Net Radio Gain: CBS Radio, Last.fm Collaborate

From Media Post - INTERNET RADIO IS SEEING THE flurry of content and sales deals continue in first-quarter 2008. The latest partnership brings together CBS Radio and Last.fm to share content. The deal will allow the Internet company to stream audio from CBS radio station broadcasts live, while giving listeners from the CBS Radio Internet Network access to Last.fm's library of free online music.

For Last.fm, the deal represents a substantial increase in the number of broadcast partners and breadth of content it can offer--adding CBS Radio's 140 stations to its existing partnerships with Universal, EMI, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG, as well as about 150,000 independent artists and studios. The station list includes top CBS properties like New York's WCBS-FM, Los Angeles' KROQ, Chicago's WXRT and Atlanta's WVEE. Last.fm users will be able to access the content through CBS' new online audio player. | Read full article

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

From The New York Times - For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. | Read full article

Apple talking to labels about unlimited music

From The Globe And Mail - Apple Inc. is mulling a plan to upend its iTunes business by giving people unlimited free access to the music library if they're willing to pay more for the iPod and iPhone devices they use for playing and storing the digital media, according to a report published Wednesday.

Some analysts threw cold water on the plan outlined in the Financial Times, however, saying Cupertino-based Apple would risk creating an "accounting nightmare" and alienating some artists if it started giving away songs on its iTunes online store. | Read full article

Last.fm, labels launch free music on-demand

From The Globe And Mail - Last.fm, the social music network owned by CBS Corp., said on Wednesday it is introducing a free service for fans to listen to their favourite songs on-demand.

The new service is being launched in partnership with the four major music companies, as well as over 150,000 labels and artists.

When fans in the United States, Britain and Germany search for an artist on the Last.fm website, they can now stream the artist's song for nothing or pay to download an MP3 version of the song via Amazon.com.

Last.fm said the streaming service is funded by advertising revenue, which is shared with the music companies.

The move comes nearly six years after Last.fm first started reaching out to music companies to license songs to stream on its site.

“They wouldn't even take our calls back then,” said Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel.

“But our motto to always do the right thing by respecting artist copyright has helped us in our discussions,” he said. | Read full article

Last.fm, labels launch free music on-demand

From The Globe And Mail - Last.fm, the social music network owned by CBS Corp., said on Wednesday it is introducing a free service for fans to listen to their favourite songs on-demand.

The new service is being launched in partnership with the four major music companies, as well as over 150,000 labels and artists.

When fans in the United States, Britain and Germany search for an artist on the Last.fm website, they can now stream the artist's song for nothing or pay to download an MP3 version of the song via Amazon.com.

Last.fm said the streaming service is funded by advertising revenue, which is shared with the music companies.

The move comes nearly six years after Last.fm first started reaching out to music companies to license songs to stream on its site.

“They wouldn't even take our calls back then,” said Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel.

“But our motto to always do the right thing by respecting artist copyright has helped us in our discussions,” he said. | Read full article

Digital music sales up 40% in year

From The Globe And Mail - Record companies' revenue from digital music sales rose 40 per cent to $2.9-billion (U.S.) over the past year, but the growth is still failing to cover losses from collapse of international CD sales, the music industry's global trade body said Thursday.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, said the increase in legitimate music sales did not come close to offsetting the billions of dollars being lost to music piracy, with illegal downloads outnumbering the number of tracks sold by a factor of 20-to-1.

But the trade group said it welcomed efforts by French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who has proposed a clampdown on those who violate copyright laws.

Mr. Sarkozy called in November for Internet service providers in France to automatically disconnect customers involved in piracy. | Read full article

U.S. Album Sales Fell 9.5% in 2007

From The New York Times - Album sales in the United States plunged 9.5 percent last year from 2006, as the recording industry had another weak year despite a 45 percent surge in the sale of digital tracks, according to figures released Thursday.

A total of 500.5 million albums in the form of CDs, cassettes, LPs and other formats were purchased last year, down 15 percent from the unit total for 2006, said Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks point-of-purchase sales.

The decline in album sales drops to 9.5 percent when sales of digital singles are counted as 10-track equivalent albums. | Read full article

Beatles Catalog to Finally Go Digital in ’08

From The New York Times - Clues to when the Beatles’ catalog would finally arrive online have been trickling out in bits and pieces for the past year. Now, Paul McCartney tells Billboard that he’s “pretty sure” the band’s music would go digital in 2008. Still, he didn’t offer a hint as to what part of 2008 the music would be accessible on the internet. McCartney attributed the holdup to contractual red-tape in part, as well as the desire to time the release just right: “The whole thing is primed, ready to go—there’s just maybe one little sticking point left, and I think it’s being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn’t be too long. It’s down to fine-tuning...” | Read full story

File-sharing is good for Big Music

From The Globe And Mail - Earlier today, Industry Canada, a ministry of the federal government, released a surprising study of peer-to-peer file-sharing on the music industry.

The study is called The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada, and was written by Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz, of the Department of Management at the University of London in England.

Its conclusion: P2P file-sharing does not put downward pressure on purchasing music, as the music industry has insisted for years. In fact, it does just the opposite: It tends to increase music purchasing.

What? | Read full article

Apple Backs Down on Premium Prices for Unprotected Music

From The New York Times - Apple these days may well have market clout, but it is not bigger than the market.

Today, Apple dropped the price of music downloads that are not protected by copy restrictions from $1.29 to 99 cents.

