Label:Life

Sam Dodson from Loop Guru has just finished work on the next Slipper album ‘When Hot Dogs Fly’ with new singer Andrea Black as featured artist.

With guest appearances from Daniel Lazerus, Jamuud, Jym Darling, Theremin supremo John Woodley, amongst others, the album has been described as brilliant by erstwhile Steely Dan producer Gary Katz.

The track “Marooned” will be the title track of the new animated movie by 20th Century Fox currently being completed by film producer David Logan in Los Angeles. Daniel Lazerus in Los Angeles as also added some great harp, guitar, and Hammond and mixed some tracks in Dolby 5.1 surround sound in Hollywood.

This record is available for licensing. For more information, please contact : chris@mechanismrecords.com.

Members of AFTRA, attending meetings in six different cities, have voted to ratify the collective bargaining agreement reached between the union and major record labels BMG, EMI Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group (UMG) and Warner Music Group. Pursuant to AFTRA’s Constitution, the agreement—finalised in September—was voted on by the membership in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington DC and Nashville.

Kim Roberts Hedgpeth, Associate National Executive Director and chief negotiator for AFTRA announced that the Trustees of the AFTRA Health & Retirement Funds have also approved the contract.

The crucial element of the new agreement is an innovative arrangement that guarantees access to basic AFTRA health plan coverage for all AFTRA-covered royalty artists who are under exclusive contract to a label. “Everyone, on both sides, recognizes the value and the significance of providing basic health insurance for recording artists,” said Hedgpeth. [more @ www.mi2n.com]

Futuresonic 04 is an international festival of electronic music and media arts featuring artistic showcases, club events, workshops, discussions, installations, and interventions. The festival will present a range of electronic music events and media arts projects, and will explore twospecific themes:

Mobile connections:artistic projects exploring how perceptions of space and time are being reconfigured by wireless technologies and digital media, from the radio to mobile telephony, streaming and wireless lan. themes to include wireless interfaces, location based sound, distributed events, and mobile phone culture

Turntable re:mix : To mark the 25th anniversary of the technics 1200mk2 record deck, one of the most iconic cultural artefacts of the 20th century, a series of events will showcase the many diverse forms of turntable music and look over the horizon at emerging formats and post-turntable music. Futuresonic 04 Takes place from 29.04.04 – 02.05.04. in Manchester,U.K..[more @ www.futuresonic.com]

With EMI, Warner Music, Sony and Bertelsmann racing to get regulatory approval for their planned mergers – what will consolidation mean for the music industry?

Music companies are in a real spin – battling falling profits, increasing competition and rampant piracy.

A report by IFPI, which represents the music industry worldwide, estimated that in 2002 one in three discs sold was pirated, boosting the value of the global counterfeit music market to $4.6bn (£2.7bn).Physical piracy – illegally copied CDs – meant that in 2001, for the first time in many years, no album sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.

Pro-music, an international initiative to promote legitimate online music – added that internet uploads have soared as album sales have fallen.In one four-month period in 2002, the number of music files available on pirate sites jumped from 500 million to 900 million.

Meanwhile, global music sales in 2002 fell by around 7% – resulting in 250 million fewer albums being sold in 2002 than in 2001, Pro-music said.

There is a race taking place with significant rewards for winning as the cost savings are absolutely vast in proportion to operating profits.

[The remainder of this article gives a good overview of the pros and cons of major label consolidation and how new business models will evolve -ED.] [more @ www.bbc.co.uk]

A partnership led by former Universal Music chief Edgar Bronfman Jr. has agreed to buy Warner Music Group for $2.6 billion cash, creating one of the world’s largest independent music companies.

The announcement Monday came just hours after London-based EMI Group PLC said it had withdrawn its offer to purchase Warner Music, a unit of the giant media conglomerate Time Warner Inc.

Under terms of the Bronfman group’s deal, Time Warner would retain an option to buy back a minority stake in the company, which is home to such artists as Madonna, R.E.M and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The purchase, which also includes Time Warner’s Warner/Chappell Music publishing business, would create one of the world’s largest independent music companies and include some of the industry’s best known music labels, including Warner Bros., Atlantic and Elektra Records. [more @ www.abcnews.go.com]

People who walked into Hallmark Cards stores in the United States this month may have noticed “Closer,” the new CD by Josh Groban, amid all the greeting cards, Christmas ornaments and stuffed animals.

Time Warner, whose Reprise Records label released the album, is hoping Groban’s adult contemporary sound strikes a chord with Hallmark customers, an older crowd than the one that typically visits music stores.

But, if it does, the sales may not count – not, that is, in the weekly tally compiled by Nielsen SoundScan, the bible of sales data for the music industry and the foundation of the influential Billboard Top 200 albums chart. [more @ www.iht.com]

Record labels have long been accused of stealing musicians’ copyrights as soon as the ink is dry on the contract. Now, one small independent label in Great Britain is doing the opposite: It’s giving the rights to the artists—and anyone else who wants to use the music, too.

Loca Records wants to foster experimentation and freedom in music by building a stable of free music which can be shared, remixed and manipulated by anyone. Songs are not locked by digital rights management technology.

The music is available for free in MP3 format, but the company sells its CDs and vinyl in retail stores throughout Europe. Artists earn a percentage of any record sales; Loca Records makes its money through record sales, gigs it promotes and merchandise.

“You’re free to copy it, give it to your friends and you can play it. If you’re really interested, you can sample it and then re-release it,” said David Berry, managing director of Loca Records and an artist himself, known as Meme. “Because at the end of the day, if you sample the work and create a fantastic remix, we think you’re entitled to try and make some money from it.” [more @ www.wired.com]

When Apple Computer Inc. started selling songs over the Internet for 99 cents each, the company had the field almost to itself. Now, just seven months later, so many competitors are jockeying for position in the music-download business that a brutal shakeout is all but certain.

A half-dozen companies have already followed Apple’s lead. Roxio Inc.’s Napster, the once-renegade pioneer of Internet music, now lets you download songs at 99 cents a pop. And some of the biggest names in retail, technology and media—including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Sony Corp.—will soon jump into the fray.

It’s a rare moment in which technology has jolted an industry’s business model and past practices, kicking open the door to a radical new distribution strategy. For decades, retailers have dominated the sales of physical copies of music on compact discs, vinyl and other formats. As more music fans download songs over Internet connections and organize music collections on their PCs, it suddenly isn’t clear just who will sell music to consumers in the future and how. [more @ www.Wall Street Journal.com]

MP3.com founder Michael Robertson, now CEO of Lindows.com, has launched a last ditch appeal for the preservation of the site’s archive.

Last week Vivendi Universal sold MP3.com to CNET, but the million or so songs there were not part of the deal, “will not be transferred to CNET Networks, Inc. or any other third party [and]... will be destroyed.”

Robertson has some interesting insights on VU’s motivation in purchasing MP3.com in the first place, and he insists it was not simply to shut it down and make the world safe for DRM. “You don’t spend nearly $400 million on property you intend to destroy.” [more @ www.theregister.co.uk]

‘O2 Music’ – Europe’s first mobile ‘over the air’ music download service – was launched yesterday by O2. It enables customers to select, download and store the latest chart hits and popular music via their mobile handset onto a specially designed ‘O2 Digital Music Player’ (O2 DMP) and start listening in around 30 seconds.

To provide the very best music available, O2 has, in a world-first, partnered with global brand MTV and some of the largest music providers in the world, including BMG, Universal, AIM (Independent record labels) and Warner Music International. O2 Music is available in the UK from today and will roll-out in Germany and Ireland during 2004. [more @ www.mi2n.com]