Label:Life

The Full Federal Court has today upheld that Warner Music and Universal Music had breached section 47 of the Trade Practices Act 1974 dealing with exclusive dealing when responding to the parallel importation of music by small business.

The court did not affirm a breach of section 46, based on the earlier High Court Boral judgment. The court increased the total penalties payable by Warner, Universal and company senior executives to a total of more than $2 million.

“This decision is important as it sends a strong message to those who would attempt to influence retailers against stocking the often cheaper parallel-imported CDs in competition with Australian-made CDs”, ACCC Chairman, Mr Graeme Samuel, said. [more @ www.mi2n.com]

A new set of services aimed at giving independent music labels online distribution is springing up, hoping to reach companies such as Apple’s iTunes and the new Napster.

San Francisco-based Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) is the latest to hit the scene. It launched on Monday with deals in place to negotiate digital rights on behalf of 50 labels whose music it hopes to place with the growing net download and subscription services. A few older companies, such as CD Baby and The Orchard, also represent the digital rights of independent artists and labels.

IODA founder Kevin Arnold said: “What we’re saying is that this solves problems for both parties, and particularly for the independent labels. Typically, independents are companies with small staffs that don’t have a lot of expertise with digital rights, and don’t have in-house attorneys.”

The move towards organisation of independent labels could help speed the acceptance of authorised music subscription and download services, most of which have focused so far on acquiring music from the five major music labels.
[more @ www.silicon.com]

The campaign launched in May by the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) to target individual music sharers appears to be scaring punters away from file-sharing services, the latest figures from market watcher NPD appear to show.

NPD tracks consumer file-sharing activity. It calculated that 14.5 million US households downloaded music files in April. In May the figure fell to 12.7 million, and dropped to 10.4 million in June, the company said today.

On a statistical note, the figures listed are calculated from the activity of a sample of 40,000 users, NPD said. [more @ www.theregister.co.uk]

The record labels’ sue ‘em all campaign is having a noticeable impact on file sharing.

That’s what RIAA president Cary-Sue Sherman and his team of fact realignment specialists would have you, and the world at large, believe.

However, a visit to any network will instantly prove the reality is very different and as Slyck’s Tom Mennecke states it here:

“Although the RIAA’s holy war had some initial success, current network losses tend to be slight, or non-existent.”

FastTrack is/was the focal point of the RIAA’s assault and more than a month since the first shots were fired, the FastTrack network remains steady, he says. “At the time of this writing [August 1] the FastTrack network had 3.9 million users sharing 6.03 Terabytes of information. Despite the relentless onslaught of the RIAA, comparatively few have been frightened by their Gestapo tactics. [more @ www.musicdish.com]

Elbow frontman Guy Garvey has told us how the mass sing-a-long featured on the band’s current album was inspired by the “f*cking travesty” of war in Iraq.

Speaking exclusively to dotmusic recently, Garvey said he had wanted the new LP to carry an anti-war sentiment and used the crowd at Glastonbury 2002 to make that message stand out.

‘Grace Under Pressure’, one of the tracks from Elbow’s new album, ‘Cast Of Thousands’, features the voices of thousands of Glastonbury-goers chanting the line, “We still believe in love, so f*ck you”.

[more @ www.dotmusic.com]

Golden ears and gut instinct are the lifeblood of the business side of our industry, but are they enough? In this day and age when falling sales and lost jobs are the order of the day labels need a tool that can provide more information upon which to make decisions.

Hit Songs Science Technology is one such tool that claims to be able to predict the hit potential of a song by looking at mathematical similarities to other already successful singles.

HSS Hit Database analysis for this week reports some excellent results for:
Stacy’s Mom by Fountain’s of Wayne (S-Curve),
Why Can’t I? by Liz Phair (Capitol) and Bright Lights by Matchbox Twenty (Atlantic)

Stacy’s Mom shows some mathematical similarities to Don’t Say You Love Me, a 1999 hit for M2M. It also has some of the same hit creating substance that went into Angels Would Fall by Melissa Etheridge and Everything You Want by Vertical Horizon.

Why Can’t I? is mathematically related to Smash Mouth’s Then The Morning Comes as well as to Creed’s My Sacrifice. Fans of the related songs will most likely also enjoy the Liz Phair track and this could be the basis of some creative marketing and one of the hidden patterns this technology is able to detect.

[more @ www.mi2n.com]

“Money In Music: Do You Know the Cold Cash Facts of Music Clearance?” an article written by columnist and musician The G-Man, is published on the main web page of NARIP (National Association of Record Industry Professionals).

All musicians will be interested in the article, which contains insights, tips, ideas, and contact info in the profitable world of licensing music for film, TV, toys, greeting cards, games, and more. Have a look at NARIP’s site at:www.narip.com

Ringtones are – quite literally – the new rock’n’roll. The downloading of pop songs and melodies to your mobile phone is speedily becoming a big business, while manufacturing continues its relentless decline. According to the Mobile Data Association, sales of ringtones are expected to rise 60% this year to £70m, at which level they are poised to sell more than CD singles, which are falling fast. This is mainly interesting as a social phenomenon, the “branding” of youngsters by the genre of the tunes they choose to identify them when their phones ring. At the very least, such aural personalisation is a welcome relief from passive identification using someone else’s brand like Nike or Adidas.

However, the success of ringtones should also provide a moment of reflection for the music industry. Music moguls have been quick to blame the ease with which tracks can be downloaded from the internet as a reason why sales of singles have collapsed. But this does not explain why album sales rose (at least in the UK) last year. There is no doubt that many people downloaded tracks for free from the “file-sharing” groups that exist on the web. Most would not have bought the tracks anyway and many of the rest may have gone out and bought a record having sampled it on the net. The music industry cannot accept that one major reason for poor record sales is not piracy but competition from other leisure activities, like the internet, DVDs and ringtones.
[more @ www.guardian.co.uk]

Songwriters/producers Steve Isles (film and TV composer) and Jamie Cullum (producer – Brit and Mercury nominated Tom McRae album and new Island band Bell X1) are currently writing an album for release. The album consists of cool beats, acoustic instruments, and atmospheres in a mellow epic style. They are looking to collaborate with some distinctive vocalists on the album and are interested to see if any labels out there know of singers who might be interested, and if so could get in touch- steve@jaminc.demon.co.uk or,

Excitation Music Productions, The River, 30-40 Elcho Street, London, SW11.020 7924 4487/Steve – 07884 341394/Jamie – 07887 604818
(Apologies for incorrect contact details last week – ED.)

In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed Blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why.

No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There’s absolutely nothing new about that.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films – sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching – and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

“In the old days, there used to be a term, ‘buying your gross,’ ” Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. “You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience.”

But those days are over, because the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for movie-goers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money. (Ha!-ED.)

[more @ www.independent.co.uk]