Music Ally

With a new DRM-free music store being launched every week (seemingly), Digital Music News has an interesting article on Live Nation subsidiary Musictoday, and its plans to run MP3 download stores for artists.

The article suggests that Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and EMI have all signed licensing deals allowing Musictoday to sell MP3s on artist sites. Well, kind of - the actual deals have apparently been signed with US firm appliedSB, which will be hosting and delivering the actual downloads within those artist sites.

“We’ll be turning on sites for the artists and labels that have given us the authorisation to do so,” says appliedSB boss Todd McGee.

Yesterday, indie digital distributor The Orchard announced its third-quarter financial results, revealing a net loss of $59,000 (down from $3 million in Q3 last year), with revenues more than doubling year-on-year from $6.7 million to $14.6 million.

You can read a full transcript of the company’s analyst conference call here, but we’ve filleted out some of the key stats and quotes from CEO Greg Scholl:

- iTunes is still the company’s biggest source of revenues, followed by eMusic and then Verizon. That’s the same as Q2.

- At the end of Q3, The Orchard had $3.5 million of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, with no debt.

- Paid downloads rose 133% year-on-year to around 12 million in Q3. 61% of those tracks were downloaded at least once during the quarter, and the average number of downloads per track was 16. Meanwhile, paid streams totalled 42 million in the quarter (up 53%), with nearly 75% of the tracks being streamed at least once. However, paid downloads are still 62% of The Orchard’s revenue, while streams are only 7%.

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Today’s Financial Times has a report on EMI Music’s planned restructuring into three separate business units: new music, catalogue, and music services.

The news comes as EMI announces earnings of £59 million in the six months to the end of September, compared with a £14 million loss in the same period last year. EMI says its first-half physical recorded music sales were down 3%, although the fall was 12% in the US.

Revenues rose to £482 million, with digital revenues rising 37% to £102 million. Meanwhile, CEO Elio Leoni-Sceti says the soon-to-launch EMI.com D2C site will have “limited commercial scope” but will provide “learning value for the consumer”.

Now that’s what we call the power of virality. 80s popster Rick Astley scooped the Best Act Ever award at tonight’s MTV European Music Awards, beating off Britney Spears and U2.

And if you’re wondering why we’re writing about it, well, it just shows the power of a proper organic viral - in this case, the infamous ‘rickrolling’ clip on YouTube. It was enough to propel the mild-mannered singer back to the spotlight. Not that he was able to actually turn up and collect the award, mind. D’oh!

UK retailer HMV has soft-launched its new MP3 store today, offering tracks from Universal Music Group, EMI and various indie labels.

According to Music Week it’s got a catalogue of four million tracks, delivered as 320kbps MP3 files. It’s somewhat surprising that a retailer like HMV couldn’t get Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment on board for launch - but maybe that’s why it’s a soft launch. Single tracks start at £0.69, while albums start at £6.99.

However, it doesn’t work with the Firefox browser at the moment - the image above is what we saw when trying to access the store. Given that Firefox currently has around 20% market penetration, that’s a puzzling decision on the part of HMV, although the site does say ‘check back in the next few weeks’, so hopefully it’s being sorted.

Thankfully, we hadn’t deleted Internet Explorer, so had a nose around (see right). There’s a lot of information in there - you could say it’s a bit cluttered - but it seems to work pretty well so far.

Much depends on how (and when) HMV promotes the store to its customers, and also how the store ties in with its swizzy new next-generation stores that are launching in the UK.

New research published by comScore claims that nearly 25% of all Japanese internet users accessed the iTunes Store during August - a higher penetration rate than the US, UK, France and Germany.

However, with other stats consistently showing digital sales in Japan are dominated by mobile, comScore’s figures don’t necessarily herald a swing back to online.

Meanwhile, the company says that 40% of Japanese internet users accessed a music website in August - Yahoo Music is the most popular, followed by Sony Connect and Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

Virtual world Habbo has announced plans for its second Trax Factor virtual music festival, due to take place between 6th November and 4th December. Artists taking part include Alesha Dixon, DJ Ironik, Same Difference, The Days and Envy.

It’ll take the form of a competition between the artists, with three distinct phases. First, Habbo users will form virtual street teams to bang the gong for their favourite artist, wearing badges to show their allegiance. The second phase will involve each act visiting Habbo in avatar form to chat to their fans.

Finally, the Habbo community will vote for the best artist, with the winner due to be announced at a virtual party within the world. Around all this, there’ll be various mini-games and competitions. Habbo has been one of the more active virtual worlds in partnering with the music industry, of which the Trax Factor festival is just the latest example.

The use of music in games isn’t just about licensing, these days. A new breed of games are exploring the idea of using the music tracks already on the devices on which they’re played (whether PC, console or mobile phone) to ‘auto-generate’ in-game levels or content.

As an example, today I’ve been playing a PC game called Audiosurf, which came out late last month. It’s a PC game that costs £9.99, and is a ‘puzzle racer’. It looks a bit like Wipeout, in that it’s a futuristic-looking 3D racing game, but you have to collect coloured blocks as you zip along the various tracks.

But the interesting thing is the way it uses the music stored on your hard drive to generate unique tracks to race on - with slower tunes creating a gentle uphill ride, and faster songs creating more of a rollercoaster effect. Watch our video hands-on above, and then click below for more info on this, and similar games on other platforms.

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A recent contest inviting fans of Colombian artist Juanes to send in video cover versions was a big hit with mobile users, according to advertising agency Vidal Partnership.

30% of entries were filmed and submitted using mobile phones, rather than webcams or camcorders and computers. “Hispanics are more prone to use their phones for these things,” says Vidal boss Alberto Ferrer.

The contest was apparently a success for Sprint, which commissioned it, with monthly downloads increasing 63% during the competition, including a rise of 93% for Juanes ringback tones.

More free music, albeit of the novelty-seasonal-event kind. Bruce Springsteen gave away a free track last Friday to celebrate Halloween. It’s called `A Night With The Jersey Devil’, and Bruce even had the decency to dress up as the main character for an accompanying video (above).

Downloaders are sent to Sony BMG’s website to get the track, but entering their email address and signing up to a mailing list are entirely optional, unlike most official giveaways of this type.