Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Royalty Rate Agreement Breathes New Life Into Online Radio Stations

Record labels and online radio operators reached an agreement Tuesday (7/7) on a new royalty rate structure for online airplay. The deal caps a two-year battle that culminated in threats of complete shutdown by radio sites that would have deprived labels and artists of much-needed exposure as music consumers increasingly shift their music discovery from terrestrial to online sources.

Web radio site Pandora hailed the new rates as a substantial reduction, though the new fee structure will force the site to begin charging a 99-cent fee to users who want to listen more than 40 hours a month.

“If the rates weren’t resolved, we were sunk. So this is a huge relief,” Tim Westergren, Pandora co-founder told the L.A. Times.

Under a previous plan, imposed by a panel of judges in March of 2007 and decried by webcasters as financially impossible, online stations would be liable for a royalty rate of 0.08 of a cent per song, per listener, billed retroactively to 2006. That rate would increase incrementally to 0.19 of a cent per song per listener by 2010.

The new plan starts at the same 0.08 rate but incremental increases roll out more gradually and top at 0.14 of a cent in 2015. Additionally, webcasters are grouped into two categories—large webcasters who generate over $1.25 million a year in revenue and small webcasters who earn less.

The actual payment structure will task a large webcaster with an annual fee based on the larger of calculated royalties or 25% of revenues. Smaller webcasters would pay against a smaller percentage of revenues (10%-14%) or 7% of their expenses, whichever is greater.

All webcasters must pay a $25,000 initial fee for legal access to streamable material, though the fee is applicable toward royalty payments.

The struggle to get to this point has been far from amicable on both sides. Large webcasters like Pandora threatened repeatedly to pull the plug and take their millions of listeners away from artists and labels. Labels and SoundExchange, their proxy in the negotiations, held a hard line, accusing webcasters of building a business on the backs of artists and not adequately compensating them for the use of the artists’ music.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Facebook Unveils Chat And Live Streaming Tools After Successful Jonas Brothers Test

Facebook has announced a significant set of broadcast and community tools for its publishing platform with the rollout of an embeddable chat widget and a partnership with video service provider Ustream that could allow musical artists to broadcast live footage to their Facebook-membered fanbase.

The tools underwent load testing with a trio of recent Jonas Brothers webcasts. According to Ustream, the Jonas Brothers events logged the following activity:

While most artists would never approach this level of fan engagement, the webcasts proved the stability of the system and provided a preview of the technology. According to Techcrunch, the streaming service will initially be open to a limited group of applicants. Once approved, an artist can go with a free, ad-supported player or pay a setup fee of $15,000 for Ustream to develop an ad-free player for them. No immediate word on other potential costs.

The chat service, called Facebook Live Stream will operate as follows per Facebook:

Again, this provides an opportunity for an artist to take advantage of an existing Facebook-membered fan base to create a community event on their own official website. Per Mashable, Ustream already has chat functionality incorporated into their video stream offering.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Police Cruise Through Los Angeles Opener

Three weeks into 2007’s largest reunion tour, The Police hit a mix of high notes and partial duds during the first of three nights in Southern California on Wednesday (6/20).

The band’s return to the stage after a 23-year hiatus has been one of the few bright spots in a sluggish concert season, and is expected to be the top-grossing tour of the year by a wide margin, due to a combination of stadium stops in several cities and ticket prices surpassing the $250 mark in larger markets.

That set of factors bring a pretty high level of expectations, and the band didn’t quite deliver superstar pacing, performance or production at the Staples Center.

The nearly two-hour set was plagued early on by sound problems that gave Sting’s bass a quacky tone and buried guitarist Andy Summers’ intricate chord work too deep in the mix. The sound sorted itself out a few songs in, and drummer Stewart Copeland in particular shone, nailing many of the crisp fills and syncopated rhythms that formed much of the Police’s trademark sound.

Sting at 55 is a wonder to behold, with a chiseled physique and in fine voice, though like many of his contemporaries (Bono and Bruce Springsteen come to mind), he’s taken to artistically stepping away from some of the high notes of the early catalogue.

As a group, the band’s biggest problem proved less to be the mechanics of their performance than their projection of it. During several of the too-long-and-interchangeable ska jams that punctuated the night and at some critical points in their bigger songs, the band felt less like they owned the material and more like a talented cover band that hadn’t quite nailed some of the nuances.

The fact that the setlist has changed since the beginning of the tour indicates the show may still be finding its rhythm. There was a palpable sag about mid-set during “Invisible Sun” and “Walking In Your Footsteps” that may find its footing later in the tour.

Highlights included terrific takes on “Driven To Tears,” “Can’t Stand Losing You” and “So Lonely.” Sting’s voice lit up compelling performances of “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and “Every Breath You Take.”

In all, the show was a fun—if uneven—journey through one of the premiere staples of the early music video generation.

