Surprising reason why Germany and France buys lots of CDs: because classical music sells well. Lots of interesting nuggets from a neat map.

Google is offering billion dollar checks to labels for blanket rights to their entire catalogs, according to highly placed digital music sources.</p><p>

According to one source,  ”Google has offered at least one label over a billion dollars for all the rights in every country for every piece of music and for every platform.” This means that Google could potential be writing checks for a total of well over $5 billion, if they’re crazy enough to actually go through with it. By comparison, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI), total revenue generated by the global recorded music industry in 2011 was $16.6 billion.

Isn't going to happen, though it might sorely tempt some labels. Problem for Google is that (if the report is correct) it has a slight air of desperation, which is never a good way to look in negotiations.

Enormous fun. (Requires Flash.)

Here's how he started his blast:

Last week at our debate, I talked about the essential unfairness that my friend and colleague Levon Helm had to continue to tour at the age of 70 with throat cancer in order to pay his medical bills. On Thursday, Levon died and I am filled with unbelievable sadness. I am sad not just for Levon's wife and daughter, but sad that you could be so condescending to offer "to make right what the music industry did to the members of The Band." It wasn't the music industry that created Levon's plight; it was people like you celebrating Pirate Bay and Kim Dotcom - bloodsuckers who made millions off the hard work of musicians and filmmakers.

It is a hell of a blast. (Thanks @pauljreynolds for the link.)

(Musician) Helienne Lindvall:

I was told to prepare a five-minute speech, so apart from speaking of the reality musicians are facing, I spent days reading the actual [ACTA] agreement, different points of views on it, as well as looking into the different issues it deals with, to make sure I knew what was being discussed. I'd heard from the Pirate Party as well as some other action groups that it would impede freedom of speech so naturally I was concerned – after all, musicians rely on freedom of expression, as do journalists. I was surprised to find that Acta would do nothing of the sort. In fact, it wouldn't change any existent laws in the EU.</p><p>

It soon became clear that my preparations were in vain.

This is a battle that appears to be bleeding beyond the major labels.  We've seen the markings of a broader artist and industry backlash, and now, there's this.  The sharpest attack on Grooveshark is now coming from TuneCore CEO Jeff Price, an artist champion who spends most of this time fighting against the majors.  Yet on Friday, Price tore into the company for failing to compensate his artists and blatantly exploiting legal loopholes.  In fact, Price is now urging his massive indie and DIY community to boycott the company, and directly contact Grooveshark advertisers to pressure change.

The clock is definitely ticking for Grooveshark.

Three people have been sentenced for participating in a massive online music fraud, in which the gang uploaded music to iTunes and Amazon before using compromised cards to buy it back in large volumes.</p>

<p>At Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, James Batchelor was jailed for two years, Siobhan Clarke was given an eight-month suspended sentence and 150 hours' unpaid work, and Colton Johnson was order to undertake 80 hours' unpaid work. The sentencings were the last to take place in connection with the fraud, which has already seen 11 other people convicted and sentenced.</p><p>

The fraud cost Apple and Amazon somewhere in the region of £1m, the Met said. The members of the gang were originally arrested in 2009 following a joint operation between the Met's Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) and the New York Police Department.

Thousands of compromised US and UK credit cards were used for the fake purchases. Stupidly, they picked too few albums - they'd have been major recording artists to get that volume of purchases.

Mark Mulligan makes the point that the CD, the main money-maker, is vanishing, and nothing is coming to replace it:

The music industry is being entrapped by a demographic pincer movement: on the left the emerging Digital Natives lack a product strategy that meets their needs, on the right the traditional CD buyers lack a format succession cycle. This is why the industry is becoming obsessed with squeezing as much ‘ARPU’ as it can out of the remaining core of 20 somethings and 30 somethings. But of course that strategy can only go so far. <a href="http://blogs.forrester.com/mark_mulligan/11-01-20-digital_natives_the_generation_that_music_product_strategy_forgot">I’ve written at length about strategies for the Digital Natives</a>, but the case for the Digital Refusniks is even more pressing, if less glamorous.

Wayne Rosso:

According to a highly placed digital music executive, Google Music has actually been losing customers week over week–consistently–since it’s launch last November. “I’ve never seen anything like it”, the source said.”It’s astounding. It’s hard to believe that with an install base of over 200 million Android handsets they’re actually losing customers.”

