World Music

Warner Music Owner Bets on Competing Digital Services By Ben Sisario - March 6, 2013 - NY Times: Media Decoder Blog Len Blavatnik, the Russian-born billionaire investor who bought the Warner  Music Group two years ago, has placed big bets on multiple digital music services as the streaming model grows around the world. Daisy — still only a code name, and not confirmed as the service’s eventual brand name — will compete with Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio and others by letting users stream millions of songs by subscription.Mr. Blavatnik’s holding company, Access Industries , is one of several parties investing $60 million in Daisy , a planned service by Beats Electronics, the high-end headphone company, Beats announced late Tuesday. The others are Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management ; James Packer, of Australia; and the Texas oil heir Lee M. Bass. Read More: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/warner-music-owner-bets-on-competing-digital-services/

The dangers of seeing streaming music royalties as a ‘trickle’ By Stuart Dredge - January 30th, 2013 - From Music Ally For the most part, the debate over artists’ income from streaming music services has been conducted in trade publications and websites. It’s breaking out now though: check the New York Times’ feature headlined ‘As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow to a Trickle’ , which kicks off by focusing on an individual New Yorker who now spends $10 a month on Spotify rather than $30 a month buying music, and then jumps back to cellist Zoe Keating’s reveal last year of her Pandora and Spotify payouts. Cause for angry fist-biting from executives at Spotify, its rivals and the labels who are so invested in them? Well, don’t jump too fast. Read More: http://musically.com/2013/01/30/streaming-music-royalties-trickle/

Universal Music Publishing 'Now Has the Power to Shut Pandora Down...' By Paul Resnikoff - Feb. 5, 2013 - From Digital Music News Perhaps the only question is why Pandora 's top executives aren't cashing out faster . Because it's becoming increasingly apparent that this company lacks a sustainable business model, even if they successfully force recording royalty reductions through Congress. Enter Universal Music Publishing Group, which now looks like the second publishing behemoth to independently negotiate its rates with Pandora. The first step involves the cancellation of digital performance contacts with ASCAP and BMI, already in motion. The next step is creating a new deal with Pandora, on their terms. Read More: http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/20130205umpg#-k5VKaX6LZyfbRB042A-Fw

Streaming and Micropennies: The Footnotes By BEN SISARIO - January 29, 2013 - NY Times Media Decoder Blog 1. The role of record labels. When it comes to royalties, the relationship between artist and label has long been fraught, but it has become especially strained in the streaming age, for two reasons. First, digital services generally don’t do business with musicians directly, but instead go through labels or distributors, which are then responsible for paying royalties. But exactly how those royalties are calculated is often in dispute. Older artists may have no provisions in their contracts for such streaming services , or digital music at all. And despite some major lawsuits , the matter is far from settled. Second, there is wide suspicion in the industry about the deals between labels and digital services. Labels own equity in some of these services, as a condition of licensing their content. (The major labels, for example, own a minority stake in Spotify.) Critics say this cr...

For Many Digital Music Services, Free Is Not a Choice By BEN SISARIO - January 28, 2013 - NY Times Media Decoder Blog The competition among streaming music services is going global. It is also increasingly going free. As CD and download sales cool, the music industry is looking to subscription services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Deezer to provide an attractive alternative to pirated content. But the growth of these companies has been relatively slow, and to compete against one another, more of them are opening free tiers — a move that gets attention, but has always caused worries that it could undermine the value of music. Read More: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/for-many-digital-music-services-free-is-not-a-choice/

What Music Creators Should Know About Streaming Royalties By Etan Rosenbloom, Associate Director & Deputy Editor, Communications & Media , ASCAP - January 17, 2013 - From ASCAP.com When Spotify stopped offering European users the option of paying to download music in early January, it came as another piece of evidence of a sea change that many have predicted for a long time: music is migrating  to the cloud . Over the past two years, we've seen a four-fold increase in streaming music subscriptions in the US. The ability to stream any piece of music at any time is of course great for consumers. But as we usher in new technologies, we have to think about the way they affect the songwriters and composers that make those technologies possible. As noted entertainment attorney Don Passman recently told us , "Advertising dollars are migrating online in a big way, which means traditional media is earning less, and they're squeezing down the public performance license fe...