Category: Music

OD2 Allows Users to Pay for Music Through Mobile Bills

Companies offering digital music downloads have long had a problem with getting revenue from their core market – as many music buyers are under 18, they won’t have a credit card. However, a quick glance at the top deck of any bus, or inside a chip shop, will clearly demonstrate that most of them have mobile phones.

On Demand Distribution (OD2) the company that supplies the music service behind sites like Virgin and Freeserve, has come up with a scheme that will allow purchasers to charge the cost of music downloads to their mobile phones. The system, developed by MChex and launched on March 22, is simple: purchasers send an SMS with a code to a premium number and the cost of the message is then charged to their bill.

Paul Smith, OD2’s UK marketing manager, said: “This payment option opens up our services to a much wider demographic. It will allow younger fans to control their own music spend, without having to hijack their parents’ credit card.”

Of course, this wheeze is just moving the payment stage one step further down the ladder and may cause problems for parents who pay their children’s mobile bills, if they’re not on a pay-as-you go plan.

On Demand Distribution

BMG License Tracks to P2P Network

Wippit has added to its repertoire with 10,000 tracks licensed from BMG. Interestingly, the tracks will only be available to subscribers in the UK and Ireland for the time being. This could be seen as a stop gap until iTunes launches in the UK and Europe.

Wippit charge US$54 (UK£30) for unlimited downloads, and subscribers are allowed to swap tracks and burn them to CD. With the EMI deal we reported on earlier, Wippit now offer music from over 200 record labels.

Paul Myers, CEO and Founder of Wippit says, “We offer music from 200 great labels already and having BMG join us is fantastic for Wippit and music lovers alike. BMG have made available a wealth of world beating talent for Wippit subscribers to download, with an emphasis on quality.”

Wippit

Chrysalis Mobile Offers MP3 Downloads Straight to Mobile Phones

Chrysalis Mobile, a standalone business unit within the Chrysalis group of companies, has launched a service designed to bring music to mobile phone users, in various forms.

Chrysalis are offering the service on a “white label” basis – third parties will be able to contract the service and have it branded with their own identity. The service is comprised of hosting, content creation, billing and even royalty payments.

Available for download will be MP3s of real songs, ringtones, short edits of real songs (for alarms, tones and fun use), and images.

Chrysalis are pushing the CRM aspect of the service to potential customers – they’ll know who bought what and when, allowing effective management of campaigns and promotions.

Chrysalis Mobile

iTunes Sells 50 Million Songs; Hewlett Packard-branded iTunes Launches

Apple announced on Monday that they’d sold 50 million tracks through its iTunes music service. They’re not including free songs redeemed through the Pepsi promotion running at the moment, just tracks which users have paid for and downloaded.

The service is now selling 2.5 million songs per week – that’s an annual rate of 130 million tracks per year, and it’s increasing. Steve Jobs said “It’s increasingly difficult to imagine others ever catching up with iTunes.” He may have a point: there’s no denying that the service has completely changed the face of the music industry, with many other companies are trying to get a slice of the market – though many other offerings (such as myCokeMusic) are considerably inferior. We’re looking forward to iTunes belated launch in Europe in the Summer – and hope that this will prompt Apple to do a bit more work on their slightly shoddy Windows client for the store.

Apple also partnered with Hewlett Packard to offer a special HP-branded copy of iTunes.

Oh – and what was the milestone song sold this time? “The Path of Thorns” by Sarah McLachlan.

Apple on the milestone

HP iTunes

Let Your Mood Dictate the Music

Biometric feedback as an input device is an idea that’s been floating around for a while, but researchers at MIT’s Media Lab Europe have developed a musical “game” that allows your mood to influence the music, rather than the other way round.

When your mood changes, so does your skin resistance (just ask the CIA), and MIT’s project, called Peace Composed, uses a pair of biometric sensors to measure it. This is then used to compose a piece of music based on seven different layers of instruments, including bass, piano, strings and wind instruments.

