Google Music expected to launch next week

Google Music expected to launch next month

Search giant understood to be close to unveiling its first music service in bid to rival Apple's iTunes

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• Dan Sabbagh
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 19 October 2011 18.30 BST
• Article history

Pink Floyd is just one of the groups that Google's partner EMI has the rights to. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

Google is understood to be a month away from unveiling its first music service, which will combine an MP3 download store with a cloud storage system set up to allow people to store songs remotely and play them back on multiple devices, according to sources in the music industry.

The search giant has signed up fourth music major EMI and is in serious negotiations with market leader Universal – who together account for a third of all music worldwide. Sony Music and Warner Music, the remaining two majors, are also in talks with Google, although as yet neither are understood to be close to signing up.

Andy Rubin, the head of development for Google subsidiary Android, told a conference in Hong Kong that "I think we're close" to launching Google Music, and added that the service would have "a little twist – it will have a little Google in it. We won't just be selling 99-cent tracks."

He offered no timing for the launch, but sources in the industry indicated they believed Google Music would emerge in November. Universal acts range from Lady Gaga to U2, with the smaller EMI holding the rights to The Beatles and Pink Floyd.

The cloud storage service roughly mirrors Apple's iTunes Match, in that it will scan a computer hard drive for all the music stored on it – whether paid for or pirated – and will make those songs available to be listened to legally from the remote services. Music executives are enthusiastic about the idea because it gives consumers an amnesty for all previous illegal copies or downloads.

However, some of the music majors are keen that Google charges for its matching service, amid concerns that they do not want to see the search engine dramatically undercut its competitor. Apple charges consumers $25 a year cash – the service is only available in beta in the US – which in turn largely goes to the record companies as royalty payments, as a partial indemnity for years of piracy.

Google is aiming to sign up worldwide agreements with the music majors, although music executives believe that the company is most likely to offer Google Music in the US before expanding the offering to other countries, including the UK.

HARDtalk: The Music Industry - Artists vs. Labels

Universal and Sony Music plan 'instant pop' to beat piracy

• New singles to go 'on air, on sale' simultaneously
• Record labels target X Factor generation

• Dan Sabbagh
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 16 January 2011 18.46 GMT
• Article history

Jessie J’s Do it Like a Dude went on sale as it was launched on radio last month. Others are following suit. Photograph: Purple PR/PA

Ten years after piracy first began to ravage the music industry, Britain's two biggest record labels will finally try to play their part in stopping it, by making new singles available for sale on the day they first hit the airwaves.

Universal and Sony Music – home to Take That and Matt Cardle, respectively – hope the effort will encourage the impatient X Factor generation to buy songs they can listen to immediately rather than copying from radio broadcasts online.

David Joseph, the chief executive of Universal Music, said: "Wait is not a word in the vocabulary of the current generation. It's out of date to think that you can build up demand for a song by playing it for several weeks on radio in advance."

Songs used to receive up to six weeks radio airplay before they were released for sale – a practice known as "setting up" a record. But the success of selling the winner's single immediately after the X Factor final has made record bosses think again.

"What we were finding under the old system was the searches for songs on Google or iTunes were peaking two weeks before they actually became available to buy, meaning that the public was bored of – or had already pirated – new singles," Joseph added.

Sony, which will start the "on air, on sale" policy simultaneously with Universal next month, agreed that the old approach was no longer relevant in an age where, according to a spokesman for the music major, "people want instant gratification".

Cardle, who signed to Sony via an agreement with Simon Cowell, sold 439,000 copies of When we Collide when it made the Christmas number one, the track having gone on sale just as the X Factor final ended on television.

Industry insiders believe instant sales will make it easier for records to climb the charts as excitement about a new song builds, developing a trend first seen when download sales joined the mainstream.

In the past, heavy pre-release marketing had tended to mean a new single crash-landed at its peak position on its first week of release – making the top 40 a dull narrative of short-lived new entries leavened by falling songs and fading glamour.

