The online personalised music streaming service Pandora has signed a deal with US carrier Sprint to be pre-installed or downloaded to handsets. Pandora and other web broadcasters have been heavily hit by recent increases in the licensing fees for web broadcasters in the US. Pandora has also had to stop streaming outside the US. The new Sprint venture means a badly needed extra revenue stream on top of advertising. Pandora
Mobango, a site for publishing and sharing user-generated content for mobile phones claims it has experienced a 41% monthly growth in the amount of content being downloaded through its mobile portal across Europe, North America and Asia. This uptake has resulted, in part, from a 26% compounded monthly growth rate in the number of people using this function, says the firm.
It’s now obvious that in order to promote a band these days you have to play online. MySpace was a ‘go-to’ place for a long time, although it is fast losing its cache as record companies start to – ethically or unethically – virally seed their own acts, sometimes even using robots to add hundreds of friends to an artist’s site or just employing people specifically for this task. And
Apple’s iTunes music software is not fully compatible with Vista, Microsoft’s newest operating system, says the BBC. Like we couldn’t have guessed…
Global digital music sales almost doubled in 2006 to around $2 billion, or 10 percent of all sales, but have not reached the industry’s “holy grail” of offsetting the fall in CD sales, says the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Reuters reports that expected digital sales to account for a quarter of all sales worldwide by 2010.
It looks like Koopa – a punk trio which a mate of mine has been involved with – have now proved that real punk (the kind that really does screw the establishment) is not dead. From Reuters: Koopa is the first unsigned band to land a top 40 single — “Blag, Steal & Borrow” — that is available only by downloading it on the Internet. The breakthrough followed changes to
Reaction is coming in on the Myspace decision to sell non-DRM MP3s from unsigned bands registered on the site. The Register: “We reckon it’s the record companies that should be more woried about MySpace than Apple at the moment, though. If so-called “MySpace phenomena” such as the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen continue to emerge through self-promotion and are given unprecedented direct selling access to their MySpace-addicted audience, where do
MySpace is to sell songs from nearly 3 million unsigned bands, reports Reuters. Thats’non-DRM’d MP3s, by the way. The bands will be able to set the price for each track, with MySpace and tech partner Snocap taking a cut of the sale, reports Wired. However, the move probably won’t affect Apple, as CNN and MySpace itself seems to think. As tbites points out – guess what – MP3s can be
Spiral Frog will make us watch adverts before downloading the music track to one PC and two portable devices, while remembering to log in at least once a month, in order to retain access to the music we've already watched adverts in exchange for. MusicBites thinks this sounds a bit like all those dumb businesses during the late 90s which tried to play 15 second to 30 second adverts at
The mbites.com podcast this week looked at how digital music is impacting both on music fans and the artists themselves. The guests (pictured) were Laura Lee Davies, former editor of Time Out magazine in London and a music journalist of 20 years experience, and Ben Drury, founder and managing director of 7digital.com, which provides digital downloading services to many leading brands and artists’ web sites. Download the MP3 file here