I don't care who you are, you play by the Reddit rules

Over at Hypebot, there's an amusing post about how Dave Grohl's announcement that he was going to do an Ask me Anything got slapped down for violating Reddit rules.

Grohl's just lucky he didn't screw up on Outpost Gallifrey. There'd be no coming back from that.

See You,Tube: Apple dump YouTube from iOS

Thoughtful bit over on Hypebot about Apple's decision to not renew its deal with YouTube to have a baked-in app on iPhones and iPads the moment you've finished making the unboxing video.

There's a slightly cloudy view about if this means people will start to create ad hoc HTML5 apps using Safari bookmarks (at a guess: nope) but this is the key bit:

When I shot this concert footage of my brother’s band, my iPhone encouraged me to upload that video to YouTube, as it still does today. In iOS 6, Apple’s default video destination of uploads will be Vimeo instead, as Mashable points out.

Have you been to a concert lately? There are a lot of iPhones there, many of them shooting audio and video footage. It won’t happen overnight, but gradually, Vimeo will replace YouTube as the place to see concert videos uploaded from iPhones.

It might not tip the balance in Vimeo's favour, but it's certainly going to strengthen Vimeo's position. You do wonder, though, if IAC has thought through what becoming the default location for all that iOS video might mean for its systems.

Facebook hopes music will stop the inevitable decline being inevitable

Mark Mulligan has done a guest blog for Hypebot:

How Zuckerberg Is Using Music To Keep Facebook From 'Doing a MySpace'

Hmm. MySpace used music in a bid to stop MySpace doing a Friendster, but Zuckerberg is being a bit smarter:

Zuckerberg’s music strategy is simple:

Make Facebook an integral part of the music experience without ever getting bogged down in paying to license the music from record labels.

And, more importantly, without having the panoply of hosting to bother about.

Still, if this does fail, he could always put the site in a sack and try to flog it to an old media company.

How big is an average music library?

Have you ever got music library envy, and felt that your stack of digital music files might be on the light side?

Tidysongs reckons it's 7,160 tracks.

A note of caution here: that's based on people who've invited their software to clean up said libraries. And people who only have a few tracks in their collection are less likely to bother paying for a service to tidy up - partly because they can still do it by hand, if they wish; partly because if you don't have that much music on your PC, you're clearly not that fussed about music.

Still, it's an interesting statistic, in a pub-quiz-tiebreaker sort of fashion. Hypebot reports some further numbers:

* The average number of songs missing album artwork is 4,230
* The average number of songs missing the name of the artist is 490.
* The average number of songs missing track or year information is 1,984.
* The average number of duplicate songs is 814.

They suggest that 'dirty' songs must indicate some sort of wrongdoing:

Why would you have dirty songs?

Either you ripped a bunch of songs off random CD-Rs or are using LimeWire Pirate Edition, among other things, because iTunes and Amazon downloads come complete with artwork and don't have any misspellings in the titles.

Perhaps. Or, perhaps, you've ripped them from CDs you paid money for. Or downloaded them from a legitimate source that didn't have artwork, or correct tagging. Again, things that you might expect people with larger collections to be doing.

Major label holds out the begging bowl

One of those moments where the majors behave so terribly, you could almost admire them: Warners' Atlantic imprint is trying to get fans to fund Natty's new album. Hypebot reports:

To encourage fans to invest, Natty's offerings offerings include £8 for the EP, introducing Natty from stage for £70, a private acoustic concert in your own home for £600 - £5,000 (not sure why there's such a wide price range), all the way up to Natty remixing your track for for £1,200. Atlantic hasn't announced if they'll be taking their normal full royalty from Natty on the EP.

Isn't the only point of a record label that they put their money up in advance for the record to be made? What, exactly, will Atlantic be doing to justify their involvement in the project? Providing the sort of marketing and promotion expertise that has proven to not work so well in the modern world?

A major label wanting the audience to put the cash up front is akin to a buffet restaurant wanting you to bus your own table, fetch your own drinks and tip the staff.

Apple try to stop sales vanishing down the Amazon

According to Hypebot, Apple have started to use their market share to - shall we call it bully? - to bully labels into not taking part in the Amazon Daily Deal.

Alarmed at the prospect of Amazon effectively underwriting the cost of spot promotions on albums, Apple warned labels to not do deals with its rival. Billboard quotes anonymous music industry insiders who claim to have been on the wrong end of Jobs' boys turning up with a "nice artist here, shame if something happened to their visibility on the largest online music store" friendly warning.

