Business News Week In Five

The music business week in five – Friday 28 May 2010

By | Published on Friday 28 May 2010

So, it’s Eurovision Weekend, which either means you’re having a party to celebrate, or you’d best do everything you can to avoid BBC1 and (probably) Twitter tomorrow evening, depending on your viewpoint on the big Song Contest. It’s also the Bank Holiday Weekend, so no CMU Daily on Monday, but we’ll be back on Tuesday in a June-like fashion. Meanwhile, here’s the big five stories from the music biz in the last week.

01: BBC Trust consultation deadline passed. This was the public consultation on BBC management’s Strategy Review, which, amongst other things, includes the proposals to shut 6music and the Asian Network. Most of the music industry trade bodies lined up to diss those plans as the consultation deadline approached; some published the submissions they had made to the Trust. The Save 6 community, meanwhile, staged a second demo outside Broadcasting House last weekend. It remains to be seen if either radio station will now be saved. CMU report | Beehive City Save 6 rally report

02: Speculation grew about the future of Fabric. Last week’s announcement that sister club Matter will shut its doors for at least the summer months, was followed by reports this week that numerous redundancies had occurred at Fabric HQ. This led to speculation that the whole Fabric empire might go under, with the Fabric company saddled with Matter’s £3 million debts. Still no word on those rumours from Fabric management, though they have confirmed it will be business as usual at the club this weekend. CMU report | Resident Advisor report

03: Celebrities launched music companies. First Craig David announced he was launching a publishing company to handle his own songs catalogue and to sign up other songwriters, then ‘American Idol’ judge Ellen DeGeneres announced she was setting up a label, seemingly after falling in love with YouTube sensation Greyson Chance when he guested on her TV show and deciding she wanted to launch his pop career herself. Meanwhile, at the International Music Summit in Ibiza, Sony A&R man Mike Pickering announced that Calvin Harris – who launched his own label earlier this year – had been given an A&R role at the recently relaunched Deconstruction, the Sony dance imprint Pickering founded. CMU reports Craig David | Ellen DeGeneres | Calvin Harris

04: McFly banned a gay message board from hosting their pictures, then didn’t. Moderators at FM Forums announced McFly’s management had asked that they stop their users from uploading half-naked photos of the band for other users to, erm, enjoy – not on copyright grounds, and not because they mind the band’s gay fanbase perving at their pictures, but because they were stressing about how a set of new promo photos and some of the band’s personal private photos had leaked online. Later they said that there was no need for a ban providing FM Forum chiefs stopped the leaked photos from appearing on their site. CMU report | FM Forum statement

05: Apple grow bigger than Microsoft as iPad arrives in UK. Despite Microsoft once being a giant next to the tiny Apple Computers in terms of market cap (share price multiplied by number of shares), the decline of the former and unstoppable growth of the latter means Apple is now the bigger of the IT firms. Of course, being big has its downsides. There were reports this week US anti-trust regulators were investigating claims Apple misused its dominance in the digital music space to pressure labels to not participate in an Amazon MP3 promotion. CMU report | An interesting Marketwatch comment

And that’s it. Look out for your artist news digest in the form of a big fat CMU Weekly this afternoon, complete with a Spotify playlist lovingly created for your pleasure by Russell Lissack from Bloc Party – sign up to get it if you haven’t already: www.completemusicupdate.com/subscribe

Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU Daily

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