Label:Life

Record label bosses are pinning their hopes on mobile phones to weaken Apple’s dominance of the music downloads market.

Executives are concerned that they have yielded too much power to Apple, which has about 70 per cent of the worldwide market.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has used his position of strength to resist the labels’ desire to maximise revenues, by charging more for some downloads and less for archive material. Apple insists that the one-price-fits-all policy makes the process of using iTunes as simple (and trustworthy) as possible, and it is hard to argue with the evidence that its success provides. [more @ www.pcpro.co.uk]

SonyBMG and Warner Music Group’s music publishing arm have reached a new licensing agreement that will speed the development of new digital music offerings.

Included in the deal are new platforms such as DualDisc (a new two-sided disc that is one side compact disc, the other side DVD); mobile-one offerings, such as master-ring tones (30-second clips of actual songs), and ring backs (snippets of songs that callers hear when they dial a number), plus other forms of digital distribution such as video-on-demand services and video downloads. [more @ www.nypost.com]

For the first time a new single will be released on a mobile phone prior to being for sale in the stores.

With MusicDownloads, from 28 April Vodafone customers can download the new hit single “Something To Say” by Kane exclusively on their Vodafone live! UMTS handset, a few days before it is for sale in the stores. With this, Vodafone customers are the first in the Netherlands to be able to purchase the new Kane release. [more @ www.esato.com]

To hear the newest Coldplay song you’ll have to download a 30-second track to your cellphone and set it as your ring.

In another statement of how technology has turned the music industry every which way, Coldplay’s single “Speed of Sound” is available for download through Cingular Wireless. That happened almost a week before its radio debut last week and almost two months before the British alternative rock group’s album X&Y is released by Capitol Records on June 7. [more @ www.macon.com]

The British music industry has secured access to the names of 33 people it suspects of sharing up to 72,000 music files on the internet.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) applied to the High Court for internet service providers to hand over personal details of the alleged file-sharers.

The internet services now have two weeks to hand over the identities. [more @ www.bbc.co.uk]

Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is no dummy. He’s an award-winning musical artist. A hip-hop mogul. The CEO of Bad Boy Entertainment Group. And soon (drum roll, please) a wireless-service provider.

On Mar. 14, at the cellular industry’s annual confab in New Orleans, Combs boldly declared that he is an MVNO, wireless jargon for mobile virtual network operator. [more @ www.businessweek.com]

Tired of seeing other companies building business with free content from the music industry, Universal Music reached a deal yesterday to begin charging America Online for streaming music videos over the Internet.

The deal follows Universal’s announcement in February that it would no longer provide videos for free to online, satellite and cable companies for use over video-on-demand services.

Warner Music is expected to do a similar deal with AOL, sources said. [more @ www.nypost.com]

Long before Napster existed, the music industry condemned itself to a broken sales model. It guaranteed piracy, huge online song swaps and declining revenue. Luckily, none of this has much to do with the health of music. Music is thriving like never before. It’s the moguls and not the musicians who are hurting.

This is the broad context laid out in The Future of Music by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard. Their brief manifesto traces a century-long battle in which entertainment professionals have always sought to stifle new technology such as records, the radio, the VCR and now P2P technology. In the case of P2P, the record labels’ battle against innovation has never been more comical since it was the mighty moguls that decided to release millions of CDs without any digital rights management (DRM) protection at all. Now the labels want to vacuum up 20 years of unfettered music, stuff it in a vault and pretend this huge oversight never happened. [There follows a review of ‘The Future Of Music’ covering the new business models it presents, in particular, compulsory licensing. -Ed.] [more @ www.theregister.co.uk]

There will be no Label :life this week as Ed is away lounging on a beach somewhere sipping Guinness, listening to Reggae and getting some well earned sunburn.

Label:life will be back next week with all the latest music industry news, views and musings.

More than 900 internet file-sharers were threatened with legal action on Tuesday as the global music industry stepped up its anti-piracy war.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) announced it was launching 963 new actions in 11 countries in Europe and Asia.

It brings the number of cases against internet users accused of illegally uploading music to 11,552 worldwide. [more @ www.bbc.co.uk]