Music Ally

Napster’s joint venture with Tower Records Japan – Napster Japan – is to shut down on 31 May, with the company saying the reason is its inability to switch to a DRM-free model there.

Billboard suggests that Japanese labels are highly resistant to such a switch, but points out too that Napster Japan isn’t thought to have signed up significant numbers of subscribers. “One of Napster’s biggest problems was that major labels and certain major Japanese artists refused to license to them, resulting in the situation where their offer was not so satisfying to music fans,” says a source.

It’s an interesting time for Japan. Recently, RIAJ figures showed that digital growth has slowed right down there. And while elsewhere in the world subscription-based models are being hailed as the next big growth area (admittedly in streaming rather than Napster-style download variants), it seems Japanese rightsowners aren’t sold on the idea.

This week sees the annual CES show in Las Vegas, showcasing the latest, hottest and often barmiest new consumer technologies. As ever, music is present and correct. And one of the themes emerging already is the coming spread of streaming music beyond web and mobile to new platforms.

Two announcements to chew over. First, Samsung unveiled Samsung Apps last night, which will provide an iPhone-esque applications store for its new range of connected HDTVs and Blu-ray players.

Developers will be able to make downloadable applications for these devices that connect to web services. The first free apps will debut in spring, followed by paid apps in the summer.

(more…)

Napster CEO Chris Gorog and president Brad Duea have both left the company, after their positions were axed in a bout of restructuring by parent firm Best Buy. Gorog had claimed his departure was voluntary – he’s setting up his own company to “explore new opportunities”.

The person now in charge appears to be Christopher Allen, who’ll take the job title of General Manager. The timing was strange, coming the same day Napster launched its Napster Access initiative, which opens up its APIs to third-party developers, letting them integrate the music service into their own sites.

It remains to be seen what Best Buy’s plans are to revitalise Napster, whose thunder has been stolen in recent years by streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

In the fourth part of our series looking back at the Decade of Digital (read part one on 2000, part two on 2001 and part three on 2002 published earlier this week) we examine 2003: the year that US labels started legal actions against individuals and the year that the iTunes music store launched for the PC.

Sign up for a free two-week trial to Music Ally and get access to all our past reports and bulletins plus a suite of research tools including market data, a deal tracker and an analyst forecast tracker. In the most recent PDF Report you can find a rundown of 2009’s big events plus an extensive timeline detailing the key digital music happenings of the past ten years.

And continue reading after the jump to take a look back at the year 2003, as we reported it at the time.

(more…)

Music Ally has been studying the intersection between entertainment and technology since 2000, publishing reports throughout that time. But now that we’re fewer than two weeks from the start of a new decade, Music Ally has taken some time to reflect on the past ten years – a decade that will forever be remembered as the era when digital entertainment went mainstream.

Since 2003, all subscribers to the full Music Ally service have been able to search our archives of news, insight and analysis. Today, as part of a series in which we excerpt the most fascinating digital music events of the years 2000-2008. we unearth some of our reports from the year 2000.  

Sign up for a free two-week trial to Music Ally and get access to all our past reports and bulletins plus a suite of research tools including market data, a deal tracker and an analyst forecast tracker. In the most recent PDF Report you can find a rundown of 2009’s big events plus an extensive timeline detailing the key digital music happenings of the past ten years.

And continue reading after the jump to take a look back at the year 2000, as we reported it at the time.

(more…)

Napster has announced the launch of a new version of its Napster Unlimited service in the UK, offering unlimited streaming music plus five MP3s to keep every month, for a monthly subscription fee of £5.

The service provides streaming access to Napster’s eight-million strong catalogue, and the company claims it will offer many tracks that rivals don’t. The service can be accessed from any computer, PC or Mac, and will include playlists, ad-free radio stations and recommendations. Mobile is also tied in – users can preview and download MP3s from the mobile website, with backup MP3 files sent to their PCs too.

The launch isn’t a complete surprise, as Napster launched a $5 version in the US in May this year. However, its launch in the UK comes against a backdrop of competition from Spotify’s new offline mode, Nokia’s Comes With Music, and the soon-to-launch unlimited services from ISPs BSkyB and Virgin Media.

Napster will be promoting the new service in Carphone Warehouse stores around the UK, offering customers a one-month free trial. Both Napster and Carphone Warehouse are subsidaries of US retail chain Best Buy, so this is one of the first examples of them working together in this way.

In his new book Appetite For Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash Of The Record Industry In The Digital Age, Rolling Stone business reporter Steve Knopper frames the last 30 years of digital music against a backdrop of fear, ignorance and big bucks, to present a compelling narrative. We caught up with him to find out more. (more…)

The planned acquisition of The Pirate Bay by Global Gaming Factory X continues to go from strange to stranger. Now the company is telling bloggers that it received a bid of $10 million from former Napster CEO John Fanning, which was rejected, but is still considering a follow-up offer of $2 million investment in the site.

What’s more, GGFX claims to have received an informal bid of $16 million for The Pirate Bay from an unnamed Russian company, which it’s also turned down. We’re puzzled as to why the company is revealing this information now, when its own acquisition of the infamous torrent site has yet to be completed.

There are also more legal clouds ahead for The Pirate Bay’s original co-founders. They’ve announced an appeal against a Dutch court’s ruling that they must block access to all users in the Netherlands, with fines to be levied if they don’t.

Meanwhile, Italian music industry body FIMI and anti-piracy organisation FPM have announced plans to file a $1.4 million lawsuit against The Pirate Bay. The suit was sparked by the Pirate Bay acquisition announcement, and the desire on the part of FIMI and FPM not to see the site’s founders profit.

Connected hi-fi maker Sonos says it’s not planning to support Spotify any time soon, but that’s due to technical issues rather than a point of principle. “The way they offer the content isn’t easy for us to be able to push that out to the thousands of controllers and systems we have in the market,” says co-founder Thomas Cullen, whose company already supports Napster, Last.fm and Deezer on its systems. It’s because Spotify’s API isn’t as open as rivals like Last.fm, so a company like Sonos would need a dedicated app on every device. Is this a big problem for Spotify? Not right now, but if at some point it decides it needs to integrate with home music systems, it seems logical that it’ll open out its API to do so.

BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor has penned a column for BBC News Online reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the original Napster, admitting that the music industry should have embraced Napster rather than fought it.

“I, for one, regret that we weren’t faster in figuring out how to create a sustainable model for music on the internet,” he writes (before shifting the blame back to “formidable hurdles” faced in 1999). He also says that “the music business is now widely recognised as leading the creative sector in redefining itself for the digital age”, although cynics may point out that perhaps redefining its licensing models for the digital age needs a bit more work.

Even so, he ends on a positive note: “The invention of Napster and all that has followed may soon deliver its greatest legacy – a renaissance in artist creativity for the digital age.”