Jessie J's Do it Like a Dude went on sale and on radio at the beginning of December, and the 22-year-old's R&B single climbed steadily to reach number 5 last week. As more singles follow suit, the charts will briefly become uneven as songs adopting the old and the new marketing policies mix.

Piracy remains a crippling problem for the British music business, where the overall market fell by nearly 6% in 2010 and album sales slumped 7%, despite the success surrounding Robbie Williams's rejoining Take That and Simon Cowell's television-fuelled hits factory.

Although pirating songs from the radio is as old as tape recorders, the record companies believe the move will show ministers that they are playing their part in fighting copyright theft.

Universal and Sony have both notified Ed Vaizey, the minister for culture and the creative industries, of their plans.

Sales of digital albums soar year on year 7/11/2011

Sales of digital albums soar year on year

Digital album sales in 2011 hit 21m, beating last year's total even before the traditional Christmas boom

• 
  

• Josh Halliday
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 November 2011 11.37 GMT
• Article history

Coldplay’s new release, Mylo Xyloto, broke the record for first week digital album sales last month, with more than 80,000 downloads. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

Sales of digital albums for the year to date in the UK topped 21m copies in October, beating last year's total even before the traditional Christmas boom.

Digital downloads now account for more than a quarter of total album sales, up from 17.5% in 2010, as Britons' appetite for online music continues to defy a fall in overall music sales.

Coldplay's new release, Mylo Xyloto, broke the record for first week digital album sales last month, with more than 80,000 downloads, according to the Official Charts Company.

Digital sales of Mylo Xyloto, which accounted for 40% of total purchases last month, may have been boosted by Coldplay's decision to withhold the album from popular streaming services Spotify and Deezer.

Figures released by the Official Charts Company in October for the three months to the end of September showed that digital album sales were up 24.2% on the same period the previous year to 6.1m. However, the total market was down 11.4% year on year to 21.8m units sold.

Adele's hit 21, released in January, remains by some way the biggest-selling digital album of all time, selling almost 670,000 online copies to date – almost twice as many digital sales as Lady Gaga's The Fame in second place.

Geoff Taylor, the chief executive of UK music industry body the BPI, said weekly digital album sales could top 1m for the first time in the final seven days of 2011 with new releases due from Rihanna, Susan Boyle and last year's The X Factor finalists One Direction.

"It's encouraging to see such strong sales in the digital albums market before the Christmas gifting season gets properly under way," he said.

"For the last five consecutive years, the final week of the year has been the biggest in terms of digital album sales, as consumers spend digital music gift vouchers received at Christmas and try out legal digital music services on their new iPods, tablets and laptops.

"In the last week of 2010 digital album sales topped a record 800,000. This year we may see the 1m weekly sales barrier broken for the first time, despite the adverse impact of illegal sites and tough economic conditions."

The BPI is leading calls for the UK's largest internet provider, BT, to clamp down on illicit downloaders by blocking The Pirate Bay, one of the world's largest filesharing portals.

EMI: the sad demise of a very British company - 11/11/11

EMI: the sad demise of a very British company

For three decades, EMI took on the world in record sales. Now its sale to Sony and Universal marks the end for the music major

Emeli Sandé … the singer signed a publishing deal with EMI in 2010

EMI has been put through the wringer more than any other music company in the past few years so news of its sale today – in two parts to two different music companies – finally ends all the speculation and uncertainty about its future. Inevitably, as with every sale or merger, jobs will be lost; but the EMI brand, after having been owned by private equity company Terra Firma since November 2007 and then finding itself under the begrudging custodianship of Citigroup bank since February, will live on in its new homes, among music executives again.

Even as the final details of the sale were being hammered out, it was business as usual for the company. On Thursday night it took over its
iconic Abbey Road studios in London to showcase its brightest prospects for next year: new talent like Emeli Sandé, as well as Kylie Minogue, the
singer whose career rehabilitation in 2000 coincided with her signing to
EMI imprint Parlophone and from whom a new album is now anticipated.

Assuming it all clears the European Commission, US antitrust bodies and the aggressive lobbying of the independent sector, EMI's record music arm could now be folded into Universal Music (giving that company a global market share of over 40%) while EMI Music Publishing is absorbed by Sony/ATV to create a new publishing powerhouse.

The journey to this point has been a rocky one that saw EMI cut its staff, previously occupying three huge offices across London, so they could squeeze into one building as the company's global significance waned. For better or for worse, Terra Firma was there for the long haul and wanted to revive EMI as a company and as a brand – with no less an ambition than to reinvent it as the first truly 21st-century music company. Citigroup just wanted shot of it to the quickest and highest bidder, with no real care for the legacy EMI – with one of the truly great music catalogues in the world – represents.

This all marks the sad, almost apologetic, demise of a standalone EMI – a very British music company that took on the world and, for a time at least from the 60s to the 90s, was winning. The traditional music business has had a difficult time post-Napster in 1999, unable to move quickly enough and adapt to a new rhythm punched out by the internet and digital technologies. Universal bulked up (notably by swallowing indie giant Sanctuary), Sony and BMG merged in 2004 and Warner Music most aggressively pursued the contentious "360-degree" route (where all acts now signed must give over a share of their non-recorded income).

For EMI, its publishing business was in rude health – it was the biggest music publisher in the world until the merger of BMG Music Publishing with Universal Music Publishing in 2007. The recorded side was the real concern, having only broken a few acts globally this millennium (notably Coldplay and Katy Perry). Even the brightest stars of its catalogue business were jumping ship (the Stones, McCartney and Queen have all - presciently - defected to Universal in recent years and even David Bowie was rumoured to be shopping around for a new home).

It was with some chutzpah that Guy Hands, on buying EMI, described it as the "worst company in the worst performing industry" – but he said he was going to save it, mostly from itself. The EMI old guard walked the plank and Terra Firma tried to rebuild from within. A schizophrenia at the executive level meant management from non-music companies (such as Reckitt Benckiser, Google, Northern Foods – never mind former BBC DG John Birt) was constantly changing, and new ideas were tested and then quickly scrapped; all the while, no one was quite sure where the company was trying to get to or how it was going to get there and so EMI's woes grew.

It was only, ironically mere months before Guy Hands lost his grip, that a solid recovery plan was finally put in place with the June 2010 appointment of Roger Faxon, then running its publishing arm, to take charge of the entire company. His plan would, he said, take three years to come to fruition. But the fact it is now being carved up into two portions actually unpicks a lot of what initially Terra Firma and latterly Faxon were trying to do in terms of reinventing EMI as a "full rights" company, ensuring its recorded and publishing arms worked in unison. Faxon himself had said post-Terra Firma that a splitting of the company was the worst possible outcome. His nightmare is about to come true. As no single music company could have bought EMI Records and EMI Publishing outright, so the chainsaw was applied. The cut will not be a clean one.

There is an argument that EMI would have gone out of business if Terra Firma had not bought it. The irony here was that most of its debts were absorbed by Guy Hands's misreading of the market, making it more appealing to other buyers such as Universal and Sony/ATV. Until recently, Warner Music (itself no stranger to new owners) seemed the likely home and might well have been the best fit for the market overall. They'd tried to merge in the past but had been blocked due to regulatory issues. Now the climate has moved on so much that the biggest major can look to buy the smallest – a situation that was unthinkable even a few years ago.

Presented with the hypothetical situation of EMI merging with Warner, one leading independent label executive told me recently that having three record company super-powers - each with a relatively equal market share was - preferable to a duopoly of Sony and Universal. Now, for the indies at least, something much worse has happened: one company controls just under half the market. The lobbying against this happening will be ferocious so this is all far from a certainty.

If, however, the deals go through, it will mark a bittersweet ending to a chapter in the history of the music industry. The EMI legacy – of enviable diversity and leftfield signings that went multi-platinum – looks like it will live on as a brand, but doing so within much bigger multinational concerns and as just another part of their steady march towards consolidation.

