Marah is a duo from Phillidelphia who has been getting some great press of late. Marah’s upcoming LP Life Is a Problem was written and recorded in an old Amish farmhouse in Pennsylvania. This is the first taste of that new LP and its called the Valley Farm Song.

According to the band’s press release, some of the instruments they used on the album include “…flea market drums, a trash picked bass, a cheap fiddle, Serge’s collection of rusting harmonicas, banjos, a free church piano, etc.” All that, and the etc seem to make an appearance on the song. The result sounds triumphant and melancholy, sort of an anthem for farmhands and factory workers.

Marah – Valley Farm Song by routenote

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The rumours are true and Universal Music Group and Google have announced their joint venture, Vevo – a video site offering UMG’s music videos, with advertising revenues shared between the two.

The full press release is below for you to digest, and naturally we’ll have more analysis next week.

UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP AND YOUTUBE TO LAUNCH REVOLUTIONARY PREMIUM MUSIC AND VIDEO SERVICE

VEVO – UMG’s Premium Music Service Powered By YouTube To Launch In Coming Months

NEW YORK, NY and SAN BRUNO, CA, April 9, 2009 – Doug Morris, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s leading music company and Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer of Google Inc., today announced that UMG and YouTube, a Google subsidiary, are working together to launch VEVO, a music and video entertainment service that will feature UMG’s premium video content.

In addition to VEVO, YouTube has renewed and extended its successful partnership with UMG that allows users to continue creating and watching user-generated videos containing UMG sound recordings and Universal Music Publishing Group’s compositions on YouTube through various territories around the world. The two companies will also share advertising revenue on YouTube and VEVO.

Launching later this year, VEVO will be a premium online music video hub built for consumers, advertisers and content owners that will blend UMG’s broad catalog of top artists and content with YouTube’s leading edge video technology and user community. YouTube will provide the technology infrastructure that will power VEVO and host UMG’s extensive library of professionally-created music videos on the new site. On YouTube, this content will be exclusively available through VEVO.com and a new VEVO channel through a special VEVO branded embedded player.

“VEVO will bring the most compelling premium music video content and services to the world’s single largest online video audience,” stated Mr. Morris. “We believe that at launch, VEVO will already have more traffic than any other music video site in the United States and in the world. And this traffic represents the most sought after demographic for advertisers, especially as advertising dollars continue their shift from old media to new. VEVO will be uniquely positioned to monetize this opportunity and a host of others as we grow it to become “the” destination for premium music video content online. For music lovers who want the best in music videos, the VEVO experience will be second to none. At the same time, VEVO will expand the premium video marketplace, generate new revenue streams for content creators, and provide brand advertisers an unprecedented opportunity to get in front of a highly engaged audience. We couldn’t be more excited about the huge potential we see in the VEVO service.”

“Technology has allowed fans to discover music in endless ways while creating new business opportunities for artists and labels alike,” said Mr. Schmidt. “At Google, we are committed to promoting greater innovation and choice and are thrilled to be working with UMG in what will surely be an exciting new service for consumers, advertisers, content creators and the music industry at large.”
At launch, people will be able to access UMG’s entire catalog of premium music video content, including professionally-created and full-length videos on VEVO, as well as artist-generated content and user-generated content hosted on YouTube. VEVO will also serve as a syndication platform, expanding the reach of the VEVO brand. This innovative platform is aimed at providing consumers the very best in digital music content while further extending UMG’s lead in the direct-to-consumer market.

Presently, UMG’s YouTube video channel has more than 3.5 billion views, making the UMG channel the most watched on YouTube.

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One of the first videos we have added to Mininova is The Peoples String Foundation – Red Dress Woman in Black. The video can be currently viewed on our YouTube channel, but if you want to download the video to place on your computer or ipod here is the link to the torrent on Mininova.

Enjoy!

In the future RouteNote will be adding more videos and other content to Mininova and other bittorrent sites to help drive promotion of our artists. Stay tuned for more freebies coming soon.

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If you have any issues with our service, or suggestions, please just drop us a message on there and we will reply straight away.

Thanks,
RouteNote Team

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Amazon Mp3 UK has all four major labels signed up, SonyBMG, Universal Music, EMI Music and Warner Music – and leading independents such as Cooking Vinyl, Harmonia Mundi, Beggars Banquet, The Orchard, Concord and IODA.

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The iDrum lets users remix a bunch of classic club tracks with more than 300 samples to play with, tapping the screen to build up layers of bleeps and beats.

There are 3 different apps available in the iTunes store.

Ministry of Sound version –

Club edition –

Hip-hop edition –

The prices vary depending upon your country, but check it out!!

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In the last year or so it has been tough times for the major record labels. The majors have not really been moving into the digital as fast as they should, whilst at the same time not understanding the digital business models.

Whilst this still remains the case Universal have released their lastest quarters results, and they seem very surprising to me.

• $3.97 billion revenue for first 3Q’s of ’08
• + 3.5% without currency fluctuations
• + 33% for digital sales which “”more than offset” lower CD sales
• Earnings 21.8% to $516M before deduction of interest, tax and amortization
• Net is lower due to restructuring costs
• Full press release

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