MaxxoMedia Digital Media and Entertainment Trends

Want to snag Pearl Jam’s new single “Just Breathe” without having to pay for it? No problem. You can do an old-fashioned switch-a-roo and swap one of your tweets in exchange for an iTunes download of the track.

The band is using Culture Jam’s custom Twitter application to manage the Twitter whuffie track exchange, so retrieving your free copy of the live recording is a simple-three step automated process.

Click the “Connect to Twitter” button on the application landing page, grant the application access to your Twitter account and tweet as instructed. You can then redeem your music download using the provided iTunes gift code and the I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine deal is complete. Should you also want to take home one of 15 White Vinyl LP editions of the Backspacer album, you can enter to win that as well.

CBS should be pleased with its choice to allow Microsoft to sync Xbox LIVE to Last.fm, as the partnership has already netted the streaming music service nearly a million new subscribers. Last.fm went live on Xbox last Tuesday, and both companies are already hyping the deal as a success in terms of the numbers. CBS (NYSE: CBS) says it broke a record for the number of new profiles created in a 24-hour period, and that Xbox LIVE users had already streamed more than 120 million minutes worth of music.

Less clear is whether there is money changing hands: neither company would comment on whether Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is paying CBS a rev-share, since only Gold (paying) Xbox LIVE subscribers get access to Last.fm.

Aside from a potential rev-share from Microsoft, the million new subscribers can still add to CBS’ bottom line, as they’ve instantly increased the reach (and targetability) for the ad-supported Last.fm service. In a statement, CBS Interactive Music Group President David Goodman said the company was looking forward to the next “big opportunity” to “expose new users” to the Last.fm brand, a hint that similar partnerships with other device-makers could be coming down the pike.

via Pair Plan Venture to Sell Music Subscriptions – NYTimes.com.

The idea of selling monthly subscriptions to a vast catalog of online music has met with only limited success. That isn’t stopping a new batch of entrepreneurs from trying to make it work.

The latest and perhaps most surprising entrants to the field are the European entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. In 2001, they created and financed Kazaa, one of the original peer-to-peer file-sharing services that hurt the music industry. The two have created and financed a secretive start-up called Rdio, with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

By Mark Levy, CEO MaxxoMedia

MCPS-PRS, the U.K. music publishing licensing and collecting organization, recently released a proposal suggesting that new digital media companies that want to license their copyrights should provide equity in their fledgling companies in exchange for the license.

They cited as some of the reasons behind this proposal:

1. Start-up firms present an undeniable headache for music rights entities. At incorporation, emerging firms tend to lack the financial resources, both in terms of cash holdings and cash revenues, to pay otherwise standard fees for music rights.

2. Emerging firms are not stable entities, in terms of their chances for success and the nature of their business models.

…and…

Here’s an article from Slate about a proposed plan by Warner Music Group to fight piracy and in essence give the people what they want – freedom to download whatever they want, DRM free and share it all they want for a flat rate fee every month.

I actually like the idea to a point. I’ve been a Rhapsody subscriber for years and find great value in the subscription model. The underlying question I have in the Warner plan is if the music is freely shared all around the net, how do they account and pay to the artists who work so hard to produce the music in the first place.

Let me know what you think.

Sonific.com goes offline on May 1, 2008

A message by Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO

As a consequence of a the unworkable music licensing situation and the resulting lack of solid revenue modeling Sonific’s founders and investors have decided to temporarily take Sonific.com and Sonific.net offline.  While we are looking for other ways to realize our vision we are also open to talking to any interested party that may have use for Sonific’s user base, content relationships, technologies or distribution network (please contact us anytime to find out more). Together with some other partners, we may also investigate the concept of making Sonific a paid-for service that is provided to artists, record labels and other content providers on a white-label basis.

Here are some background details on our decision:

From Paidcontent.org Rafat Ali

A known secret of the music industry: the labels, though becoming open to new business models from startups, are asking for a hefty upfront advances for licensing music and in some cases a substantial equity stake in the company, and Billboard explores the practice. Someone like Universal Music Group is making the equity stake standard in any deal, our sources say.

