Welcome back to Weekend Update, where we showcase some of the highlights from this site over the past week. In the umpteenth round of the old versus new media match, the Associated Press in its annual meeting this week played into the stereotype of the grizzled no-nonsense editor who shakes his fist at the new interweb thing (or was it intertube?) and its feisty friend, Google News, who are running amok on his lawn.
A song purchased from iTunes or Amazon is no different from one bought from a brick-and-mortar retail outlet, despite the vast differences in the economies of distribution between the two. That, in a nutshell, was the jury verdict handed down in a case brought by rapper Eminem’s former production company, FBT Productions, against Universal Music Group.
A two-year-old lawsuit against Universal Music Group over digital music royalties finally landed in court this week and its outcome could have a profound effect on the digital music business. Filed by rapper Eminem’s former production company, FBT Productions, the suit accuses Universal of underpaying artists for sales of their work through online services like iTunes, and seeks about $1.3 million in unpaid royalties.
Overall CD sales are plummeting after eight years of unflagging erosion. Digital music sales now account for 15 percent of recording industry’s revenues worldwide and 30 percent in the United States, according to recent data from The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And those numbers are climbing faster than ever. Consider: This past June, Apple said it has sold some five billion songs on its iTunes Store. Clearly, physical media are giving way to the Internet as a means of music distribution. What better time, then, to reinvent the music industry’s business model for physical media, as SanDisk hopes to do with its new microSD memory card album format?
Sony BMG (SNE) has signed on to Nokia’s (NOK) new “Comes With Music” program and really, who better than the pioneer of the rootkit digital-rights management scheme to endorse Nokia’s DRM-hobbled prebundled music initiative?
This morning, Sony BMG became the second record label to jump on board the Finnish phone giant’s Comes With Music offering, which–when [...]
Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris’s attempt to wrest control of the digital music market from Apple has–shock!–run afoul of U.S. regulators. The Justice Department has begun investigating Universal for proposing to its three main competitors that they collaborate on “Total Music,” a service that would bake the cost of an “all-you-can-eat” music subscription into [...]
Offering its entire catalog of digitized video and music for free to the 19 million users of an upstart social-networking site was once about the farthest thing from Universal Music Group’s mind. Now, with the Internet rejiggering the music industry’s economic structure, it’s at the very top of it. And so this morning, UMG said it would allow members of social network Imeem to stream its music for no charge, in exchange for a cut of the revenue from advertising aired while songs are playing.
If terms of Nokia’s new “Comes with Music” program appear impossibly generous to the consumer, who will pay no monthly fees for Universal Music Group’s entire catalog, it’s because they are.
Though “Comes with Music” does indeed permit owners of certain Nokia cellphones to download as many songs as humanly possible in one year (with no [...]
The per-device royalties Universal Music Group receives for every Zune player sold were apparently substantial enough to buy CEO Doug Morris a bigger set of balls, because he’s out drumming up support for an industry-owned subscription service with which he hopes to loosen Apple’s grip on the digital music market.
NBC Universal’s sandwich-board iTunes protest may well turn into a full-blown proletariat uprising after all.
At a press conference this morning, Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy slagged Apple, bitching about the company’s retail pricing strategy for its iTunes service. “The split between Apple and [music] producers is indecent,” Levy said. “Our contracts give too good a share [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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