Record labels lose odd-smelling YouTube views

YouTube have been tidying up view figures, removing dubious counts.

Who has been especially hit by this purge o'views?

Why, record labels. The Daily Dot reports:

Universal's channel is the one that took the biggest hit. According to figures compiled by the YouTube statistics analysts at SocialBlade, the record company's YouTube channel lost more than 1 billion views from its preexisting tally of 7 billion views Tuesday.

Sony/BMG was the second largest sufferer, dropping more than 850 million views in one day, bringing its total number of views to a mere 2.3 million. RCA, which got off scot free by comparison, dipped 159 million views. Its tally now sits more modestly at 120 million views.

Of course, there's no evidence of wrong-doing, and Google is known for its caprice in how it handles, well, everything.

But it does look as if, once again, the labels haven't quite been living up to the virtues they expect the rest of us to achieve.

[UPDATE: Billboard thinks it can account for nearly all the lost views. The "nearly" is significant]

Businessobit: Norio Ohga

Former head of Sony, Norio Ohga, has died.

Ohga's time at the head of Sony saw him take two decisions which, for good or ill, would shape the music industry for twenty years.

He threw the company's weight behind the development of the Compact Disc - which was important - but he also led Sony from being focused on being an electronics company into one that would be an entertainment company. Sony had been running a joint venture with CBS for twenty years, but in 1987 Ohga's company would buy CBS' music business outright. Ohga was still at the top when the renamed CBS arm, Sony Music Entertainment, merged with Bertelsmann's group to create the massive-major Sony BMG.

Ohga is the man who, in what might be a bit of an urban myth, persuaded the Sony-Philips team that CDs should be twelve centimetres across, in order to accommodate the full 75 minutes of Beethoven's Ninth.

Norio Ohga, who was 81, died from massive organ failure.

When Toad met Sony

Fascinating post on Song, By Toad, detailing a meeting between Sony BMG and a group of bloggers (Mr Toad, Winston from Winston's Zen, Jamila from Fucking Dance and Tim from The Blue Walrus.

This came about following Winston getting hit by a takedown notice for a track posted on the Zen; the outcome of the meeting is probably best filed under "a good start at opening the lines of communications" - or, as Toad puts it:

. It was interesting, certainly, and if it’s the start of blogs no longer being treated as the enemy, that would be nice. Both sides have to be very wary of lazy thinking though, and not assume that it will be straightforward simply because we are all such nice folks and had a nice night out. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops though.

Nothing soothes a battle like being able to put faces to the 'other side':

The people we spoke to were really nice, and I think it’s really important that the online community engage with them, prove them right, and show the powers that be at Sony that bloggers are legit, and that most of us want to be a positive influence, not a negative one.

Toad is sharp on the risks of close engagement with the labels, though - that music blogs will, essentially, become part of the mainstream:

If blogs are treated as ‘proper music press’ then that pretty much involves being pulled into the same machine as everything else. We would become part of industry, part of the same juggernaut which a lot of us are fighting, and suckling from the same bloated expense accounts which make these massive labels as unwieldy as they are. We become, in essense, part of the problem. I don’t want to be sulky or snobby about all this, and I genuinely do want to engage with them, but it still makes me a little twitchy.

Which does open a massive philosophical debate: if you really believe that the four-label system is bad for music, do you wind up shoring it up by becoming part of their release-and-promotion procedures? Or is it better to engage and try and effect change to the existing system?

There's also a scoop, too:

In future they are pulling back from simply setting the IFPI hounds of hell loose, brandishing swords crafted from DMCA steel, and they are going to get a list of infringements and examine it themselves. This has changed since the Glasvegas business, and is a very very good thing as far as I am concerned.

That's good news as it suggests a less blunt approach, and it's also interesting news as suggests that the labels are already weaning themselves off the IFPI and preparing to live with one less RIAA variant draining their coffers to no good effect.

[Big thanks to @Imrania for the tip]

Unintended consequences

Nice piece on Hypebot pointing out that Sony BMG's Google ads campaign has been turning up on isoHunt, and thus helping underwrite the bittorrent site.

It's only a financial version of what a decade of poor business decisions have been doing: the music industry helping promote an alternative they can't control.

Sony BMG help with your Christmas shopping

Sony BMG (nobody seems to have told them they're not called that any more) sent out an email yesterday with "suggestions" for Christmas gifts. It's an interesting insight into how record companies' minds work.

First up, do you need something for the woman in your life? A partner, perhaps, a wife, or a lover? Well, if there's one thing Sony BMG know about women, apparently, it's that they have rubbish taste:



Sony BMG don't, for a moment, entertain the possibility that the woman with whom you share your home, your life, your most intimate moments, might not actually be dead inside. Let's be lucky they're not helping us choose Christmas dinner, too, otherwise it'd down to some sort of liquidised mush or perhaps a big cup of Complan.

Still, that's Mum out the way. What about the rest of the family? Given that you're shacked up with a woman who would accept an Il Divo record without a murmur of objection, you might be feeling like the best of your life has passed. But, hey, you're still young, you're still down with the kids, right? Rather than give your daughter something she'd actually want, why not take the opportunity of the gifting season to try and show her that Daddy still knows what's groovy. Sony BMG can help:



Picture Christmas morning: "Hey, Dad, I thought you were past it, but by buying me a Dido album, you show you're still vaguely aware what the squarer fifteen year-olds were listening to at the end of the last century."

Seriously: getting advice from Sony BMG about what's "in touch"? Isn't that like reading the Daily Mail for tips on charity?

Your daughter, then, can be used to hold off the mid-life crisis at least until fancying Sheridan Smith on the Jonathan Creek special makes you feel a little dirty. But what about your son? What can you get him?

Let's face it, he's just waiting for you to die so he can be the man of the house, so why put any effort into it?



Yeah, buy him one of those records that has topped everybody's best of lists. That's the way to go. After all, since everyone has heard them, loved them, and bought them already, what could possibly go... hmm. Better keep the receipt.

Of course, there may be some people who feel that Sony BMG knows their family better than they do, and if you do read the suggestions and find yourself thinking that, perhaps the most magical gift you could give this year would be some of yourself?

RCA and Velvet Revolver split up

Normally, when a big-name brand leaves a major label, it's the label who comes off worse, but with Velvet Revolver quitting RCA, you suspect that RCA might be breathing a small puff of relief.

Slash insists that it's all friendly, like:

Slash told his official fan site that "while it is true that VR is no longer with RCA, the truth is not as negative as the rumor. The band owed RCA money for a third album which at this time they are unable to produce (no singer). The band and RCA parted amicably. When they are recording the new album, it most likely will be for a new label."

Yes, this is one of those splits where the label holds open the door and offers to phone for a taxi.

Gordon in the morning: Lewis was robbed

Gordon has a tale to bring a tear to the eye: Sony have screwed up the release of Leona Lewis' cover of Snow Patrol, robbing her:

LEONA LEWIS has been robbed of a No1 single by a blunder which has left the singer’s team and fans furious.

The superstar was due to release her version of Run for download this week after she performed it on her return to The X Factor on Saturday.

But due to a bungle at Sony, the song has not been available online and this week’s planned internet release has been shelved.

It's worth bearing this in mind the next time some moist-eyed RIAA type tells you about how all they care about is their artists. Gordon points out this isn't the first time they've messed her about:

When she went up against BEYONCE KNOWLES, BRITNEY SPEARS and CHRISTINA AGUILERA in a Diva Day chart battle, with all four releasing singles on November 3, the download of her track Forgive Me was released a day after her rivals’ songs.

This left her playing catch-up and Forgive Me eventually only managed No5.

Whereas, of course, those extra day's sales would have helped her... well, make it to number four. But it's the principle.

