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.
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.
Well look at that: EMI Music Group, which had been working on a licensing deal with music start-up Grooveshark but ended up suing it instead, now has a licensing deal with Grooveshark after all.
YouTube sneaked up on big media, then scared the hell out of them, then tried to do business with them, more or less unsuccessfully.
Now, three years after Google plunked down $1.6 billion for the video site, it seems to have figured out an approach that works for at least some big players: Hand over a chunk of the site to content creators, who get to control it, sell ads on it, program it with their stuff and share some of the ad dollars. Newest example, reportedly: Britain’s Channel 4.
Last month, Warner Music Group won the right to sell ads on its YouTube videos. Next step: Getting someone to sell ads on its YouTube videos, since the music label doesn’t have its own sales team. The plan: Hand those duties over to someone who’s already doing it for Veoh and other video outfits.
You already know this, but it’s always good to be reminded: In online video, there’s YouTube, and then there’s everybody else. Today’s data point: ComScore’s August video report, which shows Google’s video site generating 10 billion views and owning 39.6 percent of the market. That’s 10 billion views, and that’s just counting Web surfers from the U.S. Factor in international visitors and…it would be a lot bigger.
Warner Music and YouTube, co-owners of the one of the Web’s nastiest spats, are about to patch things up. How’d they do it? By cutting a deal that looks a lot like the one YouTube has already made with Universal Music Group.
There are very good odds that there are going to be some very big deals happening in the media world in the next year or so. So this move makes a lot of sense: Former Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons is joining up with Providence Equity Partners, the private equity firm with a hankering for media investments.
How do you sell a business magazine that lost $43 million last year? Convince buyers that they could fire 20 percent of the staff without missing a beat.
That’s part of the pitch Evercore Partners has been making to investors on behalf of McGraw-Hill, which wants to dump BusinessWeek. Look out, copy editors!
Rejoice, British Web surfers! You’ll soon be able to watch your favorite music videos on YouTube again.
Google has reached a settlement with a British licensing group in a dispute over royalty payments, which means that YouTube’s U.K. outpost will begin showing licensed music videos again, following a five-month outage.
Want to play your favorite Beatles song in a videogame? If you want to do it with the official Fab Four-endorsed version of Rock Band, you’re going to have to wait until Sept. 9 and pay up to $250 for the privilege. Or you can head to JamLegend and play along with any song you like, for free.
Spotify is the best music service you’ve never used. That’s because the much-hyped streaming music company is only available for Europeans and for a select few in the U.S. who have either gotten sneak peeks or hacked their way into it. The service took one step toward wider distribution today when Apple approved its iPhone app. But that won’t help U.S. users until the big music labels agree to American distribution deals.
In order to move from money pit to profit center, YouTube has to spend less, which is hard for the site to talk about. And it needs to sell more ads on more videos–which YouTube is happy to talk about. Hence, yesterday’s news that YouTube would start selling against “viral videos.”
Digital music start-ups seem to come in two flavors these days: Those being sued by the major music labels and those with expensive licensing deals they can’t afford.
But for some reason, plucky Grooveshark, which runs a very nice, free streaming music service, has stayed out of both of those buckets until now. I’ve confirmed that EMI Music Group is suing the site–whose motto is “Play any song in the world, for free!”–for copyright violation.
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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