Via: paidContent
One part of the music business has finally reached the fabled tipping point at which digital income offsets declining physical sales.
UK royalty collector PRS For Music, announcing 2009 income, says: “(Digital) growth (£12.8 million) outperformed the decline in traditional CD and DVD formats (down £8.7 million) for the first time, though the legal online [...]
Via: paidContent
Litigious EMI may have avoided a court showdown with yet another digital music startup (it’s settled a case over lyrics data with TuneWiki), but it’s also fighting a case brought against it by one of its own artists…
Pink Floyd has two beefs, according to some rather bare-bones reporting of Tuesday morning’s initial hearing in [...]
Via: paidContent
David Dorn doesn’t flinch when the C word—“cheesy”—comes up during an interview about Rhino Entertainment. He embraces it, talking about the two extremes of the Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) catalog division—a “really great sense of humor” that can result in something like Golden Throats, the series of compilations featuring performers best known for [...]
Via: Billboard
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen since, for companies whose core product is content — like every newspaper and magazine you read, including this one — the idea that we Internet visionaries sold is a total load of crap. We persuaded executives to compete with themselves online by setting up Web sites that offered for free [...]
Via: paidContent
Apple’s music and app stores straddle paid content’s demographic fault line. Apps, a fundamentally interactive experience, are tailor-made for the digital natives, whereas the static 99-cent music download remains wedded to a bygone era. Of course, the kids still like music, but the current digital-music product doesn’t compel them to part with their cash [...]
Via: Billboard
Sirius XM Radio Inc posted its first quarterly profit since its merger and said it expects to add 500,000 new subscribers in 2010 as the recovery in the car market boosts demand for satellite radio.
The results suggest that the company, run by media industry veteran Mel Karmazin, has solidified and is set to grow. [...]
Via: paidContent
Berkeley, CA-based music service Mog.com, which recently launched its subscription music service with good review, is taking a new VC round to finance an entry to the UK market, promising to undercut the much-hyped Spotify and CBS-owned social site Last.fm, we have learned.
The second round closed at around $10 million, with previous investor Menlo [...]
Via: Billboard
Recorded music gets less of a household’s entertainment spending than video games, movies, sports and reading material. Each year for the last decade, music spending has dropped as consumers spend less on CDs. But this isn’t the first time the record industry has suffered a setback, and a rebound would hardly be the first.
According [...]
Via: paidContent
Spotify has reportedly raised further venture funding from Facebook and Friendster backer Founders Fund, for U.S. expansion. The company won’t comment on it when we asked.
Former Stardoll CTO Daniel Ek and TradeDoubler co-founder Martin Lorentzon put up €8 million of their own money to start the music service in 2007, then took an unspecified [...]
Via: paidContent
After months of offering advance releases, exclusives and competition prizes as inducements to premium subscribers, Spotify is now doing the opposite. Sort of.
The music service is making a song and dance about an “exclusive” new Jimi Hendrix video – it’s first ever video foray – that’s only available to its free users.
Spotify announced its [...]