Meanwhile, Pete Doherty has sponsored a football team's kit. Hey - Pete Doherty: he does drugs, doesn't he? Surely there must be something amusing to say about that. Actually, there probably isn't:

Pete has a crack...as striker
[...]
PETE DOHERTY plans to “score” every week — as a striker for a pub footie team.
[...]
Shooting up (front) ... Pete Doherty
[...]
A close pal said: “Pete is a very good footballer who scores again and again.”

I believe the phrase is "you've done that one - ed"

The big question, of course, is has Gordon seen sense and quietly dropped the Timmy Mallet business?

No:

I’ve turned Inspector Clouseau in my search for the famous prop from his 1980s cult TV show Wacaday.

Turning Clouseau? Are you sure that's quite the image you were going for, Gordon?

Clouseau is a bumbling and incompetent police inspector with the French Sûreté, whose investigations are most notably marked with chaos and destruction that he himself largely causes. Immensely clumsy, his various attempts at solving the case frequently lead to misfortune for himself and others; in the 1976 film The Pink Panther Strikes Again, he cannot even interview witnesses to a crime without falling down stairs, getting his hand caught in first a medieval knight's glove and then a vase, knocking a witness senseless, destroying a priceless piano or accidentally shooting another officer in the backside. Clouseau is also not particularly intelligent, and will frequently follow a completely idiotic theory of the crime which often accidentally allows him to solve the case. His sheer incompetence, clumsiness and stupidity combined with the fact that he is sometimes right is enough to eventually transform his direct superior, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, into a homicidal psychopath – to such a degree that Dreyfus even went so far as to construct a doomsday device and threaten to destroy the world in a desperate attempt to kill Clouseau.

Actually, reading the wikipedia entry for Clouseau, I'd have to congratulate you on the similarity.

Sony Music: The losses turn from drain to vortex

The Sony Corporation as a whole is suffering right now - pricing stuff in Yen doesn't do it any favours - but in a sweating company, it's the now wholly-owned music division which looks like the plague victim:

Sony BMG losses ballooned from $8 million to $57 million “due to the timing of new releases combined with the continued decline in the worldwide physical music market not being offset by growth in digital product sales”. Sony reckons buying out Bertelsmann’s half of the JV will cost $600 million.

If you think you can hear Teutonic giggles at the idea that they've been given millions of dollars to sell off twenty-five million bucks' worth of loss, you might just be imagining that.

It's interesting that the division is trying to explain away its performance in ways that don't make sense. Sure, not having any big releases hurts the bottom line, but equally, you're not shelling out for promotional work, manufacturing and what-have-you. Not having a record to sell doesn't instantly turn you into a loss-maker.

And still blaming the decline in physical sales? Has this year's decline really been so huge as to explain away such a massive increase in the amount of cash spunked away for nothing? And given that physical sales have been dropping year-on-year for about a decade now, shouldn't a company have a grip on how to manage the decline?

Sony BMG ceases to be

Sony BMG has vanished, vanished a surely as a fairy circle at daybreak - the Japanese partner has completed purchase of the German half, and has announced it now wishes to be known as Valerie.

Sorry, no - got the paperwork muddled. That was an announcement in a postcard from my Uncle Terence. Actually, Sony's music wing will now be called Sony Music Entertainment Incorporated. It's hoping we'll learn to love it as SMEI, though, which is almost an anagram of Smile.

So, that new name, then: a twisted smile with a bit missing.

Not engaged: Mobile music revenues fall

The hopes of the music industry that selling tunes to people with mobile phones might save their hides are starting to fade as the amount of cash raised from mobile sales starts to fall:

Sony BMG’s EMEA digital VP Ian Henderson was predictably pessimistic: ”If you look at the money we’re making from mobile music, it’s going down - mobile music was a lot bigger proportionally a year or two years ago. But, at the same time, we are really excited about what Nokia and SonyEricsson and Omnifone are doing. There’s a lot of hope but, right now, mobile music is in decline

Part of the trouble - and it's not just music companies who are making this mistake, it's prevalent in virtually any company that has a computer connected to a modem - is the mistaken belief that "mobile" is a platform in itself; as the iPhone and other smartphones have raised the game in displaying the full internet on a handheld device, talking about doing stuff for mobile is starting to look a little like talking about making programmes for car radios or creating shows for portable televisions. The market doesn't want to have a cut-down experience and doesn't thank you for spending time trying to create special stuff for a smaller screen; the sales come when you demonstrate how you can have the full experience on your pocket device.

