Music Ally

Online leak of new U2 songs is all Bono’s fault

musically — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:10:02 +0000

The most entertaining music piracy story this week concerns the leaking of four new U2 tracks online. Why? Because the source of the leak was allegedly Bono himself. Not in the way you think, though. Apparently the frontman was playing the music loud in his South France villa, and a passerby recorded them and uploaded the tracks to YouTube. Although they’ve since been taken down, it’s perhaps a lesson to artists that even in their own (holiday) homes, they might want to keep the volume down.

Rumour: G’n'R’s Chinese Democracy to be Wal-Mart exclusive

musically — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:08:43 +0000

Sit down for this news: Guns’n'Roses might actually be preparing to release their “Chinese Democracy” album. No, really, Reports even suggest the band is at the stage of discussing exclusive distribution deals with US retailers Wal-Mart and Best Buy. A number of songs from the album have been leaked, but it’’s still likely to be a coup for whichever retailer lands the deal.

Jared Leto responds to Virgin lawsuit

musically — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:07:28 +0000

We reported yesterday on how Virgin Records is suing 30 Seconds To Mars for $30 million for alleged breach of contract. Now the band has responded with a post by its movie-star singer Jared Leto on its website. He describes the suit as “ridiculously oversized, totally unrealistic and pretty silly”, and claims that it’’s due to the band exercising a California law that says an artist can”t be bound to a record label for more than seven years. He also claims that the band are still in debt to Virgin to the tune of $1.4 million, despite selling two million albums. “Shouldn”t a record company be able to turn a profit from selling that many albums?” he says.

Grooveshark Lite music streaming service goes live

musically — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:06:10 +0000

“If Pandora had a love child with Last.fm, its name would be Grooveshark Lite,” says Mashable, about Grooveshark’’s new music streaming service. It’’s the latest personalised music service, which lets you type in a band or song, and then be served up a bunch of other tracks based on it. Users can buy tracks from Grooveshark’’s own digital music store, too. It remains to be seen how successful it is, given the problems being encountered by main rivals Pandora and Last.fm, particularly when it comes to the thorny subject of royalty payments and turning a profit.

Playlouder denies reports of UK ISP deal

musically — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:31:57 +0000

We wrote yesterday about reports that Playlouder has signed a deal with a UK ISP that will allow users to download music using peer-to-peer applications, with the ISP compensating the rightsholders. However, CEO Paul Hitchman has now labelled the reports “pure speculation” and said it has no announcement to make just yet. Which is strange, because the original speculation was based on an interview with fellow co-founder Paul Sanders, who said “We are confident that we will have something quite good to announce in the next couple of months”.

Apple now officially bigger than Google

musically — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:30:26 +0000

Financial marketwatchers have been pointing out that Apple’s market capitalisation has just reached $158.84 billion - significant, because it’s overtaken Google’s $157.23 billion. It’s more because Google’s share price has dipped than Apple doing anything spectacular, but it’ll still doubtless spur a new round of corporate willy-waving over in California.

WMG financials reveal investment in Imeem and Lala

musically — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:29:15 +0000

As a quick extra to our coverage of Warner Music Group’s latest quarterly results last week, the company’s official filing has put a number to its investments in music websites Imeem and Lala. WMG invested $15 million in the former - despite having previously sued it for copyright infringement - and $20 million in the latter.

Radiopaq launches standalone internet radio

musically — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:27:53 +0000

UK firm Radiopaq is launching a standalone internet radio device, the Rp5. It connects to Radiopaq’s website via Wi-Fi, and allows listeners to stream thousands of net radio stations from around the world, as well as including traditional FM and DAB radio tuners. Radiopaq is describing the product, which costs £250, as groundbreaking - although with Amazon UK’s `internet radio’ category listing 47 seperate products, Radiopaq has some competition. It’s trumpeting the sound quality as one selling point though - albeit this will only be as good as the quality of the actual radio streams.

