Tonethephone

YouTube/PRS spat will impact UK live music scene

Rating: Bands reliant on video compression technology

The spat between the UK's Performing Rights Society and popular video hosting site, YouTube, will impact the UK's live music scene, according to Lemonrock's Mac MacLaren.

Music industry increases pressure on ISPs

Rating: Dodgy stats from EMI

EMI boss, Elio Leoni-Sceti has been coming up with some pretty scary stats about the current status of music downloading. It's bad news for fixed line ISPs but good news for mobile broadband.

Omnifone to target ISPs like BSkyB

Rating: Next Generation music service for trackies

by Tony Dennis

So Omnifone has expanded out of the mobile arena and onto the wider Internet with its paid-for music service. This new incarnation, MusicStation Next Generation, is aimed t ISPs including Sky (BSkyB).

Nokia signs Sony BMG to Comes with Music

I trotted down to London's Covent Garden to hear Nokia announce that it has definitely done the deal with Sony BMG to participate in its 'Comes with Music' offering. I also discovered 'Say and Play'.

Sony Ericsson talks up TrackID

A very interesting event in London's Soho saw Google, Sony Ericsson, and 3 UK sitting around the same round table. Revealing comments were made by Sony Ericsson's Anders Runevad about content services.

Qtrax - a music lesson to be learnt by all

I've been following the trails and tribulations of the freshly launched music service, Qtrax, with considerable interest. After all, it is an ad-funded, free music service. While it only works (and even that's disputable) with PCs at present, hopefully the model can be transferred to the mobile world.

So what's gone wrong? Well, the service was feted with a launch budget of over $500,000 at the music industry bean-fest that is Midem in Cannes. [Lucky beggars. They haven't been forcefully evicted to Barcelona like us.]

Anyway, no sooner had Qtrax - a unit of New York-based Brilliant Technologies - arrived claiming a catalogue of some 25 to 30 million tracks, than all four big players - EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and Universal - all said they hadn't actually agreed deals.

Mobile phones should be car stereo compatible

I thought I'd stumbled across a way to help my mate Bruce Renny at Rok Entertainment get rid of old stocks of rock and pop albums his company produced and sold on MMC cards. The solution should have been to pop them into a car music centre.
But it didn't work. In the process, I discovered the need for a common format between car stereos and mobile handsets. The chief reason Rok's album wouldn't play is that that old spoilsport, DRM, reared its ugly head again.

Sony BMG and Radiohead boost DRM-free music

To me, two seemingly unrelated events have restored my faith in the mobile handset as a music player: - Sony BMG's decision to sell DRM-free MP3s via Amazon; and Radiohead's latest album topping the US charts.

Both mean that sense has finally prevailed and it's going to be much, much easier to download tracks I like to the mobile phone of my choice. Basically, people want to play their music where they like and not how the music industry tells them.