Electronic Arts also started a label, exploiting the promotional value of its games, and the newly revived CBS Records will sell music featured in CBS TV shows.
Licensing music to video games, movies, TV shows and online subscription services is becoming an increasing source of revenue."We expect to be a brand licensing organization," says Cohen of Warner, which in May started a new division, Den of Thieves, devoted to producing TV shows and other video content from its music properties. And the record companies are looking to increase their takes in the booming music publishing business, which collects songwriting royalties from radio play and other sources. The performance-rights organization ASCAP reported a record $785 million in revenue in 2006, a five percent increase from 2005. Revenues are up "across the board," according to Martin Bandier, CEO of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which controls the Beatles' publishing. "Music publishing will become a more important part of the business," he says. "If I worked for a record company, I'd be pulling my hair out. The recorded-music business is in total confusion, looking for a way out."
Nearly every corner of the record industry is feeling the pain. "A great American sector has been damaged enormously," says the RIAA's Bainwol, who blames piracy, "from songwriters to backup musicians to people who work at labels. The number of bands signed to labels has been compromised in a pretty severe fashion, roughly a third."
Times are hard for record-company employees. "People feel threatened," says Rosen. "Their friends are getting laid off left and right." Adam Shore, general manager of the then-Atlantic Records-affiliated Vice Records, told Rolling Stone in January that his colleagues are having an "existential crisis." "We have great records, but we're less sure than ever that people are going to buy them," he says. "There's a sense around here of losing faith."
Additional reporting by Steve Knopper and Nicole Frehsée

Martine

Thoughts on music

Steve Jobs
February 6, 2007

With the stunning global success of Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods. Let’s examine the current situation and how we got here, then look at three possible alternatives for the future.

To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats.

The rub comes from the music Apple sells on its online iTunes Store. Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.

Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.

To prevent illegal copies, DRM systems must allow only authorized devices to play the protected music. If a copy of a DRM protected song is posted on the Internet, it should not be able to play on a downloader’s computer or portable music device. To achieve this, a DRM system employs secrets. There is no theory of protecting content other than keeping secrets. In other words, even if one uses the most sophisticated cryptographic locks to protect the actual music, one must still “hide” the keys which unlock the music on the user’s computer or portable music player. No one has ever implemented a DRM system that does not depend on such secrets for its operation.

The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music. They are often successful in doing just that, so any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets. It is a cat-and-mouse game. Apple’s DRM system is called FairPlay. While we have had a few breaches in FairPlay, we have been able to successfully repair them through updating the iTunes store software, the iTunes jukebox software and software in the iPods themselves. So far we have met our commitments to the music companies to protect their music, and we have given users the most liberal usage rights available in the industry for legally downloaded music.

With this background, let’s now explore three different alternatives for the future.

The first alternative is to continue on the current course, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own “top to bottom” proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music. It is a very competitive market, with major global companies making large investments to develop new music players and online music stores. Apple, Microsoft and Sony all compete with proprietary systems. Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods. This is the current state of affairs in the industry, and customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices.

Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

The second alternative is for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores. On the surface, this seems like a good idea since it might offer customers increased choice now and in the future. And Apple might benefit by charging a small licensing fee for its FairPlay DRM. However, when we look a bit deeper, problems begin to emerge. The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute. Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players.

An equally serious problem is how to quickly repair the damage caused by such a leak. A successful repair will likely involve enhancing the music store software, the music jukebox software, and the software in the players with new secrets, then transferring this updated software into the tens (or hundreds) of millions of Macs, Windows PCs and players already in use. This must all be done quickly and in a very coordinated way. Such an undertaking is very difficult when just one company controls all of the pieces. It is near impossible if multiple companies control separate pieces of the puzzle, and all of them must quickly act in concert to repair the damage from a leak.

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Martine

Nice new business model

This experiment sounds interesting. It will be implemented next year.

TuneCore Taps Brands For Free Downloads

Elisa

Adidas ads feature musicians but not their music

Adidas ads feature musicians but not their music

Wed Dec 3, 2008 6:46pm EST
By Kamau High

NEW YORK (Billboard)

- In the summer of 1986, hip-hop pioneers Run-D.M.C. played a show at Madison Square Garden in New York, riding high on the success of their single "My Adidas" and their third album, "Raising Hell."

Daryl "D.M.C." McDaniels remembers it well.

"I would take off my sneaker and hold it up and say, 'Myyyy Adidas,' and then people would do it back," he says, adding that "the people at Adidas couldn't understand why the sales of shell toes were going through the roof."

An Adidas marketing executive was in the audience at the Garden show, so it wasn't long before the company signed the group to a $1.5 million endorsement deal, its first with a music act.

Two decades after its initial foray into music marketing, Adidas has launched a new global ad campaign for its Adidas Originals line of footwear and apparel that features 11 recording stars, including McDaniels.

Regardless of what one might think of the new Adidas Originals campaign, the company's marketing executives clearly have been doing something right.

Through the years, Adidas has long been a brand of enduring appeal among performers, which have name-checked it in dozens of songs, such as House of Pain's 1992 song "Put on Your S--t Kickers" ("I got the shell-toed Adidas, with the fat strings"), Gang Starr's 1994 track "Suckas Need Bodyguards ("Since the days of Adidas, I've been a true master") and Lady Sovereign's 2005 single "Hoodies" ("Fling on an Adidas hoodie and just boogie woogie with me").

For the last three years, Missy Elliott has had her own line of Adidas shoes, as well as an Adidas apparel line called Respect M.E. She mentioned her favorite sneaker brand in her 2005 song "On and On" ("I brang fever rockin' classic Adidas").

Reuters/Billboard

VANESSA


The campaign, created by the agency Sid Lee in Montreal, depicts music acts like Katy Perry, Estelle, Missy Elliott and the Ting Tings dancing and laughing at a house party in Adidas gear. Besides starring in the TV spots, the musicians will appear online and in print ads.

In an unusual move, none of the TV ads uses any of the featured artists' music. Instead, the spots are accompanied by Pilooski's remix of Frankie Valli & the 4 Seasons' "Beggin'."

Licensing songs from the artists featured in the ad campaign would have proved expensive. But Adidas spokesman Jeff Weinstein insists that financial considerations weren't a factor in the company's decision not to use the artists' songs.

"We didn't want to single out one musician," Weinstein says. "We wanted to keep it neutral and focus on celebrating the musicians' style and originality ... It was purely a creative decision."

CHANGING RELATIONSHIP?

Does it make sense to feature musicians in an ad campaign without featuring their music?

Cyrus Vantoch-Wood, creative director at digital ad agency Atmosphere BBDO in New York, thinks that, in this case, it does.

"It's (using Pilooski) as a way to connect a whole set of musicians under one anthem," he says. "You couldn't exactly do a mash-up of all of them."

Tina Wells, CEO of Buzz Marketing Group in Voorhees, New Jersey, says Adidas' decision to use musicians without their music suggests that the company is getting more out of the campaign than the stars.

"It's great for Adidas and bad for musicians because it shows who has the power in the relationship," Wells says. "It used to be that any time musicians were integrated into advertising, it was another avenue for them to promote their music. Being in the campaign this way puts a lot of power in the ad agencies' and brands' hands."

