snapshot 9/18/07

AOL to test personal pictures, video, music site
Time Warner's AOL will test a free service that lets users consolidate on one Web site their personal photos, videos and music that are now scattered across multiple computers and Web sites. The new site, Bluestring, combines elements of video- sharing sites such as Google Inc's YouTube, online picture sites such as Yahoo Inc's Flickr service and music sites with AOL's online storage division Xdrive.


Warner Music to sell Blunt album on MySpace
Warner Music Group Corp will sell a new album by the artist James Blunt through News Corp's Internet social network MySpace, the Financial Times reported in its online edition.

U.S. consumers will be able to listen for free beginning on Tuesday to Blunt's entire album from his MySpace webpage, the report said. They can purchase a download for $9.99 that will play on Apple Inc's iPod, and will also receive a compact disc version in the mail, the report said.


Music industry looks to new models to boost sales
The U.S. music industry is becoming more open-minded about working with online music stores from the tiniest start-up to Amazon.com, hoping to boost digital music sales and erode the dominance of Apple Inc's iTunes.

Their goal is: to increase digital revenue as CD sales drop more sharply than anticipated; and to create alternatives to iTunes to boost their negotiating power against Apple when licensing contracts are renewed.

Yet, as a measure of how difficult it is to gain traction in this market, Lala only has one deal with a major label, Warner Music Group. Lala also offers to send fans free CDs of digital albums they buy from its site, and also plans to give them a chance to "return" downloads they do not like.


Mixaloo reinvents mix tapes
Until now. Mixaloo is a service that blends social networking and music, letting you build your own play lists and share them through widgets that you can post on your MySpace or Facebook page. Even better, this method of making mix tapes is completely legal and won't even cost you 45 cents for a blank. Plus, if you can create a mix that somehow appeals to the masses, rather than just your sweetheart, you can actually score some bank in the process.

The widget itself is rather interactive, giving options to hear sample tracks, buy the entire mix, send it to a friend, or gift it to a friend. In order to buy or gift the mix tape, the buyer will need to create a Mixaloo account. Mixaloo keeps track of all the mixes you’ve created to sell, and those you’ve purchased. For promotional purposes, others can also grab the widget to place on their blogs or social networking profiles. As it’s powered by ClearSpring, there are easy, one-click options for the widget to be added to the various networks including LiveJournal, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook and more.


Radiohead Blows Off ITunes, Sells Full Albums in MP3 Format
There are currently only three Radiohead songs available on iTunes, all as part of soundtracks and compilations. But head over to 7digital, and you'll find all of Radiohead's albums plus some early singles, available in the 320 Kbps, DRM-free MP3 format.

According to an EMI, Radiohead refuses to distribute via Apple -- even through Apple's DRM-free iTunes Plus store -- entirely because of Apple's policy of selling tracks individually. Prices are in UK pounds, but 7digital apparently lets you purchase albums from Radiohead, EMI's other artists, and other bands from anywhere in the world using a credit card or Paypal.


Let’s rock!
The concert industry was once the poor relation of the record business. “It used to be that the tour was there to sell the record,” says David Glick, a former lawyer who last year set up Edge Performance VCT, a £20m fund for investing in live music. Now, with compact disc sales collapsing, it is the other way round.

In an age of media fragmentation, digital disruption and rampant piracy, live music is one of the few parts of the entertainment industry to be enjoying impressive growth. In the US alone, ticket sales grew by 16 per cent last year to $3.6bn, up from $1bn a decade ago according to Pollstar, one of the few research firms attempting to measure the fragmented business. The audience has grown by 50 per cent in that period and average ticket prices have more than doubled.

Several connected factors share the credit for this turnround. An expanding audience has allowed promoters to push up ticket prices, tempting more artists out on tour, creating demand for ever more elaborate shows and attracting investment in a new generation of venues to cater to concert-goers who would never be seen dead in Harlesden.


The Orchard + DMG. Can Two Losers Make A Winner?
An SEC filing related to the merger of The Orchard with Digital Music Group reveals two digital music distributors loosing money. (SEC) In 2006 The Orchard, which as a private company did not have reveal financial details, had a net loss of $5.97 million on revenue of $14.9 million for an accumulated loss of $16.5 million.


DRM Questions Continue, Experimental Data Remains Foggy
Content protection remains a difficult puzzle piece for the music industry, and scant data is perpetuating the confusion. At the Digital Rights Strategies forum in Manhattan, top executives professed that little is known about the impact of recent, DRM-free sales experiments from majors EMI and Universal Music. And a confusing patchwork of DRM-free partnerships is further complicating the analysis.

EMI - and Apple for that matter - have declined to release data from the iTunes Plus experiment, making an early-stage assessment mostly impossible. And DRM-free experiments involving portions of the Universal Music Group catalog remain incredibly early-stage, and equally difficult to analyze.

An unexpected comparison emerged from Snocap, a core component of MySpace MyStores. The service allows artists to sell content from their profile pages, and offers the option of MP3-based or protected sales. According to Ali Aydar, chief operating officer at Snocap, most artists choose MP3s, though a minority - including Warner Music Group - broker in protected content. "Pound for pound, MP3 sells more," said Aydar, perhaps an obvious outcome.


Apple's success ruined everything
"Apple is using encryption to do what Ma Bell used to do with the phone network: wall people in," InterTrust CEO Talal Shamoon said in the opening session, setting the theme for the day. "It frustrates consumers and it feeds piracy because it doesn't allow consumers to do what they want to do."

"I can't believe I'm saying this but the real bad guy here isn't Microsoft, it's Apple," InterTrust's Knox Carey chimed in. "You can license Microsoft's DRM."


What will it take to create the middle-class musician?
Westergren: The vast majority of musicians exist in that they are the working poor. They spend a lot of time playing music...travel around the clubs...spend whatever little money they earn on their music equipment and they're basically starving, you know? They're all trying to get the attention of a big record label, because that's traditionally the only means for them to get exposure to enough people to make a career out of it.