The Adele effect hits major-record-company market shares in 2011

Music & Copyright’s annual survey of the recorded-music and music-publishing industries has revealed that Universal Music Group (UMG) remained the world’s biggest record company and Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) the largest music-publishing company in 2011. The positioning of each of the four major record-label and music-publishing companies was unchanged last year. Although this lack of change could suggest that 2011 offered up “more of the same” in the recorded-music and music-publishing sectors, such an assumption would be wide of the mark.

Filed under: download, Intellectual property, Music industry, Uncategorized, download, emi, market share, Music industry, sony music, universal music, warner music

Why the case against ReDigi should go to a full trial for the good of the music industry

Earlier this month, US District Judge Richard Sullivan ruled against EMI’s Capitol Records’ request for a preliminary injunction against the digital-music reseller ReDigi. Capitol had wanted the service closed down but Judge Sullivan denied the record company’s demand and insisted that the service should stay online and the case go to trial. The judge’s action has been widely reported as a victory for ReDigi and to some extent it is. Not every day can a start-up company say it has fended off one of the world’s biggest record companies. But in the longer term, having the case go to a full trial can only be a good thing for the music industry. Should Judge Sullivan have ruled without a trial that ReDigi was infringing copyright then the issue of legality would rumble on and proponents of digital resale would simply claim they have been trodden on by a big corporation wanting to protect its business.

Filed under: download, Intellectual property, Legal, Music industry, capitol records, Music industry, redigi

Midyear recorded-music sales roundup

Of all the countries that have reported midyear sales figures, it is the US that has provided the most optimism. For the first six months of this year, album-unit sales rose 1% compared with same period of 2010, according to Nielsen SoundScan. This represented the first time that album sales had increased since 2004. Including track-equivalent albums (10 digital tracks equal one album), the growth figure was higher, at 3.7%. Digital-album sales were reported by Nielsen SoundScan to have increased 10% year-on-year, with digital-track sales rising 11%. Recent figures from Nielsen SoundScan, for the year to Aug. 21, published in the trade magazine Billboard, suggest that the situation has improved slightly, with album sales up 2.4% compared with the same period in 2010 and album sales including track equivalents rising 4.8%.

Filed under: Collection societies, download, Music industry

Question – is now the right time for the European Commission to legislate on Pan-European digital music licensing?

The issue of Pan-European licensing and how best it can be achieved is a hot topic. Earlier this week, in an interview with the UK trade magazine Music Week, Pandora founder Tim Westergren said that a centralized licensing structure was needed for the service to return to Europe. Westergren is not alone in his criticism of the licensing in Europe as plenty of other digital music services have bemoaned the complexity of the licensing structure in the region. But is the situation as bad as they all claim? The big music publishers have all set up “hubs” to streamline the licensing process and the Pan-Nordic mechanical-rights-collection society Nordisk Copyright Bureau has shown that multiterritory licensing can be achieved without legislation from Europe.

With this in mind, Music & Copyright would like your opinion on the issue. Please answer the below question and by all means add any comments. The results of the poll will be published in the next issue on July 13.

Music & Copyright is published by Informa Telecoms & Media.

Filed under: download, Intellectual property, Legal, Music industry

Music discovery takes center stage as digital-track availability just keeps on rising

The number of digital tracks available to music customers has grown at an incredible rate over the past few years. At launch, Apple’s iTunes offered only 200,000 tracks, and the company says it now has more than 18 million tracks in its database. Users have never had it so good and to help them find the music they want, a number of digital-media companies are building customized high-performance music-discovery engines, seeking to offer the “perfect” version of such a service.

Filed under: download, Music industry, Discovery, download, full track, Internet, Music industry, Music subscriptions

Why is Spotify playing hard-ball with its free users?

Spotify is reducing the amount of music that free users of the service can stream, capping it at 10 hours per month. This should not come as a surprise. It is simply part of a “get them hooked, then make them pay” strategy Spotify began when it reduced the free service from unlimited to twenty hours listening a week.

Filed under: download, Music industry, Music subscriptions, download, full track, Internet, mp3, Music industry, Music subscriptions, Spotify

Amazon stirs the locker-licensing debate

Amazon has rolled out a new service in the US that allows users to store music in a digital locker that can be accessed from any PC or Android-powered mobile device. The latest issue of Music & Copyright takes a look at why the launch has prompted a significant amount of debate over its legality. Amazon claims it needs no license for simple remote storage.

Filed under: Digital locker, download, Legal, Music industry, Uncategorized, digital locker, full track, Internet, licensing, mp3, Music industry

Cloud-based music service roundup

In the latest issue of Music & Copyright we included a special focus on cloud-based music services. It’s no secret that cloud technology offers the music industry enormous potential to reignite the digital sector at a time when the a la carte model of downloading is showing signs of age. Licensing issues have hindered rollouts and it would seem that the big players are waiting for a decision in the MP3tunes.com case before staking their claim.

Filed under: download, Music industry, Music subscriptions, The cloud, Uncategorized, Cloud, download, full track, Internet, Music industry, Music subscriptions

Has digital music failed or are the digital expectations simply too high?

An often repeated conclusion at this year’s MIDEM conference, as well as in subsequent news reports on the state of the music industry, was that digital music services have so far failed. Digital sales are still not offsetting the decline in physical sales, they have not managed to maintain the format replacement cycle and they are not competing with piracy.

It is certainly fair to say that the music industry is having a very rough time and digital is not proving to be the saviour that many thought it would be. But should we really expect any other conclusion? Have digital services failed or have we just set the bar way too high?

Filed under: download, free, Music industry, Music subscriptions, Uncategorized, download, mp3, Music subscriptions, p2p

MIDEM and the music industry in 2011

MIDEM is now over for another year and representatives from all sectors of the music industry are busy digesting the comings and goings of the event. Some conference themes followed on from where they left off last year, whilst others debated new business models that rose to prominence during 2010. There were numerous cases of the traditional music industry bumping heads with supporters of these new business models. But at a number of conferences and panel sessions, there seemed to be a better understanding of some of the issues and concerns on all sides as well as a greater willingness from most of the participants to go that bit further to get their heads around each other’s issues, which in previous years, had been a source of major division. There were of course still plenty of areas of disagreement but on the whole all parties exchanged handshakes rather than insults.

Filed under: Collection societies, download, Intellectual property, Music industry, Music subscriptions, download, MIDEM, music, Music subscriptions, royalties