Archive for: online
We have received a tip that Tesco’s is currently working on a digital locker service which is built on the cloud. The aim for Tesco’s is to bring CD and DVD sales in-store to digital version available online.
“The way it would work practically is that when you buy a disc in store or online, that title would be put up into your Digital Locker which would immediately be accessible from devices registered to that locker,” explains Blueprint Digital CEO Richard Bron, whose company is working with Tesco on the scheme.
October is pegged as the likely launch date.
An interesting article from the Guardian on the same line as we harp on quite a lot through this blog, making the point that fans are as essential a part of the music industry as the musicians, and that they are selfishly altering the marketplace, mixing piracy and avid legitimate consumption to make a very confusing but vibrant place for artists and labels. A brief snippet:
…if anyone’s a “new partner” in the music business these days, it’s the fans. They’re the ones promoting the music on social networks, uploading fan videos and homebrew remixes. They’re creating the atmosphere that makes live music more of a draw than ever before, they’re the ones buying – yes, buying – more singles than at any time in British music history. And they’re doing this at the same time as they’re downloading whole discographies via BitTorrent and sending leaked MP3s on Gmail. Underlying UK Music’s report is the assumption that the licensed activity and the unlicensed activity are separable, that you can punish the latter without hurting the former. But what if that’s not true – what if, as several studies of piracy and music purchasing seem to suggest, the good fans and the bad fans are the same people?
There are a few things on our tools page to help you reach out to fans, and more on ReverbNation, but if you’ve found something cool and useful, drop a link in the comments for everyone to use.
Given the diversity of the music that we get uploaded to RouteNote, this might be of niche appeal, but then that’s what RouteNote is about – helping the little guys. Enough of our own trumpet – Bootsy Collins, Parliament Funkadelic’s bassist (among other roles) is taking the head lecturer’s chair at the online Funk University being launched by SceneFour, a PR house that works on corporate events and launches for groups like NIN and Al Gore. Soul and Funk music has more on this:
As Funk University’s Lead “Professor,” Bootsy will provide extensive lectures on funk, the bass, and his body of work with James Brown, George Clinton, Parliament Funkadelic, and solo projects. In addition, Collins has arranged an impressive ensemble of the music world’s finest players to provide an intense curriculum designed to promote and teach funk to intermediate and advanced players. The lectures, lessons, and exercises will be accessed through streaming video, with tablature downloads available. Bootsy’s bass school will also hold “office hours” where students are able to get their questions answered online. The entire staff will be reviewing and holding regular competitions throughout the year.
The university will feature video lectures and classes, practical tests and all the traditional coursework featured in more conventional courses, but they haven’t released details of any course fees, requirements or qualifications, so perhaps the term University might be a little grand, but it still looks like good fun at this early stage.
There are so many bands out there that want to get their music up for sale on iTunes, but haven’t found a way of doing so. About 3 years ago getting your music picked up by a digital music distribution company was pretty much impossible unless you were signed by a major record label. We’ve been working to change that. If you’re new to our site, or you’ve never heard of us before, then we’re here to help you finally reach your goal of selling your music professionally on the worlds largest music stores.
We at RouteNote are always trying to help as many artists as we can. Unlike some other services, we know that providing artists with good customer relations, useful tools and an affordable service is the way forward. If you want to get your music onto iTunes, eMusic, Spotify and more, then make sure you register for an account, download our easy to use music upload tool, and get your music selling online.
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.
They’ve not announced a specific date, but Business Week are carrying this story, in which Senior Vice President Paul Brown claims they’re in talks with various ISP’s, web hosting companies and mobile providers to co-ordinate service provision in the States before the year is out:
“We’re buying server space in random parts of the states and there are licensing discussions too,” Brown said “But they are going fine because we’re in a long-term partnership with the labels and publishers.”
They are also in discussions to port their smartphone app, that’s currently on Android and the iPhone onto the BlackBerry and Palm Inc. smartphones – a small but significant expansion of their customer appeal. Expansion into the USA will see a big jump in Spotify’s user numbers, which will necessitate improvement in their per-user revenue figures unless they are to start losing huge amounts of money. It’s for this reason that they have been restricting signups in Europe, so perhaps there’s a new model or a magic bullet, or perhaps they’re just bullish about the steady increase in their ad revenues being able to fully fund a free user by the time they’re ready to launch in the new territory.
Either way, if you’re an indie musician, sign up with RouteNote and we’ll get your music on Spotify for you ahead of their expansion.
