CBS Interactive Music Group Buys One of the Biggest Music Sites On the Web
CBS Interactive Music Group has purchased the top lyrics site on the web. Based in Vancouver, Metrolyrics is the third largest music site in the world in terms of traffic. Founded in 2002, it has a database of more than 700,000 songs and 48 million unique users per month. The site was built initially by a high [...]
Internet Radio’s Listeners Are Engaged
Targetspot has released a new whitepaper that examines the behavior of digital audio listeners with regard to discovering new music, giving and receiving musical recommendations, and music purchasing. The paper points out that Internet radio listeners are an engaged bunch, 80% listen 1-3 hours a day. What’s more, 73% listen to more than one station a [...]
Pandora’s 2Q Call Impressive
Last thursday during an earnings call Pandora reported $67 million in revenues, a 117% increase over a year ago. They also reported impressive increases in listening – 1.8 billion listening hours, an increase of 125% over a year earlier. The report was the new public company’s first quarterly earnings report and it reported on earnings [...]
MP3tunes Scores A Victory For Cloud Locker Services
This is a guest post by Angus MacDonald, General Counsel at Live365, Inc. regarding a recent court ruling that could have significant impact on the streaming audio industry. Cloud-based music services can heave a sigh of relief. MP3tunes, the cloud locker service founded by Michael Robertson, scored a partial victory in the copyright litigation brought by [...]
Will Streaming Sell More Music For eMusic?
eMusic has always had a slightly left of center approach to selling digital downloads. eMusic offers music consumers the opportunity to pay a monthly subscription fee for access to their song catalogs and download a certain number of songs per month – $12 bucks gets you 24 songs, $32 bucks a month allows you to [...]
Song, Album Sales Are Up For 2011
2011 is turning out to be a good year for the record industry, which is seeing growth year over year sales for the first time since 2004. Digital album sales are leading the way in terms of growth – they’re up 19% over 2010. Digital track sales are up 11%. Overall music sales are up [...]
Eye On Spotify
Last week was a busy week for Internet radio. Clear Channel shook things up at the beginning of the week with their announcement of the coming “New iHeartRadio”, later in the week Spotify launched its US based service. While I think Spotify’s entrance here is interesting, I don’t think it will have an enormous impact [...]
RIAA Performance Royalties Up 60% in 2010
According to 2010 year end shipment statistics reported by the RIAA, digital formats now comprise 47% of all music shipments in the US. That’s a large share, especially compared to the 9% share digital music held in 2005. Overall, the total digital music market in 2010 was $3.2 billion, a 3% increase over last year. [...]
Nielsen: Song, Album Sales Are Up
Music sales are up this year, bucking a several year annual decline. Led by strong digital downloads of albums and songs, music sales in the US are up 1.6% through May 8th. That’s according to Nielsen. Physical album sales continue to drop, but the rise in online sales is compensating for the first time. Digital [...]
Google’s Cloud Streaming Music Service
Google launched its long rumored cloud based music service on tuesday, calling it Music Beta, a name that signals the tentative nature of the service. It’s likely a response to Amazon Cloud, which hit the market a few weeks ago. Google had been in talks with record labels, trying to strike a deal for its service, [...]