Sony takes it all

There's not much surprise - although their corporate pages don't mention it anywhere - that Sony has bought out Bertelsmann's stake in Sony BMG.

Well, no surprise that it's happened - it's been expected all week - but you'd have to wonder why Sony is so excited. The analysts line is that this is going to make it easier to integrate Sony music product into other Sony businesses; but we can't imagine that the poorly organised Sony corporate structure is going to make it any easier just because there's three letters gone from the letterhead.

You wonder if the real plan is to make it more-or-less impossible for anyone investigating the original merger of Sony and BMG to enforce a divorce, while allowing Bertelsmann to escape a sector in which it has lost heart.

Oasis stick with Sony BMG

Take advantage of the new music indsutry? Pah! Did John Lennon ever take advantage of changing technology? (erm, actually, yes, come to think of it) Well, Ringo, then. He never did.

Oasis have renewed their deal with Sony BMG.

The real horror? It's a three-album deal. Guaranteeing a dribble of new (or "new") Oasis stuff until about 2014 at their current work-rate.

A figure to consider

When record labels tell you that file-sharing is undermining their business, you might want to wonder how Bertelsmann can therefore be valuing their 50% of Sony-BMG at $1.5billion. Either times are so hard it requires criminal prosecution of their wayward foes, or a major label is worth three billion dollars. Can't be both, can it?

Out of print albums come back to life

Sony BMG and EMI are hooking up with Amazon's CreateSpace service to offer a limited number of burn-on-demand albums that have been out of print for a while. The Listening Post are describing this as "like Cafe Press for music", in that each album will be made as a one-off on customer request.

It's a nice move, although why this wasn't being done a decade ago is one of those mysteries that shareholders in the majors might want to ponder.

Nokia seeks music fans who don't like music

There's a lovely Pearls Before Swine strip where Rat takes revenge on a restaurant who upsets him by attending their All You Can Eat buffet and eating everything on it. The joke being that nobody actually expects someone to turn up for an All You Can Eat service and actually eat everything in sight.

Nokia must be hoping that their customers aren't going to turn out to be like Rat, as it seems they've cut the world's worst deal with Universal and Sony BMG. The handset manufacturer pays a fixed rate to allow its customers to download as much music as they'd like. We've been saying for a few weeks now that sounds like a poor deal for the labels, but what we didn't know was the labels thought so, too. With visions of Rats emptying their libraries, the labels told Nokia it must pay wholesale rates for any downloads beyond a certain number.

That number was ruinously low thirty-five tracks. Yes, if their customers choose to download more than a couple of hefty album's worth of songs, Nokia are going to have to start paying out. And, since it's not costing them anything, chances are their customers will think "I don't really like U2, but I might as well download everything they've ever done." Nokia have left themselves horribly over-exposed. Ed Averdieck, , Managing Director of Nokia Music has been given the chance to seek out new opportunities in the business world while Tommi Mustonen is being forced by his bosses to try and negotiate the company's way out of the mess. That should be easy, Tommi. The RIAA are known for their reasonable behaviour.

The changing of the Sony BMG guard: Clive Davis steps down

Sony BMG has announced that Clive Davis is stepping down as head of BMG and will no longer be in day-to-day charge at RCA.

He's being replaced by Barry Weiss, who until now has been in charge at Zomba and is known for never knowingly spending two bucks when he can get the job done for one.

Of course, no executive ever really disappears, and Sony BMG have found a role by which Clive Davis can continue to draw a salary in a new, vaguely-defined "creative post", which is in no way a forumla for chucking him some money in return for his stepping aside quietly and with no repeat of the balls-up the company made in 2000 when it tried to get shot of him.

