Music Ally

MySpace announced a partnership with US collecting body SoundExchange today at MidemNet. The two companies will be working together to find bands who are owed money by SoundExchange, but who the body can’t find.

CEO Owen Van Natta said that MySpace has already found 25,000 artists for SoundExchange – which does beg the question of why on earth some of those names hadn’t been typed into MySpace’s search engine already.

“We’re going to be using the MySpace platform to get those connections and get the money into the right hands ,” was Van Natta’s take on the deal.

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2009 has seen the rise of streaming services Spotify and Pandora (and the fall of several of their rivals); governments grappling with anti-piracy legislation; The Pirate Bay trial – and then its tragicomic sale saga; and hundreds of bright-eyed music start-ups and thousands of iPhone apps. And STILL no Yellow Submarine iPod.

We rounded up the key trends from the year for our final Music Ally Report of 2009, and the article is republished below in full. If you’re interested in our service in 2010, with its daily bulletin and fortnightly analytical report, click here for a free trial.

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US royalties collection body SoundExchange has finally reached a deal with online webcasters over the royalty rates they pay for streaming music.

In a nutshell, all webcasters must pay an annual minimum fee of $25,000, while small webcasters (those with less than $1.25 million in annual revenues) will pay 12-14% of it to SoundExchange for the rights. Meanwhile, bigger webcasters will pay either 25% of their revenues, or a per-song fee starting at 0.08 cents for songs streamed in 2006, rising to 0.14 cents in 2015 – whichever is the greater.

Pandora boss Tim Westergren points out that the rates are still higher than any other form of radio in the US, but nevertheless hails the deal. “Pandora is finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates.”

However, the company says it will now limit listening on the free version of its service to 40 hours a month as a result, although users will be able to pay $0.99 a month to extend this again to unlimited.