Archive for: music news
Leading UK music magazine the NME has launched their official iPhone app. The application is priced at £1.19 and allows users to personalise their music news experiences. I really wonder how many people will choose to buy this application, when there are so many free options available.
The app lets users browse news, galleries and videos from the NME.com website, and tag individual artists to receive alerts on their activities. The app supports offline browsing and Twitter/Facebook sharing too.
The application is currently only on the iPhone and iPod Touch, but im sure they will develop an iPad version soon enough.
MOG initially started their service as a music news aggregator, but over the last 6 months or more they have been focused on building out their music streaming service. Thus, they are now trying to diversify and give their music news service its own identity and have now launched MOGMusicNetwork.com.
MOG CEO David Hyman says, “We wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to access the best content on our growing network of 1,300 blogs and also give brands an opportunity to do some really creative things. MOGMusicNetwork.com was an obvious solution to best serve both consumers and brands.”
The story of’s EMI’s purchase, and the company’s subsequent struggles to maintain its debt is one that we’ve featured a fair bit, and now the speculation about their move to raise cash by licensing out their publishing division to another label is becoming clearer. According to an article in The Times they’ve been in talks with all three of the other major labels (UMG, Warner, Sony BMG) about taking over the exploitation of their catalogue for a five year period, for a sum in the neighbourhood of $400 million. This would essentially solve their cash flow problems (The Times thinks until about 2014), but would also mean that the major source of revenue had been taken out of the business.
Buying breathing space with a deal like this would give them time to make economies and find alternative sources of revenue without CitiBank breathing down their neck, but would probably also see one of their competitors releasing compilations like crazy, milking whatever they can out of the asset in their short license period. Doubtless EMI think this is a better solution than being thrown to the wolves that are gathering outside Brook Green – KKR, a private equity group, is in talks with Warner Music to launch a break-up bid for EMI.
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.