Evidently some label execs are very concerned that things are so bad at Google Music that the mothership might just decide to pull the plug on the whole service, except for the geniuses at Warner Music who have refused to license it. The thinking is that the industry needs for Google Music to be successful so that the whole sector prospers. A failure of Google Music would be perceived as a setback and, of course, a loss of much-needed revenue for the labels.

Rosso has tended to have an inside track from the music industry, so this is worth noting. Unlikely that Google would pull the plug - there's always the chance of a miracle - but comments suggest that Amazon's music locker does it better.

A Danish copyright group has won a court order to block music streaming site Grooveshark from the nation's pastry-munching pirates.

In a report of questionable accuracy (the plaintiff Rettighedsalliancen is incorrectly described as a "local IFPI") at tech site Comon [Den - Eng]. Hutchison-owned mobile operator 3 must implement the block immediately. Denmark was one of the first to implement DNS-level blocking, first against Pirate Bay more than three years ago. An appeal is expected.

Grooveshark increasingly looks like the MegaUpload of music streaming.

Prepare for amazing:

Maybe Justin Timberlake and friends weren't so crazy after all. Myspace, the once dominant social-networking site that faded into obscurity during Facebook's rise to dominance, added 1 million new users over the past month, according to the company.

"The numbers tell an amazing story of strong momentum and dramatic change for Myspace," said Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Myspace. "And the 1 million-plus new user accounts we've seen in the last 30 days validates our approach."

Only one word for it: impressive.

Would you buy one?

Google Inc. is developing a home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home and would be marketed under the company's own brand, according to people briefed on the company's plans.

The effort marks a sharp shift in strategy for Google, which for the first would time would design and market consumer electronic devices under the Google brand. The company has up to now mainly focused on developing the operating system that powers devices such as smartphones, tablets and televisions and allowing other companies to build and brand the hardware that uses it.

Google's Android unit has led a multi-year effort to develop the new entertainment device, which is expected to be unveiled later this year, people familiar with the matter said.

Note that it's from inside the Android team - not a Motorola tieup. (Yet.) And: how big is the market for music-streaming devices? Isn't that what Sonos does at the high end and things like Logitech and others at the low end?

"Grooveshark attorneys are now exerting heavy legal pressure on Digital Music News, with the goal of outing a very problematic whistleblower.  Just this weekend, our offices received a mountain of subpoena paperwork from Grooveshark attorneys McPherson Rane LLC, a Los Angeles-based firm headed by celebrity lawyer Ed McPherson.  The aggressive and broad-reaching subpoena is designed to force the disclosure of the identity of the anonymous whistleblower".

That would be the commenter who alleged last October that Grooveshark employees are assigned a predetermined amount of material to upload - perhaps illicitly - to the site. If something "known" gets removed from the site, the commenter said, the internal task is to re-upload it. Digital Music News is resisting. Grooveshark, meanwhile, is being sued by all the major record companies.

"This partnership means Verified Twitter Accounts can be distributed into a wide range of products and brands – from smart TVs and automotive infotainment systems to cloud music services and smartphones," says Gracenote president Stephen White. Got that? Verified accounts only.

"Total [US] Album sales were up for the first time since 2004 (1.3%) with sales totaling 330.6 million, compared to 326.2 million in 2010." You have Adele and the internet to thank for that.

"Grooveshark, a popular digital music service that is being sued for copyright infringement by three of the four major record companies, now has problems with the one big label that it has a licensing deal with.

"On Wednesday, EMI Music Publishing filed suit against Grooveshark’s parent company, the Escape Media Group, for breach of contract, saying that since striking the deal in 2009, Escape has 'made not a single royalty payment to EMI, nor provided a single accounting statement.'”

Grooveshark is toast; all that remains is the question of how long it will take to curl up.

He bought himself a Mac. (Interesting that even Oracle engineers are buying Macs.) He has lots of music files. "The next issue is that, within iTunes, you cannot organize your music based on the directory structure. All it cares about is the various metadata fields. You can’t even display the file name or the file path in the main iTunes window.

"Leave it to Apple to create a Unix operating system which hates files."

This is like arranging your music based on the colour of the album covers. Fair enough, but how would you deal with the customer support complaint from this user? Happily, though he flirted with writing a Python script to solve it, he wrote an Automator task (high-level scripting) to do it. Including a shell script with regex.

He's not impressed with iTunes, though.

"The arrival of Apple's iCloud and iTunes Match this month, coupled with Spotify's October drop of its invite-only requirement, seem to have shaken the online music world.

"All the other online music service players seem to be desperately searching for ways to compete."

