Label:Life

London-based, digital music company Digimpro will launch YourSpins.com, an interactive music community where music lovers, remixing fans and producers can meet, share and publish their music creations online at the Midem show. The pre-launch version of YourSpins.com will be demonstrated at Midem, on 22 January, 2006 at booth R34.08.

Behind YourSpins.com lies Digimpro’s interactive music .di format that enables users to create their own mixes and arrangements of new releases, save them and share them with other community members.

Far beyond traditional remix software, .di also allows for real time mixing and improvisation, and has already been used by major artists such as Moby, Erasure, Spooky and Roots Manuva. (more…)

Starbucks Corp., seeking to expand its entertainment business at a time of music industry ``chaos,’’ plans to move beyond compact disc sales and CD burning to allow customers to transfer songs onto MP3 portable music players.

``A lot of our customers are asking for device fill-up, and going forward we’ll do that,’’ Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment, said yesterday in an interview at the Midem music- industry conference in Cannes, France.

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While Apple’s iTunes Music Store continues to dominate the legal digital music market, far ahead of a handful of competitors, the majority of online music sellers are struggling. There are some 355 digital music retailers, according to a report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry released last week, and most of them may be forced to shut down or consolidate.

“I don’t imagine all these services can last. Some will go out of business or be consolidated,” said Gabriel Levy, head of music in Europe for RealNetworks, home of the Rhapsody subscription service. Barney Wragg, senior vice president of Universal Music Group’s eLabs unit, shares the same view. “The market keeps growing, and there will be winners and losers,” said Wragg. “The fact that there are 355 retailers—are they all economically viable? Clearly the market is adjusting all the time.”

A UK version of the social networking site MySpace.com is to be launched “within the next 30 days”.

The announcement was made by Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinson at a meeting of the National Association of Television Programme Executives in Las Vegas.

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The chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), John Kennedy, has said that legal advances and key victories worldwide in the recording industry’s fight against illegal file sharing were helping to contain the problem. He made his comments at the MIDEM music trade fair in Cannes. He called on Internet service providers to begin blocking Internet access to persistent illegal file sharers and condemned the French proposals to legalise online sharing of copyrighted music and movies.

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EMI Music is building a digital infrastructure to distribute and share content globally with help from Microsoft and SAP AG, the company said Friday.

The five-year strategy is estimated to cost between US$133 million and US$176 million for software, hardware, training and education. “We are refreshing the entire infrastructure,” said Andrew Hickey, chief technology officer at EMI Music, which represents artists from the Beatles to Coldplay to the Rolling Stones.

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Nobody said it was easy for EMI, the world’s third-largest record company and the home of British band Coldplay, as the music industry has weathered six straight years of falling sales.

Yet EMI Chairman Eric Nicoli and others in the industry are seeing signs of hope coming from the very source of many of the industry’s woes—the Internet.

Downloaded music sales on online services such as Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store are surging, and made up 6 percent of industry revenues in 2005. Nicoli said digital revenues are now expected to offset flagging CD sales within a few years.

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Still hunting through vinyl bargain bins and lawn sales for that gem of a recording that’s been unavailable for years? That may no longer be necessary.

Both Sony and Universal Music have announced plans to reissue classic recordings in digital form.

Universal Music, the world’s biggest record label, has announced it will begin a program to digitize 100,000 out-of-print European recordings.

It will re-release back catalogue editions of work by artists such as Greek singer Nana Mouskouri, folk rockers Fairport Convention, French singer Jacques Brel, Rolling Stones contemporary Marianne Faithful and Brigitte Bardot, who made several pop recordings in the 1960s.

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This past year in 2005 saw strong take-off signals from China’s digital music value chain. The online original-creation music market is booming, while most of the 120 local Chinese publishers license their songs online without a flat royalty guarantee.

Piracy is still the key blocking issue to developing China’s digital music industry, but online piracy is being attacked both by the government and industry music labels. The end of 2007 will be the turning point for China’s legitimate digital music market. Unauthorized music companies are now in the process of, or have already made their services legitimate. Also, with the emergence of mega online music stores, legitimate online music will become a dominant service for users.

More@tmcnet

Imagine..You are having severe pain due to spondylitis and instead of taking all those anelgesics you go for a music session or after a bout of asthma you find yourself in a music sitting.

If you are unable to find the connection between the two- you must meet Shashank Kutty, the trained classical singer from Maharashtra.

Mr Kutty said that the serene and soothing effect of the classical music if played in a definite and researched pattern can cure not only diseases like asthma, spondylitis and diabetes but can also be helpful in removal of complications in the growth of child in mother’s womb and normal child delivery.

More@webindia123