If that's true, Apple are running a little out of control.

And Hypebot reckons it has evidence:

But the proof of Apple's tactics and the labels' acquiescence can be found within the [Amazon] Daily Deals themselves.

Gone are most of the new hit makers. There are a fraction of the one day exclusives that there were just a month ago; and the label executives are back to complaining about iTunes instead of helping an alternative compete with them.

It's amusing, though, that the labels are so weak and unable to think things through that they're caving in to Apple and then moaning about Apple's dominance. Perhaps if they said "yeah? Well, how long do you think iTunes would keep market share if you did bury major label content that was being discounted over on Amazon?" then they wouldn't be sat at home wailing about how Apple treat 'em bad.

The positive thing in a dismal story is that if the majors are too frightened to get the subsidised promotion on Amazon, there are plenty of other, smaller labels - labels who could probably benefit from a bit of extra support from Amazon.

QTrax now not even able to deliver a press conference

Ah, our old friends QTrax are at it again. Their form, you'll recall, is for making sweeping announcements and then quickly winding backwards when those plans are compared with the real world.

Now, they've got to the stage where they announce press conferences only to pull them at the last minute. They were going to make a big announcement on Christmas Eve. Only they had to pull it because, erm, everyone turned into The Master. Or something. Hypebot reports:

Apparently only one person is capable of speaking for the company or honoring its commitments and he was...ill. "Yes, it is true that we intended having a Press Conference today," said a post on the Qtrax blog. "And it’s also true, that in the last week, our CEO, became ill with a generally non-life-threatening but quite painful ailment - kidney stones. And it is also true he was admitted to hospital & thankfully is leaving today. So we’ve decided to cancel the conference".

Well, yes, kidney stones are pretty painful. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable if I'd invested in a company where only one guy knows what's happening well enough to be able to deliver an explanation to the public of what the plans are. What if - rather than kidney stones - he'd been hit by a bus?

Anyway, QTrax are happy to announce they're now going to launch in January. Wisely, they don't say which January.

TunesPro: Going broke selling downloads

Hypebot reports the launch of a new music store, selling downloads in America for 19 cents a pop.

The store, TunesPro, says it can do this price because it's absorbing a loss of 39 cents a download. It says it's happy to do that because it's cheaper than advertising. It also tells Hypebot that it is offering legal downloads.

In the comments section of Hypebot, anonymous sources are being cited suggesting that the last claim is as untrue as the first two are unlikely, but nobody seems quite sure.

Even if the organisation is legal, the business plan is very high-risk - spending forty cents to get every sale is the sort of thing that even the losing team on The Apprentice would avoid doing. You might attract price-sensitive consumers - at a huge cost - but (since they're price-sensitive) as soon as you return the prices to a level where you can make a profit, they'll be off again.

MySpace: In the money to in the doldrums to in trouble

News International announced pretty good profit figures this week, based mainly on the take from the Ice Age cartoon. To be fair, the company relying on making money out of dinosaurs is nothing new, and it's attempts to evolve are so far generating more duck-billed platypuses than leopards.

The latest rumblings from MySpace aren't encouraging: as traffic to the site falls, the money flowing back from Google is scaling down in proportion. Indeed, the public's diminishing affection for broken page layouts and clashing backgrounds is going to cost NI $100million, reports Hypebot:

We’re still losing traffic,” admitted Chase Carey, chief operating officer of News Corp. “It’s a business in transition.”

Ah, now there's a euphemism. "I'm terribly sorry, Mrs. Smith, your husband is in transition. Indeed, he might not still be transitioning by the end of the night."

MySpace is throwing its hopes on music as its rescue pod. But it's not entirely clear that there's much music-related stuff they can add that they don't already have.

QTrax: Another little fib?

The team at QTrax continue to delight with what can only be a prankster's approach to business. The world has been watching for a couple of years as they send out releases announcing something or other, only for a clarification to follow in a few days that reveals that, actually, the deals with the major labels they said they had weren't in place, or it's taking a little longer to get the music on the system than they expected, or it's simply not possible to download the actual Tina Turner to dance round your living room.

This week, they proudly revealed they'd done a brilliant deal with Baidu:

Qtrax (www.qtrax.com) announced today that Baidu, China's leading Internet search engine, has agreed to direct music related search inquiries from its Entertainment Portal, and Qian Qian Music Online sites to Qtrax's independent, free and legal download service, wherever Qtrax has the queried artist or song in its catalogue.

