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digital music
Posts Tagged “
Music
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Napster really hoping someone will buy it
Online-music service Napster's management says the company is "open to a sale" — to anyone, that is, except the activist shareholders trying to get on its board. [PaidContent]
Online-music service Napster's management says the company is "open to a sale" — to anyone, that is, except the activist shareholders trying to get on its board. [PaidContent]
digital music
copyfight
Prince can't keep babies from dancing on YouTube
U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel has ruled that fair use — a complex set of exemptions to copyright meant to allow for commentary, criticism, and parody — must be taken into consideration before rightsholders request the removal of infringing content from websites like YouTube. The improper takedown suit was brought by Stephanie Lenz after Universal Music Group asked the popular video-sharing site to remove a clip of Lenz's then 13-month old son dancing to party-jam classic "Let's Go Crazy" by his purple majesty, the pied piper of Minneapolis, Prince. Lenz and her lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation can now proceed with their case seeking damages against Universal for issuing an improper takedown request.
rumormonger
Muxtape's spending real cause of music site's shutdown
Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette says he's shut down the mixtape-hosting website because of a problem with the Recording Industry Association of America. A statement from the RIAA itself seems to confirm the story. Bu we hear another reason Muxtape is shutting down is that it got too expensive for Ouellette to keep up. More »
digital music
Pandora throws temper tantrum over music rates
The days of marveling over online music service Pandora's ability to know that you hella heart Oakland's own Digital Underground may soon be over. A court decision adored by the recording industry doubled the royalties Web broadcasters have to pay. Radio stations pay nothing to for rebroadcast rights to recordings, but do pay publishers a royalty. Satellite broadcasters pay nearly half what online music providers are charged. Pandora reports that the charges, payable to royalty collector SoundExchange, will amount to $17.5 million of their $25 million in annual revenue. Which would permanently mangle the company's business model, according to CEO Tim Westergren. The flip, convenient thing to do here is to blog about the evils of the rapacious music industry. Sure, SoundExchange is notorious for its long list of artists it can't find in order to pay, while it naturally collects royalties regardless. But after Muxtape's run in with the RIAA today, one has to think there's blame to spread around. What did these music entrepreneurs expect? More »
copyfight
RIAA "problem" shutters online-music startup Muxtape
Muxtape, a New York-based online-music startup much favored by the Tumblr set, has shut down its website, citing a "problem" with the RIAA, a music-industry organization which polices copyright. Could it have anything to do with the ease with which users can download music files from the site, despite founder Justin Ouellette's efforts to block them? The company blog elaborates, barely: "No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned."
developers, developers, developers
Google's Android now a fake OS for more gadgets
Google's mobile OS Android might have a future in "set-top boxes for televisions, mp3 players and other communication and media devices and services," reports VentureBeat. Silicon Alley Insider confirms the story — or at least the fact that Google's working on Android-loaded cable boxes — and wonders if maybe Google will move them as a part of its partnership with Clearwire. None of this will happen anytime soon, of course. More »
hires
MySpace music venture lonely at the top
MySpace Music, the joint venture between the social network and three big record-label groups, is struggling to find a CEO, according to The Deal. There's a long list of prospects who have turned the News Corp.-owned social network down: Ian Rogers, the former head of Yahoo Music; Jim Bankoff, formerly of AOL; Eric Garland, the highly quotable head of file-sharing research firm BigChampagne; and former Launch CEO Dave Goldberg, who now works at Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence and is married to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, which makes the L.A. job geographically undesirable. But what's most amusing about MySpace's failed CEO search is the excuse MySpace is now giving for putting off a hire: The team is so close to delivering a product that hiring a boss now would just screw things up. Makes sense — but it raises the question, why hire a CEO at all?
Napster finds music-buying sucker market shrinking
Napster — or rather, the pathetic music store which picked up the famous file-sharing service's brand — reported a drop in quarterly revenues to $30.3 million, despite the launch of an MP3 store. Subscribers fell from 760,000 to 708,000 in a quarter's time. Here's Napster's latest commercial, obviously not effective at drumming up business. [PaidContent]
Napster — or rather, the pathetic music store which picked up the famous file-sharing service's brand — reported a drop in quarterly revenues to $30.3 million, despite the launch of an MP3 store. Subscribers fell from 760,000 to 708,000 in a quarter's time. Here's Napster's latest commercial, obviously not effective at drumming up business. [PaidContent]
we read twitter so you don't have to
Is Zappos.com getting into the music business?
