BREAKING NEWS

French National Assembly Adopts 3 Strikes Law

iLike Launches Custom iPhone Apps, Syndication Platform To Help Artists Connect With Fans

Imeem About To Expand iPhone Music Storage By Way Of The Cloud

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OPINIONS AND REPORTS

Seth Godin: Another View Of Free

Bruce Houghton: Despite The All The Gloom And Doom I’m Still Optimistic About The Music Industry

Is the Long Tail really long?

Not just a matter of semantics:about “pirates” and “theft” in the music industry.

Spotify CEO interview ortability and subscriptions to a social music experience as key future developments.

FACTS

Live Nation looks to ticketholders for more revenue

The Biggest Music Sites Online?

Music Industry So Weak You Only Need To Sell 83,000 To Be No. 1

Pandora Mobile In Numbers.

BREAKING NEWS

A week dense of social networks ‘ announcements

FACEBOOK COLONIZATION

April 28th is a date to remember. Facebook launched the Open Stream API: it’s the start of the Facebook experience extending beyond the Facebook walls. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream.

One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop.

Another example is a demo of Silverlight+ Facebook Stream, that has wowed the lucky Techcrunch viewers: Microsoft Shows Off The Power Of Facebook’s New APIs

For a technical review of the Open Stream API, check Nick O’Neill’s post at AllFacebook.com

More on the business implications thanks to NYT Brad Stone Tinker Away. Facebook Says

For a less enthusiastic review, Marshall KirckPatrick Despite New Openness, Facebook Remains Fundamentally Closed

MYSPACE AND PLAYLIST

MySpace has a new CEO, former Facebook executive and Playlist CEO, Owen Van Natta. WSJ.com: Taking Helm at MySpace

Playlist names former MTV veteran as new CEO: MTV Vet Sykes New Project Playlist CEO

TRENDS

MUSIC SPONSORSHIP SPENDING

Music Sponsorship Spending at an all time High in 2009

AD SPENDING IS OFFICIALLY NOT RECESSION-PROOF

TechCrunch: The Online Ad Recession Is Officially Here: First Quarterly Decline In Revenues

MORE TWITTERS, MORE QUITTERS?

Nielsen shocked the Twittersphere this week by reporting that Twitter shows that some come but never come back, yet the small community is indeed very influential.

See also Pete Cashmore at Mashable: 60% of Twitter users quit within the first month.

GOING UP, DOWN AND UNDER

UP- HULU AND VEVO: The Gold Race to monetize music videos is on. Wired’s editor,Eliot Van Buskirk, reports on the Next Music Battle: Hulu vs Vevo

UP-HULU AND DISNEY: Hulu is becoming the preferred distribution channel for the big media companies. It just got major buy-in from  Disney that is now an investor, joining News Corp and NB.

Who should worry more? YouTube or Apple?

UP AND THUMBS UP-COLDPLAY,JOSH FREESE &DE LA SOUL

More artists experimenting with innovative models

-Coldplay will give away a free nine-track live album, LeftRightLeftRightLeft, at every gig this year. MusicAlly

-Legendary Hip-Hop Trio De La Soul works with Nike for a new Music Release. AdAge

-Josh Freese is getting ready to release self-release a solo album and has been attracting some attention because of the unorthodox pricing model he is employing.

UP AND THUMBS UP-SLACKER,SPOTIFY,PEOPLE MUSIC STORE&THINKINDIE:

More success stories for a few new music start-ups

-Slacker Radio hits the 1million downloads on the BlackBerry. Billboard.biz Q&A: Slacker CEO Dennis Mudd

-Spotify continues to recruit music fans at a rate 40,000 users/day. MusicAlly: Spotify has more than 1mln users in the UK

-People Music Store has signed a deal with UMG. Good job! Hypebot

-ThinkIndie.com launched today as the music download destination for  Coalition Of Independent Music Stores’ (CIMS) indie music retail outlets. Hypebot

DOWN

-France Reintroduces 3 Strikes Bill. UK Says No. Hypebot.