Among the examples: troubled online ad-supported music service SpiralFrog has given more than $3 million in upfront advances to UMG alone before it even went live, and has paid additional millions in licensing fees since the original term expired. Imeem is said to have paid major advances and gave labels equity in the company, the story says. We reported on the Buzznet-UMG deal last week, which involved equity as well.

By David Gales

Music Purchase vs. Subscription

The Big Idea behind music subscription plans is that they may be an idea whose time has come. The debate over the benefits of music subscriptions vs. music purchases has heated up lately. A number of subscription services have been in the market for a time, including Rhapsody, Napster among others. iTunes, the world’s second largest music retailer, is said to be looking at the idea, in a bundling format with the iPod. Among music companies, there is some concern that subscriptions would be so popular they would hasten the demise of the CD, still an important profit center for music labels.

AT ISSUE: Can music subscriptions provide enough economic fuel for the music industry to replace the revenue lost by un-paid consumption of music?

BIG IDEAS VIEW: For purposes of this discussion, consumers are defined as those who listen to music on radio, online and other promotional media, and customers are those who pay to own or listen to music. There are dozens of issues around this topic, but key to our thoughts are the following.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Reselling tickets, once viewed as illegal and a rip-off of consumers, is now being legitimized. Over the past few months there have been a number of large acquisitions of “ticket resellers” made by leading e-commerce companies in an effort to take advantage of this lucrative secondary ticket market. eBay purchased Stubhub for $365 million; last month Ticketmaster purchased TicketsNow for $265 million. Many of the tickets that are re-sold on these secondary marketplaces are initially purchased from the Ticketmasters of the world.

The new combined business model aims to cut in the venue owners and promoters. Ticketmaster President and Chief Executive Sean Moriarty said, “Clients who five years ago were not willing to allow a ticket to be resold now want a piece of it.”

The size of the secondary ticket market is hard to judge, but estimates range from $2.5 billion to $5 billion a year in the U.S. So it’s no surprise that new companies are popping up looking to enhance the experience and take a slice of the pie.

By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia

Not long ago, people had few choices for finding new music. These included listening to the radio, hanging out in their friend’s bedroom listening to their collection, or subscribing to a music magazine. All three were really limiting.

Radio limited the music they played to the hits; you were limited by the number of your friends’ record collections, which were limited by their budget … and the same with magazine subscriptions.

Will.i.am interviewed by Tamara Coniff from Billboard Magazine at the 3GSM Conference in Barcelona Spain.

The mobile industry, not the record business, will create the next wave of music superstars, according to Black Eyed Peas founder Will.i.am.

Speaking at Mobile Backstage, a GSMA/Nielsen production for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, powered by Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter, the artist said the record industry was now “like a grandmother — and the artists of tomorrow need to do deals with her granddaughters. It’s the mobile industry that will produce the Michael Jacksons and Madonnas of tomorrow.”

From Springwise

Customised content has long been held up as the Holy Grail of digital publishing, and idiomag is making that promise a reality with a personalised, daily digital magazine about music that is based entirely on members’ individual interests.

Launched just over a year ago, UK-based idiomag uses a system of weighted tagging to customise both content and advertising to readers’ personal musical tastes. Readers initially name their favourite music topics and weight the relative importance of each of them in the content they will view. idiomag then uses that information to serve articles, tracks, videos and other multimedia content in a high-quality, audio-visual virtual magazine format that readers can enjoy in page-by-page fashion. idiomag has content partnerships with publications including Billboard, 365mag and Hip Hop Nation as well as popular blogs such as Aurgasm and BlogCritics. It has also built up a large team of its own journalists across the UK. As readers rate the appeal of the content they view, idiomag intelligently adapts subsequent issues to reflect those changing preferences.

Not insignificantly, advertisers benefit from idiomag’s personalisation system as well, with the ability to serve nonintrusive, full-screen and rich-media advertisements that closely match readers’ interests. A newly incorporated social element, meanwhile, uses Facebook integration to let readers get their idiomag within the social networking site, view their friends’ magazines and capture articles they like, submit articles, and view trends and favourites among the other idiomag readers on the site. idiomag also offers widgets to incorporate the magazine on other social networks, blogs or home pages. Subscriptions to idiomag are free for readers; advertisers are charged on a CPM basis, and revenue is shared with content providers based on their content’s popularity.