It’s official: MySpace has closed on its acquisition of Imeem, the streaming music service. It is paying a fire-sale price of $1 million, sources familiar with the situation tell me, and could pay up to $7 million to $9 million in earn-outs for key employees, who will likely include CEO Dalton Caldwell. Investors like Sequoia and Warner Music Group had pumped at least $25 million into the venture.
It’s official: You still can’t buy the Beatles’ songs on the Web, despite the efforts of a site that attempted to do so by rewriting copyright law on the fly. In other news: Have you seen this clip of Richard Pryor reading the alphabet on Sesame Street? Awesome.
Vevo, the music industry’s attempt to create a Hulu-like site for its music videos, will formally launch Dec. 8. The site, which is co-owned by Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony’s music label and Abu Dhabi Media, will host a New York kick-off event that day.
Here’s a match up that makes plenty of sense: EMI Music Group, which has a new Norah Jones album to promote, is showing her videos on Hulu, the video joint venture that specializes in “premium” content. But the deal is the only one of its kind. While the big music labels have played footsie with Hulu in the past, they have yet to actually move any of their clips there. Instead, they’re concentrating on YouTube, which makes plenty of sense.
Are Warner Music Group and EMI, which have been circling each other for nearly a decade, finally ready to consummate their relationship?
That’s the obvious question in light of news that both Terra Firma, the private equity group that bought EMI in 2007, and Citigroup, which funded most of that transaction, have written down most of their investments in the music company.
Going, going, gone: The last of the Web 2.0 music services are dwindling away. The latest is Imeem, which is in the process of being purchased by MySpace, I’ve confirmed.
Haven’t heard a price yet, but I wouldn’t expect much, given that this deal, like the iLike purchase MySpace made earlier this year, is an “acqhire”–News Corp.’s social network/portal wants to buy Imeem for its “sales team, engineering, Snocap and other Imeem IP,” a person familiar with the transaction tells me.
The new conventional wisdom is that sooner or later, consumers will have to start paying for some of the stuff they currently get for free on the Web.
But will they actually pay up? Here, the conventional wisdom is not so helpful. Nor are studies predicting consumer behavior.
Did Rupert Murdoch wait way too long to fix MySpace? It’s easy to get that impression from the News Corp. earnings call today.
The takeaway: The site is losing traffic and money and is going to get at least $100 million less from Google than it once thought. “It’s a work in progress,” News Corp. says, over and over again.
No, you still can’t buy the Beatles on iTunes. But next month, you will finally be able to buy the band’s music–legally–in MP3 form. Provided you’re willing to pay way, way up.
Would you pay $30 a month to watch TV via iTunes?
That’s the pitch Apple has been making to TV networks in recent weeks. The company is trying to round up support for a monthly subscription service that would deliver TV programs via its multimedia software, multiple sources tell me. The industry finds this idea both tempting and terrifying.
What happens when one of the biggest bands in the world Webcasts a live concert on the world’s biggest video site?
You get a lot of video streams. Close to 10 million, says YouTube, adding that Sunday’s live Webcast of U2’s Rose Bowl concert was the single largest event it has streamed so far.
Digital music entrepreneurs Dave Goldberg and Bob Roback, who built up Launch Media in the 1990s and ran Yahoo’s music group for much of this decade, are trying their hands at tunes again.
This time, though, they’re not trying to convince consumers to pay for music or asking advertisers to subsidize it. Instead, they’re trying to act as a middleman between labels and publishers who own music and advertisers, Hollywood and other folks who want to use the tunes for commercial purposes.
Last week, Jeff Bezos made $2 billion in one day, courtesy of a massive spike in Amazon shares. That gives him more money to plow into the likes of Aviary, a Long Island-based company that makes design software. The Amazon CEO has made a second investment in the company as part of a $7 million round led by Spark Capital.
Google insists, over and over, that it has no intention of getting into the content business. So how is it finessing its way into the music business? Very carefully.
The search giant is working on a new service that will provide searchers with streaming music, which sounds a whole lot like a content play at first blush. But Google will only be offering limited bits of music, and it will be relying on other companies–Lala.com, MySpace’s iLike and Imeem, sources say–to actually provide the tunes.
Not sure what Barnes & Noble has to say about the “Nook” that it didn’t discuss yesterday, when it unveiled its new e-reader. But the bookseller’s press conference this morning, scheduled for 9:30 EDT, gives us an opportunity to try a little crowd-sourcing experiment: Send me any questions you have and I’ll try to ask the company on your behalf.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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