Label:Life

Apple Computer Inc. announced Monday that consumers have purchased more than 250 million songs from its iTunes Music Store since its launch, a rate of nearly 1.25 million per day, putting the Cupertino-based company on track to potentially sell 500 million songs this year.

The iTunes store is now available in 15 countries and represents more than 70 percent of the global digital music market, according to a statement from the company. [more @ www.labusinessjournal.com]

Independent labels from around the world have met at Midem and voted unanimously to create a formal organisation to represent the sector on a global scale.

The new organisation is set to be a coalition between current trade associations such as Aim, Australia’s Air, New Zealand’s IMNZ and Europe’s Impala.

Impala vice president and Aim chief executive Alison Wenham says the organisation is intended to turn the independent sector into a “virtual major”, acting to address problems such as access to market.

Crucially, the coalition will also include the American Association of Independent Music, which is currently being established. The formation of Aim has acted as a catalyst for the decision to form the new venture. [more @ www.musicweek.com]

Indie Music Week, one of the most important conferences for independent musicians, singers, artists and management, is now open. Produced by Nashville-based DaCapo Music, the event is expected to be sold out and attendees are asked to register early to insure a spot at the event.

Indie Music Week will be held during the weekend of March 11th -12th in Nashville, Tennessee, at the prestigious Nashville Marriott hotel. The event will feature a stellar array of top, well-known record label executives and decision-makers as well as promoters, producers, managers, agents and consultants. [more @ www.top40-charts.com]

Napster is about to expand into Germany, MTV is starting an online music store in the United States, and mobile phone Latest News about mobile phones companies are hard at work turning their handsets into pseudo iPods.

Not a bad overture for an industry whose sales have been falling for years, whose leading companies have been cutting jobs and the number of artists on their books, and which has irritated its customers by suing 7,000 of them around the world for copyright infringement.

As the annual global music trade show, Midem, which opened in Cannes over the weekend, digital music was one of the few things record labels had to sing about, even though it accounted for less than 2 percent of total revenue last year.

When the official numbers for 2004 come in over the next couple of weeks, they are expected to show that the global music business was flat, probably saved from another declining year only by a slight blip up in digital music sales, several industry veterans said here. [more @ www.technewsworld.com]

The Orchard, the world’s leading distributor and marketer of independent music, today announced that it has licensed portions of its catalogue to eight industry-leading mobile companies: Dwango Wireless, Zingy, 9 Squared, HIFI Ringtones, IAM Mobile, Securycast, Arvato Mobile and Hudson Soft. The licensed tracks-drawn from The Orchard’s 300,000-song catalogue-will be sold as “mastertones” or “true tones” to customers of those mobile services.

The Orchard catalogue includes thousands of tracks coveted by mobile customers eager to personalize their phones. Immediately available are great comedy tracks from comedians Jerry Seinfeld and George Carlin, rock from Coldplay, Green Day, and Beck, rising stars such as Keane and The Donnas, tango from Astor Piazzolla, and Indian music from Ravi Shankar to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. [more @ www.top40-charts.com]

MTV Networks UK and Ireland, IPC Ignite and Capital Radio plc have collaborated once more to launch Play, the UK’s largest ever research project into the UK music scene.

The study will sit alongside RSVP, the commercial joint venture formed by the three media companies in 2004.

Over one million music consumers will be recruited by direct email. After initial responses have been analysed a panel will be formed to reflect a cross section of respondents.

The database will be asked to complete surveys on a regular basis to provide an insight into the attitudes and behaviour of this influential social group.

A quarterly report will be produced into the study’s key findings, as well as monthly headline updates. [more @ www.mediaweek.co.uk]

The digital music service Napster is considering a move into digital film distribution, its chairman said at the weekend.

Napster is a poacher-turned-gamekeeper; once a prominent facilitator of illegal file-sharing, it now works with music publishers to offer paid-for music downloads.

The move into film distribution comes as the movie industry finds itself in the same position as the music business a couple of years ago. File-sharing programs such as BitTorrent and eDonkey make it easy for users to share even large files such as digital versions of movies, and the studios are becoming increasingly anxious about the trend. [more @ www.guardian.co.uk]

The world’s four biggest consumer electronics companies have agreed to start using a common method to protect digital music and video against piracy and illegal copying, they said on Thursday.

Japan’s Sony Corp and Panasonic-brand owner Matsushita Electric Industrial, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Dutch Philips Electronics formed the alliance because they want buyers of their products to watch or listen to “appropriately licensed video and music on any device, independent of how they originally obtained that content,” they said in a joint statement. [more @ www.cnn.com]

Five groups, representing a broad cross section of the technology industry, joined to file legal briefs Monday urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reaffirm a 21-year-old ruling protecting most technology companies from being held liable for their customers’ copyright infringement.

The briefs were filed in response to a case, scheduled for oral arguments in March, in which members of the U.S. entertainment industry sued peer-to-peer software vendors for copyright infringement. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that Grokster, Morpheus distributor StreamCast Networks, and a site operated by StreamCast called Musiccity.com were not liable for copyright violations by their users.

One of the two briefs filed Monday came from the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), NetCoalition, Digital Media Association (DiMA), and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). ITAA is a trade group representing more than 300 technology companies; NetCoalition is a trade group representing Yahoo, Google, and other Web-based businesses; DiMA represents 20 companies that create or distribute digital media; and CDT is a technology-focused civil liberties advocate.

Those four groups ask the Supreme Court to uphold its 1984 Sony Betamax ruling, in which technologies with significant noninfringing uses—in that case, a video recorder—were not liable for their users’ copyright violations. “Application of this standard … has promoted the explosion of technological innovation since the mid-1980s, involving everything from the personal computer to digital music players to the rise of the Internet itself,” the four groups say in a press release. [more @ www.pcworld.com]

The late Johnny Cash’s video for his song Hurt has come top of a list compiled by a panel of music artists and industry insiders.

The top 20 list was commissioned by mobile phone company 3 to celebrate over three decades of pop music videos.

Michael Jackson’s 1983 video for Thriller came second, followed by Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy from 1997.

Panellists included musicians Norman Cook and Michael Stipe along with Brit Award front-runners Franz Ferdinand. [more @ www.bbc.co.uk]