• EMI has filed a $100 million lawsuit against ringtone provider Infospace. The suit alleges Infospace and its subsidiaries have miscalculated royalties, sold restricted songs and sold in territories for which they are not licensed. EMI's auditor ran the numbers and found that Infospace had underpaid royalties results from third-party sales at Verizon and US Cellular web sites. The final straw was probably when Infospace touched a restricted, Beatles-related song, John Lennon's "Imagine." (Read article at Hollywood Reporter)

• Spiral Frog, which is almost set to launch its ad-supported P2P business, just sacked CEO Robin Kent. Could this delay yet again the service's launch? (Read post at The Key blog, via paidContent)

• News from MIDEM: The launch of Merlin, the world's first globa new media rights licensing agency. Founded by member groups like Beggars Banquet, K7, Tommy Boy and Naive, Merlin is meant to facilitate licensing to the new generation of websites like YouTube and MySpace. (Read article at Billboard.biz)

• Digital distributor The Orchard inked a deal with digital jukebox company TouchTunes Music. Its The Orchard's first licensing deal with a digital-downloading jukebox company. Basically, that really cool digital jukebox just got better. (Read press release)

• SoundScan International has added over-the-air full-track digital download sales from a number of mobile operators in Europe -- Vodafone in Spain and Ireland, 3 Mobile in Denmark and Sweden, TDC in Denmark and from Telenor in Norway. (Read press release)

Posted by Glenn at 10:45 AM | Link
|Digital Distribution||EMI||Indies||Licensing||P2P|

The new year is just a few days old and already there are interesting developments (which is nice in a time that's usually painfully slow). The Wall Street Journal's Ethan Smith reported yesterday that some major record labels and publishers have deals to license their songs for podcasts. Not surprisingly, the first are for corporate-sponsored podcasts.

"San Francisco-based Rock River Communications Inc. has struck some of the first deals to license major-label content for podcasts. Rock River, which specializes in making the mix CDs sold at the check-out counters of retailers like Gap Inc. and Williams-Sonoma Inc.'s Pottery Barn, is creating a series of promotional podcasts on behalf of corporate clients including DaimlerChrysler AG and Ford Motor Co.

Chrysler and Ford pay Sony BMG Music Entertainment -- the joint venture of Sony Corp. and Germany's Bertelsmann AG -- a flat fee, which the companies decline to disclose, for the right to distribute the podcasts for a year, regardless of how many or how few copies are downloaded. Users can keep the programs on their personal computers or MP3 players indefinitely."

Chrysler's podcast is/has been available at its corporate website as well as iTunes. The Ford podcast series will launch later this month.

Right now this is nothing to get overly excited about. While far short of the kind of solution so many labels hold out hope for, it's an important change and possibly a precursor to larger shifts. And it just plain makes sense. Labels and publishers should recognize the need for additional revenue, and hopefully they realize that a podcast -- a professionally-produced broadcast contained in a single, large file -- is not a replacement for commercially available digital tracks or albums.

Posted by Glenn at 3:47 PM | Link
|Licensing||Podcasts|

• Hits predicts a massive first week for Jay-Z's Kingdome Come...in the 850,000 range. All in all, it looks like abum sales are surging upward just as they do this time of year. (Read article at Hits)

• EMI Music signed a licensing agreement with mobile music company Jamba, which has launched only in Germany thus far (it is known as Jamster in other countries). Tracks will be available for downloads and subscriptions for both the PC and mobile phone simultaneously. In September of 206, News Corp. purchased 51% of Jamba. The company plans to combine Jamba with Fox Mobile Entertainment. (Read press release)

• More EMI: EMI Music UK inked a deal with PSP-Playlist to allow its catalog of music videos to be downloaded onto the Sony PSP device. Videos will sell for between £1.89 and £2.19. (Read article at New Media Knowledge)

• The FCC will finance ten studies on media ownership: How People Get News and Information, Ownership Structure and Robustness of Media, Effect of Ownership Structure and Robustness on the Quantity and Quality of TV Programming, News Operations, Station Ownership and Programming in Radio, News Coverage of Cross-Owned Newspapers and Television Stations, Minority Ownership (two on this topic), Vertical Integration and Trends in Ownership, Format, and Finance. (Read article at Radio Ink)

• The U.S. Copyright Office has allowed a few new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. One is the ability to reverse engineer the DRM on audio CDs for security purposes. All exemptions will take effect on Monday, November 27 and will last three years. Where did such an exemption come from? Why, the Sony BMG rootkit fiasco, of course. (Read article at Security Focus)

• RIP Robert Lockwood, blues artist. (Read AP article)

Posted by Glenn at 2:27 PM | Link
|EMI||Licensing||Portable Music Players||Radio|

• Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, with financing from JP Morgan and Citigroup, offered $50.8 billion for Vivendi, parent company of Universal Music Group. It didn't amount to anything, though, reportedly because of tax issues. A deal with the buy-out company would have annulled the tax benefits granted by the French government. (Read article at Financial Times)

• Vivendi is seeking permissiion from the European Union to purchase BMG Music Publishing. A combination of BMG and Vivendi's Universal Music Publishing would have a market share of 22%, larger than current #1 EMI. (Read article at Reuters)

• Tower Records is trying to unload founder Russ Solomon's contract, which pays him $400,000 per year. (Read article at the Sacramento Bee)

• XL Recordings has created a new imprint, Abeano Music. The new London-based label is already working with three bands: To My Boy, I Was A Cub Scout and Blood Red Shoes. (Read article at Billboard.biz)

• Iron Maiden manager has left Sanctuary and has taken Iron Maiden with him. (Read article at Dot Music)

• No big loss: Microsoft will stop selling downloads at its MSN Music Store. Millions ask, "Microsoft has a download store?" Microsoft's Zune Marketplace arrives November 14th, the same day MSN drops its downloads. (Read post at ZDNet)

• Billboard's article on Goldfrapp's "long string of licensing coups" reads more like a label press release. The British duo's music has been licensed by Verizon, Diet Coke, "The OC" and "Grey's Anatomy." The latest deal puts Goldfrapp's music in Target's holiday campaign. Licensing does drive album sales, but the sales of Goldfrapp's latest album, Supernatural (Mute Records), shows a different story. Since its March 2007 release, the album has sold 62,000 units. Slightly more than the group's previos two, yes, but nothing that shows licensing is responsible for a big uptick in album sales. (It could be the result of the upstream to EMM from Caroline.) However, there has been noticeable increases in downloads of the songs "Ooh La La" and "Strict Macine." (Read article at Reuters)

Posted by Glenn at 10:30 AM | Link
|A&R||Indies||Licensing||Publishing||Universal Music Group|