Music Ally

Orange is launching its big-budget marketing campaign for its new Monkey mobile music service today, kicking off with TV ads around Friends, Hollyoaks and Ugly Betty.

The ad takes the form of a pseudo weather report, pretending that genres of music are sweeping the UK (rock sweeping the north, etc etc). Which sounds a bit cheesy, but here’s the quite-interesting thing: the ads will be updated every couple of weeks to use real data from Monkey users’ listening habits. There’ll be an online version that’s updated every day, too.

The campaign also takes in contests on broadcast partner Channel 4’s various channels, starting with VIP tickets to see La Roux play Paris in early November. Outdoor ads and flyposters (hang on, aren’t flyposters illegal?) will also be plugging the Monkey playlists of La Roux, Lady GaGa and Tinchy Stryder, ensuring exclusive label partner UMG gets its dues.

And if that’s not enough marketing wheezes for you, Orange is promising “the UK’s first multi-artist holographic gig across five locations in the UK”. Nice. Monkey, as you may remember, is an IVR-based service where users dial in to listen to music from UMG acts, while building their own playlists on the online version.

MTV has guaranteed a minimum royalties payment of $10 million to Beatles rightsholders for its The Beatles: Rock Band game, which comes out next week – but if it sells as expected, the payments will top $40 million.

“The royalty rates on this are not even comparable to anything that has been done before,” Sony/ATV Music Publishing chairman Martin Bandier tells the Los Angeles Times. MTV is clearly counting on the Fab Four’s console-owning fanbase being willing to shell out for the game, which includes custom-designed instruments.

Meanwhile, MTV has launched a new initiative called Rock Band Bar Nights, to support bars holding Rock Band Nights. Participating pubs get a free five-song playable demo of the Beatles game.

And in not-necessarily-related news, Apple has confirmed that it will hold a music-focused “special event” on 9th September, the same day as The Beatles: Rock Band goes on sale – not to mention the band’s remastered back catalogue on CD. It could be co-incidence, but expect plenty of chatter about a Beatles iTunes deal in the days ahead.

(If Apple launches a Yellow Submarine iPod touch next Wednesday, remember, you heard it here first).

More doubt has been cast on Global Gaming Factory X’s chances of completing its purchase of The Pirate Bay this week as planned – by its proposed technology partner Peerialism, which it’s also due to buy.

CEO Johan Ljungberg says that last week’s shareholders meeting “gave us no direct answer at all, but based on declarations by GGF before and after the meeting, and the reporting that has taken place in recent days, we conclude that GGF will not succeed in obtaining any financing.”

He also points out that GGF’s caim that it will use its own shares as collateral for the financing will run into trouble, because trading in them is currently suspended on the Swedish Aktietorget exchange. Meanwhile, Swedish media are reporting that Global Gaming Factory X boss Hans Pandeya has had his motorbike and car seized by bailiffs, as part of his personal tax debt. Not the best start to the week, it’s fair to say.

Songbeat used to be a desktop application that let people search for music on Seeqpod and then download it to their computer. It went offline following a lawsuit from WMG, but has just returned as Songbeat 360 with much the same idea, except with its own search technology.

Yes, it’s still facilitating piracy. “Why should I pay for music when it’s available for free everywhere anyway? This is the question everyone is asking themselves today,” says CEO Claudio Fritz-Vietta in the launch blurb.

The company has no deals with labels or publishers, but says it is “open for talks” and that “whatever we earn with this we are willing to share in a fair way”. Despite a takedown policy, we sense more lawsuits will shortly be thrown at the company.

After weeks of speculation, Apple approved Spotify’s iPhone application last night – and unusually, it announced that news to journalists. Although it’s not available on the App Store at the time of writing, Apple says it’s coming “very soon”.

It’s obviously very good news for Spotify, which took a calculated risk in releasing a video demo of the app and giving journalists hands-on previews several weeks ago, when it still didn’t know if the app would be approved.

The app is its first move into mobile, and will be an important weapon in its battle to persuade more of its free users to upgrade to the premium version of the service, which costs £9.99 a month. The hooplah around the iPhone version will also benefit take-up of the Android and Series 60 versions when they come out, too.