EMI IS GOING! 13/11/2011

Farewell then EMI, your tunes were the background to our lives

The company that brought us Cliff, the Beatles and the Sex Pistols is disappearing. We should salute its contribution to our culture

• 
• • Simon Napier-Bell
  • The Observer, Sunday 13 November 2011
  • Article history

In the 1930s, after a merger with Columbia UK, EMI became the biggest record company in the world. By the 1950s, its worldwide sales outdid everyone else's. Yet its artists were uniquely British: Cliff Richard singing the likes of Living Doll and Summer Holiday; balladeer Matt Monro, an ex-London bus driver; and Frank Ifield, who yodelled.

Amazingly, with these artists EMI built world dominance. Only in America were sales lacking. So the company bought Capitol Records and picked up Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and the Beach Boys. And this was allbefore the Beatles. With the Beatles added, the competition was annihilated. In 1964 the company held the No 1 position in the UK charts for 41 of 52 weeks.

The company's decline started in the 1970s when it signed the Sex Pistols. Their manager, Malcom MacLaren, was an anarchist on a mission; not so EMI's holding company, Thorn Electrical, which made brain scanners and came with a very pukka board of directors. In fact, a whole decade of EMI inaction could be traced to the moment when the Pistols' Johnny Rotten arrived at Heathrow the worse for wear. His ensuing public vomiting got into every newspaper. "Vile Sex Pistols", "Disgusting Punks", "Teenage Filthies". To add to the fun, a week later the group said naughty words on television.

When Thorn Electrical said the group had to go, MacLaren turned it into class warfare. The ensuing row froze EMI's record division for a decade. Demoralised. Not signing new acts, losing staff, re-packaging old songs, living in the past. In the '80s the company perked up with its Now…compilation albums of hits. Then again in the '90s with the Spice Girls, Coldplay, and Robbie Williams.

But in 1996 Thorn Electrical set EMI adrift. It was put on the stock market as a music company and nothing else. When it had hits, shares went up; when it didn't, they tumbled. And the boardroom panicked. The top man was paid £15m to leave. A few months later his replacement was given £6m to go. The next man decided to run the company from America. And all the time the company's value dropped.

In 2007, Guy Hands's private equity outfit Terra Firma pulled off a takeover. Bouffant and blond, Mr Hands thought the world of himself and his hair. But he didn't much like artists. When he told them so, Radiohead left, then Paul McCartney, then the Rolling Stones. And things slid downhill. Citigroup, who loaned Hands the purchase price, took over the company and now – finally – it's been sold to the French-owned Universal.

With EMI no longer a power in the industry, it feels as if there's a void. But culturally, Britain doesn't lose much. We still provide the world with singers as quirkily British as Adele and Susan Boyle, and with the likes of Radiohead, Coldplay and Gorillaz.

EMI was the first company to sell flat discs, records as we know them. The company's history and the history of the record business have been interlinked ever since. So with sales dying fast and records about to fade from our lives, perhaps it's fitting that EMI fades out too. Records are what the company did but records are finished. And a nice place in history isn't a bad place to be.

BBC Article - 4/8/2010

UK music industry 'bucked downward trend'

Take That had a lucrative live tour during 2009

Continue reading the main story

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The UK music industry grew by 5% in 2009 thanks to an upturn in revenue from concerts, according to a report.

Live music events raked in an estimated £1.5bn last year - an increase of more than 9% on 2008 - the Performing Rights Society (PRS) for Music said.

UK Music sales "stabilised" against a global slide in CD revenues, it added, outperforming DVDs and computer games.

"2009 was simply not a bad year," the report said, given the poor state of the global economy.

It acknowledged that huge record sales by Susan Boyle and Michael Jackson may have bucked the downward trend, along with major live events including Take That's Circus tour.

PRS for Music's findings also revealed that live music revenues continue to be concentrated in London, but the city's share is diminishing.