-Artist advocacy group The Future Of Music Coalition has released a new report “Same Old  Song” confirming that indie music is not getting its fair share of airplay on broadcast radio. Hypebot

DOWN AND THEN UP – SEEQPOD

Seeqpod CEO announces imminent acquisition. Wired

SOCIAL MEDIA

-TopSpin Ian Rogers has an amazing post on how musicians are experimenting with Twitter as a music platform and direct marketing channel

-Top 10 Twitter Tools For Musicians. Hypebot

-7 SEO Tips for Musicians. Hypebot

-Provocative advices from Eric Herbert. Forget MySpace: How To Build The Ultimate Website To Interact with Your Fans

OPINIONS AND MUST READS

Is A&R Still Necessary in Today’s Music Industry? Jim Markunas at MusicThinkTank

Resnikoff’s Parting Shot: The DIY Utopia… From the editor of DigitalMusicNews

Is MySpace becoming Windows of Online Music? Matt Rosoff

Music Is Not Like Water Fingertip

Your Facebook Profile Makes Marketers’ Dreams Come True Wired

100 Days of Data TopSping

Related articles by Zemanta

• AOL, MTV alums join MySpace’s revamped exec team (news.cnet.com)

If you talk about the Music Industry, one word you will hear for sure -and a lot- is Crisis. In its most positive connotation, a crisis is a turning point that triggers some radical changes. So with a crisis come opportunities.

That seems to be the gist of the speech Mike Masnick, editor of TechDirt, gave at the at the Leadership Music Digital Summit.

In front of an audience, featuring RIAA top execs and the 4 big labels, Masnick, who is a long time advocate of the “Free Music” theory, talks about the latest and greatest from Trent Reznor, the front man of NineInchNails ,who has been experimenting with disruptive models where record labels and copyright are not needed anymore.

“Connect with your fans – give them reasons to buy” is the motto of the Masnick’s keynote. Connections can be shaped in different forms: you can offer your music for free  and upsell concert tickets and merchandise, or you can ask your fans to finance your new album. Some of your fans – or to say it with Kevin Kelly- your  1,000 true fans -  will end up wanting more than a mere MP3. As the Italian saying goes: appetite comes with eating.

But this presentation- unlike the MidemNet one that focused solely on the Trent Reznor visionary experiments- lists other success stories from around the music industry.

-Fans as investors: In mid-January 2008, Jill Sobule launched a website, jillsnextrecord.com, which sought to raise $75,000 through fan donations in order to produce, manufacture, distribute and promote an upcoming studio album. In exchange for their donations, Sobule offered an assortment of gifts with values commensurate with the donation: from the free download of the album when it’s released ($10) to the opportunity to attend a recording session and sing on the record ($10,000). 53 days after the public launch of the site, Sobule reached her target! The  album is now live and distributed through Sobule’s own label, Pinko Records. Jill who had a hit in 1995, had been dropped by two labels in between and two others went out of business…

-Engage with humor: Josh Freese who has played drums for Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails in the past, released his latest new album with a rather hilarious take on the tiers. As Ian Rogers from TopSpin revealed, Josh’s $250 tier has sold out in less than 48 hours (there were a total of 25 available)!

-Free Music and Cheaper-Smart Ticketing: For Corey Smith Free Music built the base and tours built the revenues. In 2007, he grossed $1.7 million, in 2008 $4.2 million. Users can buy the tracks on iTunes. When Corey experimented with taking the free tracks down from his site, iTunes sales went down! Corey also innovated the approach to concerts by selling $5 tickets!  Tickets are cheaper on the on sale date and users can bring a friend…a potential new fan.

-Tours go to fans, not the opposite: ”Thing a Week” is the name that former programmer Jonathan Coulton gave to a creative experiment. In this project, Coulton undertook to record 52 musical pieces in the course of a year, one each week. All songs were released under the Creative Commons license.  In an interview with This Week in Tech, Coulton stated that he made more money in 2007 than he did in his last year of working as a programmer, 40% of it from digital downloads and 40% from merchandise and performances.  Coulton has been one of the first ones to use services like Eventful to guarantee a large enough crowd at a certain location and showing up for a “strategic” concert in a place where he’s guaranteed to make some money out of it.

-Video concerts, Souvenirs & BitTorrent: Swedish musician Moto Boy went around to various videos sites, found all the videos fans had posted of his concerts, picked the best ones, and put them all together to create a “virtual concert” for fans (both new and old) to enjoy.  Also, while distributing his music for free through BitTorren, Moto Boy created a little mechanical music box that plays one of Moto Boy’s songs. You can place it on any surface and wind it and it plays the song. The music box is a cool souvenir that Moto Boy’s true fans are more than willing to pay for.

