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Business News Week In Five
The music business week in five – 3 Feb 2012
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 3 February 2012
So, it’s February already. I’m still not sure how that happened. It all means May is getting closer, and this year’s Great Escape is all starting to fall into place, which is rather exciting. We’ve already announced a well sized handful of radio themed sessions on the convention side, including John Kennedy in conversation with Jon Hillcock, timed to coincide with Xfm’s 20 years on the air. There’s much more still to come, but in the meantime this week the first batch of festival announcements landed, and do check out our little playlist featuring ten of the acts set to play. And then go buy your delegates passes for May, it would be great to see you all there. But back to business, let’s review the week in five.
01: The Pirate Bay founders were refused a Supreme Court hearing. Two founders and a key funder of the rogue file-sharing site were hoping to appeal for a second time their convictions for copyright crimes, handed down by the Swedish courts in 2009 and upheld on first appeal in 2010. But this week Sweden’s Supreme Court said it wouldn’t hear the case, meaning the prison sentences and damages ordered in the earlier hearings stand. It remains to be seen if the jail terms are now enforced, and also whether the final ruling in the Swedish Pirate Bay case – the most prominent of all the legal actions against TPB – has any impact on the operations of the file-sharing search service, which continues to operate despite numerous court rulings against it around the world. CMU report | Inquirer report
02: No one was certain what would happen to the legit Mega data. When the US authorities took the MegaUpload file-storage and transfer service offline last month on the grounds it was primarily used for copyright infringement, they also cut off the platform to legitimate customers, who used the Mega service to store or share their own content files. While it’s not clear exactly how many people were affected in this way, concern grew this week that said data might be deleted, now Mega cannot afford to pay the two server firms which hosted its online operations, its bank accounts being frozen. Mega’s lawyer said he’d negotiated a two week reprieve from the server firms, and one of them then stated it had no intent to delete the files at all in the short term. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is now looking into ways to reconnect legit Mega users with their data (and may as yet go legal on the matter), the US authorities having seemingly washed their hands of the problem, and the content industries who lobbied for action to be taken against the Mega companies being very quiet about the issue. CMU reports | Ars Technica reports
03: Paul McGuinness and Edgar Bronfman Jr hit out at Google. U2 manager McGuinness, speaking at MIDEM, was critical of Google for backing Wikipedia’s protest against new anti-piracy rules in the US, and for not doing enough to stop illegal sources of music appearing in search results, noting “it amazes me that Google has not done the right thing”. Outgoing Warner Music chief Edgar Bronfman Jr was speaking at a conference in California, and said Google still couldn’t decide whether or not it wanted to be a content platform, and that affected its dealings with content creators. Though both McGuinness and Bronfman said the industry should continue to try and persuade Google chiefs of the commercial value to their own business of playing ball on copyright issues. McGuinness report | Bronfman report
04: Outgoing Warner chief said the company would oppose the EMI sale. He spoke out about Universal’s plans to buy the EMI record companies at the same Californian conference. Bronfman’s Warner, of course, was outbid for the EMI labels by Universal Music. He confirmed Warner would now oppose Universal’s takeover in both the US and Europe, where competition regulators must approve the sale. The outgoing Chairman, who will still have a seat on the Warner board, mused on Universal’s EMI bid: “I think it’s dangerous, I think it’s problematic and I think it’s got to be stopped. It does strike me as hubris, particularly for Universal to think it’s going to be easy to buy EMI, and frankly to think they can buy EMI at all”. CMU report | Billboard analysis
05: Facebook announced IPO. Not strictly a music business development, but very interesting all the same, the social networking giant is looking to raise $5 billion by selling a portion of the company via one of the New York stock exchanges. Papers filed with America’s SEC confirming the IPO plans revealed Facebook made a billion dollars in profits last year. Elsewhere in social networking, one time Facebook rival Bebo went offline, leading to speculation the once buzzy social media platform had finally gone out of business, but it turned out to be technical problems, or, in the words of a Bebo spokesman, a “technical clusterfuck”. CMU report | Telegraph report
And that’s your lot, until CMU Podcast time – sign up so that lands in your iTunes later, ready for some audio fun.
Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU
