Business News Week In Five

The music business week in five – 15 Jun 2012

By | Published on Friday 15 June 2012

Chris Cooke

Now here’s an interesting fact for your Friday consumption. As of next Thursday, the CMU Daily will have been landing in the inboxes of music business people every weekday for ten whole years. Which makes me feel rather old. But what a decade it’s been for this business of music – though I have an inkling that the really exciting decade is the one ahead of us. Over 25,000 people now subscribe to the CMU Daily, and why not share in the fun with all your colleagues and fellow music people by telling them all to sign up too, for free, right here? And then, once that’s done, sit back for your Week In Five.

01: We7 was sold to Tesco. The retail giant has acquired a 91% stake in the company for £10.8 million as part of a £150 million plan to expand its online operations. It’s not clear what the deal will mean for the UK-based digital music platform, which has been through various incarnations over the years, before landing on a Pandora-style offer last year. The takeover follows the departure of some key execs in recent months, though CEO Steve Purdham remains. CMU report | Guardian report

02: The EC’s investigation into Universal’s EMI deal entered a new phase while US Congress prepared to consider the takeover too. The European Commission prepared a ‘statement of objections’ for Universal, a routine stage in its investigation into the major’s proposed purchase of the EMI record companies, though one that will likely enable the mega-major to work out what concessions it might have to offer to secure regulator approval (even though it has always insisted no concessions should be required). Meanwhile the US Senate judiciary committee’s antitrust panel confirmed it would discuss the deal next week. An all star cast, in industry teams, will present arguments – ie the bosses of Universal, EMI, Live Nation and the Beggars Group, and former Warner music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. Statement Of Objections report | Congressional hearing report

03: ReDigi announced a quirky artist payment scheme. The controversial MP3 resale platform is currently facing legal action from EMI, which says that the digital business infringes its copyrights. In a bid to win favour with the artist community, ReDigi this week said it would pay a cut of its transaction fee on any MP3 resale to the artist who featured in the resold track, providing said artist registers. Though quite how that will work, given a number of artists may work on any one track, isn’t clear. And it’s a move that will probably piss off the major labels even more, given they, not the artist, will likely be the copyright owner in most tracks. CMU report | Hypebot report

04: Hargreaves and Hooper said copyright needed to be “credible” in order to tackle piracy. Ian Hargreaves, who led the government’s copyright review last year, and Richard Hooper, who is looking into setting up a Digital Rights Exchange, spoke at a First Monday event, and said that while their initiatives didn’t tackle piracy head on, by making licensing simpler and by removing the “nonsense” rules of copyright (eg not being able to make private copies of CDs and not being able to post parodies of songs on YouTube), there would be more political and public support for anti-piracy measures. CMU report

05: Morrissey and the NME settled in their ongoing libel dispute. Which was a shame, because that would have been a great court case. The NME agreed to publish an apology, saying that it never intended to portray Morrissey as being racist in the 2007 interview that the former Smiths man sued over, and that it did not believe the singer was racist. The publisher said that it had not agreed to pay any damages or legal costs as part of the settlement, apart from one small set of legal fees it had been previously ordered to pay by the courts. CMU report | NME apology

And that is your lot people, until the CMU Weekly podcast goes live this weekend.

Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU



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