In April, Apple introduced iTunes Plus, offering songs from EMI with better sound quality and no copy protection. It attempted to create a premium price tier for songs, although full albums were priced the same as its regular downloads, which limit the number of devices on which they can be played. | Read full article

Pandora Will Rock Radio As We Know It

From Portfolio - Tim Westergren, chief strategy officer and founder of Pandora, stopped by Portfolio yesterday and talked to our staff about the future of his online radio company. He's working to eventually take Pandora public and describes its growth as linear, with half a million new users each month, capturing a total of .2% of radio listeners in the U.S. Pandora sets itself apart from other internet radio sites by allowing users to personalize their own radio stations through a 'music genome' that analyzes songs for rhythm, lyrics, genre, etc. and then feeds similar songs into the user's play list.

Though this is a great way to discover new artists and appreciate ones you never thought you would, as one Portfolio staffer pointed out, play lists can tend to sound homogeneous sometimes. But Westergren assures that there are ways of mixing up one's radio selection. "The secret sauce is that people interact a lot with Pandora."

Users can give a recommended tune a thumb up or a thumb down, and they can also learn how their play list was selected for them. To expand on the user interaction the company right now is considering ways to incorporate into the site elements of online social-networking. | Read full article

Music Business Pioneer Says IPod Will Soon Be Obsolete

From The Wired Blog - The man who bet his professional life on the future success of rap music has finally come forward to offer his vision of the future of music business in an iPod age. Legendary producer and record label executive Rick Rubin (Beastie Boys, Slayer, Johnny Cash, Run DMC, Jay-Z) told The New York Times that the future is not iTunes serving á la carte songs to your iPod, but music labels offering every song on the planet, anywhere, via subscription.

Rubin said, "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home." | Read full article

Apple Rumors — Day 1

From The New York Times - Apple is announcing a big event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Wednesday, Sept. 5.

This is really short notice. It leaves us only 167 hours to wallow in rumors.

What do we have so far? | Read full article

Nokia to Introduce Digital Music Service

From The New York Times - In the same converted 19th-century fish market where Apple announced the European introduction of its iTunes music store three years ago, Nokia said on Wednesday that it would soon introduce its own digital music service, along with an easier-to-use Apple-style mobile interface and an Apple-style touchscreen handset.

The Nokia Music Store, to open this year, will let users download songs from the Internet to their computers or directly to mobile phones over wireless networks, which Apple’s recently released iPhone cannot do. | Read full article

Music industry caps fees for Net radio stations

From The Globe And Mail - A music industry group Thursday said it would cap “per channel” fees for major Internet radio companies streaming music on multiple channels.

SoundExchange, which collects royalties from Webcasters and distributes them to artists and record labels, said it would limit fees — at $50,000 (U.S.) a year — for online radio station companies that offer more than 100 channels to customers.

A panel of three copyright judges earlier this year mandated that Webcasters had to pay higher royalty fees and a $500 fee “per station or channel” streamed, regardless of the total number of channels. | Read full article

MTV, RealNetworks Challenge Apple Music

From The New York Times - Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks and digital media company RealNetworks announced Tuesday a digital music joint venture that will compete with Apple's dominant trinity of the iTunes store, iPod player and iPhone.

MTV will merge its Urge music service into the Rhapsody offering from RealNetworks Inc. The new offering will be accessible on computers and music players and integrated with Verizon Wireless's VCast multimedia service for cell phones. | Read full article

Jukebox With Hit Potential - Free Online Service Fine-Tunes Music to Listener's Tastes

From The Washington Post - Some of my favorite radio stations don't have DJs. But they do include some other features not found on FM: a button to pause playback, another to skip to the next song and, most important, a playlist I can customize.

Free, interactive music sites like Pandora and Last.fm are a hybrid of radio station and jukebox. They provide a selection of streaming music to match your tastes, but they don't let you request a particular artist or song.

At their best, these sites give both the comfort of familiarity and the thrill of discovery.

Perhaps as a result, the music industry can't figure out what to do with them. Should they be treated as a substitute for a record collection or as a promotional tool that helps expand those libraries? | Read full article

Universal Partners With Google To Rival iTunes

From Gizmodo - Another online music download service is set to enter the ring. The difference this time? The partnership is between Universal and Kingpin, Google. The pairing off was announced earlier last week, but now more details have emerged on the business plan. The service called gBox, (not a euphemism), will be different to traditional offerings such as iTunes, as Google will play the role of advertiser and Universal will pick up the cash from the sale. The dangerous-duo are set to launch on August 21, 2007.

The system actually seems fairly smart and sounds like it may prove to be a threat to the stranglehold Apple has on the market at the moment. | Read full article

Musicians aim to create virtual choir

From CNN - Pop music icon Elton John complained to a British newspaper this week that the Internet was destroying music.

The self-confessed technophobe told The Sun that: "The Internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff... Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the Internet."

But John is part of a shrinking number of people who steadfastly refuse to accept the changing nature of not only how music is consumed in the 21st century, but also how collaboration across continents is redefining how music is made and performed, linking musicians and audiences in extraordinary ways.

The appetite for digital music is growing exponentially. | Read full article

Universal Music Will Sell Songs Without Copy Protection

From The New York Times - Signaling another departure from the music industry’s longtime antipiracy strategy, the Universal Music Group will sell a significant portion of its catalog without the customary copy protection software for at least the next few months, the company announced yesterday.

Universal, the world’s biggest music conglomerate, said it would offer albums and songs without the software, known as digital rights management, through existing digital music retail services like RealNetworks and Wal-Mart, nascent services from Amazon.com and Google, and some artists’ Web sites.

But the music will not be offered D.R.M.-free through Apple’s iTunes, the leading music service. The use of copy protection software has become a major bone of contention in the digital music business, where iTunes accounts for the vast majority of download sales. The record labels generally have required that retailers place electronic locks to limit copying of music files. | Read full article