Regardless of what one might think of the new Adidas Originals campaign, the company's marketing executives clearly have been doing something right.

Through the years, Adidas has long been a brand of enduring appeal among performers, which have name-checked it in dozens of songs, such as House of Pain's 1992 song "Put on Your S--t Kickers" ("I got the shell-toed Adidas, with the fat strings"), Gang Starr's 1994 track "Suckas Need Bodyguards ("Since the days of Adidas, I've been a true master") and Lady Sovereign's 2005 single "Hoodies" ("Fling on an Adidas hoodie and just boogie woogie with me").

For the last three years, Missy Elliott has had her own line of Adidas shoes, as well as an Adidas apparel line called Respect M.E. She mentioned her favorite sneaker brand in her 2005 song "On and On" ("I brang fever rockin' classic Adidas").

Reuters/Billboard

VANESSA

EMI seeks deal with rivals to distribute recordings

EMI seeks deal with rivals to distribute recordings

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York

Published: December 5 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 5 2008 02:00

EMI is in talks with rivals over a US distribution deal that could bring in tens of millions of dollars for the indebted company - after earlier discussions about selling some of its labels stalled.

Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music had each been approached by Terra Firma, which bought EMI for £4bn ($5.9bn) in 2007, several people familiar with the talks said.

Rivals value the contract to take over EMI's warehouses and distribution network at $20m to $30m although Guy Hands' private equity group has pushed for a higher price.

Terra Firma initially discussed getting out of the distribution of compact discs and digital music in the US altogether, according to several people familiar with the negotiations. Talks now focus on physical distribution only, excluding sales and marketing.

Universal, Sony BMG and Warner each outsource parts of the physical distribution chain to third-party specialists such as Entertainment Distribution, Sony DADX and Cinram.

By negotiating with rival music companies rather than third parties, EMI is more likely to secure an upfront payment, people familiar with the talks said, as its rivals could find savings from consolidating its distribution with that of EMI. "Terra Firma is looking for a cheque," one said.

One issue discussed has been the potential competition issue of allowing a rival access to details of EMI's wholesale pricing.

The talks were led by Chris Roling, one of the Terra Firma executives now leaving EMI as their chances of large bonuses or rapid returns on their personal investments decline.

The discussions over the recorded music business do not affect the more profitable music publishing division, which owns the rights to songs from Amy Winehouse and Simply Red.


VANESSA

Mail On Sunday to launch own record label

NME News
Mail On Sunday to launch own record label

Tabloid says it wants to sign 'original talent' and 'bag Christmas Number One'
Dec 9, 2008

Tabloid newspaper The Mail On Sunday has launched its own record label.

Called Mail On Sunday Sounds, editor Peter Wright says he wants the label to "put something back" into the music industry, adding that he is keen to sign up original talent.

He told Music Week: "I think that if we can move into original content in the long run that will be more exciting. It is closer to what we do in the newspaper - we don't publish other people's stories. We are original content providers. If we can move into that area with music, it is very exciting."

Previously, The Mail On Sunday has given away copies of Prince's 'Planet Earth' album and McFly's 'Radio:Active'.

The first release on the newly-established record label is ACM Gospel Choir's cover of 'Holy Night', released yesterday (December 8).

Wright says he hopes the album will be a contender for Christmas Number One.

VANESSA

EMI releases CD of music from Guinness commercials

EMI releases CD of music from Guinness commercials
by Gemma Charles, Marketing 09-Dec-08, 14:35

LONDON - EMI Music and Diageo Ireland have teamed up as part of a move to develop global music-based projects in a licensing first for the drinks company.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the lease by Arthur Guinness on St James's Gate Brewery, EMI Music and the Guinness owner are releasing Guinness 250 - Music from the TV ads, a commemorative album featuring 17 of the most memorable tracks used to advertise the stout brand. Artists featured on the album range from Dusty Springfield, Dionne Warwick and Al Jolson to the Jesus and Mary Chain, Leftfield and Future Sound of London.


The release next year marks the start of a new partnership between EMI Music and Diageo Global Licensing through which the two parties will develop new music-based projects across Diageo's brands in Europe and North America. This is the first time Diageo's licensing group has struck such a partnership with a music company.

VANESSA

US music festivals now offering payment plans for tickets

NME News
US music festivals now offering payment plans for tickets

Bonnaroo and Langerado come up with recession solution for music fans
Dec 9, 2008

The Bonnaroo and Langerado music festivals have responded to the economic crisis in the US by offering payment plans on weekend tickets to the festivals in 2009.

Langerado, which takes place in Miami, FL in March and features performances by Death Cab For Cutie, The Pogues, Snoop Dogg and Ryan Adams And The Cardinals among others, will be offering a layaway plan for purchasers of weekend passes, with three payments spread out over three months. Tickets start at $120 for weekend passes.

Meanwhile, Bonnaroo is offering specially-priced pre-sale tickets for the festival until December 31. During this period, tickets will be available for five payments of $50.00 plus applicable fees through the festival's payment plan.

Bonnaroo 2009 will run from June 11-14 next year on a 700-acre farm 60 miles southeast of Nashville, TN. The line-up has yet to be announced.

VANESSA

HMV posts loss in weakening market

HMV posts loss in weakening market
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON - HMV Group PLC, the British retailer of music, DVDs, games and books, reported Thursday a net loss for the first half of its financial year as swelling costs offset higher sales. The company also warned markets had weakened further since the end of the period.

The company reported a net loss of 19.8 million pounds ($29.5 million) for the 26 weeks through Oct. 25, compared to a net profit of 25.9 million pounds a year earlier. Last year's figure was boosted by a 49 million pound one-time gain resulting from the sale of HMV's Japanese retail unit. The company did not publish quarterly figures.

Revenue over the period increased by 3.5 per cent to 754.5 million pounds.

But the high cost of achieving those sales - at 733 million pounds, compared to 712 million pounds a year earlier - meant they were not strong enough to push the company into profit.

HMV warned that the picture was unlikely to change soon, as its markets had weakened even more since the end of October because of falling consumer confidence amid the global economic downturn.

"In particular, the book market has seen a marked deterioration in the five-week period to Nov. 29," said the company, whose book retailing arm, Waterstone's, is a household name across Britain.

HMV shares fell 4.5 per cent to 106 pence.

VANESSA

Universal Music heads to Bollywood

By Amanda Andrews
Last Updated: 11:37AM GMT 11 Dec 2008

Universal Music heads to Bollywood
Universal Music has joined forces with UK-listed Indian film company Eros International to launch a joint-venture artist-management agency to "groom and promote" Indian pop talent globally.

Universal Music has joined forces with UK-listed Indian film company Eros International to launch a joint-venture artist-management agency to "groom and promote" Indian pop talent globally.
Eros International will provide Universal with access to Bollywood talent, which Universal will in turn be able to develop and promote.
Kishore Lulla, the chief executive of Eros International, said: "Music and films are naturally intertwined, so the synergy is unmistakable. As we continue to expand our film slate, we are constantly searching for new talent.
"Our tie-up with Universal, and their expertise in pop music talent management, is perfectly complimentary with Eros' ability to offer a credible platform for such talent through its films or worldwide distribution network. The possibilities for Indian and international collaborations are very exciting."