So while the crisis is unfolding so are the new opportunities. To quote William Gibson, the future is definitely HERE….and it’s getting distributed!

Leadership Music Digital Summit 2009 – Mike Masnick keynote address, 3/25/09 from Leadership Music Digital Summit on Vimeo.

It’s official. A Swedish court has found four men behind the BitTorrent tracker the Pirate Bay guilty of assisting in making copyrighted material available and sentenced each of them to a year in jail. They were also ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.54 million) to the film and music industries by Stockholm district court. Plaintiffs included Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros., EMI Music and Columbia Pictures.

The Swedish and international music industry has welcomed today’s (April 17) verdict against Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde. The Pirate Bay is the most notorious site used for searching P2P downloads of music and films, claiming 22 million users in February.

The court found the defendants guilty of making 33 specific files accessible for illegal P2P file-sharing. It ordered that damages must be paid to companies including all the majors and film studios MGM and 20th Century Fox., reports Billboard

International music trade group IFPI was suitably thrilled by today’s news. CEO John Kennedy, who appeared as a witness during the trial, said that the case “was about defending the rights of creators, confirming the illegality of the service and creating a fair environment for legal music services that respect the rights of the creative community. Today’s verdict is the right outcome on all three counts.”

The verdict itself was leaked yesterday, with the defendants first learning their fate from a journalist. “Really, it’s a bit LOL,” Kolmisoppi (@brokep) wrote on Twitter. “It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.”

It was a fitting end to this spectacle of a trial, which opened with The Pirate Bay driving a city bus up from Belgrade to Stockholm, saw the prosecutor dismiss half the charges on the first day, and featured the astonishing claim that 80 percent of the material on the site was legal.

The Legal Implications: The threat of piracy remains

“The threat of piracy remains” says Reed Smith , quoted by MusicAlly, “given that the Pirate Bay founders have indicated that they will appeal, a process which will take at least a year, there is still some way to go until the principle that an individual who posts links to infringing content is ratified into Swedish law. In the meantime, the level of sophistication of determined file-sharers grows and technology continues to develop faster than legislation”

As remarked by TechDirt “The trial did certainly include plenty of theatrics, but the core question was an important one: should a site that is, effectively, a search engine, be liable for the content that is linked from that search engine, given that it hosted no infringing works itself.”

Forrester Research analyst Mark Mulligan has posted a more thoughtful take on the implications of the decision, saying that even though the verdict is by no means definitive, it’s still good news for the music biz.

“The music industry has come out of this with a ruling that is more positive for them than many had been expected,” he writes, before suggesting that “there are some interesting implications from this ruling, most notably the question of whether Google could now be held responsible for posting links to content that does not have copyright cleared?”. Even though as pointed out by the Guardian,  “There is no shortage of links to copyright information on Google. There is a difference, in that linking to torrent files is a byproduct of Google’s ubiquitous search strategy, rather than its purpose. Still, it would be interesting to see Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt jailed as well.”

Business Implications

Some will say fileshring lost a battle, but won a war and that the verdict was really irrelevant. Or as Wired puts it, Pirates wins either way. “It’s a win-win situation. That’s what author Anders Rydell, who wrote a book about the Swedish piracy movement, calls the pending verdict ” He continues “there is a wider and more symbolic aspect, where a whole young generation is on trial. This is a generational issue, a conflict between different ways of looking at and spreading culture.”

He goes on “On a larger scale, the outcome of this trial won’t be able to stop the ongoing development. File sharing has made it easier to access culture, and business models are being adjusted to fit the new reality. I’m convinced that the business models will change faster than the laws. In the end, we’ll have legislation with no real function, except for scaring people.”

“Swedish studies show that half the musicians are file-sharing illegally themselves. Many musicians, filmmakers and artists are annoyed that the copyright organizations tend to speak for all of them, while they themselves may feel closer to the piracy movement. Recently we’ve seen new services, such as the music streaming service Spotify, that many pirates like and use”

From TechDirt ” The folks this will hurt the most are those content creators who actually do value The Pirate Bay — such as best selling author Paulo Coehlo, who found that “pirating” his own book helped him tremendously, and who recently spoke out about what a useful tool The Pirate Bay has been. “

Follow the conversation on Twitter.

It’s been official for 24 hours now: Google has launched an ad-supported free music search in China, with the backing of more than 140 record labels, including the Big 4.

The Google service allows Chinese consumers to search for music, link to the Web site of a Beijing company called Top100.cn and download licensed music from that Chinese site, which has signed contracts with the music industry. Screenshots for non-Chinese readers have been made available by Music 2.0. It looks pretty slick, with lyrics, a flash player, upsell of ringback tones. Tracks are DRM free and high-quality (192kbps).

The news was not unexpected. It is a tactical move for Google to win market share against its long-time competitor Baidu, which has about 62 percent of the Chinese search engine market and has grown partly by offering music search services and linking to sites that offer free downloads of music. By comparison, Google has only about 28 percent of the search engine market in China. Pretty lame for a Google!

So a new alliance Google-Record Labels is born with the immediate goal to try to monetize the world largest illegal music market, China. Revenues will/should come through advertising, which will be shared between Google and the Labels.  China has been a tough nut to crack for the music industry in “traditional” ways: Chinese consumers have skipped the CD generation and happily jumped into the Napster-p2p file-sharing one.

But whatever the immediate goals, it is evident that this is/will soon be a Paradigm Shift for both the industry and consumers and it is going to be a global one.

In the words of MediaFuturist Gerd Leonhard: if this works in China, why not do this everywhere else? If this works for Google, why not for telecoms, ISPs and mobile operators?  If this works for music, why not – sooner or later – for music, TV, video, books and newspapers?

Since its launch in October 2008. Spotify has been getting lots of plaudits from users and bloggers.

From TorrentFreak to  TechCrunch, the service seems to have impressed people who have tried it with its speed, usability, and depth of songs. Spotify seems to be the new European Mecca for music.  Yes European only, since it isn’t officially available in the U.S. yet (though a Digg commenter did provide a way for people to try it out Stateside, at least temporarily). Right now it can be accessed in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.

What is Spotify? It  is a downloadable application that lets users stream music instantly from its library. Once downloaded, the service allows users to search its music catalog by artist, genre, or title, and stream the tracks on-demand any number of times.

As with all new social media sites, Spotify offers its users the ability to create and share playlists (a la the now-defunct Muxtape). In December 2008, it also added the ability to scrobble the songs you listen to through Spotify on Last.fm.

The Spotify catalog is huge – notwithstanding some recent troubles – and built with the blessing of EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and some smaller record labels, including most recently CD Baby.

That, of course, begs the question: how does it plan to make money?

Let’s put it in a temporary timeline

-Spotify started off by offering two ways to use its service, a free service sponsored by ads, and a paid subscription service.

-How is this playing out? In an interview to Robert Andrews from PaidContent UK, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek points  at the difficulties of the advertising market and the not ready yet CRM platform as the reasons for a lukewarm start  “We launched probably at the worst possible time in 70 years for advertising”.

-In less than 6 months, Spotify has certainly attracted an interesting crowd of  followers. It has hit the million-user mark, but that’s across its ad-supported free option, £0.99-a-day service and £9.99 unlimited offering. However, according to Mark Mulligan, analyst at Forrester Research, Spotify has found that far fewer users then expected are handing over the cash for a monthly subscription.

Plans for the future?

-Mobile apps to stream and download songs – still in the works. But this is certainly a place to be today, for branding and marketing reasons.

-A celestial juke-box (a la Lala and PlayAnywhere). This is going to be huge and who wins this market, has the chance to be the next ITunes!

-Click to buy links. And that’s happened today thanks to a partnership with 7digital.

Initially only single songs and albums will be available to purchase but eventually users will be able to buy entire playlists from the store. The buying option will go live first in the UK and Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Sweden, Norway and Finland will follow in a few weeks time. No prices have been given for the price of each 320kbps MP3.

To quote Mark Mulligan again it appears that “The deal (with 7Digital) is happening now rather than at launch because Spotify is going through the process of re-learning its business”.

We’re all here to learn and re-learn!

James Heckman, former chief strategy officer at Fox Interactive, MySpace’s parent company, is quoted today by the Financial Times in a report on the status of the online music industry, saying .“A lot of these guys are going to be wiped out, but everything that is happening right now doesn’t matter in the long run.

“This is a transformation period and I think there will be some winners.”