Business News Week In Five

The music business week in five – 30 Sep 2011

By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 30 September 2011

So, hello there, and how are you? Time to review the music business week once again. Actually, it’s not been an especially eventful week, has it? I think as the late summer heatwave kicked in, everyone was too occupied with the sunshine to be eventful. Or perhaps they were all distracted by the Conrad Murray trial. Or perhaps with the tech industry a flurry post Facebook’s big announcement last week, and with Amazon’s move into the tablet market, the music business decided it would be polite to keep quiet. Anyway, some stuff did happen, including this lot…

01: Citigroup set a deadline for EMI bids, or at least that’s what insiders were saying. The US bank has asked those bidders still in the running – believed to include all the usual suspects – to put in their final offers by next Wednesday. We assume the bankers are getting ever keen to have this deal done asap. It’s thought that bids for both the company outright and for its constituent parts are still being considered, so the future of EMI is still very much in the balance. CMU report | LA Times report

02: Spotify responded to the backlash over its Facebook tie up. After a few hours of glory as the only content partner Facebook’s chief geek Mark Zuckerberg got up on stage while announcing his company’s latest innovations last week, there was some pretty vocal criticism of Spotify online this week. Many took a dim view of the streaming service’s decision to force new users to sign up via their Facebook accounts, and of the way existing users may inadvertently sign up to the streaming service’s new Facebook integration, which shares lots more user information with the social network and the wider world. Team Spot stood by their decision to force new users to login via Facebook, but announced a new easy-to-use private listening option in the player, that, if activated, will ensure information about what music a user plays is not be passed onto the social network. On the up side, and despite all this online rage, new subscriptions for Spotify were rolling in big time. CMU report | FT report

03: We7 relaunched. The UK-based digital music company, which pushed its Pandora-style interactive radio service to the front last year, will now only offer that service to its freemium users. The We7 website was overhauled to accommodate the change. We7 says that, while interactive radio is cheaper to run than their previous fully on-demand music player, it has actually gone that route because it is the service that has proven most popular with its users. CMU report | Telegraph report

04: Absolute Radio’s owner confirmed ity would not sell. Current owner TIML indicated it might sell the national rock station earlier this year, and both rivals UTV and the station’s former owners Virgin were said to be interested. But it seems neither party were willing to pay the asking price. To that end TIML said this week that it has completed a business review and now intended to keep hold of the Absolute business for the foreseeable future. CMU report | Guardian report

05: Lady Gaga took legal action over domains and trademarks. The former, a bid to take ownership of the ladygaga.org domain, currently run as a fansite, failed this week, because the singer’s reps failed to show the current owner was acting in bad faith. The latter, a lawsuit against Excite Worldwide, which is trying to register the US trademark for Lady Gaga in the make-up space, started this week. The singer said Excite was trying to trade off her good reputation, and was interfering with her own moves to register a number of Gaga trademarks. CMU report | BBC report

And that’s your lot. Except, of course, there’ll be more discussion of the week’s big music stories on the CMU Weekly podcast, available at 4pm today from www.completemusicupdate.com/podcast

Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU