Tag: Digital Music
MidemNet 2008: Brit digital music firms 7digital and We7 get funding
UK digital music store 7digital has announced that it’s raised £4.25 million from VC firms, as part of its efforts to continue developing its service and expand to new countries, such as the US.
MidemNet 2008: Digital music sales will match physical sales in 2009 says Sony BMG
There’s an ongoing debate within the music industry about the way rising digital sales aren’t making up for the continued slump in physical (i.e CD) sales. So while more people are purchasing music online, overall spending is down.
QTRAX launches, claiming legal access to 30 million tracks. Server overwhelmed
QTRAX, which originally launched back in 2002 but closed down due to avoid the risk of legal action, has relaunched today.
It claims that users will be able to find and download between 25 and 30 million copyrighted music tracks, with the blessing of a large proportion of the music industry.
“QTRAX is a magical and game-changing service that revolutionizes the way fans consume digital music,” said QTRAX President and CEO Allan Klepfisz.
Well, possibly not revolutionary. We’ve seen a shift towards “free” ad-supported music streaming and download services recently.
Last.fm launches free on-demand music platform in UK
Last.fm has today announced that it is the first website to offer free, global, on-demand access to the largest licensed catalogue of music from Universal Music Group, Sony/BMG, Warner and EMI, plus CD Baby, IODA, the Orchard, Naxos and more than 150,000 independent labels and artists.
The service is ad supported, which means that they can implement the second part of their master plan: paying unsigned artists each time one of their tracks is played on the Last.fm service.
DRM-free MP3s will boost music download sales, say UK retailers
The UK’s Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) has praised Sony BMG’s decision to abandon its opposition to DRM-free music, and allow online retailers to sell its tracks as MP3 files. The label said last week that it’d make more than three million tracks available without DRM – and was the last major label to hold out against ditching copy protection.
CES 2008: Don Was talks digital music at Billboard Digital Music Live
One of the events happening within CES is the Billboard Digital Music Live summit, which sees a bunch of music industry executives getting together to chew the fat about digital music: opportunities, threats, ways to screw Steve Jobs over. You know the kind of thing.
First speaker in the afternoon is music industry legend Don Was, who’s an artist and producer, and also active in the digital area, looking at advertising-funded music on his own site, My Damn Channel, giving away MP3s supported by advertising.
Pandora finally closes its doors to all but US visitors – and that now includes the UK
The traditional music business is on a downward slide, fearing new technology rather than embracing the opportunity it gives. As an example, see Pandora – a great opportunity to shift music. But guess what? It’s finally been blocked to all but US users.
Mac users pay for more digital and CD music than PC users, report suggests
It seems that there’s always a new way to stir up the age old rift between PC and Mac users, and the latest report to have a go comes from the NPD Group research firm, who even go as far as to state that, “there’s still a cultural divide between Apple consumers and the rest of the computing world”.
Well, I suppose we knew that really. Apparently, half of Mac owners surveyed say that they have paid to download songs from sites such as iTunes, compared to 16% of PC owners.
In addition, Mac users are more likely to buy music CDs — 32% compared to 28% of PC users.
30 Trends in Digital Music: 11-15
After a pause to take in the Nokia World show, I’m back on track with our roundup of digital music trends. So far, it’s covered topics like ad-funded music, console game downloads, governments cracking down on file-sharing, Radiohead-style choose-your-own pricing, and gnarly old rawk bands getting down with Web 2.0 technology.
