This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Digital Labels & Publishers Top Stories
A2IM backs .music TLD bid
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 28 August 2014
The trade body for indie labels in the US, A2IM, has added its support to one of the bids to control the .music domain, while also questioning the motives of some of the corporate bidders.
The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers has, of course, been busy introducing a whole barrage of new ‘top level domains’, so that people and companies bored with tedious old .com or .net or country-based domain names can instead add some spice to their official internet designations. Though since .fish went live what else could people possibly want? We’ll be rebranding as CMU.fish from next Tuesday.
While many of the new TLDs have already been allocated to organisations, who can now choose how to distribute domains incorporating them, others are still to be assigned, including good old .music.
Eight groups have bid to control that TLD, including Google and Amazon. Though two of the eight are so called ‘community priority applications’, which enjoy preferential treatment in the bidding process, providing they meet a big stack of conditions set out by ICANN.
It’s one of those applications that A2IM has confirmed it is supporting, joining a load of other trade groups and collecting societies in urging ICANN to give control of the music TLD to .music LLC and its parent company Far Further. It’s hoped that, unlike the corporate bidders, the .music LLC organisation would give priority to labels, artists and legit music platforms when distributing its domains.
A letter signed by various music groups backing Far Further’s bid, notes: “The .music LLC/Far Further application defines us as its community, identifying our practices, characteristics and core values, setting us apart from all those that are merely interested in, or differently engaged with music”.
The chief of A2IM has gone a bit further in questioning the motives of the other bidders, one of which, Google, has, of course, been in conflict of late with many indie labels over the way it has been negotiating licensing deals for its planned YouTube audio service.
A2IM president Rich Bengloff told Billboard: “We’re afraid their total goal will be maximising revenues, so they may not have the safeguards in place to ensure the necessary support for the industry, individual labels, and artists who should have it. We want to make sure only legitimate owners get first shot of these domains”.
If the community priority applications do not satisfy ICANN’s criteria they will then go into an open bidding war with the other bidders, which is where Google and Amazon would likely have the edge. Though if the big bad Google does end up controlling .music and we all decide to boycott it, there is always the .fish option.
