Mike Butcher

The online personalised music streaming service Pandora has signed a deal with US carrier Sprint to be pre-installed or downloaded to handsets. Pandora and other web broadcasters have been heavily hit by recent increases in the licensing fees for web broadcasters in the US. Pandora has also had to stop streaming outside the US. The new Sprint venture means a badly needed extra revenue stream on top of advertising. Pandora says it has 6.9 million registered listeners. Pandora founder Tim Westergren says if the new royalty scheme stays then the business no longer makes sense.

Update: TechCrunch has news that Pandora will release a mobile device powered by Zing.

Mobango, a site for publishing and sharing user-generated content for mobile phones claims it has experienced a 41% monthly growth in the amount of content being downloaded through its mobile portal across Europe, North America and Asia. This uptake has resulted, in part, from a 26% compounded monthly growth rate in the number of people using this function, says the firm.

It’s now obvious that in order to promote a band these days you have to play online. MySpace was a ‘go-to’ place for a long time, although it is fast losing its cache as record companies start to – ethically or unethically – virally seed their own acts, sometimes even using robots to add hundreds of friends to an artist’s site or just employing people specifically for this task. And while the likes of Lilly Allen and Sandi Thom have managed to shoe-horn their MySpace exposure into a real-world record contract, the likes of Imogen Heap has some 330,000 ‘friends’ signed up to her myspace – a fact which still didn’t get her into the charts.

Instead, some bands are starting to bypass the whole record industry infrastructure (MySpace included), with some evidence of success. Koopa, a punk band, recently made it into the UK top 20 charts based on their sales via IndieStore.com – which is now hooked-up to the official chart system.

Indiestore enables artists to build their own download store, earn cash from the sales of their tracks and secure a chart position in official charts in the UK, US and 20 other countries. In addition, artists can promote their gigs and stay in touch with their fans on their own indiestore. Bands receive 80 per cent of money from sales.

The UK-based Bandwagon, too, has the advantage that people can download a single from the site and it will be chart eligible.

Now Bandwagon has launched a Millionpoundjukebox.com. This plays a jukebox of a random track from Bandwagon bands, and displays pixels which you can buy to advertise on the page (via paypal).

So the deal is: over a 12 week period, 120 bands will be streamed through the jukebox; 10 tracks from different artists will be playlisted and streamed each week; an industry led A&R panel will chose 20 winners at the end of the period; each winner will receive £25,000 for development (music videos, publicity). (My favourite so far is Lucky Soul, but then I always like music which sounded like The Cardigans!)

You can get a feel for how these sites are doing from Alexaholic. There, you’ll see IndieStore has had the most traction so far. However, it’s worth reminding you that page traffic figures on e-commerce sites have never been that useful a measure.

Meanwhile, the opportunities to sell or push your own music online have never been bigger. Just check out Soundclick, CDbaby and Garageband to get a flavour. Soundclick, which offers free music, is the biggest of these obviously. Here’s a traffic comparison.

Apple’s iTunes music software is not fully compatible with Vista, Microsoft’s newest operating system, says the BBC. Like we couldn’t have guessed…

Global digital music sales almost doubled in 2006 to around $2 billion, or 10 percent of all sales, but have not reached the industry’s “holy grail” of offsetting the fall in CD sales, says the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Reuters reports that expected digital sales to account for a quarter of all sales worldwide by 2010.

It looks like Koopa – a punk trio which a mate of mine has been involved with – have now proved that real punk (the kind that really does screw the establishment) is not dead. From Reuters:

Koopa is the first unsigned band to land a top 40 single — “Blag, Steal & Borrow” — that is available only by downloading it on the Internet. The breakthrough followed changes to the chart this month that mean no physical version of a record is required for the track to qualify.

Reaction is coming in on the Myspace decision to sell non-DRM MP3s from unsigned bands registered on the site.

The Register: “We reckon it’s the record companies that should be more woried about MySpace than Apple at the moment, though. If so-called “MySpace phenomena” such as the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen continue to emerge through self-promotion and are given unprecedented direct selling access to their MySpace-addicted audience, where do the big guys fit in exactly?”

The New York Times: “… for the four major labels, which must approve each retailer that sells digital versions of their music, the new store could represent a challenge. The MySpace store would let labels set their own prices for songs, which they have complained that iTunes does not let them do. And all of the major labels have put their catalogs into Snocap’s database, which uses an audio fingerprinting technology to prevent people from selling songs they do not own. The MySpace store will sell music in the MP3 format, however, which allows them to be played on the Apple iPod but does not offer any copy protection… For each track it sells, MySpace will charge a band or label a fixed fee of around 45 cents, which it will share with Snocap.”

Business Week: “Unlike iTunes, where all tracks are 99 cents, musicians set their own prices. MySpace and Snocap say they will take a cut just large enough to cover the costs of the materials and provide a tiny profit; the lion’s share of the sale goes directly to the artists. That’s a sweet deal for independent bands like The Format, a Phoenix pop band that participated in a test of the storefront. The band has listed 12 songs for sale at 79 cents each. Already, lead singer Nate Ruess says he has received loads of e-mail from fans saying they appreciate that they can get the music directly online. “We got burned by our old label, and you realize you don’t need these things when you have something like Snocap,” Ruess says.”

Technorati Tags: Musicbites

MySpace is to sell songs from nearly 3 million unsigned bands, reports Reuters. Thats’non-DRM’d MP3s, by the way. The bands will be able to set the price for each track, with MySpace and tech partner Snocap taking a cut of the sale, reports Wired. However, the move probably won’t affect Apple, as CNN and MySpace itself seems to think. As tbites points out – guess what – MP3s can be loaded onto the the iPod and iTunes software. Apple will make far more out of the hardware sales. Kerching!

Technorati Tags: Musicbites

Spiral Frog will make us watch adverts before downloading the music track to one PC and two portable devices, while remembering to log in at least once a month, in order to retain access to the music we've already watched adverts in exchange for. MusicBites thinks this sounds a bit like all those dumb businesses during the late 90s which tried to play 15 second to 30 second adverts at callers in exchange for free or cheaper calls. Do ANY of those companies still exist? No. Will you really want to watch an ad EVERY TIME you want to download a track? No. I predict the sacking of a number of Universal executives and a relaunch in under a year.

Technorati Tags: Musicbites, Spiralfrog

The mbites.com podcast this week looked at how digital music is impacting both on music fans and the artists themselves. The guests (pictured) were Laura Lee Davies, former editor of Time Out magazine in London and a music journalist of 20 years experience, and Ben Drury, founder and managing director of 7digital.com, which provides digital downloading services to many leading brands and artists’ web sites.

Download the MP3 file here (approx 18MB, 20 minutes long) or subscribe to the podcast feed and download it automatically into your favourite podcasting software and/or mobile media player device (ok, iPod then), or even subscribe direct from iTunes.

This is the third in a series of regular mbites podcasts, hosted at London private members club, Adam Street.

If you’d like to be a guest on the next Bitecast, where we’ll be documenting some of the most interesting new developments in digital and mobile media, contact Mike Butcher.