EMI Music and Warner Music Group separately announced that they had agreed to extend their existing marketing and distribution partnership in India and the Middle East and enter into their first partnership in Turkey.
Under the multi-year license agreement, EMI will continue to serve as the local physical distributor of WMG's repertoire in India and the Middle East - a role it has had since 2005 - and will become WMG's local digital distributor as well. In Turkey, where WMG previously licensed to a local physical distributor, EMI will become WMG's new local physical and digital distributor.
John Reid, Vice Chairman, Warner Music International, said: "With us currently serving as EMI's distributor in South East Asia, and with EMI serving as our distributor in India, the Middle East and Turkey, we have developed a strong partnership that we're pleased to be expanding with this deal."

VANESSA

Nokia 'investigates' Comes with Music crack

PHONE AND COMMUNICATIONS NEWS

Nokia 'investigates' Comes with Music crack

Finns aren't happy at the thought of losing all that money

Thursday at 17:03 GMT

Nokia have responded to the rumours that the DRM for its Comes with Music service can be circumvented by a cheap piece of software.

It might be a bit of a wishy washy statement, and one that is confusing as the TuneBite software has been proven to work, but Nokia still thinks it can protect its products.

Illegal misuse

"All Nokia CWM tracks are in high-quality WMA format protected with WM-DRM to prevent the illegal misuse of tracks," a spokesman told TechRadar.

"Any rumours of removing the DRM from Comes with Music have not been confirmed, and will be fully investigated."

However, it is quite possible that the creation of a new file, one that merely replicates the original DRM-ed file but doesn't tamper with it, could be legal. Techradar will keep on digging and come back with the answers... in the meantime, have you read our review by a unicorn named Winston?

By Gareth Beavis

VANESSA

Copyright law 'could be extended'

BBC NEWS / ENTERTAINMENT

17:47 GMT, Thursday, 11 December 2008

Copyright law 'could be extended'

Culture minister Andy Burnham has said the government has changed its mind on allowing performers to make money from their music for 70 years.

Performers currently lose the copyright to their recordings after 50 years.

"It's only right that someone who created or contributed to something of real value gets to benefit for the full course of their life," he said.

Sir Cliff Richard and Roger Daltrey were among those who have campaigned for copyright to be extended.

'Encourages innovation'

Sir Cliff's earliest hits will go out of copyright on 1 January next year, while The Beatles' catalogue will start to enter the public domain in 2013.

Sir Paul McCartney and U2 have also spoken out in favour of extending the copyright.

Under current laws, the copyright is about to expire on Sir Cliff's earliest hits, like his 1958 breakthrough song, Move It.

"We must ensure that any extension delivers maximum benefit to performers and musicians. That's the test of any model as we go forward"
Andy Burnham


In July, the European Union proposed artists should receive money for the rest of their lives.

Mr Burnham said the government had been considering extending the law to match more closely a performer's expected lifetime.

Speaking to the UK Music Creators' Conference in London, Mr Burnham said: "There is a moral case for performers benefiting from their work throughout their entire lifetime.

"We must ensure that any extension delivers maximum benefit to performers and musicians. That's the test of any model as we go forward."

Geoff Taylor, the chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry, said he was "delighted" the government was considering the extension.

He said: "Copyright stimulates investment in musical talent and encourages innovation.

"Thousands of recording artists, hundreds of music companies and all British music fans will benefit from a fairer copyright term."

However, intellectual property solicitor Gregor Grant, of law law firm Marks & Clerk, said: "Any victory will be felt by big-name artists who tend to benefit the most from royalty fees.

"For the contribution they make to UK music, they are already more than adequately protected. The real innovation - the creation of musical content and lyrics - is already protected for the lifetime of the composer and a further 70 years."


VANESSA

iPhone 3G now with in-home activation!

December 11, 2008 10:42 AM PST

iPhone 3G now with in-home activation

Posted by Kent German

Activate your iPhone 3G at home
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)

When the iPhone 3G went on sale exactly five months ago, AT&T and Apple ended the in-home activation process that customers enjoyed with the original version. Though AT&T and Apple may have thwarted some iPhone unlockers, rule-abiding customers weren't happy about being forced to visit an Apple or AT&T store to buy the phone.
On Thursday, however, AT&T had a change of heart. You now can buy the iPhone 3G on AT&T's site (Apple will still make you come into the store) and have it delivered right to your home for activation through iTunes. The price is unchanged ($199 or $299) but as I said when AT&T business customers could buy the iPhone online, the convenience of activating at home is priceless.
Gadgetell first reported the news this morning, but I have confirmed it with AT&T's media relations office. Now hurry, you have only eight more ordering days to get a delivery by Christmas.

VANESSA

Apple branching out in 2009?

December 8, 2008 1:19 PM PST

Apple branching out in 2009?

Posted by Tom Krazit


Axiotron has a Mac tablet already, could Apple be planning to join them?
(Credit: Axiotron)

Familiar Apple rumors are making the rounds again this week as Macworld looms in the distance, one month away.
Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research put out a research note Monday morning spotted by D: All Things Digital saying that Apple plans to release something from "a completely new device category" next year. He fails to explain exactly what such a product might encompass, but speculates that it will be based around a processor designed by the former P.A. Semi engineering team.
As a result, the usual rumors (Mac tablet, iPhone Nano, iKindle) are under discussion within the Mac universe. Chowdhry believes that Apple patent filings will be released early in 2009 that will make everything clear, and also notes that P.A. Semi should have an iPhone chip out around that time that improves performance and battery life.
Earlier this year CEO Steve Jobs implied Apple was watching small-device categories like tablets and Netbooks to see if they actually take off as a mega-trend, but in the meantime the company had other priorities. Mac tablet rumors stretch back for years, and in the past Jobs has quickly shot down talk of an Apple-produced competitor to Amazon's Kindle, which has been interpreted as a sign Apple was doing just that.

VANESSA

Reselling MP3s: The music industry's new battleground?

Reselling MP3s: The music industry's new battleground?

Posted by Greg Sandoval
December 11, 2008 4:00 AM PST

A new digital music service is getting lots of attention for proposing to help consumers sell their used MP3s in much the same way people once unloaded second-hand albums.
Bopaboo has generated splashy headlines recently for coming up with what on the surface seems like a good idea. Music fans have always exercised their first-sale rights, which under copyright law, allows them to sell their unwanted CDs, tapes, and albums without permission from the copyright owner. Why can't they do the same with digital music?

But there are dramatic differences between physical and digital medias. For this reason, Washington, D.C.-based Bopaboo appears to be careening toward a head-on collision with the recording industry. According to Bopaboo CEO Alex Meshkin, he will soon meet with executives from the major labels and execs there will no doubt ask why they shouldn't set their attorneys loose on the service. They may also inquire about controversy that dogged a then 23-year-old Meshkin when he was owner of Toyota's NASCAR team.

As for the legal questions involved with MP3 resales, Meshkin, 28, argues that the law allows consumers to sell digital media files in the same way they do physical media. Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that supports Internet-user rights, disagrees saying the issue, to the best of his knowledge, has never been addressed in court.