The UK continued to be one of only three countries in the world whose music exports financially outweigh imported music, the others being the US and Sweden, it added.

Meanwhile, British live music overseas generated an extra £4m during 2009 to make a total of £18m.

Earlier this year, the British Phonographic Institute (BPI) reported that the music industry had registered its first growth in sales for six years.

Guardian Article - 4/8/2011

UK music industry revenue falls £189m

Digital revenue continues to grow as CD sales fall and digital piracy hits UK music industry takings

• Mark Sweney
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 August 2011 10.20 BST
• Article history

Kings of Leon was one of the acts that opted to play smaller venues on their UK tour to limit risk. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features

Plummeting CD sales, the ongoing toll of digital piracy and a lack of big name acts on tour fuelled a £189m drop in UK music revenues last year.

The music industry saw revenues decline 4.8% to £3.8bn in 2010 as the post-party hangover kicked in following a bumper 2009 driven by Susan Boyle's record-breaking debut and big-selling albums from Lady Gaga and Michael Jackson.

As consumers tightened their purse strings amid fears over the state of the economy, nervous band managers decided against launching tours for their big name acts in case they failed to fill venues.

After a decade of growth, live music revenues declined 6.8% to £1.48bn last year.

"A number of stadium- and arena-filling bands were not on tour and many of those that did tour opted to play smaller venues to limit their risk (Kings of Leon and Rod Stewart)," said the UK's music royalties body, PRS for Music, in its Adding Up The UK Music Industry report for 2010.

The extent of the decline in acts touring the biggest venues was evident in a 70% fall in revenues from stadium gigs. Revenues from acts playing at arena-sized venues also suffered with revenues down about 14% year on year.

A bounceback in income from live gigs is expected this year as big acts such as Rihanna, Westlife, Justin Bieber and Take That all launch major tours.

The British love of festivals continued unabated with a 20% rise in revenues from ticket sales, thanks to existing festivals such as Latitude increasing in size and the launch of a number of new events.

Sales of CDs fell by 7.9% to £1.24bn as music piracy and the ongoing cultural shift to listening to music via digital services such as Spotify and Pandora continue to take their toll.

Half of the top 10 selling albums in 2010 were either releases from 2009 – such as Lady Gaga and Michael Bublé – or compilations such as Now That's What I call Music 76.

In addition research on breakthrough acts - deemed those who pass 100,000 album sales for the first time – hit a new low in 2010, with just 17 passing the mark. In recent years the average has been about 25 a year.

Jumping forward to this year the massive success of Adele, the 23-year-old behind the multimillion selling 21, has seen her album account for 10% of all sales in the first four months of the year.

"The success of Adele is as welcome as it is worrying," said the report. "While her feats at home and abroad are worth celebrating, what's worrying is the performance of the rest of the market".

Despite increased growth in revenue from digital services in the UK, up almost 20% year on year to £316.5m, the report said the promise of legal streaming and download services appears to have been overstated.

"While steep falls in physical revenues continued apace in 2010, there were clear signs that growth in digital revenues slowed across the main international recorded music industry markets," said the report, with global digital revenue growth halving year on year to just 5.3%.

"Put more bluntly, global digital revenues are not going to be the '$30bn baby' people talked about five years ago. Indeed they may stabilise at a around $5bn."

Trade bodies representing the UK music industry – as well as counterparts in the film and TV sectors – were disappointed after the government announced on Wednesday that the it has scrapped plans to introduce legislation to force internet companies to block websites accused of illegal filesharing.

A brighter note was provided by business-to-business revenues –which include royalty collections from businesses that play music, the licensing of music services such as Spotify, advertising and sponsorship – which rose 2.6% to £1.06bn.

"It comes as no surprise that the overall numbers are down 5% as consumers are feeling their wallets tighten," said Will Page, chief economist for PRS for Music.

"However, the licensing revenue streams which lie outside of the conventional radar are not only displaying impressive growth but illustrating the pace of diversification now taking place in the UK music industry."

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