The approval is, obviously, good news for iPhone and iPod touch-owning Spotify users – at least, the ones who are either paying already or are happy to upgrade. As we explained in our hands-on preview, the application is really impressive: slick, easy to use, and with a playlist-caching feature that sets it apart from the competition.

However, the approval is also good news for those rivals, not to mention Apple itself.

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We’ve covered Rock Band Network before: due to launch in November, it will let any artist or label create downloadable tracks for MTV’s Rock Band games – as long as they can find a developer trained to use the system.

More details have emerged now: tracks will cost between $1 and $3 with artists setting the price, but free one-minute demos will also be made available, inviting players to try before they buy. Interesting, given that you can’t get demos of existing tracks in the Rock Band store.

Meanwhile, the game’s developer Harmonix will increase the number of genres available on the store, allowing artists to categorise their tunes as speed metal or rockabilly, among other new additions. It’s a fairly big deal, this network – right now Rock Band is a closed store, with Harmonix only able to create a handful of new downloads every week.

Opening it up will vastly increase the number of tracks available, and help artists to make use of this new distribution channel for their music.

Big news tonight: Spotify’s official iPhone app will soon be available on the App Store, after Apple confirmed that it has been approved. The app was submitted several weeks ago, and has been the subject of much speculation since then.

“The current status as of right now is it’s been approved and we hope to add the app to the more than 65,000 apps on the app store very soon,” an Apple spokesperson tells MocoNews. “We’ve been in constant communication working with the developer and have already notified Spotify that the app will be in the app store very soon.”

It’s good news for Spotify, as the app requires a premium subscription to be used – meaning it could spark an uplift in users upgrading to the company’s paid service. The approval will also raise cheers at RealNetworks, which is submitting a Rhapsody app for approval this week. And it’s good news for iPhone users, as the app is rather spiffing.

Swedish firm Global Gaming Factory X says its purchase of The Pirate Bay WILL go ahead, having secured the approval of the company’s shareholders. This, despite investors in the deal withdrawing their backing in recent days.

CEO Hans Pandeya told a press conference that it will take 7-10 days for the deal to complete, and that “when the domain name comes over to us, at that moment it will be a legal site.” This may raise eyebrows, given that earlier this week, GGF’s proposed technology partner Peerialism said it had not been paid, nor had it started the necessary preparatory work.

Pandeya seems undaunted: PaidContent reports that he’s still claiming that GGF is “very close to an agreement with a major music company… one of the world’s largest”. Meanwhile, GGF’s shares remain suspended from the Swedish Aktietorget exchange pending a disciplinary committee meeting to decide whether to delist the company – which could prove an obstacle for the acquisition.

Still, GGF has the green light to proceed. Now it’s just got to sort those rights…

Today is the self-imposed deadline for Global Gaming Factory to complete its acquisition of The Pirate Bay. Is it going to happen? The omens aren’t promising, to say the least.

Swedish exchange Aktietorget, on which GGF is listed, has announced plans for a disciplinary hearing to decide whether the company should be delisted after failing yesterday to prove that it had the necessary funds to complete its purchase of the file-sharing site.

“After a meeting with the company on August 26th Aktietorget has concluded that the company can not be considered to have the capability to inform shareholders in a correct, relevant and reliable manner,” read a statement from Aktietorget, translated by Swedish news site TheLocal.

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Forget the rumours about Spotify and Facebook for a minute: how about Spotify and Twitter? No, there’s no merger on the cards, but the streaming music service is introducing a Twitter sharing feature in the new version of its desktop client.

Right-clicking on any song, then selecting the Share to option will now offer a choice of publishing details about that track to Twitter, as well as Delicious and Facebook. Presumably in the form of a Spotify link so your followers/friends can open it up.

It’s a simple feature, but this kind of sharing is increasingly popular for any service looking to build word-of-mouth buzz, so it’s good to see it in there. Plenty of our Twitter contacts are already manually tweeting links to Spotify songs, so this just makes the process a bit quicker.