VANESSA



Even von Lohmann, a well-known champion of the technology sector, sees potential weaknesses with Bopaboo's legal argument. He says while its true that under the first-sale law people are allowed to sell CDs and other physical goods, it hasn't been established whether the law covers digital media. Von Lohmann argues that Bopaboo could raise the public's awareness about what may one day be an important issue for digital music.
"We shouldn't lose our first-sale rights just because the second-hand stores involved are online," von Lohmann said. "Up to now, there hasn't been a huge opportunity for people to spend large amounts of money on digital music, but as time goes on some music fans will have thousands of dollars invested in their digital libraries or audio-book collections. It would be a big change if you weren't allowed to sell them."

For Bopaboo to survive, it will likely have to avoid legal skirmishes with the top four recording companies. For other digital-music services that have devised new ways to exploit music, the choices have always come down to partnering with the labels or getting sued by them. Meshkin said he will soon meet with music-industry representatives in New York and has already met with other important players in the sector. "The talks so far have been positive," Meshkin told CNET News on Wednesday.
One label executive I spoke with disputed Meshkin's version of the negotiations. "There haven't been any talks," said the executive. "They have asked to meet and we responded. That's it." A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) declined to comment.

To say that Meshkin has a tough job selling his idea to label honchos is an understatement. Bopaboo's business model works this way: sellers register and are given an MP3 store where they can upload the music they wish to sell. Music protected by digital rights management software is not allowed. Sellers share profits with Bopaboo.
The main difference between selling physical goods, such as a CD and selling a download is that a seller of physical goods loses possession of the merchandise after it's sold. That is not the case with digital files.

A person could transfer numerous copies of the same song file as long as it wasn't protected by digital rights management software. But Meshkin says his company can prevent repeat sales of the same song. Bopaboo has developed song-identification technology that prevents individuals from uploading more than one copy of the same song to the site regardless of how the file might be altered, he said. A copy is always produced when MP3s are transferred and a copy is retained on a computer hard drive.

Meshkin didn't have any technological solution for that. He said that in such harsh economic times the music industry must accept a few risks. After all it was they who allowed their music to be sold without DRM in the first place.
"Obviously, MP3s are very easy to duplicate," Meshkin said. "It's very difficult to tell the difference between a so-called new copy and a so-called old copy."

The label guys are unlikely to just shrug their shoulders at this kind of set up, said von Lohmann.
"If you buy a song from iTunes' (DRM-free) store you can immediately go and sell a copy of the song on Bopaboo," von Lohmann points out. "You would be assured of getting a discount on your iTunes purchase. There is no doubt that the first-sale law was drafted with physical objects in mind. There's no question that you are allowed to sell books or CDs. But when it comes to selling MP3s, it's an untested legal question."

Another problem for Bopaboo, says von Lohmann is that some digital music stores specifically forbid the resale of songs. At Amazon.com for example, the terms of use agreement says customers must agree to "copy, store, transfer and burn" digital music for personal-use only. Customers also agree that they won't "redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, sub-license or otherwise transfer" the music.

I spoke with two label representatives who declined to comment for the record but told me they thought the resale of DRM-free songs could be the music industry's next big legal battleground.
Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a watchdog group made up artists, producers and other content creators, chuckled when I explained Bopaboo's business model.

"Clearly a first-sale defense won't apply here," Ross said. "In the case of a book or any other creative work, you no longer possess the work once you sell it...It's also hard for me to imagine the model succeeding because if somebody wants to pay for works they will pay for it at a legal site and see that creators are compensated. If they are willing to break the rules, they would just go on (P2P service) Lime Wire and get it for free. I hope (Bopaboo) crashes and burns before it gets sued. It seems like a flawed business model as well as an illegal business model."

If the business model isn't a hard enough pitch to make to the music industry, Meshkin has the added burden of trying to explain his past.

In a February 2005 story, BusinessWeek questioned some of the claims Meshkin has made about his background and highlighted the controversy surrounding his oversight of a NASCAR racing team for Toyota at the age of 23.
According to the story, Meshkin was sued by one former executive with Bang! Racing, his NASCAR team, and accused by some investors of misleading them about his personal wealth and ability to operate a racing team. Meshkin is quoted in the magazine denying the accusations. Toyota eventually pulled its support.

Apple and MASS IT joint for seminar Podcast Producer (DUTCH)

Op 15 januari a.s. organiseert Apple in samenwerking met MASS IT een seminar over
Podcast Producer.

Tijdens dit seminar zal Bram Elderman, Consulting Engineer bij Apple Nederland, de visie van Apple toelichten op het beschikbaar stellen van digitale content voor onderwijstoepassingen.

Denk hierbij aan podcasting en webstreaming van digitaal lesmateriaal.

Daarnaast gaat het hoofd onderwijskundige zaken van de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, de heer drs. H. Geurts, in op de ervaringen die de Radboud Universiteit de afgelopen twee jaar heeft opgedaan met het beschikbaar stellen van video-opnamen van colleges via Podcast Producer. Klik op titel om u aan te melden.
Lees verder: recordingbox.nl

VANESSA

EMI Music And Warner Music Group Expand Existing Marketing And Distribution Partnership In India And The Middle East And Enter Into New Relationship I

EMI Music And Warner Music Group Expand Existing Marketing And Distribution Partnership In India And The Middle East And Enter Into New Relationship In Turkey

12/10/08


Agreement Builds On Existing Relationship in South East Asia

EMI Music and Warner Music Group Corp. (NYSE: WMG) today announced a new agreement to extend their existing marketing and distribution partnership in India and the Middle East and enter into their first partnership in Turkey.

Under the new multi-year license agreement, EMI Music will continue to serve as the local physical distributor of WMG’s repertoire in India and the Middle East—a role it has had since 2005—and will become WMG's local digital distributor as well. In Turkey, where WMG previously licensed to a local physical distributor, EMI will become WMG’s new local physical and digital distributor. WMG will continue to develop and operate global digital partnerships, which will include these territories.

Adrian Cheesley, EMI Music’s President - International, said: “These markets have exciting growth potential, especially in digital. We are delighted to be extending our successful relationship with Warner Music to include digital rights to their fantastic artist roster and catalogue and to cover Turkey as well.”

John Reid, Vice Chairman, Warner Music International, said: “With us currently serving as EMI’s distributor in South East Asia, and with EMI serving as our distributor in India, the Middle East and Turkey, we have developed a strong partnership that we’re pleased to be expanding with this deal. Since WMG does not have local operations in these territories, it was extremely important that we partner with one of the strongest players in the region, which is why I’m confident that EMI’s efforts, local resources and expertise will be of great benefit to our artists.”

The territories covered under the new agreement are India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Lebanon, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Kuwait and Egypt. The agreement also includes an extension of EMI's physical distribution deal with WMG for Libya, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and adds certain digital rights.

In one or more of these countries, EMI is already the exclusive local distributor of many independent labels including Domino, Beggars Banquet, Ministry of Sound and Cooking Vinyl. EMI also distributes Disney’s soundtrack and Hollywood repertoire in the Middle East and Turkey.

Pursuant to an agreement announced in September 2008, WMG markets and distributes—both physically and digitally—EMI’s repertoire in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea and Thailand while EMI will continue to develop and operate global digital partnerships which will include these territories.

