Vivendi is still the corporate parent of Universal Music Group (UMG). Edgar Bronfman, Jr.'s continued position there would have been perceived as a conflict of interest in pursuing his new interest in Warner Music. Both UMG and WMG are among the…
search
Bronfmans bid Vivendi adieu: On Wednesday, December 3, Edgar M. Bronfman and his son Edgar Bronfman, Jr. officially resigned from Vivendi Universal's board of directors. The move followed an announcement by Time Warner that it would accept a $2.6 billion offer for its Warner Music Group (WMG) from an investment group led by the younger Bronfman.
Only a month after being scrutinized by the Senate Commerce Committee, Clear Channel Communications may have to explain itself to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
On Friday, February 21, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee told members of the recording industry that he plans to launch an investigation into alleged "payola-like practices" by big radio groups that also own concert venues. Clear Channel, the nation's number one radio broadcaster with over 1200 stations, also owns Clear Channel Entertainment, the number one concert promoter. Some recording artists have said that the…
Widely assumed to be at death's door, streaming-audio site MP3.com may be on the rebound after reaching a preliminary agreement October 19 to license more than one million songs from the National Music Publishers' Association, Inc. (NMPA) and the organization's primary subsidiary, the Harry Fox Agency, Inc. (HFA). Individual music publishers represented by the Fox Agency must approve the agreement before it can take effect.
San Diego–based MP3.com built a massive network of subscribers through a simple service that allowed them to upload tracks from favorite CDs onto central server…
Several rooms at the Alexis Park featured SACD front ends, but as we moved around the floor of the main LV Convention Center, we heard and saw a lot more about DVD-Audio than SACD. Denon showed their DVD-3300 DVD-A/V player, which began shipping a few months back for $1199. No new models were on the floor, but the Denon rep suggested that something new will be appearing later this year. Pioneer was promising a universal DVD-A/V/SACD/CD machine in the future, and Yamaha was also showing a new DVD-Audio machine, the DVDS1200, in their booth.
Panasonic had the most aggressive DVD-Audio…
In October 2000, during Napster's prolonged courtroom agony, Bertelsmann AG alienated fellow music industry plaintiffs by investing $50 million in a strategic partnership with the file-sharing upstart. At the time, Bertelsmann hoped to leverage Napster's technical expertise and fame to give Bertelsmann Music Group the inside track with Internet music distribution.
That strategy may now be backfiring in Bertelsmann's face. Napster is gone and forgotten, and the German media conglomerate is defending itself in a $17 billion copyright infringement suit brought by a group of songwriters and…
Last Friday, October 23, Garden City, NY---based CDKnet announced that Atlantic Recording Corporation had signed a licensing agreement to use the company’s CDT technology for enhancing the content of its music CDs. CDKnet’s audio and video streaming technology embeds links on music CDs to sites on the World Wide Web, such as Atlantic’s own Metrotainment site. The first musical release under this agreement will be "A Random Act of Senseless Kindness," a single by South SixtyFive, a new group on the Atlantic label.
Eventually, millions of customers will be accommodated by CDKnet’s high-…
Imagine yourself a recording artist just signed to a contract with one of Sony Music's record labels. You put out a couple of albums and start a website using your own name (say, for example, www.bobdylan.com). But the music wind starts blowing in a different direction, your contract comes up for renewal, and, either through your manager's insistence or that of one of Sony's big cheeses, you decide to leave the label and sign with someone else.
There's just one problem: Your contract says you can't take your website with you. Sony owns it for the rest of your life (and, probably, beyond…
For 14 years now, Stereophile has recognized the components that have proved capable of giving maximal musical pleasure with its "Products of the Year." Based on a vote by the magazine's reviewers and editors, the 2005 winners were announced in the December 2005 issue and the awards were presented by Stereophile editor John Atkinson at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held January 4–8 in Las Vegas.
Winner of the Amplification Component Award for 2005 and one of the two Joint Overall Winners, the DarTZeel NHB-108 Model One power amplifier impressed both Wes…
For the music industry, copyright and royalty litigation is like an endless war fought on many fronts. During early November, as four of the industry's "Big Five" continued their pursuit of the file-sharing service Napster, a parallel trial in US Federal Court in New York against music archiving-and-accessing site MP3.com by Universal Music Group entered its penalty phase, that segment of the proceeding in which aggrieved plaintiffs seek to extract money from guilty defendants. Other plaintiffs in the trial—Sony Music Entertainment, BMG, Warner Music, and EMI—have all settled with the San…
On August 18, XM Radio invited the press to Manhattan's Rainbow Room to announce its latest product offerings. The locale was not unintentional, according to Chance Patterson, XM's vice president for programming operations, "This building [30 Rockefeller Plaza, headquarters of NBC] was at the center of radio's first flowering, and XM represents radio's future."
XM senior vice president of retail and marketing operations Dan Murphy announced that the satellite broadcaster now boasts 2.1 million subscribers and looks to pass the 3 million mark by year's end. This growth will come out of a two…