Per Reuters, Universal cements music publishing lead:
Two interesting points in this article.
One, UMG has grown their publishing business very substantially.
Universal Music’s publishing division has overtaken EMI as the world’s leading major music publisher, according to market research on Monday.
Music & Copyright (M&C), which is published by Informa said Universal’s market share among [...]
Judge OKs Tivo-In-The-Clouds: Hosted DVR services — which allow cable companies to create “virtual” Tivos that live in a datacenter somewhere, not on a hard drive in your living room — are legally sound. Specifically, network-based DVRs “would not directly infringe plaintiffs’ exclusive rights to reproduce and publicly perform their copyrighted works,” says the [...]
Some indies are selling more records than ever while the majors limp along:
Major labels struggle to keep platinum sellers (acts that sell a million units) from backsliding to gold (500,000 units) or worse. But some smaller labels—among them Sub Pop, Merge, and Matador—have hit a pocket of relative prosperity, with many of their top stars [...]
Elemental Consulting on pay-per-download songs:
If Amazon has a hard time making money on music priced a little below iTunes standard pricing, how can downloads priced at a fraction of the cost be profitable for indie labels and musicians?
Applying the concept of loss leaders … it logically requires that the download is then just the gateway [...]
Unauthorized distribution has already been factored into the music economy. Valuations have been adjusted. The economic impact of filesharing is complete.
When Napster happened, it was a surprise to the music industry. The techies saw it coming but the music people didn’t. This hurt many people with investments in the music business. [...]
In the upcoming Myspace Music launch, Amazon is likely to be the provider for paid downloads. This is per TechCrunch:
The as-yet unlaunched MySpace Music will likely partner with Amazon to handle all music ecommerce transactions, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Apple and Rhapsody are also bidding for the business, however, and one source says [...]
hypebot does the numbers on eMusic:
eMusic collects 30 or 40 cents per track downloaded. Because some subscribers don’t download their monthly allotment, eMusic pays 30-35 cents per download. From that 35 cents most labels pay 10-20% to a distributor. Using 15%, that means the distributor pays that label 29.75 cents per track. The current statutory [...]