Guns N’ Roses have gone even more viral, following last weeks introduction of a viral air guitar competition with the move to stream their new album, ‘Chinese Democracy’, directly from their MySpace page.
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Major labels are happy now to sell DRM-free music through retailers such as Amazon and 7Digital, but Apple remains locked out, with three of the four majors denying it permission to sell tracks DRM-free through its iTunes Plus service - even though it’s the largest US music retailer. But this may soon change.
9to5Mac claims Sony Music will make moves to license its tracks for sale through iTunes Plus in the coming “weeks or months”, with some speculating a potential announcement at Macworld San Francisco.
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MySpace may have plans to introduce its very own ‘iPod-killer’ to supplement its newly-introduced music download service, company CEO Chris DeWolf explained at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco yesterday.
There’s no big rush to do so, however, with DeWolf simply conceding “it’s possible” before stressing his company remains focused on the music service right now.
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Facebook plans to launch its own digital music service in competition with MySpace Music, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said.
With social network competitor MySpace using its high-level News Corp. connections to launch a major label-friendly (some say too friendly) music service, Facebook - already hurting through sustained criticism of its new user interface and continually plagued by the challenge of monetising its traffic - plans to hit back.
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MySpace’s MyAds scheme is to be opened up to the public with the company particularly hungry to convince bands to use the service, which will let them create banner ads targeted at specific demographic groups of MySpace users.
Billboard claims 1,100 categories of interest, ranging from hip-hop to rock to tattooing. There is a $25 minimum per campaign.
This ads took has been available in private beta to a small pool of MySpace users for a few months after being introduced for large brands last year.
MySpace Music was launched last month, offering on-demand music streaming and song downloads.
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A new indie artist-friendly streaming music service, Spotify, has launched last night in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway and Sweden, with more countries to come in the weeks ahead.
Founded by Daniel Ek & Martin Lorentzon (pictured), Spotify is a refreshing breath of air after the partially major-label owned MySpace Music apparent unwillingness to treat indie labels as peer partners for its somewhat confusing music service.
In a late announcement last night, global indie label trade association Merlin confirmed it has signed up as a “fifth major” for the launch of the new on-demand streaming music service. Read the rest of this entry »
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Scant days since launch, MySpace Music has already streamed over a billion songs since, the company has claimed.
In a statement from the company, MySpace Music said, “We’re extremely pleased with the launch of MySpace Music—clearly our users around the world are engaged and excited about the new music experience on MySpace. We’ve hit some incredible milestones in only a few days—some of the numbers you’re reading about are already out of date.”
And continues, “We can confirm that we hit a milestone of one billion music streams in only a few days after launching the new product.” Read the rest of this entry »
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We7 CEO and co-founder Steve Purdham is over the moon at achieving a BT Digital Music Award, but warns that the industry remains under threat - even at this stage in its evolution.
“The digital world is about to go through another upheaval with 1 billion streams on MySpace Music, We7 Launching in November and Apple threatening to pull the plug,” he said, speaking to Distorted Loop just in advance of the revelation of the royalty deal for publishing in the US announced last night.
Despite the hubbub of activity, Purdham thinks there’s still significant challenges to the development of the digital music industry.
“All of this activity shows two things, first the demand for digital music is outstanding and if allowed to flourish will build a very healthy business for artists, labels and fans alike,” he said, warning, “but at the same time the fundamental economics of the industry are still trying to kill off the opportunity rather that allowing it to grow.” Read the rest of this entry »
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MySpace Music may be in a strong position to influence the development of online music, but analysts and industry pundits appear underwhelmed by what’s on offer.
We know that 12 per cent of European internet users visit artist pages on social networking sites and that they are also more likely than all other online music consumers to pay for digital downloads and listen to online radio.
However, independent artists are already angry with the new MySpace offering as the service has refused to reach an equable deal with them. And they see this a potential collusion among the major labels, each of whom actually own a stake in MySpace, a place for major label friends.We think this scathing criticism of the service from Bob Lefstz is well worth repeating:
“Content is not king, distribution is. That’s what gave the major labels their power. They could get the records in the store and get paid for them too! But with anybody able to get their stuff on iTunes, the labels needed another monopoly. Hence, MySpace Music.
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The world’s leading indie labels are furious with their perceived treatment at the hands of the formerly edgy start-up now News Corp. owned MySpace.
Indies are furious that MySpace’s new music service - a service in which major labels own a stake - won’t offer independents the same kind of level playing field. In essence, each time an independent label sells some music, the major labels each makes some money. That’s making the indies pretty mad.
MySpace Music launched without deals in place for the independent labels, though it does have some arrangement with leading music aggregator, The Orchard. Now the indies are speaking up - and, as reported on the BBC - are threatening to boycott MySpace. (Does this mean MySpace has become a place for major label bands? A&R departments may have to seek unsigned acts elsewhere….)
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