For the last 2½ years, Bill Armstrong, co-founder of local rock label SideOneDummy Records, has been working on a side project. His vision was to create a website for independent labels to give away free music.
Apple Inc. has just sewn up its contracts with the four major record labels Thursday for a cloud music service, with agreements from music publishers to follow on Friday, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. Dubbed iCloud, the service initially will be offered for a free period to people who buy music from Apple’s iTunes digital download store, allowing users to upload their music to Apple’s computers where they can then play from a Web browser or Internet-connected Apple device. The company plans to eventually charge a subscription fee, about $25 a year, for the service. Apple would also… Read more »
Christmas came early for Lady Gaga fans this week, as Amazon sold downloads of the singer’s brand-new LP, “Born This Way,” for just 99 cents on Monday and Thursday of this week.
Industry sources told Billboard on Friday that Amazon sold some 440,000 downloads of the album – nearly all of which were the 99-cent version. Billboard will include the count normally for their weekly Billboard 200 chart.
Proving unable to come to an agreement with all the major labels for the music service it originally wanted, Google is going to pull an Amazon and unveil a digital music locker service without any licensing deals at all during a keynote today at its I/O conference in San Francisco, Google execs tell Billboard.
A new Amazon.com Inc service that lets customers store songs and play them on a variety of phones and computers is facing a backlash from the music industry that could ignite a legal battle. Amazon’s Cloud Drive, announced on Tuesday, allows customers to store about 1,000 songs on the company’s Web servers for free instead of their own hard drives and play them over an Internet connection directly from Web browsers and on phones running Google Inc’s Android software. Sony Music, home to artists such as Shakira and Kings of Leon, was upset by Amazon’s decision to launch the service… Read more »
Google and Amazon had also pitched to secure The Beatles rights for their own digital music stores, according to industry sources.
Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all. These groups even want compensation for iTunes’ 30-second song samples. In the future, Apple may be required to pay licensing fees to ASCAP and BMI for the downloads of TV shows and films it sells. At a time when many iTunes shoppers are still fuming over Apple’s first-ever increase in song prices, the demands by the American Society of… Read more »
Amazon.com and Wal-Mart have both quietly followed Apple’s lead and will now charge more for some top-selling tracks in their MP3 stores. Some songs will now sell for $1.29 at Amazon’s MP3 store, up from 99 cents, while Wal-Mart is now charging $1.24 for top tracks, up from 94 cents. Apple introduced variable pricing to its iTunes music store Tuesday, by charging 69 cents for older tracks, 99 cents for recent songs and $1.29 for new hits, instead of the previous 99 cents for any track. Amazon’s decision to raise prices seems especially unusual, considering that the company actually cut… Read more »
Yahoo Inc. is partnering with other online music providers as the Internet giant tries a fresh approach to getting an edge in the evolving digital music business. The new version of Yahoo Music unveiled on Monday, aggregates paid and free music services available on the Internet, allowing Yahoo users to access and interact with the services directly from the Yahoo site. Yahoo has struck commercial relationships with digital music retailers like Apple Inc.’s, collecting a fee for every referral, the company said. The move comes a little over a year after Yahoo announced it was shuttering its own paid-music service,… Read more »
Bruce Springsteen has unveiled a second new song from his next album, “Working on a Dream,” jointly through Amazon.com and MySpace Music. Fans can download “My Lucky Day” from the two services exclusively for a week, starting Monday (December 1). The sites are also hosting the live-in-the-studio video for the song, with Amazon.com featuring an extra two minutes of behind-the-scenes clips. The title track from the new album, due January 27 from Columbia, is an iTunes exclusive for the time being. The artist and his E Street Band will return to the live stage February 1 as part of the… Read more »
