Music

Joseph Menn Apple might offer a `Cocktail’ of new iPods and music

September 8, 2009 4:45 pm by Joseph Menn

UPDATE: follow it live. Chris Nuttall will be providing live coverage from San Francisco of Wednesday’s Apple event, starting at 10am local time. Follow it here.

Apple is holding a music-themed press event tomorrow, where it is expected to unveil a package of  goodies that will start being attached to sales of full digital albums.

The product, code-named Cocktail by the record labels, will include interactive lyric sheets, photos and other virtual extras aimed at replicating and improving on the old experience of opening a vinyl record sleeve or CD boxed set filled with trinkets. Read more

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Posted in Consumer Electronics, Digital media, Hardware, Internet, Mobile, Software, Tech, Tech Finance, Techfile, Telecoms |

Tim Bradshaw Last.fm loses its founders

June 10, 2009 8:16 pm by Tim Bradshaw

“It’s a bummer.”

That’s how Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, described the departure of Last.fm’s three founders, Martin Stiksel, Felix Miller and Richard Jones.

CBS paid $280m in 2007 for Last.fm, an online music service and community now used by over 37m people a month. It remains one of the UK’s biggest buyouts in the web 2.0 era and Last.fm is still a fixture of London’s Silicon Roundabout.

Yet Mr Smith was magnanimous as three darlings of the web scene left CBS Interactive, which as a whole generated revenues of over $600m last year. Read more

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Posted in Digital media, Europe, Hardware |

Maija Palmer YouTube in German music payments row

April 2, 2009 7:38 pm by Maija Palmer

YouTube logoGoogle has waded into another row over music royalty rights in Europe, this time in Germany. Again, it has shut off premium music videos on the YouTube service as it negotiates with the local rights agency, Gema, over how much it has to pay for each video. It did the same thing in the UK two weeks ago.

Like any payment dispute, this is grubby. The rights agencies want more money for their musicians and songwriters. Google wants to pay less – preferably a flat fee – and argues that YouTube doesn’t make enough money to pay any more. Read more

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Posted in Digital media, Europe, Internet |

All-you-can-eat iTunes

March 19, 2008 5:11 pm

ipod_classic_fam.jpgNews that Apple is in talks with record labels about a possible ‘all-you-can-eat’ model for iTunes is making the rounds on the blogs this morning following last night’s story in the FT.

Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld asks whether music companies would be willing to go along with a subscription model. We think the answer is clearly yes. Read more

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Posted in Digital media, Hardware, Internet |
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