The financial terms surrounding the agreement announced today were not disclosed.

-ENDS-

About EMI Music
EMI Music is one of the world’s leading music companies, representing artists spanning all musical tastes and genres. Its record labels include Angel, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol, Capitol Nashville, EMI Classics, EMI CMG, EMI Records, EMI Televisa Music, Manhattan, Mute, Parlophone and Virgin. Artists on EMI labels include Lily Allen, The Beatles, Coldplay, Corinne Bailey Rae, Gorillaz, Hot Chip, Norah Jones, The Kooks, Korn, Kylie Minogue, Katy Perry, Pink Floyd, Sir Simon Rattle, Joss Stone, KT Tunstall, Keith Urban and Robbie Williams, as well as international artists such as Amaral (Spain), Camille (France), Utada Hikaru (Japan), LaFee (Germany), Belinda (Mexico) and Tiziano Ferro (Italy).

About Warner Music
Warner Music Group became the only stand-alone music company to be publicly traded in the United States in May 2005. With its broad roster of new stars and legendary artists, Warner Music Group is home to a collection of the best-known record labels in the music industry including Asylum, Atlantic, Bad Boy, Cordless, East West, Elektra, Nonesuch, Reprise, Rhino, Roadrunner, Rykodisc, Sire, Warner Bros. and Word. Warner Music International, a leading company in national and international repertoire, operates through numerous international affiliates and licensees in more than 50 countries. Warner Music Group also includes Warner/Chappell Music, one of the world's leading music publishers, with a catalog of more than one million copyrights worldwide.

Source: Warner Music Group

VANESSA

The day the music industry died

There is no money in recorded music any more, that’s why bands are now giving it away

From The Sunday Time
October 7, 2007
By Robert Sandall

Having waited four years for their heroes to finish another record, Radiohead fans were understandably excited last week to learn that the band’s seventh album, In Rainbows, will finally be released on Wednesday. But what really rocked the fanbase – and heightened the air of gloom enveloping the global record industry – was the news that In Rainbows could be preordered and downloaded perfectly legally for as little as 1p at Radio-head.com.
Currently out of contract and thus entitled to dispose of their recordings as they see fit, one of the most popular bands in the world had decided to let the fans decide how much their latest album was worth. An MP3 file of In Rainbows would have no price tag. Honesty boxes, it seemed, were the new rock’n’roll.
If the Radiohead faithful appeared somewhat nonplussed by this move – “The danger is that people will stop seeing their music as important,” one fan posted in a blog; “I will gladly pay $20 knowing the artist will get the money,” pledged another – the band’s strategy was anything but mad, and not even that revolutionary. Last week the Charlatans announced they would be giving away their new album as a free download. Earlier this year another rock band, the Crimea, did the same.
In July Prince arranged for 2.5m copies of his new album to be cover-mounted on a Sunday newspaper and issued several hundred thousand more free of charge to anybody attending his London concerts in August. The scale of this charitable epidemic can be measured by a quick browse of the Free Albums Galore blog that lists more than 800 albums by a range of artists – from the Beastie Boys to some unsigned metal bands – all of which are free to download.
Related Links
Radiohead: In Rainbows
What looks like commercial suicide is, in today’s reality, sound business sense. Records, CDs or downloads now have all become downgraded to the status of promotional tools – useful to sell concert tickets and fan paraphernalia. While there is still good money to be made in music, and particularly on the concert circuit, the record business – blame it on piracy, too many CD giveaways or the advent of the recordable CD – is a busted flush.
A revealing story doing the rounds in America tells of a young rock band who decided to stop selling their CDs at gigs after they discovered that by offering their CDs for $10 they were cannibalising sales of their $20 T-shirts. The truth now is that a rudimentary cotton garment with a band logo stamped across it that has probably been manufactured for pennies in a Third World sweatshop costs about twice as much as an album recorded in a state-of-the-art western studio. And even at that price, recorded music isn’t selling.
Album sales are currently in freefall all over the world. The 10% drop in the UK over the past year is dwarfed by a 15% slide in the US, 25% in France and a whopping 35% in Canada. The bankruptcy this summer of the CD retail chain Fopp, HMV’s announcement that its profits halved in the first six months of this year and Richard Branson’s recent decision to dump the Virgin Megastores – which have reportedly lost him more than £50m in 2007 – are only the most visible signs of a crisis that has rocked the music industry on its axis.
The point isn’t just that people are buying fewer CDs; they are paying as much as two-thirds less in real terms today for the music they listen to on their iPods than they used to when the compact disc first took over the market. Twenty years ago a chart CD cost about £14. Today you can buy the same in a super-market for £9.
The online market may have grown recently, but not enough to fix the hole. Here, too, margins have shrunk. A download of a single track now costs 79p against the £4 a CD single cost in 1999.
The impact on the bottom line of the record labels has been catastrophic. When EMI’s subsidiary Virgin put out the Spice Girls’ debut album in 1996 the company cleared roughly £5 in profit on each copy sold. That margin has since shrivelled to around £2 – and only then for albums that are significant hits. Industry insiders estimate that only one of the new British acts that has “broken” in 2007 – the pop diva Mika – will actually make his record company any money.
This has not gone unremarked in the City. When the private equity firm Terra Firma bought EMI recently it paid about a third, in real terms, what the company nearly fetched 10 years ago when a sale to its competitor Universal was mooted. That decline mirrors what has happened over the same period to the retail price of new CDs, and it also reflects the scale of the cull of EMI’s workforce, which has shrunk in 10 years from more than 10,000 worldwide to about 4,000 today.
The mood of panic is palpable, and there are no obvious solutions in sight. In America the recently appointed co-chairman of the Columbia label Rick Rubin, formerly a record producer by trade, has spoken of his ambition to turn the company around by refocusing it along the lines of a cable TV business – making Columbia’s entire catalogue downloadable to customers who pay a monthly subscription.
Another senior figure at Columbia has dismissed this plan as “potentially the last nail in the coffin”. The recent establishment of a “word of mouth” department at the label reflects the loss of control felt within a business that has lost a grip on its market.
One – fading – hope of the major labels is that they can somehow grab a share of the profits their artists make elsewhere. When Robbie Williams resigned to EMI in 2002 for a reported £80m this new deal guaranteed the label a piece of the action from Williams’s highly lucrative concert tours. But many young artists since have become wary of such composite arrangements. Some have decided to bypass the major record companies altogether.
One of the hottest new names to emerge here this year, the rave metal band Enter Shikari, refused to sign to anybody and in March released their debut album, Take to the Skies, on their own label Ambush Reality. In the past these tiny, so-called indie labels have usually been funded by majors anxious to covertly purchase credibility for their products with a young audience traditionally distrustful of big music corporations.
But that is not how it is with Ambush Reality. The marketing of Take to the Skies was largely down to the band themselves, who have played nearly 700 gigs since forming in St Albans in 2003. Word of mouth, coupled with a band presence on MySpace, has done the rest.
In November 2006 Enter Shikari became only the second unsigned act after the Darkness to sell out the leading London rock venue the Astoria. Take to the Skies entered the album chart at number four in March. In May they undertook a major tour of America – the first British band to do so without the support of a big record company.
This upending of the music business was neatly predicted back in the 1990s by the guitarist of the American hardcore band Anthrax who described their new album as “the menu; our concert is the meal”. This comment recalled the Beatles’ producer George Martin’s observation about his protégés’ first LP, Please Please Me from 1963. It was, Martin said, “just a memento of a concert”. Now, likewise, bands sell CD recordings of their performances at the end of the night.
The reprioritisation in recent years of live music over the recorded variety has been dramatic. Attendance at arena shows rose here by 11% last year. By the time 2007 bows out, 450 music festivals will have taken place in the UK.
Every week brings news of another frenzied assault on the box office. Last Monday Ticket-master reported that 20,000 tickets for the Spice Girls’ first reunion concert at London’s O2 arena in December sold out in 38 seconds, with 1m fans registering to buy. Three weeks back more than a million clamoured for seats at the forthcoming Led Zeppelin reunion. Glastonbury disposed of its 135,000 weekend passes for this year’s event within two hours – taking more than £21m in the process.
Ticket prices, especially for Alist artists, have soared as the price of CDs has tumbled. You could have bought Madonna’s entire catalogue for less than half what it cost to see her perform at Wembley Arena last summer where the best seats in the house went for £160. With the Rolling Stones at Twickenham a view from the pitch would have set you back £150.
Now that live music rules, nobody bothers to complain about what it costs any more. Euphoria at the news earlier this year that the Police had reformed obliterated all concerns that it cost between £70 and £90 to see them play at Twickenham in September. I spoke to many fans at one of those gigs; not one complained about the ticket price.
In the light of these numbers, the probability is that music fans now are spending more money on their passion than they were in the heyday of the CD. They have rediscovered an ancient truth that music is, at root, a communal experience as much as it is something that goes on between your ears.
Interestingly the band now tolling the death knell of the record industry, Radiohead, seem currently to have mixed feelings about live work.
“They probably will be playing some dates next year,” a spokesman said last week. “But Thom Yorke doesn’t like touring much.”

