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Business News Week In Five
The music business week in five – 4 Nov 2011
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 4 November 2011
Hello there! How you doing? Coming up, the five biggest music business news stories of the week, but before that will you let me do two quick plugs? First up, voting has opened for this year’s Record Of The Day Awards, and you should all go and vote now and then tell any students you know to put themselves forward for the CMU supported student categories.
Second up, we still have a couple of a places left on next week’s CMU Training course, which is my particular favourite, Music Rights Inside & Out. Alas we won’t get to talk about Justin Bieber’s (alleged) backstage groupie action, but we can discuss why he won’t being going to jail for uploading covers of other people’s songs to YouTube, even if a new bit of American copyright law making unlicensed streaming a criminal offence goes through (and despite what those who oppose the new law say). We’ll also cover everything you need to know about music rights, how they exist, how they work, how they make money and, most crucially, how the music rights industry is changing. Book your places here.
Now, back to the Week In Five…
01: There was no progress on the EMI sale. Except that last weekend it emerged that Warner had pulled out of the bidding for the EMI record companies, following Universal’s lead a few days earlier, leaving no one actively bidding for the labels. Though it’s assumed both Warner and Universal will return to the table if Citigroup budges on price. Talks are ongoing with BMG and Sony/ATV re EMI Music Publishing, but no actual announcements were made this week. CMU report | Bloomberg report
02: The digital royalties case against Universal was allowed to proceed. Rob Zombie and the Rick James estate have launched a class action against the major arguing that it should treat download revenues as licensing income and not record sales – on many pre-web record contracts that would mean paying the artist a bigger cut of the money. Previous legal attempts by heritage artists to get a bigger share of digital royalties have failed, but then Eminem producers FBT Productions won when they sued on this issue, directly resulting in the Zombie/James litigation. Universal objected to the case being given class action status, but a judge knocked back that objection this week. CMU report | Billboard report
03: There was an interesting extra ruling in the EMI v MP3tunes case. MP3tunes.com is a digital locker service sued by EMI, which also provides a platform allowing users to share links to music, a lot of which is unlicensed. MP3tunes successfully argued in court that that service did not constitute contributory copyright infringement because they operate a takedown system under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. EMI went back to the judge to ask about pre-1972 recordings, which are covered by state copyright laws, not federal law. Did DMCA protection apply there to? Yes, said the judge this week. Which is a bugger for Universal, which is using the same argument to try and render Grooveshark’s use of the DMCA protection defence redundant. CMU report | Techdirt report
04: EMI announced an interesting new service for app makers. A partnership with The Echo Nest, EMI will make available content from both new and catalogue artists to play with in app development. The major will also consider proposals for music-based apps and, if it likes them, will look after licensing and marketing and split revenue. CMU report | Wired report
05: The Radio Festival took place in Salford, bringing together the great and the good of British radio. BBC boss Mark Thompson talked a lot about how the Beeb and commercial radio could collaborate, Global Radio boss Ashley Tabor then criticised the BBC for “dragging its feet” over DAB digital radio expansion, Bauer Media’s Dee Ford said her company would gladly have run 6music had they been given the option when the BBC service faced closure, and Andrew Harrison of commercial radio trade body RadioCentre said the Corporation should let commercial operators run its local stations. Elsewhere EMI’s Andria Vidler called on radio stations to collaborate with record companies more on nurturing new talent – beyond just saying “we’ll playlist their songs” – and Pete Townsend said a lot of nonsense about iTunes. CMU report | Guardian reports
And that’s your lot, till the CMU podcast this afternoon where we will be discussing Bieber’s backstage shagging that probably didn’t happen.
Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU
