Via: paidContent Remember 12 months ago, when YouTube, negotiating music rates with European royalty collectors, yanked official music videos from its site in the UK and Germany? By the summer, YouTube had forced the UK’s PRS For Music to halve its on-demand music stream rate, leading to YouTube’s reinstatement. But, in Germany, the GEMA society’s [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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Via: paidContent Tunesat, a startup which tracks what music is being played on major TV stations in the U.S. and Europe on behalf of copyright holders, has raised $975,000 in a funding round, we have confirmed. An SEC filing lists NBC Sports digital media SVP Perkins Miller, Music Publishing Corp. of America CEO John Hecker [...]

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Via: paidContent From the record labels’ perspective, on-demand free music services such as We7 and Spotify have yet to deliver the goods. They haven’t made a dent in illegal downloading and they haven’t converted enough new consumers to pay for digital music. (Spotify’s 250,000 paying subs is an encouraging start, but is just 3.6% of [...]

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Via: paidContent Global digital music revenue has grown 20,900 percent since the music business started keeping count in 2003 – but it still needs government protection to grow further, says the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the industry’s main trade umbrella. 2009 digital sales hit $4.2 billion, or 27 percent of industry revenue [...]

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Via: paidContent Ad-supported music downloader Guvera has raised a $20 million second round, bringing its total funding over the past two years to $30 million, Techcrunch reported. All of its funding has come from AMMA Private Investment, an Australian consortium of private angel investors.The private, registration-only music site recently signed a big licensing deal with [...]

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Via: paidContent Albums suffered another precipitous drop in 2009, according to the latest US-based data from Nielsen Soundscan. The group reported yearly sales of 373.9 million units, down 12.7 percent from a 2008 total of 428.4 million. The tally includes CDs, digital albums, LPs, and the increasingly-marginalized cassettes. That represents another tough drop, though the [...]

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Via: paidContent 2009 Official Charts Company figures from the BPI show unit sales 15 percent up from 2008 to a decade high of 281.6 million, spurred by digital singles… —Digital resurrected the singles market in 2004. Virtually all of the 152.7 million singles sales were digital last year (98 percent, or 149.7 million). Accordingly, 32.6 [...]

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