Martine

Business Model music industry report entertainment media research

Martine

iTunes Inspires Changes in Music Industry

Imagine a world where musicians keep the copyright to their music and make $5 or $6 per album sold instead the current $1 or $2. This is a model being proposed by Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music Group. With sales of CDs continuing a downward spiral, he realizes that the music industry needs to make some changes.
According to an article in Wired.com, CD sales have dropped over 20% in the United States since 2000. The drop isn’t because of lack of interest in music, though. Since 1999 concert ticket sales have increased 100%, peer-to-peer filesharing has proliferated, and iTMS has sold over one billion downloads. While all this has been happening, artists have seen their payment for each song decrease from an average of 30 cents per song to 10 cents per song.
McBride thinks there’s a better way. He recognizes that there are more venues for selling music than ever before. The goal of the major labels has been to sell CDs. It’s time for the music industry to focus on selling music in all possible forms.
McBride’s model calls for artists to record under their own labels. They retain ownership of their music. Companies like Nettwerk take the place of all of the different players who are typically involved in selling CDs. This means any profit has a much smaller split, with all involved able to take more home. In addition, keeping the copyright in one place makes it easier to sell songs to advertising agencies, to approve free downloads for promotion, or to do whatever it takes to market the music. Every move doesn’t require multiple approvals.
This is not the only proposal to change the face of the music industry. Ingenious Media founded Ingenious Music in 2005. This United Kingdom firm makes money in the music industry by investing in bands and small labels as well as managers. In July, EMI announced the creation of a new music company called The Firm. This company plans to replace the traditional royalty schedule for artists with profit sharing. Other proposed changes include the elimination of DRM.
Does iTunes have a role in the rethinking of the music business model? Epoch Times and others believe that the success of iTunes has forced the music industry to think differently. A model that allows artists to keep their copyright, particularly if the same model helps new artists to be heard, is something we can all hope for.
Still, while giving iTMS credit for demonstrating that music lovers are willing to pay for what they can get elsewhere for free, I would take one step back and give Napster and other early music download sites credit for leading the way. Without them, it is unlikely that iTMS would even be in the picture.
Others would argue that iTMS is more of an enemy to the industry than a friend. Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader thinks that the dominance of iTunes means that there will be only one model that really means anything. Analyst Phil Leigh suggests that if the music industry feels threatened by iTunes, a good strategy might be to back Microsoft’s Zune.
What are your predictions or suggestions for change in the music industry? Are changes something Apple should proudly take credit for, or has the ability to download music done more harm than good to the industry and to consumers?
Labels need to change with the times. This could be to the advantage of artists and consumers. I’m looking forward to seeing what other innovations occur in the industry.

Martine

Record labels' new approach

Jul 5th 2007
From The Economist print edition

IT HAS become a familiar refrain. For years record labels, citing tumbling CD sales blamed on internet piracy, have decried the decline of the music industry. The reality is rather more subtle, as Edgar Bronfman, the chairman of Warner Music, a big record company, pointed out last month. “The music industry is growing,” he told an investor conference in New York. “The record industry is not growing.”

Indeed. Seven years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry's biggest and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.

Martine

Wii Music: Innovation or Disappointment?

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With last month’s release of Wii Music, Nintendo concludes its “Big Four” group of nontraditional games (Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Wii Fit being the previous three). Unfortunately for the Big N, its foray into the music game genre has been receiving less than stellar reviews, averaging a score of 60, according to Metacritic. Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s resident developer guru, has come out in support of his game. Which, he admits, may not really be a “game” at all, but rather something approaching a “musical arrangement engine.” It would appear that with Wii Music, Nintendo’s dogged pursuit of nongamers has finally resulted in a misstep, in spite of Miyamoto’s firm defense of his creation.

In Wii Music, gamers (musical arrangement engineers?) can choose from a list of over 60 instruments to play in over 50 songs. The song list is a combination of public domain music (e.g. “Happy Birthday”), Nintendo themes (e.g. the Mario Bros. theme), and a few licensed pop songs (e.g. “Every Breath You Take” by The Police). Once you’ve chosen an instrument, you essentially mimic the motions of playing that instrument with your Wiimote and nunchuk, and, voila!, you’re making Wii music.

Unfortunately, all of Wii Music’s music is presented in not-particularly-stellar sounding MIDI format. I defy you to hear one of the choral performances in the conductor minigame without conjuring images of the opera scene from Final Fantasy 3 (the US one, pictured). With both Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour out there rocking fans with full master recordings, it’s difficult to see Wii Music as a “musician’s” music game.

So what is the point, then? According to Miyamoto, he wanted to create an experience that differed from the other music games out there. While talking to a group of reporters after being honored at the ESA’s 11th annual Nite to Unite event, Miyamoto said that Guitar Hero and Rock Band “let players be the best cover band they could possibly be.” With Wii Music, the developer sought to give players a feel for what playing music is really like as opposed to training them to hit a particular color at a particular time. As a musician of 13 years myself, this is certainly an admirable goal; I’m all for getting people excited about playing music.

As a lifelong gamer, though, I’m disappointed in the direction Nintendo has taken itself. The company I grew up loving has seemingly thrown its fan base out the window in pursuit of “nongamers.” There was a time when 1st-party Nintendo games were unbeatable, the pinnacle of gaming quality. Personally, my Wii got packed away when I moved into a new apartment, and I’ve yet to find a reason to unpack it.