Allan Klepfisz, President and CEO of Qtrax, commented: "We are very pleased with Baidu's decision. As the dominant search engine in China, Baidu will provide us with substantial traffic from its music and entertainment portals. We, in turn, will provide the visitors they send to our independent free and legal site, a superior music discovery and download experience. In the coming weeks, we will progressively launch in each of nine Asia-Pacific countries and begin to divert and monetize traffic - for the benefit of artists and copyright holders - that previously found its way to non-licensed sites. We believe our offering, including information about the artists, is vastly superior to these unauthorized sites."

Wow. That's quite something.

Trouble is, Baidu - oh, yes - have said there isn't actually any such deal:

But comments from a Baidu representative on Wednesday did not seem to confirm that it would direct any users to Qtrax. "The partnership with Qtrax regards text-based information, such as singer backgrounds; it has nothing to do with the music itself," the Baidu representative said via e-mail.

No links to Qtrax appear to be showing up yet in Baidu's music search section or on its entertainment portal.

In other news, the villagers decided that next time QTrax yells that there's a wolf in the field, they might just not bother going to investigate.

[Story via Hypebot]

Warners figures

Hypebot has got the details on Warners losses for the quarter, and the position isn't pretty:

Total revenue decreased 9.3% and operating income from continuing operations declined 51%. Total losses from continuing operations swelled to $37 million from $9 in the prior year quarter.

Twelve million dollars a month? It's hard to see how Warners could even manage to be spending that, much less losing it.

But don't worry, Warners have a cunning plan:

WMG improved its financial position during the quarter with a $1.1 billion offering of secured notes which the company used to pay off previous loans. But the new new notes carry a hefty 9.5% interest rate and come due in just 7 years

So it seems that Warners is adopting the survival tactics of a desperate single parent on a sink estate, and turning to a loan-sharkey solution. We give it three quarters until they're trying to flog off their telly down the pub.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Amanda Palmer

Emily White talks to Hypebot about Amanda Palmer and her audience:

The attendance at those shows spiked in 2006 when a few Dolls songs were receiving airplay. Awesome, right? Well, now it's 2009 and we've returned to some of those markets. Many of those radio fans don't turn up anymore. Yet, the hardcores or "1000 true fans" are still there, just like they have been since they organically founded The Dresden Dolls back in the day. They still line up outside for hours, know every word of every song (whether or not it has been released), and wait around for Amanda's autograph. They don't need a top down marketing plan to tell them what to like. And who are the new hardcore Dolls/ Amanda fans? They are the younger siblings and friends of the original fans, who continue to spread the gospel about an artist who's work they love so much they can't not talk about.

I think major label marketing can be and is effective for the right kind of artist. But not with this fanbase, they are the definition of direct-to-fan. Of course expanding the audience is always a goal, but this is an artist whose fans don't need to see their hero in a magazine or hear a new song on the radio to keep them interested. Amanda will just email, tweet, or blog to them directly. And why not? The technology is there, so let's embrace it, not ignore it.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - the Zombieconomy

Umair Haque considers the numbers being thrown about right now:

Let's use MJ's tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That's $12 million a year.

I'm deliberately leaving out ads, endorsements, concerts, etc., to focus on the the structural problems in one industry: music.

If the world's biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels' pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that's how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

[via Hypebot]

Warners staffer dumps stock

Hypebot suggests that those who know most about Warner Music Group aren't seeing stock as an investment:

But according to respected investment trade publication Barron's, insiders are "hearing a different tune" and last week unloaded $3 million in stock.

Barron's points specifically to Vice Chairman of Strategy and Operations Michael Fleisher who on June 2nd sold 400,000 shares for $3 million, an average of $7.41 a share. Fleisher, who joined the company as CFO in 2005 still owns 766,207 shares.

Now, it could just be that Fleisher needed some ready cash. We're all a little short right now, aren't we? It doesn't have to mean any sort of inside knowledge of the way the wind is blowing.

Seeqpod launches its Napster 2.0 phase

Seeqpod is dead. But just as Napster died, and got replaced by something with the same name, but useless, and Muxtape died, and got replaced by something with the same name, but uselss, here's the new Seeqpod. It's... well, useless, as Hypebot discovered:

The site os back online, but all of its popular former functionalities are gone. "We'll be back soon, stay tuned!" is the only explanation along with "Meanwhile, enjoy one of our featured artists" and an offer for indie band Arlo Hero's new EP plus a Seeqpod T-Shirt for just $4. Whether this signals a new direction for an embattled Seeqpod or they are just cleaning out their swag closet is unclear.

