News

Live Nation To Sell DRM Free Mp3s

Live Nation has concluded deals with three of the four major labels, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and EMI to offer DRM-free mp3 downloads of music to be available directly from an artists’ web page. Live Nation subsidiary MusicToday will serve as the backend.

TMV has commented how Live Nations strategy seemed to be all over the place in terms of its quick movement into 360 degree deals and then Michael Rapino’s subsequent sacking of Live Nation’s record label board. They followed up this year when they lined up to take on Ticketmaster, the dominant force in the ticketing, with their own in-house ticket sales. And now they intend to move into digital music retailing? This really seems to give out signals of desperation in terms of a company without direction of what its core business focus is or needs to be.

Apparently, Live Nation’s strategy is monetizing virtually every aspect of an artist, from venues and concert tickets to merchandise and even music. Talk about mixed signals! Read the story »

Mobile

AMG/Live Nation get Closer with 02 Live Venues Tie Up

O2  today announced it is  extending its partnership and interactive services with live music company Live Nation across the UK to a further 11 venues.

From 1 January, 11 Live Nation/Academy Music Group (AMG) venues will be renamed as O2 Academies with the operator’s subscribers offered priority access. O2 expects around 3.5m fans to be affected by the decision, which will offer subscriber’s special early opportunities to purchase tickets to around 4,000 events each year up to 48 hours before they go on general release. Read the story »

Online

Official WE7.com Launch

The folks at WE7 put on a great launch party last night and they obviously have a lot to shout about. Every UK digital music person worth their salt was in attendance. As we all know I have been dubious in reference to ad-funded business models within a number of posts I wrote here on TMV. Before we get to that lets look at what we7.com now bring to the table in terms of its proposition.

All major labels are now on board and so are a lot of independent labels bringing its song catalogue to above 3 million tracks. The service now has a simple “Search, Click and Play” and a “play anywhere” service which allows blogs and websites to link to and have their users listen to music powered by WE7. Some good new features there.

The service has evolved from its first incarnation and now also offers al-la-carte track sales to its users. We7 have utilised The Filter recommendation engine to enable users to discover new music that suits their tastes. So overall the service has definitely grown some legs since its inception. Read the story »

Marketing

Will Kerchoonz Mean Kerching for Artists?

You might expect a lot of things from former Wet Wet Wet producers (like rapidly fading into obscurity) but launching a new social music website that (potentially) has the jump on both MySpace Music and Last.FM is not one of them.

And yet this is precisely what Ian Morrow and singer/songwriter partner Indiana Gregg have gone and done. Scheduled for public release later this month, new website Kerchoonz (in PHP framwork, for the nerds out there) aims to pay artists, both signed and unsigned, for every single stream and download that their community generates.

Backed by a $490,000 (£250K) investment from the Scottish Co-investment Fund, Kerchoonz is artists ‘doing it for themselves’ and seeking to address the perceived imbalance in social music sector with regard to artist royalty payments (a topic touched upon in my recent posting “Why Social Music Rocks“).

Read the story »