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 rates have remained high – and negotiations have now broken down… [Read More]

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 London’s High Court…

—PA: “The case concerns how online royalties are to be calculated.”

—And the band also says EMI is breaking their contract by selling individual tracks, unbundled from wider albums.

Aside from that amorphous royalties issue (Bloomberg says “EMI was granted a request to have part of the hearing heard without the media present”), the case illustrates how creative wishes laid down by artists in analogue-era agreements might be trampled over in the online age… [Read More]

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 talents other than singing, and on the flip side, “the most amazing musical experience thought out and well curated” like the limited-edition Rhino Handmade series. A few minutes in, it’s clear his title could be Chief Evangelist. But as of today his real role at Rhino is to mesh that enthusiasm with making money as SVP, Global Sales and Digital Strategy, U.S. Repertoire.

With this promotion, the 17-year Rhino vet takes responsibility for physical and digital sales, along with developing the global digital sales and promotion strategy for the company’s U.S. catalog. He’ll also be working with Warner Music International affiliates on their digital strategies and catalog efforts. He had been in charge of e-commerce activities in the U.S. and operating the international department. Dorn remains based in LA. “How do we globalize our efforts? It’s easier said than done. We trying to get everybody to row in the same direction.” [Read More]

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 pleasure at bagging a “world exclusive” on the video – but Twitter filled up with depressed onlookers, perceiving Spotify has launched a new video service, scratching their heads that they couldn’t see it.

But Tweeters, chillax – the video, which appears on the Home page for free Spotify users, is a one-off paid ad placement by Sony (NYSE: SNE) Music for the forthcoming new Hendrix album, Valleys Of Neptune – and paying customers don’t see ads. [Read More]

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 and MPCA SVP Bruce Bunner, as directors. But in a short phone conversation, Tunesat CEO Scott Schreer said the company would not disclose who participated in the funding round (He did say that while NBC Sports was a past backer of the firm, it was not among the investors in this raise). [Read More]

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 its 7 million total installed base.) And there is a very real threat that these services are educating mass- market consumers that music online is free.

It’s one thing having spotty teenagers downloading from BitTorrent casting nervous glances over their shoulders, but having their parents stop buying CDs in favor of streaming Spotify into their living rooms is another proposition entirely. And to top it off, all these services have yet to learn how to make ad-supported music pay. (Pandora is a notable exception, but it took many years to finally hit operational profitability in 2009 and it isn’t even fully on-demand, so has lower rights costs.) [Read More]

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 – up from £20 million and a negligible share in 2003 – according to IFPI’s Digital Music Report 2010, published on the eve of the big Midem industry conference in Cannes, from which I will be reporting this weekend.

“It would be great to report these innovations have been rewarded by market growth, more investment in artists, more jobs. Sadly that is not the case,” writes IFPI CEO John Kennedy in the report. “Digital piracy remains a huge barrier to market growth. [Read More]

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 Universal Music Group. Australia-based Guvera is angling to build up its U.S. presence and has already opened a New York office late last year.

In addition to UMG, Guvera also licensing deals with EMI and other labels. It’s hoping to get Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) on board as well. [Read More]

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 label-partial Nielsen softened the blow by factoring in its usual bag of questionable calculations. That includes ‘track equivalent albums,’ as well as a separate methodology that counts every discrete transaction – download, ringtone, album sale, whatever – and invariably comes up with a gain. [Read More]

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 percent more singles were sold overall last year than 2008.

—But albums aren’t enjoying the same boost. Digital sales rose from 10.3 million to 16.1 million, but it wasn’t enough to stop albums overall shifting 3.5 percent fewer copies (128.9 million). [Read More]