Label:Life

It is set to become the must-have accessory for hill walkers, shepherds and farmers everywhere – a sheep ringtone!

A clutch of singing sheep from the Lake District are now “flock” stars after their indiscriminate bleatings were dubbed to an energetic remix of the William Blake classic, Jerusalem.

Just as the Crazy Frog craze appealed to the young and urban, it is hoped the reworking by The Baarmy Sheep of The Lake District, will appeal to those with a love of the countryside and outdoors.

More@golakes

Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world’s second largest music group, has become embroiled in a very public debacle after it put copyright protection software on its compact discs. The discovery that the software could expose the CD users’ personal computers to hacker attacks has highlighted the controversial use of digital rights management (DRM) technology as well as hitting the operations of the joint venture between Japan’s Sony group and Bertels­mann, the German media giant.

...

But some, including the powerful Consumer Electronics Association in the US, fear the concept of fair use enshrined in the Sony Betamax case 25 years ago could be curtailed.

“In the rush to crack down on pirates, we risk eliminating a critical consumer right – the right to use copyrighted material, without the permission of the copyright owner,” Gary Shapiro, the CEA president and chief executive, said in testimony before a congressional committee investigating the issue earlier this month (the CEA’s members include Sony).

More@ft.com

L:L must have missed this one, not a huge amount of detail but interesting for some none the less..

Terms of Apple’s agreement with record labels for its newly launched Australian iTunes Music Store were recently disclosed to Think Secret, offering insight into the business that goes on behind the scenes between record labels and the biggest digital music store.
advertisement

While financial terms can vary between record labels, sources report that Apple is typically paying AU$0.99, excluding GST, for every single that it sells for AU$1.69. Apple’s cost for albums varies from AU$5.99 to AU$11.99, depending on which tier the album falls into; Apple typically charges customers AU$17.99 for those albums. Apple’s terms with the labels also stipulate that the wholesale price Apple pays for an album will never exceed the aggregate of the songs if they were sold separately, in keeping with Apple’s policy of charging less for albums with fewer tracks.

More@thinksecret

Although not strictly music related this is an excellent use of a new medium to gain new fans and give something back to existing fans, not to mention a fantastic tool to get people to the Guardian website.

Ricky Gervais, the comedian behind The Office and Extras, is returning to radio with a weekly show that will only be available as a podcast through the Guardian Unlimited website.

Gervais and his writing partner, Stephen Merchant, will be reunited with Karl Pilkington, who produced their show on Xfm.

Gervais said: “I want to do a radio show where I can say what I want, when I want, for as long as I want and that’s free for anybody who can be bothered to listen anywhere in the world.” The first of their 12 weekly shows will be available on the GU website next Monday.

Sourece:guardianunlimited

The music industry could be facing a crisis because of the number of young people still illegally downloading from the internet, a report has warned.

The report by Jupiter Research suggests European consumers who download music from illegal file-sharing websites outnumber those using legal services. It says illegal networks are used three times as much as legal ones. It also warns that file-sharers, particularly young people, have little concept of music as a paid commodity.

The UK music industry has been cracking down on illegal file-sharing. The BPI recently stepped up its campaign by launching 65 new legal cases against those it accuses of large-scale file-sharing.

More@bbc

Move people’s hearts, and your sales will move up.

It is a fairly simple philosophy, but it is one that Toshiaki Shibuya, president of Japanese record label Victor Entertainment Inc., applies throughout the company as it attempts to share the joy of music.

“Since becoming president of the company, I take about a month twice a year to visit all of our sections, talking with the employees directly. I tell them, ‘Be someone who knows the joy of giving a moving experience, rather than receiving it,’” he told The Yomiuri Shimbun in a recent interview.

Last month, the company started employing a technology that should bring joy to the ears of music lovers. Developed since 1987 in cooperation with its parent company, Victor Company of Japan, its netK2 technology makes it possible for downloaded music to be played back at the same quality as compact discs.

Instead of refusing to share the technology, the company is aiming to have it accepted as the industry standard.

More@yomiuri

SHARMAN Networks, the Australia-based company that operates peer-to-peer internet song- swapping site Kazaa, has been granted a Christmas reprieve by the courts.

The victory recently scored by the music industry over Kazaa, which music labels claim has cost them vast lost revenue by offering copyrighted material for free over the web, has been tarnished by an Australian court’s decision to extend until late February a stay of an injunction barring it from distributing copyrighted recordings. The previous deadline was 5 December.

More@thebusinessonline

With the Sony rootkit scandal making big time press the last few weeks all one reads about on thousands of Net postings is how average users are going to ban Sony CDs and the CD format in general from their lives. The noise became so loud and ominous that Sony kept backing up and backing away until they finally agreed to a full recall of millions of afflicted CDs. The good news for Sony is that, so far, the issue is not making a noticable dent in sales.

See figures@mp3newswire

Wippit, the UK’s third largest online music service, has launched a ‘DIY-ringtones’ service.

The service lets ringtone buyers edit songs from the company’s catalogue online, so they can choose to use whichever specific part of a song they like, or even the full tune. The Ringtone Editor then converts the results into a format that’s compatible with their phone and a download link is sent to that phone.

Tones cost from 99p each and are available internationally. Music from Cooking Vinyl, Cherry Red and Craze records is currently available through the service.

More@macworld

he launch of iTunes Music Store in Japan helped more than double the number of songs purchased online during the third quarter of the year compared to the previous quarter, according to figures released by the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) today.

The association said there were 2.3 million downloads from Internet-based music stores during the July to September quarter. In the first and second quarters of this year downloads totalled 1.1 million and 1.0 million respectively, according to the RIAJ figures, which have only been available from this year.

More@macworld