Music Ally

Every morning, Music Ally subscribers are sent our daily email bulletin, offering a snapshot of news, analysts and rumours from the last 24 hours. We’re sharing today’s for free on this blog, to give an idea of what subscribers get in their inboxes by 9.30am GMT. If you’re interested in subscribing, you can sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Read on for today’s Bulletin, and do pass this link on to any colleagues or contacts who  you think would be interested too.

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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.

Are console gamers hot for streaming music? The omens are certainly promising from Microsoft’s launch of Last.fm on its Xbox 360 console.

It only went live last week, but already more than one million new users have signed up for Last.fm via the console – apparently the biggest growth spurt for the site since it first launched in 2002. More than 120 million minutes of music have been streamed by Xbox 360 users in the last week too.

Meanwhile, Last.fm has separately announced the launch of its BlackBerry application, adding to its existing apps on other smartphones.

Last.fm is to take over four of CBS’ HD broadcast stations in the US: in New York, LA, Chicago and San Francisco. The radio stations will broadcast a mix of music based on the weekly charts on the Last.fm website, along with live performances and interviews from dedicated studios in New York.

The new station (all four get the same mix) will also be accessible through the Last.fm website, as well as CBS Radio and Yahoo Music. “It is the flip side of what usually happens,” CBSi Music Group boss David Goodman tells PaidContent. “In most cases, a media property becomes a website last, but in this case, it’s a site that becomes an over-the-air property.”

This isn’t just about a nifty way to get music mixes for HD radio stations, though. It’s all about raising Last.fm’s profile in the US, as Goodman admits. “Its peers have been more aggressive and HD radio is a good platform to help get that started.”

UK design and usability agency ExperienceLab recently completed a piece of independent research into online music services, rating four of the key players in the UK for downloading, streaming, organising, discovering and sharing music.

Assistant consultant David Loughlin shared a topline summary with Music Ally, including some of ExperienceLab’s tips for best practice when running a music service. We thought you might find it of interest, so it’s reproduced below.

“ONLINE MUSIC SERVICES USER EXPERIENCE – AUGUST 2009

Introduction

The growth of online music services has changed the way that people discover, buy, organise and listen to music. The way that services support these activities plays a key role in their success. At ExperienceLab, we carry out experience design and usability research to help clients produce simple and satisfying products and services.

With Virgin, Sky and BT set to launch online music services in the coming months, we decided to take a look at the user experience of some of the key players in the UK market. This article presents a summary of what we found and offers some usability tips for designers and developers working in this competitive market.

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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.”

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?

Universal Music Group has agreed a licensing deal to make thousands of its music videos available through Last.fm, on-demand. UMG and its artists will get an undisclosed fee every time a video is streamed using the service, although as per our report last week, it remains to be seen if Last.fm is pulling in the necessary ad revenues to fund these licensing deals. “We want to offer a video library that rivals our unparalleled music catalogue, as we work towards Last.fm becoming the only place you need to go for all music-related content,” says co-founder Martin Stiksel.

There may be trouble ahead for Last.fm, as the major labels use its acquisition by CBS to exert pressure over its commercial terms. Warner Music Group has just pulled its music from Last.fm’s free music streaming service, with a source telling Billboard that its compensation rates were completely out of whack with rivals such as Imeem and MySpace Music. Co-incidentally (or not), WMG has equity stakes in both those rivals, but not Last.fm. The latter’s parent company CBS says negotiations are ongoing to get WMG’s catalogue back on the service.