Music Ally

With the debate around new digital music business models in full swing, what does The Pirate Bay have to contribute? Co-founder Peter Sunde took part (via video-conference) in a panel at the SXSW Festival this weekend, and gave his views.

“What should actually happen is people should come up with smaller companies and go more directly towards the customers, and do crowd-funding or try alternative methods instead of the old ideas of how to fund things.” Which is interesting, given the current industry debate around investment in music, and alternative sources to the traditional label deal.

Sunde also laughed off last year’s attempted purchase of The Pirate Bay by Swedish firm Global Gaming Factory X. “It kind of died when it turned out the Global Gaming Factory people were more weird than the Pirate Bay people.”

The four defendants in the Pirate Bay trial have a date for their appeal against their conviction last April for copyright infringement.

The appeal will kick off on 28 September, and is due to finish on 15 October – although that could change if either the defendants or plaintiffs object. This may well happen, as one of the defendants, Peter Sunde, has already criticised the date because it’s just after the Swedish parliamentary elections.

Yes, he’s tweeted his response: “case set to be heard AFTER Swedish election. We’re only available before the election. Who said this case is NOT political? LOL!”

An amendment to the UK’s Digital Economy Bill that could force ISPs to block access to copyright-infringing websites has been slammed by the heads of the four largest UK ISPs, along with Google, Facebook, eBay and Yahoo.

The joint letter to the Financial Times claims that “the amendment seeks to address the legitimate concerns of rights-holders but would have unintended consequences that far outweigh any benefits it could bring”. The letter doesn’t pull its punches:

“Blocking access as envisaged by this clause would both widely disrupt the internet in the UK and elsewhere and threaten freedom of speech and the open internet, without reducing copyright infringement as intended. To rush through such a controversial proposal at the tail end of a parliament, without any kind of consultation with consumers or industry, is very poor lawmaking.”

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EMI has lost the court case in which Pink Floyd argued that the label was not allowed to sell the band’s albums ‘unbundled’ on digital music stores – the latest blow in what’s turning into a nightmare week for the label.

High Court Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt agreed with Pink Floyd that a clause in their contract with EMI expressly prohibited the label from selling their albums in “any configuration other than the original configuration” – as their lawyers put it – which includes allowing people to buy individual tracks on iTunes and other stores.

The contract was signed in 1999, and EMI had argued that the clause only covered physical recordings. Now the label is faced with the prospect of removing the band’s back catalogue from digital stores, or at least negotiating new deals for the albums to be sold unbundled.

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We apologise in advance for what reading this story will do to your internal jukebox. Fans of Ultravox are trying to get the band’s ‘Vienna’ single to number one later this month in the UK via an online campaign.

The aim is to make amends for the fact that the song was kept off the top spot in 1981 by novelty song ‘Shaddap You Face’ by Joe Dolce. Predictably, then, the original recording of the latter tune is being released for the first time digitally to go head-to-head (again) with Ultravox.

It comes out on 16th March, and YES, there is a Facebook page, as well as a dedicated ‘Battle For Britain’ website to promote Dolce’s cause. Although given that his song has sold more than six million physical copies over the years, the plucky underdog stance may wear a bit thin.

Either this will be the next big digitally-fuelled chart battle, or both tracks will debut in the low eighties before sinking without trace. Place your bets now…

A study published by the University of Rennes makes the controversial claim that online piracy has actually risen by 3% since the new three-strikes law came into force there.

Or to be specific: the piracy rate of people who were illegally downloading before the new law is 3% higher now. We’re a bit puzzled about the details as reported by TorrentFreak though – it says pirates have shifted their activity to ’streaming services’ as well as online storage services like Rapidshare.

Pirate streaming services? Maybe they mean unlicensed sites, because if pirates were switching to licensed streaming services, that would surely be a positive thing? Usage of traditional P2P services did drop by 17.1% between September and December last year though.

What was that about only labels investing in music? Charlotte Church has turned to music investment fund Power Amp Music to raise £2 million to record and market her next album, due out in the Autumn.

Power Amp will take a 50% share of the gross revenue from Church’s recordings, publishing, merchandising and live performances for a ’set period’.

Church says the deal “provides me with a financial commitment equivalent to that of a major record company but with a much greater degree of control and ownership over my career”.

Her last album was released through Sony BMG, and although it went platinum, Church has spent the last couple of years focusing on a combination of TV work and motherhood rather than music.

Our first reaction to the news, though, is that £2 million seems like a lot of money – especially as one of the big points in yesterday’s IFPI report was that it takes a $1 million investment to break a big pop album in the US and UK. With that in mind, what’s Charlotte going to blow £2 million on around a single album?

Sparks flew in court yesterday in the dispute between Pink Floyd and their label EMI. The case focuses on how online royalties for the band’s back catalogue have been calculated, as well as the way albums have been sold ‘unbundled’ as individual tracks.

The band’s contract with EMI was last renegotiated in 1998-99, before digital sales took off, at a time when – in QC Robert Howe’s words – “It was unclear whether record companies would be selling direct to the consumer or through retailers”.

It’s the unbundling aspect that has irked the band most, seemingly. “It is a matter of fact that the defendant has been permitting individual tracks to be downloaded online and that therefore they have been allowing albums not to be sold in their original configuration,” said Howe, suggesting that this is against the terms of the band’s contract. A ruling is expected on Thursday.

It sounds like an obvious thing to say, right? Of course labels invest in music and the artists who make it: that’s the definition of a record label.

Except in recent months, there have been claims that this is changing – and particularly that major labels are unwilling to invest as much in as many artists, preferring to keep their powder dry for a bigger push behind a few select acts every year, while focusing more attention on making money from their back catalogues.

At last week’s Music 4.5 conference in London, several speakers mentioned the idea of an ‘investment gulf’ in the music industry, with UK Music boss Feargal Sharkey announcing that his organisation is taking steps to combat it by courting investment from external sources.

The IFPI has published a report today that aims to counter the idea that labels aren’t investing in artists though, claiming that labels of all sizes invest around $5 billion a year in music talent – 30% of their sales revenues. It goes on to point out that there are more than 4,000 artists on major label rosters today, and claims one in four artists on all labels were signed in the last 12 months.

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Rhino’s David Dorn – just appointed as SVP of global sales and digital – says he doesn’t see subscription music services as a threat to WMG’s catalogue division.

“My feeling is that there are a lot of consumers out there who are going to choose various paths. Some are going to spend money or take ownership of things. When they buy and take ownership of it, they’re really satisfied, like the handmade collectibles. They are also going to be people who say ownership is not for me. Our job to figure out how do we monetize these experiences.”

Dorn’s words could be seen as diverging from the opinions of WMG boss Edgar Bronfman, although it’s fair to say that Bronfman is a big supporter of subscriptions – it’s just free streaming that he’s none too keen on.

He also says sales of the initial batch of iTunes LPs was “very successful”, although he points out that a quirk in iTunes means they don’t always show ahead of the standard editions, which may be costing sales.