Label:Life

After five years, Prince’s NPG Music Club online site is being shut down. According to a statement released to NPG members, the music club has maximized its potential.

“In its current form, there is a feeling that the NPGMC has gone as far as it can go,” read the statement. “Has the time come to once again make a leap of faith and begin anew? These are questions we in the NPG need to answer. In doing so, we have decided to put the club on hiatus until further notice.”

Named after Prince’s New Power Generation backing band, the site debuted on Valentine’s Day 2001. Envisioned as a thriving online community of Prince devotees, the site provided a conduit for fans to obtain new releases and non-album music, secure choice concert seats and receive passes to sound checks and after-parties.

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The BBC wants to allow audiences to create personal radio stations from its content, its director general has said. The planned service, provisionally called MyBBCRadio, was revealed by Mark Thompson at the Radio Festival in Cambridge. It aims to give audiences more control by combining existing services such as podcasts and the BBC Radio Player.

It will be part of the BBC’s iPlayer, a free service which will also offer seven days of BBC TV on demand. Thompson said MyBBCRadio would use peer-to-peer technology to provide “thousands, ultimately millions, of individual radio services created by audiences themselves”.

The BBC hoped to share these ideas with the commercial sector, he added.

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The music industry is to sue Yahoo China for allegedly providing links to pirated tracks.

“We’ve started the process and as far as we’re concerned we’re on a track to litigation,” John Kennedy, chairman of the IFPI, told Bloomberg.com. Yahoo China is the second largest search engine in the country, and is 40% owned by Yahoo Inc. Mr Kennedy told Bloomberg he hoped that negotiation could still prevent legal proceedings from starting.

Last year the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries, whose members include EMI, Sony BMG and Warner Music, sued Baidu, the most popular search engine in China and the dispute is ongoing.

Mr Kennedy declined to say how much in damages the music industry was seeking, if its claim proved successful. With similar cases in the US damages “would certainly run into tens of millions and perhaps even more than that,’’ he said.

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In a career spanning more than 25 years, pop-music parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic hasn’t exactly ranked among the music business’ fiercest iconoclasts: He doesn’t release his song parodies without the consent of the artists being parodied, and he’s rarely used the Internet as more than a tool to promote his projects and connect with his fans. But a music label’s efforts to block a (relatively tame) parody of James Blunt’s ubiquitous hit “You’re Beautiful” has Yankovic fighting back publicly, and using his Web site as a tool to do so.

According to Yankovic, Blunt himself gave his blessing to a song called “You’re Pitiful” (audio), which was to appear on Yankovic’s now-finished but as-yet-unreleased new album. But after Yankovic finished recording the parody, Atlantic Records, Blunt’s label, told Yankovic that he couldn’t release “You’re Pitiful.” Though Yankovic has encountered resistance from artists before—after a miscommunication involving permissions, Coolio publicly objected to a released parody of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” while Prince has always turned down Yankovic’s requests to parody his hits—he says this is the first time a label has stepped in to squash the release of one of his parodies. (Quoth an Atlantic representative: “We have no comment on this matter.”)

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Universal Music, one of the UK’s biggest record companies, is moving into TV production to make programmes with artists on its books, such as U2, Scissor Sisters and Keane.

The new division, Globe Productions, comes from the success of programmes such as The X Factor and Pop Idol. The production arm will aim to develop new television formats – both music based and factual – and work on programme ideas in-house, as well as collaborating closely with independent production companies.

More@TheStage

It worked for Arctic Monkeys; it worked for Sandi Thom. No one should be too surprised that another act have now used the MySpace website – which spreads word of a band (and their downloadable songs) via a growing network of internet “friends” – to launch themselves to stardom. The difference is that Hope Against Hope are a scam, a spoof indie band “with no talent whatsoever” invented by Q magazine in order to prove that the Rupert Murdoch-owned site is now just another cog in the older industry phenomenon of hype.

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For viewers who love the apparel and accessories in their favorite music videos, but until now have had little chance to identify it, StarStyle today announced the launch of its Music Section. Distinguished by a unique music video player with built-in contextual commerce engine, the section launches with videos from Universal Music Group, the world’s leading music company. Entertainment Media Works created StarStyle (www.StarStyle.com) as a groundbreaking “supersite” that already enables viewers to identify and purchase the apparel, furnishings, gadgets and music featured in their favorite TV shows and now will incorporate music videos to their roster of media partners.

[L:L believes this is the beginning of the next phase of advertising, as technology allows you will “click” on the items in the shows you are watching to make purchases, this appears to be the first step… – ED] (more…)

Sony BMG Music Entertainment has created an ad-supported channel for music video content, courtesy of digital video distribution platform Brightcove.

Called “musicbox video,” the channel will allow Sony BMG to push certain videos out to affiliates, for instance to news and radio station Web sites when they feature an artist, while reserving others for its own Web sites. Part of the company’s plan is to set up pages for individual recording artists, where a fan can view several of a specific artist’s videos in one place.

Additionally, for each video, Sony BMG will have the option to turn on a viral pass-along feature, letting individuals paste the video directly onto their MySpace or other fan pages.

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Sony apparently hasn’t missed the contradiction that the spread of digital content may sometimes be troubling in a copyright sense but it can also add up to great grassroots marketing. According to CNET, Sony hopes to harness the blogosphere to get its music videos in front of more people … on its own terms, of course.

[Wonder if they’ve seen tunecast.co.uk – ED]

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Channel 4 Radio has signed a deal with Universal Music for the record company to become a strategic partner in the television company’s application for the new national DAB multiplex.

The network announced in January its intention to lead a consortium to bid for the new national digital radio multiplex, which is expected to be advertised by Ofcom at the end of 2006.

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