Business News Week In Five

The music business week in five – Friday 1 Oct 2010

By | Published on Friday 1 October 2010

How it got to be October so soon is anyone’s guess. And how it got to be Friday so soon is a bit of a mystery, too. But there you have it.

In The City is now getting very close, and don’t forget Team CMU will be out in force there this year running workshops as part of the educational Hive programme, and chairing, participating in and reporting on the main panels. The ITC crew also announced their film and unsigned line up this week, so it’s definitely worth checking out www.inthecity.co.uk for the lowdown. Meanwhile, here are the five big stories from the music biz this week:

01: ACS:Law leaked a load of personal data from its file-sharer files. The London legal firm accidentally leaked the private details of thousands of alleged file-sharers, and in many cases the porn content they were accused of sharing, after their servers were attacked by pro-file-sharing groups. The UK’s top data protection chief said the lawyers could be fined up to half a million for the breach. Although ACS doesn’t represent any major music firms, its competitor Gallant MacMillan is likely to be more closely scrutinised as it asks the courts next week to force PlusNet to hand over the identities of people accused of illegally sharing music owned by the Ministry Of Sound record label. CMU reports | A great Ars Technica exposé on ACS

02: Barry Diller announced he was stepping down as Live Nation Chairman. There have been rumours of tensions between Diller and the two top execs at the flagging live music conglom, Irving Azoff and Michael Rapino. Though both Diller and Azoff insist the Chairman always intended to step down once the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster was fully completed. Diller will stay on until a replacement is found. CMU reports | Telegraph report

03: Everyone was talking about Mulve, a new very illegal all-you-can-eat MP3 download service. Really Mulve was the talk of the town late last week, though chatter continued on Monday. People who download the Mulve app can access millions of free MP3s hosted on servers based in a secret location, probably in Russia. Because it’s not a P2P network, use of Mulve would not be picked up by many of the record industry’s piracy monitoring systems. Lawsuits will presumably follow. CMU report

04: VEVO said it was doing very well and might launch a TV channel. According to boss man Rio Caraeff, speaking at a TechCrunch conference, the Universal and Sony owned music video service is making millions in ad revenues, though is yet to go into profit. Negotiations are underway to take VEVO to certain on-demand TV platforms, with some talk – possibly not so serious – about eventually launching an MTV-style VEVO telly channel. CMU reports | New York Post report

05: The BBC’s pop boss said a mainstream music TV show was being considered. Andy Parfitt was talking to the Broadcasting Press Guild and said that, while a revival of ‘Top Of The Pops’ was out of the question, he recognised there perhaps should be a big prime time music show on BBC television, and said his colleague Jan Younghusband was giving that proposal some consideration. However, he said the suggestion BBC TV had now completely shunned music programming was “complete rot” pleading the ‘Later With Jools Holland’ defence. CMU report | Guardian report

And that’s your lot people. Enjoy that weekend thing now won’t you, and join us next week as we mark the 70th birthday of that all important Merseyside-born icon whose impact on the British musical landscape can never be overestimated. Yes, my Mum. Happy Birthday for Monday Mrs Margaret Cooke.

Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU



READ MORE ABOUT: