In what’s got to be the most impressive piece of jobsworthery this year, airport securtiy at Heathrow forced pop-divorcee and charity campaigner Heather Mills was forced to allow a guard to hold up her false leg and swab it with an explosives detector. Components in her prosthetic had apparently set off the metal detecting arch as she made for her flight to the US, so the humourless officials ran her through the search protocols with the same good grace as they would a hook handed muslim cleric. A piece of offensive over-zealousness, or good common sense? Unlikely as it is that Heather has renounced capitalism since her lucrative divorce from Sir Paul, it’s nice to see that airport security are equally officious to everyone that passes under their wand. Music News carries more of the story.
Rumours (originating at the blog ‘Postmark Here’) are spreading over the web about a wrap party that went down [to use the vernacular] in Hollywood last week:
Bryan helped transform a house in the Hollywood Hills into a recording studio and spent the last three weeks there recording Radiohead with Nigel Godrich. On Saturday, we waded through a driveway full of Priuses and Minis to get to the wrap party.
Utterly unsubstantiated, of course, but if true, we can start hoping for a new release sometime in the next few months. The band will have to be very smart to top the buzz they created with their last release, and converting buzz to sales is another thing entirely.
The blog post over at Postmark Here has been removed, which makes this blogger think someone requested it be taken down… No smoke without fire.
The Orchard’s majority stock owners, Dimensional Associates, are considering a bid from music streaming service eMusic’s owners, JDS Capital. JDS have been angling for a majority in The Orchard for a while, and this is the third time they’ve come to the table with a new bid, this time of $2, up from their original price of $1.68.
The period between the announcement of the initial bid and this last news has seen the Orchard’s stock prices climb out of the trough they were in last October (a $1.05 low point). The advantages to the tie in of a music distributor and a music streaming service are obvious, as eMusic would gain unlimited access to The Orchard’s catalogue, and take advantage of the entire chain of profit between musician and consumer, using their own services to promote artists they think will sell.
Live Nation’s shareholder’s have voted to approve the merger between their company and Ticketmaster. You can read the SEC filing here – the news was at first positively recieved, but now indications are that the stock market is going slightly cold on the two closely linked companies, with a 2% fall yesterday.
In an adjunct to my vociferous defence of Twitter and it’s web 2.0 cousins in that John Taylor post, I thought readers might be interested in a Twitter contact list that Bruce Houghton of Hypebot (a music industry news site) is putting together. Keep yourself informed, and pester decision makers in the industry to help you out. You can do this even more easily by downloading Tweetdeck, a little program that lets you find out who’s talking about certain search terms (your band’s name for instance), and different groups of people that you’re following.
Previously here at RouteNote we have been pretty critical of the PRS and how they go about their business. However, today the PRS and YouTube have finally announced that they have come to an agreement on licensing.
Google has confirmed that the new deal is a lump sum just like the last one, thus paying an upfront amount but not a per stream minimum. It is about time that the PRS be a little more flexible on their approach to licensing, but I still wonder if Google had access to work out which artists are PRS registered and then based the lump sum around that. Songwriters and composers will be keen to hear the finer details of the deal though, in terms of what tracking will be used to equitably share out the cash.
The deal is backdated to 9th January when the previous deal expired, and runs until June 2012. Neither Google nor PRS for Music is saying how much the upfront payment is, naturally.
YouTube’s director of video partnerships Patrick Walker says that “We are dedicated to establishing and fostering relationships that make YouTube a place where existing fans and new audiences can discover their favourite content – whatever it might be. We are extremely pleased to have reached an agreement with PRS for Music and look forward to the return of premium music videos to YouTube in the UK where they will join a variety of other content to be enjoyed by our British users.”
MOG, the very popular music portal and blog network, has closed a new $5 million funding round. In total MOG has now raised over $12.5 million in funding since being founded in 2005.
MOG has been having an amazing year in which included a relaunch of their homepage in April which then included music news, reviews and more. The MOG network now sees over 8 million unique visitors a month, with over 700 blogs that generate over 6,000 posts a week.
MOG is a great network of sites which getting on their homepage would mean a nice jump in actual sales. MOG is doing really well at the moment with their new strategy, but they have an unlaunched music streaming product which was previewed back in January by Techcrunch which would be an amazing addition. The music streaming product never launched because only two of the four major labels were on board. If MOG was able to get these other major labels on board then Im sure their service will grow a lot faster and be a prime target for even more investors.
Some news that might not seem immediately edifying, but might have far reaching implications. The Intellectual Property Office in the UK has issued a ‘Scoping Document‘ attempting to assess the potential role of a Digital Rights Agency. Given what’s currently happening between the PRS and Google, the rights of artists to benefit from the exploitation of their music online is quite a hot topic at the moment.
More rumblings in the same region of the law are sounding in New Zealand, where Google has deposited it’s two cents in a discussion being held by the Telecommunication Carrier’s Forum – a think-tank organised by the TeleComms and ISP comapnies in that region to decide how to monitor and deal with digital copyright violations. Google has come in on the side of the consumer, saying that the idea of banning users who are caught infringing three times from using the ISP’s services – in effect cutting them off access to the internet as a whole – was too heavy a penalty. They also chime in with approval of measures designed to protect ISP’s from the consequences of copyright infringement perpetrated by their customers. Google is in a pretty unique position to provide a balanced opinion, given that they are operating a service across every nation in the world, but their ultimate position is always going to be pro-internet and pro-traffic of information, including music, because that is essentially pro-Google. More pageviews, more ad revenue.
How then, to deal with copyright violation on the net? The RIAA is abandoning it’s programme of coming down heavy on individuals in the hope that it will act as a deterrent to other pirates, as sending threatening letters and scaring little old ladies seems to be generating more negative publicity for them than deterrent effect on the pirates. Perhaps prosecuting people like middle-aged Mavis from New Hampshire in their fearful absence is not quite the shining moralistic proof that pinching a devious little ferret of a computer scientist with a server-filled basement of porn and Michael Jackson albums might be, but then he’d have used proxies and covered his tracks, and would be much harder to catch.
Ultimately this blogger just hopes all the legislation and discussion and arguing and imprisoning of housewives helps us home in on the inevitable. It is inevitable that consumers on the net will find a way of quickly and conveniently getting hold of the music they want, through filesharing, paid downloads, ad supported models or whatever other method they can. It is inevitable that artists must profit from the consumption of their music, directly or indirectly, because otherwise they won’t be able to afford to make music, and we’ll all have to listen to U2 and the Beatles for evermore, and no-one wants that… So we must, eventually, inevitably arrive at a solution that bridges that gap; that provides a way for music consumers to get what they want cheaply, quickly and conveniently, and for artists to profit from it. Some sort of commercial, digital radio… I’m going to go and listen to Spotify while I think about what that perfect solution might be.
It can be a bit difficult to keep perspective when all you hear is bad news. The music industry may be in turmoil, but it always has been, and change breeds creativity rather than destruction. Here’s Frank Zappa more than 20 years ago, explaining just what was causing the decline of the music industry back then (and a bit about masturbation, for some reason). Given that so much great music has been made since then, and how diversity and innovation are flourishing more richly than ever before due to the internet, I have to raise an eyebrow when I hear about the industry’s decline.
Steve does a little Q&A session on HypeBot – repeated here:
We continue our ongoing 4QFor (Four Questions For) series with Steven Finch, the CEO of Insomnia Ltd, which owns music 2.0 start-ups www.routenote.com, www.crenk.com, www.adphilia.com, and a record label and recording studio. You can learn more about Steve’s companies here. (Read more 4QFor interviews with the heads of OurStage, Sonicbids, imeem, We7, ReverbNation, New Music Strategies and Nimbit here.)
Q1. What major changes in the music industry do you foresee over the next year?
2008 will be a very interesting year for the music industry. We will continue to see the major labels complaining about the music industry declining, when in fact it is only CD sales that are heading downwards. The distance between the major labels and independent labels will continue to get closer, thus proving in this day and age that artists don’t need a major label to succeed!
Q2. How are you and your company preparing to benefit from these changes?
We strongly believe in independent artists and labels being able to promote their music to the widest possible audience, without having to worry about barriers to market. RouteNote wants to eliminate these barriers for independent or unsigned artists, and allow good artists to stand out from the crowd.
Q3. What excites you?
The music industry as a whole really excites me. It is changing and twisting all the time and with so many emerging business models in the marketplace at present, who knows which ones will actually succeed or fail. Lots of people are talking about music heading towards ‘free’, I think this might be the case…
however I still believe users are willing to pay for something that is actually worth something. Im willing to pay for music as long as I know I can transfer it from computer to iPod to CD and back, whenever I want to and as many times as I want. A revolutionary watermarking service which tracks DRM free music is the way forward.
Q4. What’s next?
The music industry has always been based around old practices, and now it seems that it is time for new beginnings. RouteNote will enter the music market with the aim of providing artists what they want. Artists want ease of use, with the ability to profit from their achievements. RouteNote will provide this and more.
In what’s got to be the most impressive piece of jobsworthery this year, airport securtiy at Heathrow forced pop-divorcee and charity campaigner Heather Mills was forced to allow a guard to hold up her false leg and swab it with an explosives detector. Components in her prosthetic had apparently set off the metal detecting arch as she made for her flight to the US, so the humourless officials ran her through the search protocols with the same good grace as they would a hook handed muslim cleric. A piece of offensive over-zealousness, or good common sense? Unlikely as it is that Heather has renounced capitalism since her lucrative divorce from Sir Paul, it’s nice to see that airport security are equally officious to everyone that passes under their wand. Music News carries more of the story.
MOG
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