Labels Agree to File Sharing

Imeem, a social networking site has settled its lawsuit with Warner Music by promising to give Warner a cut of advertising revenues from the site. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that it's signed similar deals with all four major labels, meaning that Imeem is now the first website whose users have the music industry's blessing to share music for free. The significant difference between Napster and Imeem is that Imeem only allows you to play music on its website, whereas Napster allowed you to download songs to your hard drive. The Imeem website doesn't provide a "download" button, but there's no DRM involved, and it's quite easy to download music files from Imeem using third-party tools. And because Imeem's site doesn't use DRM, Imeem downloading tools are probably legal under the DMCA.

Source: Tech Dirt > http://techdirt.com/articles/20071210/125633.shtml

Despite Pricing Offer, 500K Get Radiohead Album via P2P

Despite the fact that Radiohead is letting fans pay whatever they choose -- including nothing -- to download its new album from its website, more than 500,000 have downloaded the album for free off of the BitTorrent file-sharing network since its release, Forbes.com reported, citing data from peer-to-peer monitoring firm Big Champagne. On the first day "In Rainbows" was made available for download alone, some 240,000 illegal downloads were tracked on BitTorrent, compared with the 1.2 million sales of the album on the band's site, as reported by Gigwise.com. "People don't know Radiohead's site. They do know their favorite BitTorrent site and they use it every day," Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland told Forbes.com. "It's quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version." Article

Report: Charlatans, Oasis, Jamiroquai Consider Radiohead-Type Releases

Three popular acts not currently signed to a label -- Charlatans, Oasis and Jamiroquai -- are considering offering upcoming releases for free or allowing fans to decide on the price they pay, Telegraph.co.uk reported, citing industry sources.
Take our Poll: Which band will have the most success with the Free Music Experiment?Radiohead's seventh album "In Rainbows" went on sale exclusively from the band's website, with the band allowing consumers to determine a price they pay for the download; an $80 special edition is also on sale, which includes bonus CDs, the album on vinyl and a booklet. The Charlatans recently partnered with radio station XFM to offer their upcoming album for free through the station's website."We want 'the people' to own the music and we want the artist i.e. us, to own the copyright," said Charlatans singer Tim Burgess. "Why let a record company get in the way of the people getting the music? We reckon the people who listen to Xfm are the people who love The Charlatans and we're excited at releasing our forthcoming singles and tenth studio album online free of charge through xfm.co.uk." Another label-less U.K. band, Oasis, has already announced plans to offer an upcoming single for download for 99 pence (about $2.00). Article

Survey: File-Sharing Down, Legal Music Services Gain Among U.S. Teens

A recent survey of 980 U.S. teens conducted by Piper Jaffray found that 64% said they download music illegally, down from 72% a year ago, while 36% said they purchase music from online services, up from 28% last year.Among online retailers, 79% said they used iTunes, down from 91% a year ago; RealNetworks' Rhapsody and Napster each claimed 2% of market share, while 16% said they purchased digital music from a catch-all category of "other" services.The survey also found that 82% of teens who own an MP3 player also own some form on an iPod, up from 79% in 2006. Three percent said they already owned an iPhone, with 9% saying they expected to by one in the next six months. Article

Band allows fans to pay any price they want for album

Fans of U.K. rock band Radiohead looking to pay whatever price they chose to pre-order a download of the band's new album crashed the site on Monday, but most are deciding to pay close to retail price band spokesman Murray Chalmers told the BBC. Radiohead.com is now back up after crashing for a stint on Monday. While the digital version of "In Rainbows" will be released on Oct. 10, the band is allowing fans to pre-order and pay any price they choose. "Although the idea is that you can decide what you want to pay, most people are deciding on a normal retail price with very few trying to buy it for a penny," Chalmers told the BBC.The band is also accepting pre-orders for an $80 "discbox" version, that includes the album on CD and heavyweight vinyl, and bonus materials like extra tracks and a hardcover booklet.A standalone CD version of the album will also be released next year. Article

Sony BMG: “We Are Projecting Up To 40% Of US Sales Coming From Digital in 2008”

Digital Music Forum West 2007 - Many of the Thursday morning panels acknowledged the fact that, in this digital age, people are consuming more music than ever. They are just not paying for it. Digital revenues are still not making up for the drop in sales of CDs. However, many panelists agreed that the industry is now finally moving in the right way by dropping DRM-restrictions, moving to ad-supported models and variable pricing in order to find individual price-points that works for everyone.

Thomas Hesse, President, Global Digital Business & U. S. Sales, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, who was the morning keynote mentioned that Sony BMG are at 30% digital sales in the US this year and projecting up to 40% next year. As far as new ideas for monetizing music, prepaid download cards and gift cards can, to some extent, replace physical CDs at retail, especially when combined with free location-specific WiFi downloads like Starbucks and iTunes are going to launch.

Other opportunity that were mentioned by many of the morning panelists for the music industry is on the mobile platform and in-games.“One billion cell phones will be replaced this year and 95% of new cell phones can play music. That is a huge opportunity”, said Dave Jaworski, CEO of Pasalong Networks. Thomas Hesse projected around 17% of Sony BMG sales coming from digital for this year on a global scale, but mentioned that he thinks that it should be a much bigger business, especially when it comes to mobile offerings. Article

SpiralFrog Licenses Tracks for Ad-Supported Music Service

SpiralFrog, the developer of a free, ad-supported music download service, announced on Tuesday that it has signed a licensing deal with independent digital music distributor IODA. IODA's nearly 1 million-track catalog will be added to existing music from SpiralFrog partners including Universal Music Group, Universal Music Publishing, EMI Music Publishing, BMI and KOCH Records. Article

Universal Music to test DRM free everywhere, but iTunes

Universal Music Group announced on Friday that it plans to experiment with selling a portion of its catalog free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions from a number of online retailers, including Amazon.com, RealNetworks' Rhapsody, Best Buy and Walmart -- with the notable exception of Apple's iTunes Store. Article

Warner Music Sales Slip

Revenue fell 2 percent, to $804 million, also short of the average analyst expectation of $832.2 million, however Warner Music said digital music revenue rose 29 percent, to $119 million, accounting for 15 percent of total revenue. Article