Another victory for the music industry - by making it that bit harder to find mp3s online, they're sure to arrest the decline in CD sales.

Billboard hires bloggers

In a bid to keep up to date with what the kids are up to, Billboard has hired a couple of these bloggy chappies from off the internet: Glenn Peoples and David Prince.

The real bad news here is that Peoples is going to shutter Coolfer to concentrate on his new job; Prince is going to continue with The Daily Swarm, but it will shift from main focus to side project.

RIAA feels the cold chill of efficiency

Let's face it, any organisation that requires money to keep running is having a tricky time of it right now. But if you're a failing organisation, lacking a strategy, having burned through enormous sums on legal fees with the only outcome making an industry despised, you're going to have to work a lot harder when it comes to getting the subscription renewals in.

Hypebot is reporting a deep-throat on the slashing of budgets at the RIAA:

RIAA "It is about 90-100+ people across the US and global offices - anti-piracy, coordinated IFPI/BPI etc - trust me it's a bloodbath...

(Major label heads) Hands, Morris are squeezing the ____ out of these guys after the ISP failure and a major budget cut. (The) RIAA as you know it is probably history by Tuesday of next week, a formal announcement is being drafted for drop next week.

The new group is a aggregate of IFPI + remaining pieces of BPI + RIAA - (a) new leaner, coordinated group...DC offices are getting closed except for one part of one floor on Conn. Ave., just for the address."

What's especially interesting about this is that it suggests a dropping of the fiction that the BPI is a group representing the British music industry and an admission that its real role is promoting the interests of multinational organisations even if it is at the expense of smaller, local companies.

And if that is the case, Andy Burnham and the DCMS is going to have put on a very good explanation of why the BPI should be allowed more than a secondary influence on UK government policy.

It sounds like we could be in for an interesting week.

Free music can make money

There's a great Hypebot post on Corey Smith, a musician who has apparently made millions because - not despite - giving stuff away and charging low prices for gigs:

First, even though the music is available for free, plenty of people still buy his music on iTunes. However, as an experiment, they took down the free tracks from Corey's website for a period of time last summer... and sales on iTunes went down. Once again, this proves how ridiculous the claim is that free songs somehow cannibalize sales.

But, still, the real money maker for Corey is concerts, and even here he's doing something innovative: making concert tickets cheap: $5. The thinking here appears to be that once you see him in concert, you become a true fan who will keep going back (and paying) for more. And, in fact, at $5/ticket, you can afford to drag along your friends as well, and turn them into fans as well.

But, you might object, not every act could do well out of that - and, indeed, that's true:

Corey's manager, Marty Winsch, has tried this with other artists, where it hasn't always worked as well. So, some may claim that the model (again) is very limited. Of course, the reason is that those other acts just weren't that good.

A system which actually rewards you for being any good? (Or at least for making a connection with fans)? The record industry won't like that one...

MIDEM 2009: Empty places

Yesterday I mentioned Gerd Leonhard's guesstimate that the attendance at MIDEM was down by anything up to 20%; Bruce Houghton over on Hypebot has the official figures:

In the end, the Cannes mega-conference appears to have dodged the bullet with figures released by organizer Reed Midem showing a 12% drop in attendance to 8000 from 9100 in 2008.

Hypebot suggests these are pretty good figures in the circumstances, and points out that all the key players were there. Although it makes you wonder who the one in ten who didn't show up were, then.

That's all folks: Warners yanks stuff from YouTube

Warner Music have whacked all their videos off YouTube, over that most Warneresque of obessions, a belief that they're not getting the amount of money they should be. They've released a statement:

“We are working actively to find a resolution with YouTube that would enable the return of our artists’ content to the site,” Warner said in a statement. “Until then, we simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide."

Given that nobody is making much money off web video, it's not immediately apparent why Warners think they're being sold short (and, interestingly, I can't seem to find anything which shows Warners sharing any of the money they've got from the Google video site with their artists); presumably they know that all they're doing is guaranteeing that their artists will miss out on the exposure to the YouTube audience while their videos will appear on other, less engaged sites with no money at all flowing back to them.