Music Ally

Earlier this week, the RIAA published a blog post slamming the news that the Hope For Haiti Now charity album was freely available on BitTorrent sites.

“The posting highlights a truly ugly side of P2P piracy – the undermining of humanitarian fundraising efforts via online theft of the “Hope for Haiti Now” compilation. So much for the notion that illegal downloading (”sharing”) is an effort to help advance the plight of artists.”

But reading that, I wondered just how popular the album is on file-sharing networks. It might be available, but how many people are downloading it? So I asked someone best placed to answer that question – Eric Garland of BigChampagne, which tracks activity on these networks.

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US music purchases rose 2.1% in 2009 according to Nielsen SoundScan – 1.54 billion albums, singles, videos and digital tracks. However, overall album sales were down 8.5% to 490 million, although digital album sales rose 16.1% to 76.4 million for the year.

Digital now accounts for 40% of all US music purchases. UMG took a 30.2% share of the overall album market, followed by Sony Music (28.6%), Warner Music Group (20.6%) and EMI (9.2%), with indie labels taking an 11.5% share.

Black Eyed Peas had the biggest-selling digital single with Boom Boom Pow (4.76 million units), while Lady Gaga had the top digital album with Fame’s 461,000 units.

2009 was the year of the App Store, as Apple passed the two-billion downloads milestone for its store, which now has more than 100,000 apps available. The year also saw labels and artists jumping onto the bandwagon with their own branded iPhone apps.

The most successful, like Smule’s I Am T-Pain (pictured right) sold tens of thousands of copies a day. It’s only fair to point out that the vast majority sank down the app charts fairly quickly though – proving that iPhone apps provide a return on investment for the music industry wasn’t a huge priority this year.

Even so, there was plenty of creativity being put to work. To highlight it, we’ve chosen a selection of 40 branded music apps that we thought were innovative this year – which were all covered in the Music Ally Daily Bulletin.

They’re all based on artists, labels and other music brands – the list doesn’t include apps for music services like Spotify or Pandora, nor does it include pure music games like Rock Band or Tap Tap Revenge (although one of the latter’s artist-branded spin-offs is included).

Read on for a snapshot of what was released this year, and let us know your thoughts on the best and worst of what the App Store had to offer. Oh, and yes, we’ve put them in a rough order reflecting how much we liked them, starting with the best.

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UK streaming music service we7 has revealed its most popular songs and artists of 2009, with Cheryl Cole’s Fight For This Love topping the former chart, and Lady Gaga heading the latter.

In fact, the most-played songs chart is dominated by urban and pop music, with no indie or rock artists making the top ten. An interesting trend that’s reflected in the top ten artists chart too. Both lists are published at the bottom of this post.

“The core of our user base loves to hear music they already know from the official chart and radio playlists, and the most played songs and artists of 2009 reflect this,” says senior VP of digital music Clive Gardiner. “At the same time, many we7 users want music that’s not so mainstream, and they play hundreds of thousands of other songs each week from indie, new and even unsigned artists, many following promotions and recommendations by we7’s music team.”

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YouTube and Last.fm have published year-end charts showing which artists were the most popular on their services this year.

Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent topped YouTube’s overall chart with more than 120 million views. For pure videos, Pitbull’s I Know You Want Me racked up 82 million views, followed by two Miley Cyrus vids: The Climb (64m) and Party in the U.S.A. (54m).

Meanwhile, Lady GaGa ruled the roost on Last.fm – her album The Fame was scrobbled 18.5 million times, followed by The Killers’ Day & Age (12.5m) and Lily Allen’s It’s Not Me, It’s You (10.5m). The hottest new artists were The xx, Fever Ray and La Roux.

Maybe they should team up in 2010 to take on the world. Hey, remember that MTV Awards when Madonna and Britney… Actually, no. NO.

There’s a story going round this week, originating from the Swedish media, that Lady Gaga only earned $167 from a million streams of her Poker Face single on Spotify. Not a great advert for the service – in fact, it ties into earlier grumbles from artists about the money they’re making from Spotify plays.

The only problem with the story? It’s not true. Well, that’s what Spotify says, anyway. The company has issued a statement to Music Ally slapping down the rumour, which focused on payments made to the star by Swedish collecting society STIM.

“Firstly, any payment to STIM would only represent a fraction of the payments rights holders receive and only for music played in one country (in this case Sweden) as we pay not only collecting societies, but also publishers and the record company to play their music,” says a spokesperson.

“Secondly, the figure (unrepresentative as it is) is from a short period just after our launch last year, way before we’d established ourselves as a music service and built up a large user base. Specific payments are of course confidential, but this is certainly wide of the mark.”

So there you have it from the horse’s mouth. How much is Lady Gaga really making off streams of her songs? Heaven knows.

Forget Dr Dre and his branded headphones. Now Lady Gaga has got in on the act, albeit through a deal with Monster, the same company responsible for Dre’s earcans.

They’re launching Heartbeats by Lady Gaga, which promise to “deliver all the music the artist intended you to hear, with an incredible sonic clarity, pounding bass, and all the power demanded by today’s music”.

Which is nice. But not as good as the actual publicity quote from Gaga herself, which is worth reproducing in full:

“In the deepest hour of the night, I confess to myself three things; I would die if I was forbidden to write, forbidden to love, or forbidden to fashion. Heartbeats embody the trinity of my human-being, with one additional vow: that SOUND matters. Wear heartbeats, love each other, and celebrate the art and lifestyle of music.”

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The UK Official Charts Company has announced a Top 100 downloads of “all-time” (all-time being since its download records began in September 2004).

It’s good news for Lady Gaga, who has the top-ranked song with Poker Face (779,000 sales) as well as third-placed Just Dance (700,000).

Kings of Leon have two songs in the top five too, while Leona Lewis has two in the top ten. Recent downloads are to the fore: of the Top 100, 46 songs are from 2008 and 21 from 2009, compared to three from 2004, two from 2005, 13 from 2006 and 15 from 2007.

The Top 10 All-Time Downloads chart follows below:

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UK broadcaster the BBC has announced that Lady GaGa’s set was the most popular on its Glastonbury Festival website, attracting 1.3 million requests from users. Which at least means those 67 costume changes didn’t go unrewarded.

Lily Allen was second with 762,000 requests, followed by Blur with 538,000. During last year’s festival, the top artist Jay-Z only got 119,000 requests, so the Beeb has stepped things up this time round.

The website peaked at 229,000 daily unique users on 27 June this year, but the real hit was on digital TV, where more than 6.1 million people used red-button functionality to watch Glasto on-demand. The festival has become a key annual interactive event for the BBC, as high-profile as Wimbledon.

If you follow our buzz chart in the Music Ally Report, you’ll know that Lady GaGa has reigned supreme in recent months as the most popular artist online. At last, there’s some bad news: she was also one of the artists most often deleted from people’s Last.fm scrobbles in June.

That’s according to a top ten released by the music service, showing tracks that people played, but then deleted presumably out of embarrassment. GaGa’s Poker Face tops the chart, and she has three more tracks in the top ten.

Britney Spears has three. In fact, it’s notable that nine of the ten are by female singers (and the tenth is by Paramore, a female-fronted band). Are Last.fm’s male users a bit sensitive about their penchant for girly pop?