Ethan Kaplan, Warner Bros.'s 29-year-old vice president of technology, uses Twitter like his cohorts. Well, almost like his cohorts. He slipped up using Twitter's direct-message feature, and broadcast to the Internet a request to talk to someone in business development at Zappos.com. Despite advertising "Shoes, shoes, shoes!" on its website, Zappos has branched out into selling everything from camping axes to computers. Could it be branching out into music, too? It's hard to think why Kaplan would want to talk to Zappos otherwise — unless he's figured out that the music industry doesn't have much of a future, and it's time to find a job at a more promising company.
Google plays catchup in China with MP3 search
Google announced today a search service, available only in China, to find and download MP3s from popular artists through partner Top100.cn, a Chinese music site funded by basketball star Yao Ming. Baidu, the search company which emerged from China's homegrown bubble and producers of crazy ads, has had MP3 search available since 2005, and many attribute its lead in its home market to that feature. [News.com]
Google announced today a search service, available only in China, to find and download MP3s from popular artists through partner Top100.cn, a Chinese music site funded by basketball star Yao Ming. Baidu, the search company which emerged from China's homegrown bubble and producers of crazy ads, has had MP3 search available since 2005, and many attribute its lead in its home market to that feature. [News.com]
digital music
Buckcherry apparently too drunk to spoof BitTorrent
The grindy reporters at the Wall Street Journal have confirmed what the guys at TorrentFreak figured out a couple of weeks ago: Hard rockers Buckcherry (I recommend listening to "Lit Up" and "Ridin'" as a primer) leaked their own single "Too Drunk ..." from a computer at their manager's office in early July. The band had issued a faux-outraged press release over the pretend act of piracy. Their complaint: "We want our FANS to have any new songs first.” Uh, guys, isn't that exactly what happened?
careers
$700k salary can't get Sony BMG a digital exec
After EMI hired paisley-shirted IT exec Douglas Merrill away from Google to run the record label's digital business, other music groups have been on the hunt for a digital savior. Sony BMG, we hear, has been trying to fill an EVP position to run its digital music ventures. But after dangling a $700,000 salary in front of prospects for 8 months, its search firm, Korn/Ferry, still hasn't been able to fill the job. What this tells us: No one wants the job. One requirement: The candidate must "have a keen eye to find money on opportunities at hand." That graspingness is precisely why the record labels are so unpopular with musicians, their fans, and the the technologists creating the online tools through which people are increasingly stealing — sorry, "discovering" — music. The industry's in such a pathetic state, we thought we'd help Sony BMG and Korn/Ferry by airing the confidential job listing: More »
Amazon limps its way to 4 percent of U.S. digital-music market
eMusic CEO David Pakman estimates that Amazon.com's MP3 store may have sold 27 million tracks since opening 6 months ago — which sounds good until you consider that Apple's iTunes moves 2 billion songs a year. Pakman also estimates that Amazon's store is adding $7 million, after the labels' take and expenses. At least people are looking forward to a new Kindle, right? [Silicon Alley Insider]
eMusic CEO David Pakman estimates that Amazon.com's MP3 store may have sold 27 million tracks since opening 6 months ago — which sounds good until you consider that Apple's iTunes moves 2 billion songs a year. Pakman also estimates that Amazon's store is adding $7 million, after the labels' take and expenses. At least people are looking forward to a new Kindle, right? [Silicon Alley Insider]
MTV launches another surely doomed music service
MTV is continuing its push into digital music, despite its long litany of failures in the past, by introducing a music recommendation service and social network called Soundtrack. Most of the song recommendations will be based off of MTV's list of shows such as The Hills, Shot at Love, and G's to Gents. RealNetworks' Rhapsody, which recently dropped copyright protections on its music files, will help MTV sell those songs, as well — though a tipster reports Rhapsody been having customer service and outage issues for weeks.
great moments in pr
5 questions Viacom doesn't want Valleywag to ask Philippe Dauman
Touchy Viacom flack Jeremy Zweig called Valleywag up to let us know personally that we'd been disinvited from next week's press-only screening of Tropic Thunder. Such a pity! Because we had a list of questions we were going to ask Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman: More »
copyfight
EMI sues Hi5 and VideoEgg for listening to EMI
Record label EMI may have tired of suing individual file sharers for copyright infringement. But a number of music-industry plaintiffs, all partners and subsidiaries of EMI, are suing social network Hi5 and advertising startup VideoEgg in New York Southern District Court for copyright infringement. According to the complaint [PDF]: More »
the olds