Guy Hands and his team at the high flying venture capital firm Terra Firma have been chewing sour grapes ever since their purchase of recording giant EMI for £2.4 billion. They have been in court with their lenders Citibank over bad advice during the sale of the label, and have been practically walking on water to meet the huge cash demand of the interest payments on their gigantic loan (although they stopped short of selling off the Abbey Rd. Studios to get a cash fix). Now they are again scrabbling around to find £120 million to plug a covenant breach on the same loan, and a deal is in the offing from WMG to buy the still-profitable music publishing arm of EMI, an asset it’s been coveting over the garden fence for decades. Any bid for the £1.2 billion publishing arm is probably going to be made after EMI have cleared or defaulted on their next interest payment, in the first case, making an offer to EMI and Terra Firma, and in the second, talking to their creditor Citi if the company goes into receivership.
Spotify currently boasts 7 million users, all of them in Europe. Not bad for a product that was only released in October 2008 – this figure does only relate to the number of people on their free service, but their £10 a month premium service is also gaining traffic at a remarkable rate; they had “more than 250,000″ premium users on 23rd Jan ’10, and are now boasting 320,000 paid subscribers, (as of the 17th March ’10), and increase of 28% in under 3 months, and an extra £8,400,000 a year into the coffers. Spotify still needs to up their percentages though, according to UMG’s [Universal Music Group's] SVP [Senior Vice President] Rob Wells [and they would know, because they've taken shares in the business], they need to have around 10%-12% of their users as premium subscribers [they're currently at about 5%] to have a viable business in the long term. This might change as more and more advertising dollars go online though – as both Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek and industry analysts Kantar Media are saying:
[Table via TechCrunch's article on the same]. Other interesting facts are that 15% to 18% of the Swedish population use Spotify – and the Swedish music industry’s revenues are up, and that Spotify’s p2p based system is actually using more interwebs than the whole nation of Sweden. There are rumours of a Spotify set-top box and/or home stereo system, a bit like that Sonos thing, but running off your Spotify premium account.
Other signs of Spotify’s ambition came from comments about Apple – Ek described them as having a freemium model like Spotify’s, as everyone (in his opinion) downloads a lot of free stuff and then buys the stuff they really like on iTunes:
“The vast majority of people’s libraries are free from Limewire or trading through friends. And then there’s a small portion of tracks that they’ve bought… I really believe that if music could be legally available on any device that you wanted… I think the music industry would be radically bigger than what it is today”.
He also thinks that Apple will change the way that iTunes works, to allow remote access from anywhere to your iTunes music account on a cloud: “People want to share, to access independently. I think it makes a lot of sense for them to do something in that area.”
Everything Laura Marling touches seems to turn to gold. Her past romantic liasons have both preceded breakthrough musical success, first for ex-boyfriend Charlie Fink and Noah and the Whale, and then for current beau Marcus Mumford of the eponymous Mumford and Sons. She was also [ahem] instrumental in the rise of Emmy the Great, and modest initial success for her debut album ‘Alas I Cannot Swim’ has built into a devoted critical following and a growing fanbase. She’s now just days away from releasing a second album, and because she’s a smart cookie, she’s previewing it through the Times’ website here. If you like what you hear, you can pre-order ‘I Speak Because I Can’ on Amazon here. Imagine a young, less squeaky Joni Mitchell who could give Feist a decent bout in the song-writing ring and you’re pretty much there…
A report from business analysis firm Ovum says they think UK based Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) could bundle a silver bullet with their broadband contracts by adding a digital music service to their offerings. They argue that this would increase customer loyalty (Ovum call it reducing consumer churn), generate additional revenue per customer, reduce online music piracy and increase music industry revenue. They estimate (and they don’t say how they arrived at the figure) that direct revenues from selling music-inclusive deals could be around £103 million by 2013, representing 41% of 2009′s market.
Commenting on the report earlier this week the BPI’s Geoff Taylor said “It’s increasingly clear that it isn’t smart to be a ‘dumb pipe’. This report shows that the revenue potential of digital music services alone makes sound economic sense for ISPs.”
Fair enough. But take note that Universal Music Group sponsored the report, the same UMG that are desperately worried about the collapse of their revenues, and the same UMG that are invested in Spotify, a music service that could very easily sell premium subscriptions bundled with an ISP package. This is by all indications a great idea, and would go a long way to helping the ISP community appease big music – who are accusing it if not of complicity then at least negligence in the article of stopping access to copyright infringing sites and torrent trackers like the infamous Pirate Bay – but an awareness of possible bias might encourage conservatism when looking at Ovum’s estimated numbers. There are a lot of solutions vying for the fast growing digital music dollar, it’s a market in which we’re currently diversity and innovation, and a big move like the one the BPI are advocating could seal the future of music online.