Am I being too cynical? Maybe I’m unfairly expecting more-of-the-same from gaming companies instead of recognizing true innovation? Share your thoughts!

Martine

Has Film Music Innovation Died?

Opinion by Jason Comerford

On listening to the recent release of Jerry Goldsmith's The Edge, the end-credits lounge-music version of the score's majestic main theme got me to wondering if compositional innovation is so far gone in contemporary film scoring that turning a blood-pumping psychodrama piece like The Edge into watered-down jazz is what passes for creative vision anymore. I haven't seen the film, so I can't attest to the criticism that my fellow Film Score Daily columnist Doug Adams set forth in his recent article about the score. The Edge isn't really what's concerning me, the apparent strangeness of the cumulative cue notwithstanding. Rather, it's the unrelenting sameness of the output of composers today.
Rest assured, I've heard all the arguments. A composer is hired to do a job, and what it all boils down to is that the composer must respect the director and/or producer's wishes and do the job that the composer is hired for. This is Elementary Film Music Criticism 101: Sympathize with the subject. And then you can proceed to tear their works apart. Having been born near the tail end of the period which is generally considered the most revolutionary in film music history, the late sixties, roughly, to the early eighties, I can't comment on what then-contemporary film critics (or, for that matter, film music critics) had to say about what we now consider innovative. I don't know enough about the nuts-and-bolts process of music composition to make any educated arguments for or against compositional stratagems. But what I can offer is an outlook based upon what is commonplace today. And it seems to be, with some pertinent exceptions sprinkled here and there, cookie-cutter mayhem.
Why is it that we film music fans feel compelled to complain, constantly? It has been my experience that we typically stick to our favorite composers, using them as our deified, exempt-from-the-trash examples to prove that film music has taken a drastic nose-dive. ("Peacemaker? Bah! Goldsmith did it better in Air Force One!", or something to that effect.) There seems to be no end. Looking to even our favorite composers for constant relief is exhausting for everyone. It's as if every time Hans Zimmer (or whoever it is that he's apprenticing today) writes a score, the rest of the composers in Hollywood have to raise their standards, to please both the film music fans and themselves at the same times.
But what is most disturbing is that what the score enthusiasts see as trash, the most popular (i.e. the most financially successful) filmmakers clamor for the same scores like they can't get enough of them. (It's truly unsettling to read that Crimson Tide is Steven Spielberg's favorite recent soundtrack.) Which begs the question: during that Golden Time of Innovation, did both the filmmakers and composers realize that they were doing something different, and made the best of their situations.
It's safe to think so. I'll go out on a limb and make a generalization that film music, from its conception up until the sixties, was earmarked by unrelenting bombast. (Max Steiner, as smart as he was, seems to have given film music an eternally bad rep.) The melodies and thematic ideas may have been top-notch, but the damned volume of the music itself was so deafening, audiences couldn't really grasp the ideas behind the compositions. Then, during the Golden Age (as I'll refer to it for the purposes of this column), when composers were allowed rein to quiet down, the ideas became clearer, more focused. Jerry Goldsmith's Chinatown, for instance, is marked by such bare-bones thinking. Film noir dramas until that point were scored wall-to-wall, with a lot of brooding themes and general gloom-and-doom portent. Regardless of the ideas behind them, everything sounds like so much wallpaper that it takes a lot of patience to sort through all the soupy orchestrations. Chinatown, on the other hand, consists of a jazz love motif/main theme that's used more to color the overall atmosphere of the film, rather than to comment on the film itself. The score's stripped-down structure doesn't allow for much empathy; it's minimalism at its zenith. Goldsmith's emphasis on strident, dissonant passages for strings and piano makes a night-and-day comparison with a typical 1940s noir score.
This of course could be one of the primary ideas behind the whole scheme of things. The film itself is noir in structure and pretense, but its themes of corruption and pure evil reaches far deeper than other films of its type had ever attempted before. But I'm getting back to my main point: that in this Golden Age, radical filmmaking was in vogue. With the filmmakers getting more and more experimental, the composers followed in tandem.
This brings me to today's filmmaking environment. There have been endless complaints of late about how popular filmmaking has stopped to crass sensationalism, how the process of making money has become so demeaning, so snarling in its utter contempt for popular intelligence that audiences don't go to films to be entertained anymore; they go to get their brainpans fried. (One of my instructors at film school, a line producer, has summed this mindset up with one line that has stuck in my head, something that could be called his mission statement: "I couldn't give a shit about the art.") Film music has followed this sad path. If you can get ten orchestrators and a brand-name composer like James Newton Howard or Hans Zimmer, you've got the recipe for a serviceable music score and thus, the recipe for a film that will make enough money to pay the talent and guarantee a sequel.
But there's not much a humble film music fan/film school student like myself can do to change everything. We can raise holy hell, but the quest for making money has far outweighed the quest for the art. Whether or not the situation will change, it's anybody's guess. There are enough interesting glimmers here and there to suggest that innovation and imagination is becoming more prevalent; look at the works of Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal, Patrick Doyle, or Thomas Newman. But even these composers are stuck in ruts from time to time, ruts of no change in their styles. They're being sucked into the money machine, and there seems to be no escape. Monsters begetting monsters--what a wide, wonderful world we live in.

Martine

Rob Hubbard - Golden Days of Computer Game Music (Part 1)

Martine

Rob Hubbard - Golden Days of Computer Game Music (Part 2)

Martine

Rob Hubbard - Golden Days of Computer Game Music (Part 3)

Martine

Rob Hubbard - Golden Days of Computer Game Music (Part 4)

Martine

Rob Hubbard - Golden Days of Computer Game Music (Part 5)

Martine

Neil Young - Innovation & Music - JavaOne 2008 - Part 1

Martine

Neil Young - Innovation & Music - JavaOne 2008 - Part 2

Martine

Impact of Internet on Music Industry

Martine

ARTS: Advice for a Future in the Music Industry

This is very interesting, but there is no URL to post it on our blog.
Please click on the title to start the video on youtube.

Martine

Future of Music Industry - impact of downloads, self-publishing

Martine

Common+Microsoft+t-shirts=Microsoft Softwear

Softwear by Microsoft

I guess the people at Microsoft are desperate to create something cool. First the Vista ads with Seinfeld. Now they came up with this t-shirt collection in collaboration with Common.

Elisa

Are you twittering?

10 reasons why Twitter is a great music marketing tool

I signed in to Twitter this summer but haven't really gotten into it yet. Not many of my friends are there, yet. However, now I'm learning how to use it efficiently in promoting music.(Here's a profile I created for a band called ELK) I've read so many articles praising Twitter and above is a link to one of them.

Elisa

Can Video Games Save The Music Industry?

Music and games have been intertwined for 20 years. Can the games biz give a leg up to the struggling recording industry?

By Russ Fischer

The music industry is changing, and fast. The old model based around full album consumption simply doesn't work anymore. Single track downloads grew by 53 percent in 2007 to $2.9 billion and digital sales account for 30 percent of sales in the US and 15 percent worldwide, all while CD sales continue to dive like broken Xbox 360s, falling between 10 to 20 percent in 2007. Heck, 2008 had one of the least-watched Grammy ceremonies in television history.

