Music Ally

O2 and AT&T are catching some heat following the announcement of Apple’s new iPhone 3G S handset on Monday night. Why? Because people who bought an iPhone 3G 12 months ago aren’t eligible for an upgrade when the new model goes on sale later this month.

To get one, both operators are saying they’ll have to pay up the rest of their existing contract first – adding $200 / £200 to the price of the 3G S. Spleen is being vented, and online petitions are being signed.

On the one hand, the operators aren’t being particularly nasty – you can’t break an 18-month contract just because a sexy new phone turns up. On the other, though, they’ve managed to enrage many of their early iPhone adopters – and the affair shows the mismatch between Apple’s 12-month product cycle and the operators’ 18/24-month contracts.

Fans who registered to buy Michael Jackson tickets have received a follow-up email inviting them to vote for their ideal setlist at his 50 O2 gigs by constructing a playlist on the official AEG site.

However, it’s a bit limited – while you can pick songs and move them around, there are no streams or even 30-second clips to listen to. Perhaps they’re assuming that fans can remember all the songs without a clip to help – or more realistically, perhaps they don’t want to pay the streaming licensing fees.

Also, bafflingly, there’s no quickfire option to say `All the old stuff, nothing after Bad, especially not Earth Song’. And no Jackson 5 tracks are included either, so you can’t request ABC or I Want You Back. Come on AEG, this needs a bit more lateral thinking…

It’s all gone a bit Pete Tong between promoter AEG Live and secondary ticketing site Viagogo. The latter had some kind of official relationship with AEG for the 50 Michael Jackson gigs at The O2 – it was linked to by the official MichaelJacksonLive website, and around 10% of the seats for each night were set aside to be sold as “official premium” tickets.

Except now AEG has won a court order forcing Viagogo to agree not to offer or provide its tickets to any other resellers. Apparently Viagogo sent an email to other agents offering to cut bulk deals on inventory. “We went nuclear” says AEG Live boss Randy Phillips. “It was not our intent to sell to brokers”.

No, only approved brokers, clearly.

Sounds like an outlandish headline, sure, but we were chatting to a promoter the other day, and they made a throwaway remark that Michael Jackson probably made more money in three days last week from ticket sales for his gigs at The O2 than he did from his Thriller album.

Their working went thus: Thriller sold 45 million albums worldwide, and according to the promoter, Jacko would have got on average no more than £1 per album – so £45 million in total. But 50 nights times 20,000 people times £75 equals £75 million, which even at a conservative estimate of an 80:20 split with promoter AEG is £60 million for the King of Pop.

One of the flaws in this logic is the fact that only the top-priced tickets were £75 for The O2 gigs, although that may be balanced by the fact that Jackson may be on an 85:15 or even 90:10 split, trousering him even more loot. Of course, the star made a lot more money from Thriller indirectly too – think of the tours, the sponsorships…

Still, as headline figures go, it’s not bad for 50 nights work…

O2 UK is dropping the price of 3G iPhones in May, according to trade website Mobile, offering the handset for free on its £35 and £45 monthly tariffs.

The move is reportedly to clear stock in time for the launch of a new iPhone model (or models) in June or July – although Mobile reports that rival UK operator Orange is in talks to stock it too.

In separate news, Apple has invited media to an event next Tuesday for the unveiling of the iPhone 3.0 software – the latest firmware update for the device. No news on what features will be in it, but the ability for apps to run in the background has been hotly tipped, which could be good news for music applications.

So much for O2’s exclusive pre-sale on Michael Jackson tickets this morning, then. At the time of writing, the company’s priority tickets site has crashed under the weight of demand, alternately throwing up ‘Server is too busy’ and page not found messages when we try to access it.

O2 customers who registered yesterday to get a special code are already commenting on our previous story – while predictable, the server snafu is a bit of an own-goal for O2, as it risks angering customers who were looking forward to securing their tickets.

“Well my O2 priority password is not valid and neither are 2 friends of mine who have a password!!! To say we’re annoyed is an understatement!! Would love to know who else on O2 has not been able to get their ‘unique password’ for this event to work!!” is one comment.

“ive received a code from the 02, but went online at 7am the website says server busy and link broken and phone lines 2402 free on 02 mobile say network busy it wont connect” is another.

Ouch. We’ll keep hitting refresh, obviously, and let you know how it goes.

O2 has revealed that its customers will get priority tickets for the upcoming Michael Jackson gigs in London, but only if they text JACKSON to the shortcode 2402.

In return, they’ll be sent a code tomorrow morning, which can be used online to buy priority tickets. Whether this means they get in ahead of the hundreds of thousands of fans who’ve registered at the official Michael Jackson Live website remains to be seen.

O2 announced the news on its Twitter feed. It’s no surprise to find the operator leveraging its sponsorship of The O2 venue – where Jackson’s gigs are due to take place. It’ll be interesting to see if the operator also gets some exclusive content for its customers around the gigs.

The tickets will be sold from this website from 7am tomorrow morning (Wednesday 11th March).

O2 UK has revealed that it has sold more than one million iPhones in the UK, as part of the quarterly financial results of its parent company Telefonica.

That’s roughly one seventeenth of the total number of iPhone sales, since Apple recently announced that 17 million of the devices have been flogged worldwide. The iPhone has been a big deal for O2 in the UK – in the last quarter, it added 390,000 new customers – a decent chunk of whom would have been due to Apple’s handset.

In theory, a 3G mobile network is capable of data speeds of up to 384Kbps. However, UK operator O2 has been outed as capping many of its 3G customers to a third of that – 128Kbps – based on mysterious `customer profiles’. The Register exposed the practice, which isn’t good news for any music companies (more…)