Second Life bluesman scoops real-world record deal

musically — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:26:35 +0000

Nashville-based blues artist Von Johin has signed a record deal with Reality Entertainment. Not particularly interesting in itself, but the way he was discovered is. See, Johin made his name playing virtual gigs in his own venue in Second Life, where he was spotted by Reality Entertainment’s scouts. The company says he’ll continue doing that, but that his debut album will be released digitally through iTunes, Amazon and other popular music stores.

USA Today: The shape of digital, Stateside

musically — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:17:19 +0000

Shock horror, but nowadays it’s just not as fashionable simply to blame the labels for not “getting the internet”. So, as part of a series of regular features Music Ally will over the next few issues spotlight some leading North American managers to get their views on how the labels are learning to deal with the challenges of digital.

This week we spoke to Bertis Downs, manager of REM; Scott Welch, who has represented Alanis Morrissette, LeAnn Rimes, and Collective Soul among others; Terry McBride, ubiquitous manager of Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, and Sarah McLachlan.

Bertis Downs is very positive about his longstanding relationship with Warner. “They have a great team led by Ethan Kaplan. He’s very young - under 30 - and very much a techie. Warner realize their entire company - not just the new media department – but the whole company now has to embrace this.”

In July 2007 REM played a five night residency in Dublin as part of its working rehearsal for the 2008 album Accelerate. The residency formed the hub of most of the pre-release digital activity for the band. “I’d been reading an article in the New Yorker, and it gave us the idea to do a Wikipedia for the show,” says Downs. “We allowed people to post messages, meeting places, maps of the city … then they started posting their own blogs and trading MP3s and posting YouTube videos. …the record company was totally cool with it. Two years ago they would have freaked out.”

The resulting site, www.remdublin.com subsequently formed the hub of the band’s online activity and Downs claims that through the fan activity REM had seven of the top 100 videos on YouTube that week, in spite of the fact that often it comprised ‘unfinished material’.

Ubercool French video producer Vincent Moon was brought in to develop official videos around the shows, which took in the form of ninety different vignettes which were uploaded to www.ninetynights.com. “That got the attention of the hardcore fans,” says Downs.

Moon was then hired to create the first video. “He and Michael [Stipe] said it would be cool to see all the different camera angles - so we threw everything up and let people mix their own.” Moon has, according to Downs, been so impressed with the results, that one remixer in Brooklyn has already been invited to work with Moon on future projects

The net result has been that fans felt involved, the band created a wealth of peripheral content, and the label has been fully involved, driving the project in some areas. “The key is trying to figure out the balance between promotional activity and what you can monetise.”

Talking of monetisation (and YouTube), Nettwerk boss Terry McBride agrees that the video sharing site is a key focus of attention when it comes to digital but innovation is being hampered in his view by the majors’ lack of transparency. “Nobody knows what the deal is with the artists from YouTube. The majors have done deals with YouTube but we just haven’t seen the implementation of those deals with the artists. If none of the artists know what the deal is, there’s no real incentive to do innovative stuff with YouTube.”

YouTube is part of a bigger problem, according to McBride. “So much of this is just not transparent. It’s really still the Wild West out there. Advances are being handed out; in some cases the labels are taking equity stakes, but how is this going to be shared with the artists?” As for the positive, the most significant sign of a change in attitudes, according to McBride, is the success of Amazonmp3. “I think the most impressive thing they’ve done is to allow Amazon to go from nothing to about 8-10% of the digital market. But the best thing about this is that this has taken place without taking sales off iTunes. Our iTunes sales are just as high as they were before Amazon’s launch.”

Alanis Morrisette manager, Scott Welch, confirms that attitudes have been changing. “The majors are starting to really embrace digital. I think they’re more open-minded now. You can go to them with ideas and concepts and they’re more receptive these days. The old business was “we’re the label and digital is not going to be that successful and let’s sue them.” The digital business is the best marketing machine ever invented for music. Now you can niche market, target market and the CPU (Cost Per Unit) for marketing goes down. The labels have finally figured out that nobody buys a record because of a label. They’ve realised that the future of the business is the relationship between the artist and their fanbase and that’s where all marketing and strategy needs to go.”

This article was published in Music Ally´s Report - Issue 197