Label:Life

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????

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.

It’s been a week, the music industry has survived (apparently) and Radiohead have distributed over 1.2 million albums from their website. It’s not clear if these are all paying or not but either way you can bet that their next tour (coming 2008) will be a sell out.

According to a poll of 3,000 people the average payment was $8, so four quid – £4.8 million in a week. Seems a bit of a lesson to me…

To be honest I’m not sure how accurate we can call these figures but even if it were for free, that’s a lot of new fans in there. If I remember rightly there was an admin fee of 45p, which makes over £500,000 in administrative fees, presumably for bandwidth and storage (bet they wish they’d used Amazon S3 now).

The Big Champagne guys (they track downloads through p2p networks and bittorrent) are on about how illicit downloads of the album are dwarfing the real sales, but frankly, so what? More awareness, more fans, more merchandise, more gigs, more money – less need for a label or any traditional media coverage.

Prince is king… We’ve seen that Prince has given away his music with the daily papers in the UK after finally escaping from his deal. We’ve seen Radiohead do it, Oasis want to do it, NiN are there too, these amongst a growing number of artists are taking their destinies into their own hands, being proactive not reactive, we’ve yet to see how well this will serve them in the long term.

Madonna on the other hand has played her hand and signed a deal with Live Nation, not a record company but an events company. With a three album deal for £60 million and the backing of Live Nations gigging ability and fans unwillingness to pay for music, could this could possibly the shrewdest move yet and the real beginning of a new era for the music industry…?

Having waited four years for their heroes to finish another record, Radiohead fans were understandably excited last week to learn that the band’s seventh album, In Rainbows, will finally be released on Wednesday. But what really rocked the fanbase – and heightened the air of gloom enveloping the global record industry – was the news that In Rainbows could be preordered and downloaded perfectly legally for as little as 1p at Radio-head.com.

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Maybe the music industry will listen to this rally… We all know that there’s no money in selling music directly anymore, it’s just that the only people who lose out are the labels… They will resist, they will react, they will lose… The new labels, the artists, the pro-active ones; they move with the times, they see what is happening around them. They know that they need to survive and feed their families but they also see that their music is as entertaining as ever and they understand the new media world.

They build fan bases, fan loyalty and interact with their fans in a way that the fans want to make an exchange with them. Radiohead are one of the pioneers taking this forward and although we’ve seen Prince have a go lately too, Radiohead seem to be on the edge. They’re opening up new fans – have they been watching Nintendo who’ve very famously of late managed to open up the games market to masses of new fans…

Warner Music is entering into an agreement with YouTube that allows them both to share revenue from advertising whilst a Warner music video is showing on YouTube.

This is a very interesting collaboration showing Warner Musics growing maturity in the digital sector, this following on from Universals, “WTF is going on? Why are you marketing our products for us?” outburst directed at MySpace and YouTube last week accusing them both of being “copyright infringers” who owe the music industry “tens of millions of dollars.” L:L hears the rumbling of lawyers and their mighty pens.

“Technology is changing entertainment, and Warner Music is embracing that innovation,” said Warner Music Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. “Consumer-empowering destinations like YouTube have created a two-way dialogue that will transform entertainment and media forever.”

Everyone it seems is fighting for the eyes and ears of the masses and slowly but surely the realisation that instead of fighting the avenues opening up before them, embracing these opportunities is much more lucrative. How far back into the past do we have to go to find content owners that used to pay for their marketing, instead of being paid for it?

“British retailer Marks & Spencer is getting an earful from shoppers who don’t like the store’s new policy of allowing music to be played in its 400 outlets.The music is part of the company’s re-branding, but shoppers are planning a protest to demand that Marks & Spencer go back to the good old days of its no-music policy, the Daily Mail reported.”

So the “Daily Mail” readers don’t like music while they shop? It seems that an “anti-noise” group called “pipedown” has organized a protest, probably a very quiet one.

More@upi

You’ve heard it before. You download a little app that sits on your PC, it analyses the music you are listening to by hooking into your Itunes or Windows media player and then sends this information back to a big fancy database to compare your listening choice with others, this is in turn then updates your “last.fm”, “mystrands” web page with other music that you may like. It’s a fantastic idea and MyStrands has entered this space with a novel twist – mobile.

“MyStrands” has started a service for bars and nightclubs that allows party goers to influence the current playlist by texting in requests, the resulting playlist is then updated live on the web, a millenium jukebox if you will. We’ve seen this before in Europe but the value of being linked in to personal playilists is interesting. They’ve dubbed this “new” technology as “social programming”.

It will be interesting to see how far this company goes with their current model against the likes of last.fm, pandora and the rest.

More@businessweekonline

Online independent music magazine I Like Music has entered into a commercial agreement with the Ministry of Sound, a UK dance music and lifestyle brand. The Ministry will now provide online media representation for I Like Music.

I Like Music had previously gone without online ad sales management and representation for 5 years, while gradually building itself into a site that contains news, reviews, gigs and tour listings, interviews with folks like 50 Cent, Alicia Keys, Killa Kela and DJ Format, as well as coverage of multiple genres like Pop, Hiphop, Rock, Dance, Indie and Urban.

More@adotas

China Mobile, the larger of the country’s two cellular operators, yesterday launched a wireless music club as part of a drive to increase its presence in a lucrative emerging market.

The club, M.Music, offers a one-stop service to China Mobile subscribers, including copyrighted music downloads and sharing, and could help lift the struggling record industry.

M.Music also offers members access to the latest labels, downloads of music videos, singers’ photos and ringtones as well as magazines in SMS (short messaging service) format.

China Mobile Vice-President Lu Xiangdong said the club’s launch marked a big step for China Mobile as it seeks a greater role in the fast-growing mobile music market.

“Our wireless music club will soon become a new tool for record companies to release new labels,” he said.

More@people.com