And yet in less than three months, Harmonix's video game Rock Band notched 2.5 million song downloads at around two bucks per -- twice as much as a regular iTunes song retails. Everyone who buys Rock Band downloads at least two songs, on average. With a little over one million copies of the game sold, that's some sexy math.

The relationship between games and music is only getting peachier: coming this June, Activision is planning to release a Guitar Hero game dedicated to Aerosmith and "celebrated artists that the band has either performed with or has been inspired by in some way." Clearly, bands are taking notice of gaming's reach and influence. Here's a look at the past, present and future of the mutually beneficial relationship between music and games.

Martine

Music Downloads: Pirates—or Customers?

Q&A with: Felix Oberholzer-Gee
Published: June 21, 2004
Author: Sean Silverthorne

Internet music piracy not only doesn't hurt legitimate CD sales, it may even boost sales of some types of music.
Those were the counterintuitive findings released in March by Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and his co-author Koleman Strumpf, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their paper, "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales," caused a ruckus in the music industry not seen since the British invasion of the Beatles.
Many recording executives were not singing "Yeah, yeah, yeah," however. Convinced that illegal downloading and file sharing has robbed them of billions of dollars after four consecutive years of falling music sales, they criticized the team's methodology, which consisted of monitoring 1.75 million downloads over 17 weeks in 2002, scouring through server logs from OpenNap (an open source Napster server), and comparing the sales of almost 700 albums as reported by Nielsen SoundScan. Oberholzer and Strumpf concluded that there was almost no relationship between the two.
How could this be? The researchers believe that most downloading is done over peer-to-peer networks by teens and college kids, groups that are "money-poor but time-rich," meaning they wouldn't have bought the songs they downloaded. In that sense, the music industry can't claim those downloads as lost record sales. In fact, illegal downloading may help the industry slightly with another major segment, which Oberholzer and Strumpf call "samplers"—an older crowd who downloads a song or two and then, if they like what they hear, go out and buy the music.
Interestingly, the first half of this year saw the release of numbers seemingly supporting this theory: The number of illegal music downloads continued to increase—but so did music sales.
If in fact the research is correct, the strategic implications for the music industry are profound. Instead of conducting a high-profile campaign against pirates, should the industry instead target "samplers" to encourage them to buy more music? Should the industry consider peer-to-peer services as marketing tools rather than the enemy? Should online pricing be different from in-store pricing? What happens when broadband makes it as easy to illegally download an entire CD as an individual track or two? HBS professor Feliz Oberholzer-Gee recently spoke to Working Knowledge about these issues.
Sean Silverthorne: The draft of your paper with Koleman Strumpf came out almost three months ago, and caused quite a stir both inside the entertainment industry and out. What are your impressions of the reactions so far?
Felix Oberholzer-Gee: Two recent developments are important. Our study provides the first serious evidence that file sharing cannot explain the decline in music sales in the last couple of years. In addition, in the last two quarters, music sales increased while file sharing has become even more popular. BigChampagne.com, an Internet monitoring firm, estimates that there are now up to 9 million simultaneous file sharers, up from about 4 million in early 2003.
In view of our evidence and these new trends, even the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) now states that file sharing is only "one factor, along with economic conditions and competing forms of entertainment that is displacing legitimate sales." The industry is rethinking its position, although change occurs slowly.

Q: Let's talk strategy. What have been the recording companies' strategies to date for combating their loss of property rights via illegal downloading? And how effective has that strategy been? For example, is it a good thing to sue potential customers?
A: Suing potential customers is not exactly a standard entry in the book of good CRM. More importantly, the RIAA's legal strategy is hopeless and smacks of short-sighted panic.
Our research shows that only 45 percent of music files downloaded in the United States come from computers in the U.S. More than 100 countries supply files to the U.S. file-sharing community, and many of these countries do not have strong records of protecting copyrighted materials. The RIAA does not stand a chance to implement an effective legal strategy in all these countries.
The RIAA's legal strategy is hopeless and smacks of short-sighted panic.Those who dream of legal solutions do not recognize the truly global nature of the peer-to-peer (P2P) phenomenon. Even worse, the RIAA's legal strategy does not even seem to work here in the United States. Despite the lawsuits—the RIAA has sued about 2,000 individuals to date—file sharing is more popular than ever.
Q: Assuming your conclusion is right—that there is no evidence that illegal music downloads erode CD sales—and in fact might help top-selling record sales—what are the implications for the recording industry in terms of strategy?
A: Our research shows that people do not download entire CDs. They download a few songs, typically the hits that one would also hear on a Top 40 station. This suggests that P2P is much like the radio, a great tool to promote new music. The music industry has of course long recognized that giving away samples of music for free over the airwaves can stimulate sales. The same seems to hold for P2P.
The problem with radio as a promotional tool is that it can be quite expensive for labels to get radio stations to play their music. P2P networks are promising because they make the market for music promotion more competitive. From the perspective of the music industry, the more competition among P2P services, the less costly it will be to promote music.
Q: Apple's iTunes has seemingly validated the concept that people will purchase music online. But it seems the recording companies themselves have done little on their own to experiment with models here, such as tiered pricing (hits cost more) and bundling.
A: The classic business model was a teaser model: The music labels provided one or two hit songs for free by promoting them on the radio and on MTV. If consumers liked the samples, they purchased a dozen songs at a price of $15. We now have gone from one extreme to the other. While inflexible bundling was the rule, services such as iTunes now completely unbundle CDs and offer all music by the song. The difficulty with this approach is that the economics of producing music are characterized by significant fixed costs. It is not much more expensive to promote an entire album than to promote an individual song. With complete unbundling, the revenue streams generated by a new album are likely to be much lower. How many consumers will pay a dollar for song number thirteen?
Clearly, there is a profit-enhancing role for some type of bundling even with digital distribution. For example, consumers might be willing to pay full price for the core songs on an album if they get the rest at a discount. We need systematic experiments to find out which types of bundling are economically most attractive.
Q: What's the current state of your research? Where does it go from here?
A: A key uncertainty relates to our finding that file sharers do not download entire CDs. We do not know why they sample only a few songs. One possibility is that the current patterns of file sharing reflect consumer preferences. Consumers do not know the quality of new music and sampling one or two songs is good enough to assess quality and make a purchasing decision. If this view is correct, the radio model is well and alive, and P2P offers great opportunities to promote new content.
Clearly, there is a profit-enhancing role for some type of bundling even with digital distribution.However, it is also possible that the observed behavior is due to technical difficulties. In our data, only one out of three downloads is completed successfully. File sharing is fairly cumbersome for many consumers with poor Internet connections. If this is the reason for highly selective sampling, we can expect consumers to download entire CDs when broadband connections become more common. This is a less rosy scenario for the music industry because downloads of CDs are likely to be closer substitutes for CD purchases.
If poor Internet connections explain file-sharing patterns, general access to broadband would have profound strategic implications, suggesting that music companies ought to pursue a strategy of selling complements to recorded music. We see some examples for this strategy even today: Apple sells songs to promote its iPods. Prince gives away his most recent release to promote his concerts. We need careful continuous monitoring of the effects of P2P to know which strategies are most appropriate in the digital age.

Martine