iTunes has just gone live in South America. These new stores only launched today and they will be announced in the next few hours. This is an amazing move by iTunes, which Im sure will bring them great success.
RouteNote is an iTunes official partner and our full catalogue will be available in South America. As an artist you dont have to do anything!!
Spotify has just launched their upgraded Spotify Radio service that takes a direct shot at Pandora. Spotify Radio offers unlimited stations and unlimited skips, so it is a mile ahead of the competition (potentially makes Pandora and We7 pointless).
Features:
A unique radio experience
Thanks to our all-new intelligent recommendation engine and multi-million track library, Spotify Radio is a music discovery experience without equal.
Unlimited skips
Don’t like a track? Skip it. You can skip as many times as you like. It’s your radio station.
The new Spotify Radio is being rolled out as we speak but you can also get the preview now! The preview version available for you here.
AIM (Association of Independent Music) has released their latest digital sales figures for indie labels and bands and it claims that 94.4% of all indie digital revenues is via iTunes, Amazon and Spotify. Everything else is fighting over just 5.6% of the market.
Alison Wenham, head of the UK-based consortium, pointed to a lopsided logjam. ”There are now a series of monopolies and it is jolly hard for anyone else to get a slice of the market”.
In the US there is still no Spotify presence and it seems as though eMusic is the third largest player, but Im sure they will change when Spotify finally enter the US this year.
O2 has just launched a dedicated YouTube channel for live performances and backstage footage from the O2 Academy.
“O2 Academy TV celebrates the raw aspect of live music in our venues, giving fans a unique opportunity to get closer to the artists they love, and giving artists a creative platform to promote their shows,” says head of music sponsorship Jasmine Skee.
Additionally, fans will be able to upload their own videos shot at O2 branded venues.
This could be quite fun and you might even be able to see what your friends got upto at that concert!
It has been reported that 95% of all digitial music downloads are illegal. The Digital Music Report stated that people are buying more music, but the damage caused by piracy will cost until 2015 more than a million creative jobs.
The worldwide trend is still going away from the CD and is moving to music files from the internet. In 2010, sales of downloaded music rose by 6% to 4.6 billion U.S. dollars (3.4bn euros). Meanwhile, nearly a third of the total turnover for record companies comes from digital business.
Everything is moving to the digital world and artists need to make sure they are going to be properly prepared for this shift.
It has been noticed by the worlds major labels that mobile music is currently going through a tough time. However, Juniper Research is predicting that ‘music consumed on mobile handsets’ will rise from $2.4 billion in 2010 to $5.5 billion in 2015.
“The development of mobile devices has now reached the point where they match the technical specs of dedicated MP3 players,” says author Daniel Ashdown. “Add in connectivity – just one click to buy and download – along with all the other smartphone features, and there is no competition between the two.”
Im sure mobile music consumption will increase dramatically over the next few years, but more music will simply be consumed on all devices as it becomes a lot accessable.
Deezer has just released a press release about Apple’s recent announcement of their new subscription option. Below is the press release.
Following Apple’s announcement to impose a 30% commission on all subscriptions using its apps, European leading digital music services Deezer decided to point out that the confusion brought by such a decision on the music market will kill its start of recovery.
A lot has been said already on how untenable Apple’s new distribution rules are for digital music services considering their level of gross margin, and the very specific competition with iTunes. It is very unlikely that Apple could legally apply these rules on the paid digital music services. It would be a leverage of its dominant position on the mobile applications market to reinforce its already over‐dominant position in the paid digital music market.
Thus, considering that the distribution of applications is entirely controlled by Apple, they could not force us to use their billing system. It’s even more unlikely to be legally applicable if the imposed commission is 7 times as high as any standard billing fee.
Moreover, to protect its brand and its current user experience advantage, it’s also unlikely since:
‐ Apple has built its brand legacy around the music and is too respectful of its brand to take the risk to kill the music start of recovery for only an economic reason
‐ Applying the tax on the paid music services will favor the innovation investment on Android and lead after a while to a less competitive user experience on Apple.
Middle term, we do not believe that these conditions could be applied. The huge risk of this announcement by Apple lies into the short term uncertainty that Apple is setting in the music market.
After 10 years of drastic decrease of the music market, the subscription based music services are offering a fresh and fast growing momentum. Apple’s music model currently stays in the transition technology of à la carte music download and will be affected by this new competition. However, its interest cannot be to break the streaming services momentum for its own benefit whatever the collateral damages on music creation.
We are therefore waiting for Apple to quickly provide its exact position re music services.
It seems like the music industry in Australia is in complete free fall. The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) has reported that recording sales dropped 13.9 percent in 2010 by value (complete PDF here). Physical unit sales tanked by 19.5 percent.
The downside to the numbers is that ARIA reports in the same way as Nielsen Soundscan and RIAA, that is counting any transaction as one – album, download, ringtone, whatever.
However, on the upside “Australians are consuming more music than ever before,” ARIA chief executive Dan Rosen declared.
At Midem this year Fanatic.fm was launched and it seems to be a very interesting proposition. Fanatic.fm allows artists to upload their music where brands and fans can bid to sponsor the band. After the band’s approval, sponsors can use the music in their own social media campaigns and co-promote directly within the music player.
Every time the music is played using the fanatic.fm player, which can be embedded in any site or social media page, the band is paid and a portion goes to an approved charity.
As we mentioned previously on the RouteNote Blog, Warner Music is up for sale. It is now being reported by the NY Post that over 20 parties have expressed an interest in acquiring Warner Music Group.
Most often named as potential bidders for all or part of either music group include: BMG, Zomba founder Clive Calder, Russian investor Leonard Blavatnik, Universal Music, Sony Music, equity firms KKR, Apollo and Providence and Netherlands-based music publisher Imagem.
iTunes has just gone live in South America. These new stores only launched today and they will be announced in the next few hours. This is an amazing move by iTunes, which Im sure will bring them great success.
It has been reported that 95% of all digitial music downloads are illegal. The Digital Music Report stated that people are buying more music, but the damage caused by piracy will cost until 2015 more than a million creative jobs.
Deezer has just released a press release about Apple’s recent announcement of their new subscription option. Below is the press release.
As we mentioned previously on the RouteNote Blog, 