Music Ally

We all know Bob Dylan isn’t shy about sharing his disdain for all things digital-music related, but this week his wrath has been specifically aimed at streaming services. Over the past few days his back catalogue has been pulled from sites like we7 and Spotify, as Dylan takes issue with those who are sharing his music with their users. An instruction was issued by his US reps, through Sony, asking sites to prove they have the right to put the material up.

So far no one from Sony has responded to our requests for comment; presumably everyone at Columbia is busy sifting through years of licensing agreements and contractual binding looking for a solution to this latest outburst.

Clive Gardiner, we7’s digital music SVP, said: “We took it off the site a few days ago. Spotify would have had the same instruction.  But it may be a short listing and it may come back again.

“There are some artists that will take umbrage at this from time to time. We expect this sort of thing, especially with streaming, and it not being fully understood where it sits yet. “

The only Dylan albums Spotify is carrying at the moment are Bob Dylan 60s Live, A 30^th Anniversary Concert Celebration and a Tribute compilation, leaving out the 30-plus longplayers he’s wracked up since his first release in 1962.

Dylan is not the first artist to question the rights of streaming services, with Bryan Adams issuing a similar request through Web Sheriff a few months back. Eventually the situation was ironed out, and Adams’ catalogue reappeared.

PRS for Music has announced that from 1 July, its headline royalty rate for on-demand streaming music services will increase from 8% to 10.5%, but that the per-stream minimum will come down from 0.22p to 0.085p.

Similar changes are being made to the rates for premium interactive webcasting services and pure webcasting services, and the new rates will apply for three years. “We believe that these new streaming rates will stimulate growth in the digital music market and will benefit our licensees and our members,” says Andrew Shaw, managing director of broadcast and online.

“This is a good deal for music creators and for music lovers.” We’ll have more reaction from licensees throughout today on the blog, but the full announcement is published below.

(more…)

It may be the most successful Facebook music application ever, with more than 12.7 million installs, but until now iLike has only offered 30-second samples of tracks to its users. That’s changing though: the company has signed a deal with Rhapsody to offer full song streams, with users able to listen to up to 25 of them per month, before being directed to subscribe to Rhapsody. (more…)

Thinking of launching a streaming mobile music service in China? You better brush up on your administration skills then: new rules for webcasting in the country mean you’ll have to get permits from two separate Chinese government agencies before you can begin. Meanwhile, ownership and control of webcasting operations have (more…)