It's going to be frustrating for Weiss, trying to trim costs at the label at the same time as the company has to find funds to pay their Denny Crane in his new job.

MySpace is all about the music

There's a couple of interesting pieces on the announcement of MySpace Music, a joint venture between News International, Sony-BMG, Warners and Universal. First up, Hypebot weighs the winners and losers - EMI being a prime loser. It seems that getting a new digital overlord onboard hasn't come a moment too soon for EMI, although it might have been a few moments too late. There's no structural reason why they're not part of the joint venture, which suggests that the team running EMI's digital strategy simply made a bum decision.

As Hypebot points out, they're going to join sooner or later. But not being part of the first wave makes them look like they've not quite got their act together.

More worryingly for EMI, their eventual elevation will be like the UK joining the EU - you can never, ever, quite make the place your own when you turn up when the party has already been running for a few hours. You're always on the backfoot.

Amongst the winners for Hypebot, perhaps surprisingly, is Facebook - the theory being that as this is a non-exclusive deal, there's now a model for them to use and precedents set. It makes Facebook Music a much, much easier sell.

Over on PaidContent talks to Chris DeWolf, MySpace CEO. He offers some reasoning as to why Universal woke up this morning as a company suing MySpace, and goes to bed as a business partner:

We went out and talked to our users, with focus group, polls and determined what was the optimal online music experience, especially in a social environment. Modern music is all about letting users define their own music experience. So we mapped that up, put that together, and then went to the labels, and said: ‘Here where we think the future of music industry should go, and here’s how it should look. Lets do this together.’ We spent the next few months putting together the business plan that made sense for us, labels and the artists. And we got the deal done fairly quickly, in music industry terms. I think they are all thinking the same way, and out of the box. CD sales are down 20 percent over last year and how do they replace it. We showed them a viable model.

We're not sure that a group of people thinking the same way can be thinking "out of the box", but let's not let a mixed metaphor drown out the sound of a penny dropping.

Caveats, though: This isn't the first trumpeting of a major MySpace music initiative: Snocap? MySpace's record label?

And, more to the point, it's not entirely clear this is doing anything more than finding a way to charge for the music that's already all over MySpace like a Geldof girl over a skinny-legged guitarist. It's certainly interesting, but we'll wait until the boom before we'll know if the world has shattered.

Piracy is bad, isn't it, Sony BMG?

Piracy. It's a terrible thing. Unauthorised sharing of music? Rotten. Ruins lives. It's like gouging out the eyes of a shopkeeper, downloading an mp3 track you've not paid for.

We know, the RIAA keeps telling us so.

So, then how come Sony BMG has apparently been caught running unlicensed software in its operations.

Perhaps they could make a video with Britney Spears in to teach them the error of their ways?

Sony BMG forget past, condemn themselves to repeat it

Having caught a cold on their Connect Service, Sony BMG have decided to have another crack at selling their own music online. They've announced half-formed plans for a subscription-based service.

They are even considering going ahead if they don't get the other major labels onboard, apparently:

[SonyBMG CEO] Schmidt-Holtz: “The offer is more attractive, the bigger the music selection. I am not saying that it wouldn’t be interesting if we do it alone. But it would certainly not as exciting."

Oh, yes, a Sony-only service would certainly be interesting, as in "isn't it interesting that three-quarters of all the music you could want isn't available on this subscription, let's try somewhere else."

Bertelsmann thinks the game's up for major labels

Oh, that noise? That's the sound of another chill running through the offices of the RIAA: the German edition of the FT is reporting that Bertelsmann is having serious talks about dumping its share of Sony BMG. No decisions taken as yet, but even considering the idea is a sign that there's not much faith in the label's ability to deliver much in the way of the "organic growth" that new Bertelesmann chief executive Hartmut Ostrowski is demanding. That, though, will make finding a buyer prepared to pay a decent price quite tricky.