Setlist:

Start - 8:50
“Message In A Bottle”
“Synchronicity II”
“Walking on the Moon”
“Voices Inside My Head / When The World Is Running Down”
“Don’t Stand So Close”
“Driven to Tears”
“The Bed’s Too Big”
“Truth Hits Everybody”
“Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”
“Wrapped Around Your Finger”
“De Do Do Do De Da Da Da”
“Invisible Sun”
“Walking In Your Footsteps”
“Can’t Stand Losing You”
“Roxanne”

“King of Pain”
“So Lonely”

“Every Breath You Take”

“Next To You”
End - 10:40

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Apple iTunes Podcast Directory Draws Criticisms In Early Going

The July release of an Apple’s iTunes software upgrade that included a podcast directory has produced a new groundswell of interest in the phenomenon, as amateur broadcasters pile on to the bandwagon and established (and startup) media companies wrestle with models for monetizing the nascent medium.

The traffic surge fit well into the capabilities of many established media outfits, like Los Angeles-area NPR station KCRW, which had to ramp up server capacity in the days following the iTunes release, but managed the upgrade smoothly, offset by a well-timed podcast sponsorship deal with Lexus dealers in the station’s broadcast area. The deal, reportedly in the six-figure range, is something of a holy grail scenario for most podcasters, particularly those in iTunes’ directory who are on bargain shared-hosting plans.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Apple’s iTunes To Incorporate Podcasting Features

Months after the ubiquitous iPod portable media player and its companion software iTunes enabled a phenomenon known as podcasting, Apple Computer has decided to formally embrace the podcasting world in a new version of its platform.

In a presentation at the Wall Street Journal’s technology conference this week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs previewed an upcoming version of iTunes that will serve as an aggregator and distributor of podcasts. iTunes users will be able to download Apple-approved podcasts through the iTunes service for free and then sync them to their iPods for portable playback.

Up to now, podcast listeners had to either manually download MP3 links of their chosen programs and manually add them to their iTunes playlists or use third-party software, such as iPodder, to grab the files from RSS feeds and import them into their iTunes or Windows Media playlists.

Friday, May 13, 2005

CD Review: Dierks Bentley, “Modern Day Drifter” (Capitol)

Dierk’s Bentley’s sophomore effort finds him revisiting a lot of the stylistic ground that he covered on his debut, yet he manages to prove that this particular well isn’t dry yet.

Bentley spent much of 2004 on the road with George Strait and Kenney Chesney, and plenty of “Modern Day Drifter” feels crafted with live performance in front of those same types of audiences in mind. This is warm-weather music written with country music’s two strongest constituencies in mind: the party crowd and the heartstrings crowd.

On the party side, “Cab of My Truck” gallops out of the gate like a sequel to Bentley’s big-splash debut, “What Was I Thinkin’.” “Truck”  and “Lot of Leaving”  bring a Garth-like kinetic energy to the proceedings.

Yahoo Music Engine Adds Open-Source Twist With Open Plugin Development

Yahoo’s move into the music etail portal space this week fascinated technology-watchers and rattled competitors. As the dust on the announcement settles, Yahoo is making a public—and seemingly welcome—gesture to the open-source community to contribute to the service with the unveiling of a dedicated plugin development blog.

Noted in Yahoo developer Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, the plugin dev blog is a clearing house of widgets divided into two buckets: Those that alter the behavior of the YME application (which, like Napster or Rhapsody, must be downloaded and installed on the client system to access the YME music library) and those that change the behavior of a web browser to integrate data calls to the YME service via a public API.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Yahoo Music Engine Squeezes Competitors

The announcement of the Yahoo! Music Engine portal and its low-ball price points sent the stock prices of competitors into a tailspin on Wednesday (5/11).

Yahoo!, Inc. unveiled its music retail portal, dubbed the Yahoo! Music Engine, on Tuesday evening. The service is a subscription-based music streaming service that allows users the option to purchase tracks at a small premium.

The service will launch with prices of $6.99 monthly and $4.99 a month if purchased as a year-long contract. Both of the service’s primary competitors, Napster and Real Networks’ Rhapsody, charge $14.95 a month for a similar product offering.

Monday, June 21, 2004

Universal Easing Back On CD Price Cuts

Universal Music Group’s CD price-cut plan, hailed as a hope to get music buyers back into stores, has hit resistance from retailers, all but killing the effort.

Nine months ago, Universal Music executives announced with great fanfare that the company was preparing to slash prices on CDs. The strategy was expected to breathe new life into the flagging offline retail sector, which has been hit hard by a combination of illegal online music trading, audience migration to online stores and a long-running sag in pop sales on the heels of the Jive Records-powered teen music boom of the late 90’s.

Today, Universal’s grand plan has been quieted by a combination of resistance from the very retailers the price cuts were expected to help and internal reconsideration of the program’s details.

Online Music Alliance Set To Splinter

Echo, a consortium of major retailers funding a proposed online music shopping standard infrastructure, is reportedly being abandoned.

Billboard reports that the major backers of the project, including Best Buy, Borders Group, Hastings Entertainment, Tower Records, Trans World Entertainment and Virgin Entertainment, are each pursuing their own music retailing strategies with individually-selected partners.

The Echo project was founded to take advantage of economies of scale in developing consumer music shopping and delivery tools.