Archive for: music
Pitchfork TV is now live. What are my first thoughts! Well the site itself has a very simple design (as you can see from the image below), it has a main window on the left side to actually show the videos and then a scroll bar on the right for navigation. What does annoy me though is that the scroll bar size is limited on the page. At the moment the site is just like a basic YouTube channel. It doesnt have actual live shows or interviews, it is just basic recorded performances from selected artists and also recordings from live events. So nothing too special here.
Pitchfork,tv launches this Monday. Yesterday, the regular Pitchfork site offered a few behind-the-scenes segments as a primer, and it announced that Monday’s lineup will include an exclusive Radiohead performance. Listening Post got a preview and has a thorough post on the upcoming site.
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the relaunch of its Latin Music Store, www.amazon.com/latin, with Earth’s largest selection of Latin music titles. Focused on delivering Tu Musica, Tu Sabor (Your Music, Your Flavor) to customers, the newly updated Amazon Latin Music Store carries nearly 140,000 unique titles and brings both English-language and Spanish-language content to Amazon customers. The store features nine categories including, Latin Pop, Latin Rock, Regional Mexican, Tropical, Urban, World, Latin Children’s, Latin Christian and Latin Jazz along with 23 subcategories.
Here at Crenk we have already reported about Myspace and their new music offering several times. It seems now that the launch is imminent. The LA Times has reported that Myspace will be launching their music offering as early as tomorrow. The new service will compete directly with iTunes and will be offering music downloads, streams, videos and mobile phone ring tones, along with related items, such as merchandise and concert tickets.
Stay tuned for more coverage about the launch in coming days.
paidContent.org have reported that Buzznet has raised $25 million in a third round of funding. Additionally, it was learned that Universal Music-owned Interscope has invested a few million in it. It hasnt been confirmed who the other investors are, but im guessing some of the funding would have come from previous investors such as Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners.
Also, recently, investors Bob Pittman, of the Pilot Group and Sling Media’s Jason Hirschhorn traded their equity stakes in the influential indie music blog Stereogum for an ownership percentage of BuzzNet. Thus, it has been confirmed that Stereogum is now fully owned by Buzznet. Today it has also be reported that Buzznet has now acquired Qloud. Has this new $25 million gone to the acquisition or has it been raised to make Buzznet more like mainstream media.
Minic over at 901am has reported that Spiral Frog is now the third largest legal music download site. Spiral Frog reports that they have 850,000 registered users, thus putting them in third largest behind iTunes and Rhapsody. The company also reports that their traffic is also increasing at a constant rate, already surpassing two million unique visitors for March.
Im not really too sure if Spiral Frog should claim the fact that they are the third largest legal download store, mainly because they dont actually sell anything compared to iTunes and Rhapsody. Therefore, they should really be in first place, because people are willing to sign up to something in which they have the opportunity to get something for free rather than paying.
Direct-to-consumer mobile content service Thumbplay scored $18 million in Series E financing from rookside Capital Partners, the public equity affiliate of Bain Capital, and Cross Creek Capital, a private equity affiliate of Wasatch Advisors.
Thumbplay is behind the mobile content sales for Internet portals like AOL and MSN, as well as offering a branded service to consumers that allow fans to buy content outside of the carrier content menu. The funding will be used to accelerate growth, expand its direct-to-consumer product offerings and to expand internationally.
After about 6 months of announcing plans, the LimeWire store has finally launched. The site is completely separate from the LimeWire peer to peer file sharing application. The company is planning on slowly integrating both services and then finally moving to a legitimate store. All tracks are available as 256kbps MP3 files. Pricing is $.99 for a single track. Or you can get 25 downloads per month for $9.99, 50 for $14.99 or 75 for $19.99. At that last price, you essentially get 75 songs for $.27 each, assuming you actually download 75 tracks each month.
Limewire has already announced some great partnerships including Nettwerk and Redeye. It is going to be very interesting to see how they can prevent customers from downloading music from their store and then sharing the music via their free P2p network.
Disclosure: LimeWire is a partner of RouteNote in which I am currently CEO.
Today Yahoo have announced the release of the brand new version of FoxyTunes, in which they purchased back in February.
The new version is for IE (fresh beta) and it has some great new customisation option to boot. Now you can change the appearance of your FoxyTunes by installing custom skins (we’ve already got 11 skins available) and down the road you’ll be able to create your very own. We’ve even added a FoxyTunes Mini, basically a universal desktop widget that’s a customizable, collapsible, and skinnable version of its big bro. The best part — there’s a timer and alarm clock feature that lets you set your media player to your favorite song.
Download the new version here.
A while ago digital distribution company CD Baby started to sell their artists Mp’s direct from their own site. This has proved amazing popular and Derek Sivers reports that the company’s direct mp3 sales have exceed the revenues from most of their partners.
CD Baby sold $600,000 in mp3 downloads in the last few months, with NO marketing or announcements at all. Therefore, CD Baby sold more than emusic, Yahoo Music, Sony Connect, Verizon, MSN and Snocap.
The digital distribution space is just about to open up. CD Baby has been one of the leaders in the market, because they offer artists the ability to keep more money in their pockets. CD Baby will soon have a new competitor, RouteNote. RouteNote is a digital distribution company quite similar to CD Baby, but they will have an additional feature of licensing music. Allow artists to also have their music available to be licensed for TV, radio, games, etc, all while selling their music to the worlds largest online stores. Make sure you head over to their site and get a private beta invite.
Disclosures: Steven is currently CEO of Insomnia Ltd, which own and operate RouteNote. Â
Amie Street have just announced today that they have signed the Beggars Group to their service. The Beggars Group consists of labels such as XL, Rough Trade, 4AD, Matador Records and Polyvinyl Recording Co. This means a further 15,000 tracks to the Amie Street catalog.
As most of you already know Amie Street is a music download site that has been funded by the likes of Amazon. This is due to their unique pricing model. All tracks in their catalog start of at being a free download and once the popularity of a certain track increases, then so does the price accordingly. Tracks are finally capped at $0.98 per download. However, one of the most important selling points for the consumer is that the Amie Street tracks are totally DRM free Mp3s.
We have learnt that News Corp is trying to put together a joint venture for Myspace. The joint venture will run in a similar way to the current News Corp video product with NBC Universal. The joint venture will allow the major record labels to sign up to the service and receive a nice equity share in return for their content on the site. The full details have yet to be released, but im guessing the music will be DRM free with some sort of ad support. It is also still unknown if the service will be run as a portal from the myspace header bar or will actually run within the user profiles individually.
Myspace currently has over 7 million bands on their site and it should be hard to leverage this into huge profits, but they are still yet to come up with a plan on how to achieve this. With that amount of music and ability to go straight to market, they should really be challengers to Amazon, Rhapsody and iTunes.
paidContent report that no major labels are yet to sign, but the theory is that once one sign the rest will follow. I think Myspace are getting this whole situation wrong. They shouldnt just limit themselves to major labels, because they are in decline. Myspace should work on creating a tool in the admin of artist profiles which allows them to create a widget on their own individual sites. Thus, it will then have a tie in with a credit card company and the music will be directly delivered to your inbox. This solution also cuts out the problem of Paypal, but doesnt eliminate the issue of which currency to use on the system (because $US is in heavy decline). However, im very interested to see what system they adopt.
