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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Last year, our 200 Digital Music Startups of 2008 blog post went down a storm, so naturally we thought we’d repeat it for 2009. We’ve changed the format though: it’s in alphabetic order this time.

Some caveats to cover our backs. The list is based on startups we’ve covered for the first time in the Music Ally Daily Bulletin this year. It’s not a list of the best or most successful companies/services/sites – it’s a snapshot of what people were launching this year, or talking about launching (a few, like Rdio and Kik, won’t go live till the new year). Some are already defunct.

We think it highlights some interesting trends. Like all the sites springing up to do music stuff with Twitter. Or the huge interest in building communities around live music. Or more user-friendly torrent sites. Innovative mobile apps, legal music search engines, web games… As we said, it’s a snapshot.

What’s that? You launched a music-related startup or service this year and it isn’t on here? Please post a comment and tell us about it – this post will be updated regularly over the coming weeks with people we’ve missed. If you’re on the list but have changed tack or added major new features, please also let us know in a comment, and we’ll reflect that too.

Obligatory plug: we wrote about all these firms in our Daily Bulletin, alongside news about industry trends, digital marketing campaigns, legal/licensing developments and all things digital music. You can sign up for a free two-week trial to see how it works.

Anyway, enough preamble: read on for the startups! And for sharing purposes, we’ve turned it into a Scribd document, which is embedded at the foot of the post. And yes, we do know a more accurate title would be ‘The 9 to Z…’

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We’re conducting a survey on digital music marketing, and would love to hear your views. If you have a few minutes spare, please take our survey. As an incentive, we’ll be giving away an iPod touch as an early Christmas present to one lucky entrant.

It’s one entry per person, obviously, but if you have colleagues who handle digital marketing, please do forward this link onto them too. It’s open to artists, managers, labels, publishers, promoters, PRs and other relevant jobs that don’t have to start with the letter ‘P’…

Last month saw Music Ally packing our bags for Bogota for the second annual Resonancia Colombia conference. One of the keynote sessions saw Domino Recording Company director John Dyer take the stage for an interview, conducted by our own Paul Brindley.

He talked about the strategy and history of one of the UK’s most successful independent labels, including the success of bands like Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand. Watch it above for the full shebang.

Music Ally and Midem have extended the deadline for the MidemNet Lab initiative until Friday 6th November.

The initiative will showcase the talents of 15 of the world’s most innovative digital music start-ups as part of Midem which takes place in Cannes, France from 23-27 January 2010. The winning companies will each win a free pass and be invited to present their businesses throughout the whole event.

But entries MUST be received by no later than 12pm Friday 6th November. For full details on the initiative including judges and entry criteria, click here.

Google Wave! It’s The Future! Convergent Communication 3.0! The bleeding zeitgesty edge of real-time innovation! But, er, what exactly IS it, and what potential does it have – if any – for artists, labels and the music industry?

I’ve been puzzling over this since Google Wave was first announced earlier this year. Now it’s launched in beta, with Google having sent out the first 100,000 invites for the service, allowing those people to invite others.

There isn’t much specific information online about Google Wave and music, apart from this fairly brief Hypebot post. However, there are quite a few articles talking about what Google Wave means for brands, which offer ideas that can be translated to the music industry.

With those as the basis (and properly referenced and linked to), I’ve tried to put together a brief Google Wave primer. Read on, and do please post a comment if you have views or ideas on the subject.

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Last month, Music Ally hosted a couple of sessions at the Reeperbahn Campus conference in Hamburg, including one on the crossover between music and gaming. Embedded above is our introductory presentation outlining ten current trends in music games.

It’s very much a summary, and bullet-point focused (you miss out on the rambling commentary, which may be a good or bad thing depending on your point of view). Anyway, we thought we’d post it here.

Music Ally is looking for a young, passionate digital marketing executive for a role which could be either full time or part time.

Those applying must have relevant label or agency experience in implementing digital campaigns and have excellent communication and writing skills. This newly created role will involve writing about the subject as well as campaign implementation.

Salary is negotiable depending upon experience. Send CVs to jobs@musically.com, or call us on +44 (0) 207 420 4320 for more information.

Music Ally’s sister research company The Leading Question has revealed that most UK music fans are still happier buying a CD than downloading, The 1,000 strong face to face survey of UK music fans showed that nearly three quarters (73%) of music fans were still happier buying CDs rather than downloading.

The dominance of the CD was still high even amongst the teens with two thirds (66%) preferring CDs to downloads. CDs are also far and away the most preferred format for listening to music with nearly twice as many fans listening to CDs every day (59%) compared with MP3 players (32%).

The research also showed that even the most digitally advanced music fans continue to buy CDs, with little evidence that digital music consumption is simply replacing physical consumption.

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Music Ally’s sister consumer research company The Leading Question has released data from its fourth annual Speakerbox survey of UK music fans showing a drop of a third in regular music filesharing amongst UK teenagers.

For the first time the survey also showed a higher percentage of fans regularly purchasing downloads (19%) compared to obtaining tracks from file sharing (17%). The volume of tracks obtained for free compared to purchased tracks had also narrowed from 4:1 in Dec 2007 to 2:1 in Jan 2009 when the face to face survey of over 1,000 music fans was carried out.

We think the positive figures represent both greater takeup of legal streaming services among teens – in particular YouTube – and other competing ways of finding music for free such as CD burning and Bluetooth. Nearly twice as many teens (31%) stream music every day compared with most music fans (18%).

However, the fact that UK teens are using YouTube as a legal source of music jars with the fact that YouTube UK has removed all premium music videos due to a dispute with PRS for Music. Perhaps this research will provide an extra incentive for the pair to resolve their licensing disagreement.