Thursday’s Music 2.0 Briefing: Online Owes $100M, HypeMachine Worth $10M & Much More
HYPEBOT FEATURES:
> Online music services could have to pay songwriters as much as $100 million in royalties according to a court ruling. (Reuters)
> Rumors have Viacom trying to buy music blog aggregator Hype Machine for $10M. (ValleyWag) Rupert, I’m over here!
> Radiohead says the pay what you want album release experiment was a one off. (Reuters)
> Virgin Mobile has teamed with Burger King for a $1 ringtone promotion.
> An ad hoc group called Project Unfound Artist is using crowd sourcing to find artists with unclaimed royalties sitting with SoundExchange. (P2Pnet)
> A judge has rejected the "because its available to share, it must be illegal" theory that the RIAA has been using to sue thousands. (News.com)
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Of course, any artists who qualify but do not directly figure into the Web 2.0 revenue pie must be concerned and use whatever means they have to garner their share. That being said, any artists, especially unknown and emerging artists, except those signed to restrictive label deals, should forget about chasing dollars that are hardly forthcoming and, even when they are, will be distributed in an as yet to be determined fashion. Instead of wasting time on this unprofitable course of action, artists should be proactively seeking whatever means possible to tame the digital music frontier and dominate its future revenue streams in their favor. Record companies only have the means of monetary control if artists let them. Artists need to pick their battles. The one they need to win is that over the means of production, marketing and monetization of their music in the digital space. The discovery apparatus for new, unknown, mainstream artists is an evolving process still undefined on the Internet. It is fragmented and spread over a plethora of websites. Artists must focus their efforts into one website where it is possible to influence the musical tastes of a large number of people in a short period of time and build a critical mass of people great enough to break them into the mainstream. In this manner, independent and unsigned artists will not only make more money but control their own destiny.