Music Ally

Research firm Asymco is causing a stir with some pretty charts that appear to show that Apple’s app downloads will overtake its music downloads by the end of this year. The company points out that it’s taken just over two years for the App Store to reach 6.5 billion downloads – something it took five years for the iTunes Store to do. Asymco predicts that by the end of 2010, both stores will have reached 13 billion downloads. In its analysis of the charts, Appsfire makes a relevant point: many of those 6.5 billion app downloads are free – a different model to the paid music downloads on iTunes.

Source:Asymco
Source:Appsfire Blog

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a keynote speech at the IFA exhibition in Europe, which included comments on Google Music. “Think about a music player – if it’s not connected to the internet, it just has what’s stored on it,” he said. “It can’t get the music nearby, it can’t get the latest music. It has to be on the net. The same is true of everything.” And he also talked bigger picture, about autonomous search being the next big thing for Google. “This notion of autonomous search – to tell me things I didn’t know but am probably interested in, is the next great stage – in my view – of search.” If Google applies THIS to music, you can imagine the potential.

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Sony Music Entertainment appears to be facing a backlash from the cast of TV drama Glee over royalties from sales of its music. The show famously made tracks available shortly after episodes aired on TV, and generated big download numbers on iTunes. However, star Mark Salling says he’s seen “not a dime” of royalties, while co-star Corey Montieth says “I got 400 bucks from it going No. 1. But you know what, that’s OK, because if I’m patient, and if this thing does really well, maybe I’ll see another 400 bucks.” The New York Post suggests that various cast members are now signing deals with labels other than Sony, showing their disgruntlement.

Police in as many as 14 European countries have raised suspected file-sharing servers/admins, according to TorrentFreak and Ars Technica. Sweden appears to have seen the most raids, but other countries involved include the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Hungary, Belgium, Norway, Germany and the UK. Details are scarce on exactly what happened, but it seems the raids may have been focused more on movies than music – and that several people have been arrested. A note of controversy was injected when one of the companies raided – hosting service PRQ – turned out to be one of the hosts of the Wikileaks site. However, this appears to be a co-incidence.

A new chart from the UK’s Official Charts Company reveals that Survivor’s 1982 hit Eye Of The Tiger has finally topped one million sales in the UK – thanks to downloads. Since 2004, the song has sold more than 280,000 digital copies, smashing through the million mark. The chart also reveals that Abba has also recently scored its first UK million-selling single, with Dancing Queen – again, helped over the milestone by 105,000 digital sales. Other oldies benefitting from a digital late summer include Fame, Stand & Deliver, Sugar Sugar and Ghostbusters. iPod-fuelled wedding playlists have a lot to answer for.

Remember People’s Music Store? The UK startup launched in early 2009, and let music fans set up and run their own digital music stores. It signed a number of independent labels to offer their catalogues, and later added Universal Music Group.

However, co-founder Ged Day has written to users explaining that the store will go offline this Friday. “Unfortunately, [co-founder] Ed and I have made the difficult decision to take our company in a different direction and so have decided to take peoplesmusicstore.com offline,” he writes.

“This is something that has loomed over us for a while now, and I am happy to say that we really did hold on for as long as we could given the circumstances, but it has now reached the point where we must consider alternative routes.”

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Apple launched its new Ping social network for music last week, as part of its iTunes 10 software, and it went on to sign up one million users in its first two days.

CEO Steve Jobs was noticeably un-brash in his language when announcing it, describing it as “a social network for music – sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes. It’s not Facebook, it’s not Twitter, it’s something else we’ve come up with. It’s a social network for music.”

I’ve been using Ping since the morning it went live, getting to grips with how it works and what it’s capable of. Right now, it’s an underwhelming experience, but there is clearly scope for Apple to add more features and functionality in the months ahead. With that in mind, here’s five ways Ping could be made a richer experience both for users and for artists.

1. Get Facebook Connect working as soon as possible

We now know why you can’t log in to Facebook to find friends who are on Ping, despite that feature being shown off at Apple’s launch event. Apple balked at Facebook’s service agreement but tried to use Facebook Connect anyway, so Facebook blocked it. Twitter and Facebook had a similar contretemps a few months ago.

Apple should blink first and do whatever it takes to get Facebook Connect back into Ping. Even Steve Jobs would be hard-pressed to argue with a straight face that searching for friends’ names or emailing them one-by-one to add them as Ping contacts is a satisfactory system.

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Apple’s new Ping social network signed up more than one million users in its first two days – a third of the three million people who downloaded the required iTunes 10 software in the same period. “As many more people download iTunes 10 in the coming weeks, we expect the Ping community to continue growing,” says Eddy Cue, Apple’s VP of internet services – a new title for former music boss Cue, incidentally. However, Ping has already become a haven for spam messages, kicking off with a widespread scam about free iPhones, posted on the Ping accounts of several big artists. Finally, the owner of existing music social network Ping.fm says the day after Apple’s announcement, three times as many people registered for his own site.

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Million
Spam
Ping.fm

Here’s the good news for Google: analysts think YouTube is on course to become profitable this year, based on $450 million of revenues this year thanks to its growing ad business. However, YouTube has suffered a major defeat in a German court case, with a ruling that it must pay compensation in three cases where unauthorised Sarah Brightman videos were uploaded to the site. The Hamburg state court ruled that YouTube’s standard question to users asking whether they have the necessary rights to upload videos is not enough to relieve it of legal responsibility for the content. Google isn’t happy: “This decision results in a substantial legal uncertainty for all providers of video platforms, opinion forums, social communities, blogs and many other Internet services in Germany,” says its local director of legal affairs Arnd Haller. This is a separate case from Google’s battle with GEMA, which last week saw the latter denied an interim injunction against YouTube.

Source:

Move to profitability
Court ruling

Ticketing and social marketing startup Ticketfly has announced a deal with Transmogrify to make custom mobile apps for venues and live promoters. The apps let users see who’s playing and share details of their gig plans with friends on social networks. Ticketfly says it’s already released three apps for venues in the US, with seven more coming soon, including apps for the Hollywood Troubador. “Mainstream smartphone adoption is changing the way people surf the web, so we’re arming our clients to dominate this entirely new app market,” says Ticketfly co-CEO Dan Teree.