A puzzling story in yesterday’s Telegraph suggested that EMI’s Parlophone label has “refused to join” the Google Play service “claiming it offers no obvious benefit to its musicians”. The caveat being that Parlophone acts ARE available to buy as downloads from the Google Play music store – indeed, Coldplay’s entire back catalogue appears to be going for £2.49 an album at the time of writing. No, the boycott is of the cloud-streaming elements to Google Play’s locker service, with the story suggesting that execs “are unsure if Google’s new streaming service offers the same sorts of benefit” to artists as Spotify. We’re genuinely confused: one’s a cloud locker where licensing is for scan-and-match ease-of-use rather than stopping people uploading a certain label’s releases to their personal clouds, while the other is an on-demand streaming service. Or, to voice our puzzlement another way: does a ‘boycott’ of Google Play simply mean stopping fans from having their albums scanned and matched?
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…