Music Ally

Rhapsody America has become the latest digital music store to launch a DRM-free option, with all four major labels signed up. Pricing is 99 cents per track and (mostly) $9.99 per album, with more than five million 256kbps MP3s available at launch. The new MP3 Store is integrated with the Rhapsody subscription service, so that users can easily download songs they’ve listened to on that for transfer to portable devices. Meanwhile, Rhapsody is also providing a download manager app that can automatically import purchases into iTunes.

Billboard has an interesting piece on how labels are using the Complete My Album feature on iTunes as an effective marketing tactic. Here’s how it works: you release up to a third of the tracks from a new album a month or more before its official release, as a partial iTunes album. Then, when the full thing is released, rely on the Complete My Album feature to get fans paying for the remaining tracks. Universal Motown did it with six tracks from the 18-song Lil Wayne album ”Tha Carter III”, and it sold 100,000 digital copies in its first official week on sale - with 52% of its sales on iTunes coming through Complete My Album.

Bands sleeping with fans? Perish the thought! Oh, you mean on their sofas. That’s the idea of Better Than The Van - a website that hooks up touring artists with free places to crash for the night. “Any abuse or weirdness will result in the user’’s account being terminated,” say the Terms of Service, which helpfully also suggests carpet is a more suitable sleeping surface than hard wooden floors. Anyway, the site could be genuinely useful for smaller bands looking to tour the US on a budget-the likes of Jeffery Lewis have been known to crash on fans’ floors while on tour and appeal to them via My Space Blogs. This looks like the next step for  lo-fi touring musicians. (although it would be quite fun if J-Lo’s record label uses the site for her next tour too). Probably beats sleeping between a spare tyre and bass drum at least …possibly!
Link: http://betterthanthevan.com/

A report in The Register suggests that the UK may see its first `legal’ broadband subscriptions including file-sharing by the end of this year, with the UK government pressuring ISPs and the music industry to launch a P2P licensing system along the lines of South Korea. However, as far as we understand, this initiative is more about education - ISPs sending out `educational’ letters to users caught file-sharing, as Virgin Media is doing. The most telling sentence in The Reg’s piece is this: “No deals have been signed yet and significant details have yet to be addressed. These include the royalty share between mechanical, sound recording and publishing rights holders, and administration issues.” Sorting those by Christmas is optimistic, to say the least. We think labels are more likely to sign their own individual deals with specific ISPs rather than come up with a pan-industry Korean style approach. These ISP deals could materialise within a few weeks.

Remember we recently published links to the BPI / Virgin media letters? Well, it looks as though UK ISP BT are following suit-but taking a tougher line.  Interestingly, the story appeared  as an exlusive on The Register  at the same time as the story above. BT appears to be threatening to disconnect users who are caught file-sharing. One customer was recently sent a letter reproducing evidence collected by the BPI, indicating that they’d shared Girls Aloud’s `Biology’ using P2P client Ares. (more…)

Hey, big news: consumer electronics giant Sony is going to start selling digital music! Oh, hang on… Okay, so Sony has already tried this digital distribution lark with its Connect service, which flopped badly. However, the company has just announced a three-year plan for a more ambitious digital distribution service, covering music, films and TV shows. The idea is to distribute this content to a host of devices, including computers, TVs, mobile phones, Wi-Fi enabled music and video players, and PS3 consoles. Sony plans to spend $16.8 billion building the distribution platform, but the question is whether it can sign up all the rival studios and labels, rather than just focus on content from other Sony divisions.

After the recent upheavals and ongoing job cuts, EMI staff can at least dance about in joy counting sales of the new Coldplay album, which shifted 721,000 copies in the US alone in its first week. 288,000 of those were digital sales- an impressive 39.9%. It’s thought that iTunes may have contributed as much as 275,000 of those, and Apple has confirmed that Viva la Vida or Death And All His Friends has smashed its pre-sale and first-week digital album sale records. Meanwhile, digital sales of the band’s previous album X&Y increased by a factor of 40, helped by price promotions on etailers such as Amazon’s MP3 Store

Earlier this week, Live Nation claimed it may sign a couple more 360 deals this year with big-name artists, scotching rumours that it was going cold on the strategy. Now Fox News has some informed speculation on who those artists might be. They claim that Nickelback could be in line for a full 360 deal, while Shakira may sign some kind of deal covering concerts and CDs only

Up until now, it’s only particularly switched-on kids in the UK who’ve heard of the Jonas Brothers, but that’s changing thanks to a big promotional push ? including an innovative campaign on Bebo, which uses mobile broadcasting service Kyte. The band are being filmed with a Nokia N95, with the footage being broadcast to the Kyte channel on their Bebo profile. It certainly shows the potential for this kind of technology, since in the past producing this kind of backstage / on-tour footage required sending a camera crew around with bands.

The UK-based Digital Working Group wants the government to switch off analogue radio by 2020 - and ideally as early as 2012 - in order to get more Brits listening to DAB digital stations. The suggestion was made in an interim report by the group, which includes representatives from the BBC, Ofcom and commercial radio stations. Despite heavy promotion of DAB in the last year or two, only 17.8% of radio listening is digital in the UK at the moment. However, with a corresponding shift from analogue to digital TV, it remains to be seen if the government has the stomach to tell consumers they’ll have to replace all their radios too.