Label:Life

EMI is cutting funding to “trade bodies”, which essentially means the IFPI, RIAA and the like. With the RIAA alone getting over 130 million dollars in funding from the major labels, maybe EMI is realising that instead of spending their hard fought cash on attacking everyone and alienating their customers, they might be better off spending their money somewhere else.

EMI has been pretty forward thinking of late being one of the first labels to offer en-mass DRM free music to the likes of Amazon and other retailers. With EMI being recently acquired by Terra Firma it will be interesting to see what other strategic changes they make. This move could be the next lynch pin for the music industry since the Radiohead story…

See the full article here

Microsoft says that it has signed an exclusive deal to acquire Musiwave, who’s customer s includeO2, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Telus, Telefonica, amongst a myriad of others.

Musiwave provides music services to operators including full track downloads, ringtones, truetones, ringback tones, etc. the pull for Microsoft is obvious here, giving them a direct relationship with many labels and operators directly and therefore indirectly millions of consumers through branded portals.

the acquisition would bring together Musiwave’s relationships with music labels, device makers and operators with Microsoft products and services including Windows Mobile, Zune, MSN and Windows Live.

For every clever trick that Google pulls such as the newly announced Android platform, Microsoft just seems to steam in with its brute force attack. Although this one, I think is very shrewd on their part which is something of a rarity for MS lately.

More at Computerworld

This maybe a blatant PR squeeze(sic), but i thought I’d post the whole thing anyway as frankly they have a point.

A painting, featuring bare nipples by a Saatchi supported artist used on the cover of Will Kevans latest single “Dialing Tone” has fallen foul of iTunes’ “No Nipples” rule.

“In the age of the NHS “Breast is Best” campaign, it is more than shocking to me that iTunes should take this stance.” says Will.

Here’s what The Times has to say about it

Is this any worse than the odd naked mannequin in your local high street store window? Thoughts anyone????

This has to be the surprise release of the day. Industry Canada, part of the Canadian Federal government has released a paper – The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada – after studying the relationship of P2P file sharing and music sales. The results are to some of us; not that surprising, but clarification and decent data at last is significant.

I think a quote from the summary of the paper speaks far more than my rambling commentary ever could.

The primary objective of this paper is to determine the effects of P2P file-sharing on purchases of CDs and electronically-delivered music tracks, using representative
survey data from the Canadian population.

In the aggregate, we are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada. The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole. These inferences are based on the results obtained from estimation of the negative binomial models (Table 4.1 and Appendix 4).

However, our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing. We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year (based on estimates obtained from the negative binomial model in Table 4.3). Furthermore, we find indirect evidence of the ‘market creation’ effect of P2P file-sharing in the positive coefficient on the variable ‘Not available elsewhere’ (Table 4.3).

The full paper can be found here – The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada

It seems that Nokia’s Mosh is causing problems for it’s music store offering

Warner, which is the third largest music company behind Sony and Universal, is preventing Nokia from selling its music in the Nokia music store as a protest against the illegal trading of its releases in Mosh; Nokias content uploading and sharing platform.

This appears to me as a bit of a paradox for Warner. On the one hand they are creating negative PR for themselves by bad mouthing Nokia and to a certain extent the fans themselves (the traders) whilst on the other hand they need to appear to be protecting their IP to their shareholders and artists, sounds familiar.

Nokia meanwhile are laughing either way. The profit they make on selling music I suspect is minimal and like Apple the whole content thing to them is a way to sell more handsets. The only possible outcome here for Nokia is a win. Either way, many more people are going to hear about Mosh (have you?) and now you as a consumer are more likely to get Warner tracks on Mosh than through the Nokia store. Smashing, thanks Warner for letting us know.