Music Ally

Today’s bulletin from the race to be the Christmas number one in the UK comes from digital retailer 7digital, which says Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name Of’ is outselling ‘The Climb’ by X Factor winner Joe McElderry by 2:1.

RATM’s track is top of 7digital’s chart, which CEO Ben Drury says came as something of a shock for the retailer. “The sheer volume of sales has surprised us all,” he says. “As of Thursday morning, Killing In The Name is ahead by a factor of 2:1 and has a genuine chance of making it to number one.”

The Facebook campaign backing Killing In The Name Of has been an unexpected success – cynics (including us) expected lots of the people signing up for it to not follow through and actually buy the song. However, as Drury points out: “The real proof will come when sales of the physical version of The Climb are counted.”

Last night’s press release for the MySpace Music UK launch mentioned that users would be able to buy DRM-free MP3 tracks from iTunes. Although we did twig that iTunes doesn’t sell MP3 files, we didn’t make much of it. Perhaps we should, but 7digital CEO Ben Drury has stepped in to highlight the point.

“The link to download tracks via iTunes does not offer consumers the best deal for purchasing digital music,” he says.

“Despite the claims in the press release, music purchased through iTunes is in the AAC format and not MP3. This means purchased downloads are not compatible with all music devices and are of a lower quality than the 320k MP3s we sell at 7digital.com. It is unfortunate that they are not allowing their customers to choose MP3.”

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This week saw the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, and one of the most interesting sessions involved DevelopIQ CTO James Shannon talking about his firm’s work on 7digital’s music store application for BlackBerry.

Having trousered a $100k prize earlier in the week in the BlackBerry Developer Challenge contest, he attracted a decent crowd to hear him talk about how DevelopIQ approached the project of making a music store for a mobile device.

“We’re trying to take mobile music on from where Apple left off, and get away from the PC or Mac-centric model for music,” he said. “I want to do everything on my BlackBerry, rather than sync, sideload or dock.”

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7digital has launched a new version of its BlackBerry music store app, with a bunch of new features and improvements.

It includes support for Irish users for the first time, as well as new track search, music browsing, playlist and location options. The app’s tag browsing and My Downloads status display have also been improved, while the app plays nicer with the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm.

The news co-incides with the opening of RIM’s BlackBerry Developer Conference, at which 7digital is being showcased. Version 1.1.14 of the app is live now on the BlackBerry App World.

Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek recently blogged that “we’ve admittedly not made it easy for our users to buy music. That’s an area we need to improve”.

Well, that improvement didn’t take long – Spotify is going live today with new purchasing features in its desktop application.

Music Ally got early access to see how it all works. It’s tied in with Spotify’s existing retail partner 7digital.

From today, every track on Spotify that’s also in 7digital’s catalogue will have a clear Buy button next to the track name (see pic above – click to make it larger). Albums will also have a Buy Album button below the cover artwork.

Already, this is a step up from the way buying songs previously worked – you had to right-click on a track to see if it was available to buy, before being shunted into your web browser to do the buying.

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European music retailer 7digital has launched its US store, undercutting iTunes with individual MP3 tracks selling for $0.77 and albums for $7.77. The launch ties in with the release of 7digital’s BlackBerry music store, but the company is also partnering with companies like Last.fm, Songbird and WinAmp – not to mention Spotify when that eventually launches in the US.

“By piggybacking on their reach, we can grab some meaningful market share,” says CEO Ben Drury, saying the company’s experience with Spotify in Europe indicates streaming does lead to paid downloads. “The price per unit is definitely plummeting – people will definitely spend less money on a track-by-track basis… but the volume of consumption will go up.”

iTunes is the dominant digital music retailer in the US – and even Amazon hasn’t made huge inroads into its market share. However, 7digital’s partnership-focused strategy gives it a shot at building a decent business there.

Warner Music Group has become the first major label to sign a pan-European MP3 licensing deal with digital retailer 7digital. It’ll see WMG’s catalogue of DRM-free music rolled out to 7digital’s stores in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Portugal.

Essentially, it’s an extension of existing single-country deals, though, as WMG tracks are already sold through 7digital’s stores in the UK, Ireland, Spain, France, Austria and Germany. 7digital says it’s now selling MP3s in more European countries than any of its rivals.

There are knock-on effects, too. 7digital has retail partnerships with several music services, including Spotify and Last.fm. They’ll also benefit from the deal with WMG, since they’ll be able to offer click-to-buy buttons for its artists in the countries covered by the new deal.

UPDATE: EMI has contacted Music Ally to point out that it’s had a pan-European deal with 7digital for several years, including DRM-free music.

7digital has announced a partnership with UK magazine firm Future Publishing to offer free MP3 downloads to readers of 15 of its magazines. Each reader will be allowed to download ten free songs from 7Digital’s catalogue, and retailer WHSmith is in on the deal too, providing 7digital-branded magazine stands for the participating mags.

The deal runs throughout August, and the 15 mags include music and tech titles. The full list: Guitarist, Rhythm, Windows Vista, Future Music, Total Guitar, Guitar Techniques, Windows XP, MacFormat, Classic Rock, T3, PC Answers, PC Plus, Metal Hammer, Computer Music, MacFormat Special.

“This promotion is the ideal way to reach a large consumer base who we know are keen to download MP3 music,” says 7digital CEO Ben Drury. It’ll be interesting to see what proportion of readers take up the offer – it’s got the potential to be many millions of downloads, so someone’s presumably paying big money to make it happen.

Research In Motion’s music push will soon include a dedicated BlackBerry download store, courtesy of UK firm 7Digital. It plans to launch its store in September with a catalogue of around six million songs in the US, UK, Canada, France, Italy, Germany and Spain.

Tracks will be sold as MP3s and will be downloadable over the air. Songs are expected to cost £0.79 / $0.99, and albums £7.99 / $9.99. “We see the BlackBerry application as very much an impulse thing,” says 7Digital boss Ben Drury, making it clear there’ll be no Comes With Music style unlimited service.

The store will take the form of an application, distributed through RIM’s BlackBerry App World. It raises the question of whether this is an exclusive deal, or whether other music retailers – Amazon, for example – could launch their own store apps for BlackBerry.

UK newspaper The Guardian is to host the first ever Music Hack Day this weekend, with 200 participants monkeying about with APIs provided by several online music firms.

It’s being organised by SoundCloud’s UK manager Dave Haynes, and his company will join 7Digital, BBC Music, Echo Nest, Gigulate, Last.fm, People’s Music Store and Songkick in opening their full APIs up to the attending developers. Attendees will work through the night to prototype and build new projects based on the APIs from these sites, with prizes awarded to the best examples.

“It’s time for the music industry to start working with web technologies and innovation, not against it,” says Haynes. “Instead of suing the people coming up with the most popular new music apps, we should be embracing them.”