Included in this article: Napster has been bought (in, take note, an all-stock deal) from Best Buy by Rhapsody (the former Real Networks). Rhapsody has about 800,000 paying subscribers. Napster has... an unknown number. Spotify has about 10m, of whom 2m are paying. Is Napster + Rhapsody bigger than Spotify?

Quick comparison of the four services on offer in the US.

Fascinating. Robert Fripp isn't the sort to give any quarter and he clearly does not live Grooveshark. And Grooveshark clearly isn't as artist-friendly as it suggests, judging by the comments.

Remarkable HTML5/Javascript dynamic representation of Bach's cello suites. Beautiful.

Rubin: "[It] will have a little twist – it will have a little Google in it. It won’t just be selling 99 cent tracks.”

"Facebook Inc. is preparing changes designed to make the site a hub for listening to music, watching movies and playing videogames, according to people familiar with the matter, in much the same way people already use the social network to share personal media like photos and videos."<br />
<br />
Note: This isn't a music platform. It's not (really) an iTunes-rival.

"Grammy Award-winning musician Imogen Heap used her time on the TED Global stage on Tuesday in Edinburgh, Scotland to not just perform, but to demonstrate an entirely new way of creating music.<br />
"Using a pair of gloves equipped with wireless mics, an accelerometer, a magnetometer, a gyroscope and a variety of other sensors, Heap created a song on the fly — complete with sounds from a multitude of instruments and effects — using only her body movements and hand gestures."<br />
<br />
We very much want to get her into the Tech Weekly podcast. Think she'll bring her gloves?

You read the headline and say "Wow! This can be done that fast??" Then you read the first paragraph: "Don't get too excited: unless your music collection's already in the cloud somewhere, this isn't going to help you (with one possible exception, discussed below). In my case, that was Dropbox. The majority of my music - audiobooks and not yet unlocked DRM'd iTunes content excepted - was up in the cloud already."<br />
<br />
Grrrrr.

"Apple’s success in licensing labels means that Apple iCloud, or whatever it ends up being called, will let you mirror your local music collection to Apple’s servers in minutes rather than days.<br />
"Mainstream users determine the future, and they have neither the time nor inclination to upload thousands of songs over a period of days in order to set up a music locker. And when they acquire new music, they don’t want to repeat a miniature version of that process each time."

Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan on the new wave of cloud-based music services: "Now that Amazon and Google have both shown their hands, the last hope for a 360 Degree Music experience this year lies with that being a royal flush that Apple is holding close to its chest ... In the meantime the winner in all this is? Illegal free of course."

"On the digital front, mobile music sales, which is made up of mostly ringtones, dropped 28% to $527m last year. Sales of individual song downloads grew just 2.1% in 2010 with more than 1.16bn tracks sold, compared with 1.14bn in 2009. But overall digital music revenue grew 10%, in large part because Apple Inc. last year raised the price of top selling tunes to $1.29 from 99 cents.<br />
"The price hike by Apple, which commands roughly 70% of the market for digital music downloads, may have slowed the number of songs people bought, but it resulted in an increase in overall revenue, which last year climbed to $2.24bn, up from $2.03bn in 2009."

Music analyst Mark Mulligan: "The iTunes app is outdated and bloated. It’s long overdue competitive disruption. Spotify’s music app is clean and elegant, just like iTunes used to be. With Facebook integration, a celestial jukebox, music management and even device syncing (of sorts) Spotify may actually stand a half-decent chance of getting many of its iTunes-using customers to start using Spotify as their main music app.    <br />
"But despite the PR, Spotify is not actually trying to be an iTunes Killer at all. They’re trying to learn how to co-exist, using the iTunes ecosystem as their habitat. Almost a parasitical co-existence: if the host dies the parasite dies too. The fate of iPods, iPhones and iPads is inextricably linked with iTunes."

"The latest rumor to emerge from the Google campus is that the company’s much anticipated music service is just about at the end of their rope with the major label licensing process. A source close to the negotiations characterizes the search giant as “disgusted” with the labels, so much so that they are seriously considering following Amazon’s lead and launching their music could service without label licenses. I’m told that, though very remote and my guess is that it would never come to this, Google may go so far as to shut down the music service project altogether."<br />
<br />
Ironically, the fact that when Steve Jobs negotiated with the record companies in 2002 about licensing sales Apple was miniscule may have made his task far easier. If Apple were to go to the music business now and seek to license songs, it would probably have a tougher time. As Googie is discovering.