The application has obvious stress management uses, provided you’re not to stressed or overworked to actually get round to using it, and makes a fitting companion piece to “Relax to Win”, a program developed to help children with anxiety and stress problems. We don’t know why, but the title really appeals to us.

BBC News

Gracenote CD Database Raises US$13 Million in Venture Capital Funding

A few years ago, it was just a convenient tool to show what tracks you were playing on your CD – but now Gracenote is an important tool for people who listen to music on their PC or iPod, whether they know it or not.

We can think of few tools which have gone from a nice feature to being absolutely essential – the rise of personal digital music players has made online CD databases absolutely essential if you want to rip your 1000+ collection of disks and still stay sane.

Many users of Gracenote don’t even know they’re accessing the service – most applicatons just nip off and download the data without them realising. More recent changes to Gracenote have meant that applications must be licensed to use the database, and must display the Gracenote logo when they access the service.

The company estimate that 150 million units of Gracenote-capable software were shipped in 2003, and that this will rise to 200 million in 2004.

Gracenote

FreeDB – an open source CD database

Starbucks Offering Customised CDs

Always keen to develop the Starbucks experience, the Seattle-based coffee house has partnered with Hewlett-Packard to give customers an innovative music product – personalised CDs burned to order.

We’ve all seen services offering tailor-made CDs before, where this service is different is in the customer interface. This one uses HP tablet PCs (and thankfully, headphones) so that punters can chose can choose from 250,000 licensed tracks and have a CD or two made up for them from their selection.

This could finally be a success for custom CDs – many initiatives in the past have failed because customers don’t really like standing in front of a kiosk for half an hour choosing tracks from a limited selection. Lounging around in a well-worn sofa drinking coffee and picking favourites from a library of a quarter of a million tunes is much more appealing.

A further benefit will be that customers to Starbucks will get more exposure to legal downloads and may be tempted to try similar services such as iTunes when they get home.

The service will be available in selected US branches from 16th March – if any DigLif readers get a chance to try it out, please drop us an email and let us know how you found it.

Business Week

What Starbucks did next

Universal Music’s Entire Back Catalogue Ready for Download

Universal Music has digitised its back catalogue and signed a deal with OD2, currently Europe’s largest digital music distributor. We say currently, because iTunes and Napster have yet to launch in Europe – and Universal has deals in place with Apple and Roxio for when those music sites open up later this year. OD2 operates MyCokeMusic and MediaMarkt, amongst others.

The 300,000 tracks will not be available as MP3s – Universal is keen to use DRM to protect the tracks which are extremely popular and bound to appeal to music copiers, though customers will be able to burn tracks to CD and transfer them to audio players. Artists in the deal include Rob Zombie, The Orb and, of course, the talentlessly unpleasant ex-Soviet sock puppets T.A.T.U.

Universal Music on music downloads

OD2

Napster Will Launch in UK by “End of Summer”

Coming after shares in parent company Roxio surged last week (on a rumour that Microsoft will be integrating support for the music download service), Napster has announced that it will be launching in the UK at the end of the Summer. This coincides with the approximate time that Apple have publicised for their eagerly awaited UK debut of iTunes – and by then iTunes will have served well over 100 million tracks.

After iTunes, Napster is the most recognised music download brand – no pricing has been announced but it’s likely that subscribers will be able to burn tracks at the usual US$0.99 price point offered by competing services.

Coming Soon

Electronic Frontier Foundation Propose a Licensing Scheme for Filesharers

After a year of research, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging copyright holders to join together to offer blanket licenses to P2P networks.

They are drawing parallels with the copyright problem radio once faced in the US – Performing Rights Organisations (PRO) such as ASCAP and BMI were founded to allow radio stations to play music legally and ensure that artists and publishers were properly compensated.

The EFF also regard music licensing in the internet age as dogged with the same problems that the player piano industry fought though in 1909 with sheet music manufacturers. This early situation was also solved by a blanket license.

The money to be made is attractive – if users paid, for example, US$5 per month, income to the music companies would be more than US$3 billion – and almost in pure profit as no CDs would have to be manufactured or shipped.

The EFF’s proposal (PDF)