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Business News Week In Five
The music business week in five – Friday 29 Oct 2010
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 29 October 2010
Phew, what a busy week. For all of you that came down to the Music Mind Exchange panel event on Wednesday, thank you for joining us, and I hope you found it as insightful as I did; three great panelists providing lots of valuable thoughts and advice on the future of music investment. There’ll be another MME event very soon, watch this space for info!
Before I do the usual week in five bit, and then run off to Scotland for a day or two, I probably should remind all our university-based readers that this weekend is the deadline for the student categories of the Record Of The Day Music Journalism Awards, so you should go to our sister website CreativeStudent.net and find out how to put yourself forward. Done that? Good. Right, week in five…
01: Terra Firma v Citigroup rumbled on, providing much light entertainment for all bar the participants. And, presumably, staffers at EMI who, while probably not caring much about their equity group owners getting a bashing in court, are facing more insecurity about the future of their company. If Terra Firma loses this case, many commentators think they’ll cut their losses and bail on the music firm. Both Terra Firma’s Guy Hands and Citigroup’s David Wormsley spent time on the stand this week going over familiar arguments: Hands says Wormsley tricked him into buying EMI, Wormsley says he didn’t. CMU reports
02: LimeWire was shut down. A US court complied with demands by the American record industry to issue an injunction ordering the Lime Group to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software, and to make it harder for existing users to access unlicensed content via the LimeWire network. Team Lime, now trying to launch a legit music service, basically agreed to comply with the court order. So, the end of a file-sharing era. Not that it will really affect the BitTorrent using file-sharing community. CMU report | Independent report
03: A US court refused to rehear the Eminem royalties case. This was the case where early Slim Shady collaborators FBT Productions, which has a pre-iTunes royalty share deal with Universal Music on the rapper’s early work, claimed it should be paid a ‘licensing deal’ rate on download sales, rather than the ‘record sales’ rate the major is currently paying. The former is considerably higher. A US court originally knocked back the claim, but FBT then won on appeal. Universal asked for the Ninth Circuit appeals court to reconsider the decision, but it refused. Universal insist this dispute is contract specific, and does not set a precedent that all legacy artists should get the higher royalty rate on download sales. CMU report | Hip Hop DX report:
04: MySpace relaunched in the US. It looks prettier, is more entertainment focused and, the flagging social networking company insists, is more user friendly and distinctive from its rivals. We’ll see about that. The relaunch will roll out here in the UK next month, though MySpace is already showing off the new look site to British advertising agencies. It’s thought in the UK the revamped MySpace will focus on music in particular. CMU report | Guardian report
05: The Walkman died, or did it? It was revealed this week that Sony had stopped making cassette Walkmans, so that once the current batch had been sold no more would be available. Cue a raft of nostalgic articles about the once iconic music playing device. Though the LA Times then quoted a Sony Corp source as saying the Walkman would continue to be distributed and sold in the US, while the Wall Street Journal said production would continue in China for sale in Asia and the Middle East. I think most of us were most surprised Walkmans were still being made anywhere. CMU report | PC Mag report
And that’s your lot – see you next week.
Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU
