snapshot 4/1/08

Orchard Losses Jump Even As Revenue Doubles
The Orchard posted a 99% jump over previous year revenue in the 4th quarter of 2007, but losses also grew from $1.4M to $2.4M as gross profit margins fell 34% to 25%. The merger with publicly traded Digital Music Group factored into all results.


Radiohead sells 'Nude' deconstruction on iTunes
British rock act Radiohead has taken a different approach with its latest single, the band has announced. Rather than commission a series of professional remixes for "Nude," any musician can now buy the song's underlying elements on iTunes (link), and remix them into a new track. Available "stems" include the voice, bass, guitar, drum, and string/FX layers; while shoppers have to buy before April 8th to get free GarageBand project files, the layers can be edited using many other programs, such as Logic.

Completed remixes can then be uploaded to a special Radiohead website, where people can vote on their favorite mixes until May 1st, the best of which will be heard by the band. MySpace and Facebook widgets can be used to simplify voting by friends and strangers.


Firefox reaches 18 percent of corporate desktops
Mozilla Firefox's share of the enterprise desktop market has reached 18 percent, according to a new Forrester report noted by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley.

Mozilla's share of the browser market rose steadily throughout 2007, only slowing for the quarter directly following the release of Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) in late 2006. Adoption in the enterprise nearly doubled to 18 percent by the end of 2007, but large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox....


Universal Goes Green With Greenchoice Packaging
The insert in more than 20 Universal Music Group titles being introduced as a part of Wal-Mart's "Earth Month" promotion contain a paper insert imbeded with wildflower seeds. Its all part of a growing movement to green the music industry with environmentally friendly packaging and messages.

The albums will be sold in the new REPAK CD package, an all paperboard option containing third-party certified, renewable recycled paper. The REPAK's design features a recessed cavity to hold the disc in place, eliminating the need for a plastic hub or tray and is part of Shorewood Packaging's "greenchoice" program. The new packaging will replace the jewel box version of each title. Those albums (see list below) will also include the wildflower insert offering three free digital downloads from the UMG catalog.


Stuck In First Gear? Growth Questions Surround Mobile Content, Music
The mobile industry has one of the most explosive growth curves in history. Over the past two decades, industrialized nations have shifted from niche usage to super-saturation, and less-developed nations have leapfrogged nonexistent landline infrastructures. Current estimates peg the total number of active mobile subscriptions at roughly 3 billion, and recently-released data counted 500 million music-enabled phone shipments last year alone.

But flattening voice revenues are shifting the attention towards content, and not everyone is pleased with early-stage adoption levels. In Las Vegas on Monday, a certain level of frustration was palpable at Billboard Mobile Entertainment Live, a pre-CTIA symposium. Across various forms of mobile entertainment, executives widely agreed that mobile content evolution remains in its earliest stages. But carriers, manufacturers, content owners, and investors struggled through internal disagreements and disappointing adoption levels.


Who's Number Two? Three? Researcher Starts Counting Benjamins...
So who's right? "From our perspective, money is what counts," said Mark Kirstein, a former analyst at In-Stat and iSuppli, and currently head of MultiMedia Intelligence. Kirstein compiled a ranking based on annual revenues, and found both Amazon and Spiralfrog in the basement. "Amazon may be coming up now, but they certainly weren't in the running in 2007," Kirstein told Digital Music News. "And Spiralfrog's claimed registered user base of roughly 850,000 isn't substantially monetized."

But who are the top players? Kirstein estimated annual music revenues of $1.8 billion at iTunes, $125 million at Napster, and $42 million at eMusic. Others, including Rhapsody, Zune Marketplace, and Musicload are all "sub-$40 million" according to the data.


Exclusive: Details Revealed of Music Industry Plan to OK P2P
Details are beginning to emerge of a controversial plan to charge internet users an extra fee through their ISPs to freely download music on P2P networks. = Spearheaded by Warner Music Group, which has hired industry consultant Jim Griffin to implement a plan to turn peer-to-peer downloads into cash, the scheme would give P2P users a get-out-of-jail-free card for file sharing activity. BigChampagne, a company that measures digital-media consumption, would be one of several sources supplying the necessary data to track file sharing activity and divvy up the cash among rights holders.


Court Backs Majors On File-Sharing Question
Major labels today prevailed in a federal District Court in New York on a controversial legal question over unauthorized sharing of music files. In denying a motion to dismiss the labels' complaint, the court provided specific language for the labels to use when suing a file-sharer for simply making an unauthorized music file available in a Kazaa "shared folder."