Archive for: online music

Guvera Announce US Launch Date

Ad-supported music and digital content service Guvera has set the date for going live in the States as 30th March. The service, named for the bloody-handed revolutionary icon Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara [wiki here, tl;dr we should all strive for personal fulfilment and be nice communists, but sometimes it's ok to shoot people in the head if they betray you] – aims to instigate a ‘revolution’ in the media industry by getting advertisers to pay for content delivered to consumers, who have chosen the advertiser whose branding they find least offensive/interruptive. This may not be quite the paradigm shift that they seem to think, but their beta service has been up and running for a couple of months in Australia now, and has been successful enough for them to roll out the full scale launch. They have deals in place with Universal Music Group, EMI Music and IODA offering consumers ‘free but paid for’ legal downloads from their full music libraries, but concerns abound as to whether they’ll be able to pay for them in the long term and on the grand scale that they hope for. Another streaming service in the States means that Spotify, bogged down making their platform profitable in Europe, will find the marketplace that bit more crowded if and when they finally get their stall laid out in the US, but they will have had the headstart in refining the user experience and gathering advertisers to their service. There is a future for online ad-supported music streaming, the appetite is strongly apparent, but it will be a hotly contested race to become the dominant provider, and Guvera have yet to prove themselves against the competition.

Internet Music Radio Continues Strong Growth

Just as consumers are increasingly purchasing their music in digital form, from online music stores like iTunes, Amazon and eMusic (a trend digital music distributors like us rely on for the future of our business), radio audiences are moving online. A study published recently by Bridge Rating, company that:

“provides guidance services to media companies and investment firms seeking immediate and timely behavioral data related to media use.”

covering consumer use of satellite radio, Internet radio, MP3 players, Podcasting and mobile media consumption. They forecast that online ‘radio’ audience will grow to 77m by 2015. Their figures draw from both online only stations like Pandora and Yahoo Music, and simulcast stations (those that also broadcast over the airwaves) – see their graph for comparative growth rates.

So why are users migrating? The cost of a radio is minimal, compared to the cost of a computer, or even to a broadband subscription, and anywhere you can pick up the internet, you can pick up an FM signal. If it were the case that people were just using their computers as a convenient method of accessing the radio content, because their speakers are hooked up to it, signal is poor or they’re out of range, then simulcast stations wouldn’t be seeing a stagnation of or negative growth. Instead it seems likely that users are usign alternative music streaming services becaused of the greater interactivity and enhaned services like forums and playlist sharing that surround the musical core  of the online channels, just as they surround music stores like Spotify (which runs it’s own nascent radio platform). If it is this rather than the inherent quality of the radio content itself that is drawing users online, then what does the future hold for premium airwave radio providers like Sirius XM? Will their hold on the car dashboard be enough to save them from their competitors? Not if Pandora have anything to do with it, as their contract with Ford to build in-dash controls to interact with their service shows. The increasing prevalence of smart phones and mobile internet devices also means that anyone with a stereo jack cable can use their existing car stereo to access their own music collection and playlists.

Streaming Radio Stations On the Rise – Jelli Attracts $2 Million In Funding

Internet radio has had a couple of boosts recently, first the deals that Pandora struck with Ford and Pioneer to get their service into thousands of car dashboards, and now web radio/streaming service Jelli getting funding from a group of tech savvy investors including Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, Zappos.com COO Alfred Lin and Apollo Group founder Peter Sperling. Jelli streams music online through its own ’stations’ 24/7, and already has content deals in place with a large number of FM and AM stations, mostly through a partnership with Triton Digital, whose air-transmitted station affiliations leading into 2010 now exceed 5,000 – up 50 percent from a year ago. Jelli’s system allows users to upvote or downvote songs on a particular channel, the most popular of which get onto the playlist and go out in real time. This has been proven to work on the web, and now Jelli are taking over slots on air stations, such as San Francisco’s 105.3 fm. Users do have to be logged in to vote on tracks though, so if you’re in the car listening you need to have someone to put your votes in using your iPhone…

France To Levy Tax On Web Advertisers – Proceeds to Support Music

Good news for French musicians, bad news for internet search giants. French Premiere Nicolas Sarkozy is deliberating the recommendations put forward by a select committee to combat the deleterious effect new methods of music consumption are having on the French music industry. With Gallically direct logic, the report advocates sidestepping the whole tricky process of charging ISP’s and banning file-sharers and taxing the easy targets, those who make most from internet traffic, the big search engines and websites. If enacted the French would charge Google, Facebook, Yahoo and anyone else who makes money from advertising on computer screens in France between 1% and 2% on each ad or sponsored link clicked or displayed. The sidestep may not be as neat as M. Sarkozy could hope, however, as taxing websites whose financial base is in another country raises a whole slew of other legal problems. It seems unlikely that Google et al will allow themselves to be milked in this way, given that they are already under fire from the British Government for not declaring their UK taxable income properly.

If the proposals are enacted, and revenue starts flowing, the French Government hopes to raise between 20 and 40 million Euros a year, which it will pump into the music business in various ways, such as Government subsidised vouchers and cards for purchasing music online.

Hulu, Vevo, Spotify – Embattled EMI embraces new revenue streams

We posted yesterday about EMI’s bleak balance sheet: today they’re in the news with a new Hulu page for Norah Jones, presumably the first of many of their artists that will be featuring on the site. I think this adoption of new channels can only be a good thing for the industry. It might feel like EMI are the first to be making these deals with new service providers because they’re under financial pressure, but from this support and collaboration between big record labels and innovative new channels the next mainstream will be born, and those industry players that adopt early will have a headstart on their competitors in terms of implementation and consumer base. EMI’s cooperation will hopefully encourage the others in the big 4 to follow suit – the ground is being laid as we speak: Spotify is preparing their platform for a US launch, youtube’s collab with the majors ‘Vevo’ will launch within a month, and the big guys are warming to the idea of online streaming services, as this Hulu/EMI deal shows. I’m betting that the record labels will swallow the bitter pill of lower per track fees, the big online channels will fight it out with the rights industries over standard rates, and the dust will settle with most people using ad-supported on demand streaming services, with a smallish percentage of us opting to buy the premium ad free offerings like the one our digital distribution partner Spotify offers.

Get Your Music Online and Charted: A Useful Guide

If you’re interested in more than just getting money for your music, and you want to enter the whole Radio 1, squealing teenage girls affray, then you need to look at getting your single or album registered withthe PPL Repertiore Database, formerly knownas CatCo, so it can be a part of the “Official UK Chart” and you will get to rub shoulders with Rihanna and Jason Mraz backstage at the NME awards (let’s face it, there’s no better way of promoting yourself than already being successful). Here’s the UK OCC’s guide for getting listed on CatCo: by the way, you’ll need a free ISRC code, which RouteNote will issue you when you sign up for our digital distribution service.

UK Digital Music Market Trends

The UK has seen record levels of digital sales in 2009, with 10 trading weeks and the Christmas period still to come. 117 million singles have been sold so far, with 98.6% of these sales in digital formats.

Not only has the singles market more than doubled in the number of units sold sine ‘02, but it’s almost entirely divested itself of the physical media. This growth is not reproduced in the album market (old figures here), which in 2008 saw a shallow (compared to predictions) decline of between 3.2% and 6% depending on who you listen to, despite 68% year on year growth in digital (read people shifting over to buy digital formats rather than physical).

This is encouraging news for the music industry in the UK – despite the panic that filesharing and online piracy keeps sending through the motley ranks of the big execs, there’s not that big a downturn in sales. Music piracy is a massive phenomenon; according to the IFPI, 95% of music downloads are illegal, but is it really hurting the industry if sales are staying firm in the face of this explosion in Piracy. The BPI’s Chief Exec Geoff Taylor stated “That singles have hit these heights while there are still more than a billion illegal downloads every year in the UK is testimony to the quality of releases this year and the vibrancy of the UK download market.  Consumers are responding to the value and innovation offered by the legal services and these new figures show how the market could explode if Government acts to tackle illegal peer-to-peer filesharing.” His implication is clearly that all the pirates out there would be forced to buy their music instead of getting it free  – but I think this is something of a false premise: just because people like getting something for free, doesn’t mean they would be prepared to pay for it. I’ve been introduced to a lot of bands by people burning me CD’s or sending me tracks over the net, even way back when my teenage girlfriends used to make me mix tapes it was the same sort of piracy, but the upshot of that was that I’ve discovered more bands, been to more gigs and bought more CD’s, vinyl and downloads than I ever would have if I’d not been so freely able to share music. I strongly feel that bands should profit from people’s enjoyment and sharing of the great music they make, but it should be directly related to the cost of time effort and money involved in getting that particular piece of music to that particular person.

I would pay more for an LP than for a download because I’m getting more. Not just intangible 1’s and 0’s but a real lump of plastic and paper and design as well as the music. MP3 stores cost money to run, tech guys, ISP’s, designers and even marketing people (sadly) have to be paid, but those costs aren’t there with file sharing networks, or at least they’re not paid for by the guys in the music industry. If the site makes money, that should be shared equitably with the artists whose work they exploit, but artists should take into account that they’re not just losing download sales, they’re also gaining fans through these channels, fans that will buy tickets and albums and merchandise and write about you on their blogs and tell their friends about you, if you’re good enough, and you give them a reason to buy. *deep breath* Sorry. Rant over.

What will always be true is that supply must follow demand; if people want new ways of getting music cheaply online, the traditional market and online music stores must adapt to provide them, or fail in the competition with less legitimate routes of supply.

Mobile Phone Broadcasting

If you’re in a band that’s just starting out, you know all about sending last minute text reminders to your friends, relling them to turn up to your gig. If you’ve had some success then you know the power of information and marketing, and if you’ve read our self-promotion guide you’ve hopefully got a list of your fan’s contact details that you’re building as time goes by; names, emails, mobile numbers… Good for you!

Now here’s a little tool to help you make use of that laboriously collected contact list: if you live in the States, that is. www.broadtexter.com allows you to send text messages to whole lists of contacts at once, so no more scrolling through adding everyone in your phone to the send list, and it also allows them to send messages and pictures back to your broadtexter page for other fans to look at. You can schedule text alerts in advance, and select only people in a certain region or group to recieve them. What’s more, it ties in with your social network profiles (facebook, myspace, bebo, xanga etc.). A pretty powerful tool for getting in touch with your fanbase and promoting your music, gigs and merchandise. Of course, we’d love it to work for you, so we can make you more money by distributing your music and making loads of sales!