by Admin on April 9, 2009
Welcome back!
Universal Music Group (UMG) and YouTube announced plans on Thursday to launch a music video website featuring artists from the world’s largest music company.
Universal, a subsidiary of France’s Vivendi, and Google, which owns YouTube, said the website, to be called VEVO, would be launched later this year.
Universal and YouTube also said they had renewed an agreement that allows users of YouTube to use music by Universal artists in user-generated videos on the popular video-sharing website. Details of the agreement were not disclosed.
The two companies said in a statement that they will share advertising revenue on YouTube and VEVO.com, which they described as a “premium online music video hub built for consumers, advertisers and content owners.”
“This content will be exclusively available through VEVO.com and a new VEVO channel through a special VEVO branded embedded player,” they said.
“VEVO will bring the most compelling premium music video content and services to the world’s single largest online video audience,” said Universal chief executive Doug Morris.
“We believe that at launch, VEVO will already have more traffic than any other music video site in the United States and in the world.”
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said the Internet search giant, which will provide the technology for VEVO.com, is “thrilled to be working with UMG in what will surely be an exciting new service for consumers, advertisers, content creators and the music industry at large.”
Music videos are among the most popular content on YouTube, which Google bought for 1.65 billion dollars in October 2006, and Universal’s channel is already the most-watched on the site with more than 3.5 billion views.
Mountain View, California-based Google has been striving for ways to make money on YouTube while avoiding alienating notoriously transient Web users and assuring film and music studios that video copyrights are being respected.
Warner Music Group pulled its videos from YouTube in December after the companies failed to reached agreement on fees but another major label, Sony Music Entertainment, inked a new deal with YouTube this year.
YouTube began blocking certain copyrighted music videos in Britain and Germany earlier this year while new licensing deals are negotiated.
As album sales decline and online piracy bites into their profits, major record labels have been forging new arrangements such as deals with MySpace, Apple’s iTunes and YouTube to generate new revenue streams.
The number of US Internet users watching videos at YouTube hit a new monthly high in January, topping 100 million as it dominated the online video arena, according to comScore.
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by Admin on March 30, 2009
Google Inc on Monday launched free downloads of licensed songs in China, while sharing advertising revenue with major music labels in a market rife with online piracy.
Lee Kai-Fu, president of Google in greater China, said one reason Google lagged in the mainland search market was because it did not offer music downloads, the missing piece to its strategy in a market where it trails leader Baidu.com Inc.
“We are offering free, high quality and legal downloads,” Lee told reporters. “We were missing one piece … we didn’t have music.”
The service offers downloads of some 350,000 songs — from Chinese and foreign artists — a number that will rise to 1.1 million in the coming months, said Gary Chen, chief executive of Google’s partner www.Top100.cn, a Chinese music website co-founded by basketball star Yao Ming.
Music from artists signed by Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI and Universal Music will be available on the service, which Google has no current plans to expand beyond China, said Lee.
“This is the first serious attempt to start (monetizing) the online market in China. I can’t overestimate how important this is,” said Lachie Rutherford, president of Warner Music Asia Pacific and Asia chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Users will be able to search by musical measurements such as the level of “beat” in a song and “instrumentality,” as well as by artist and song name.
IFPI said last year that more than 99 percent of all music files distributed in China are pirated, and the country’s total legitimate music market, at $76 million, accounts for less than 1 percent of global recorded music sales.
The new service will attract users away from illegal download sites because the music and service will be of a higher quality, said Warner’s Rutherford.
Downloads of unlicensed music and videos are rampant in China, the world’s biggest Internet market by number of users.
While Google dominates the global web search market, in China Baidu holds more than 60 percent of the market, more than double Google’s share.
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by Admin on March 10, 2009
Google Inc. said Monday it will block U.K. users from watching music videos on its popular video-sharing site YouTube after negotiations with Britain’s music royalty-collecting body broke down.
Google said it would begin blocking British users starting Monday night. The Internet titan said it knew the move would cause “significant disappointment.”
But it said its hand was forced by PRS for Music, which it said is asking for royalties that would cause Google to lose money every time a video was played on YouTube.
“Our previous license from PRS for Music has expired, and we’ve been unable so far to come to an agreement to renew it on terms that are economically sustainable for us,” Google said in a statement. Until a solution is found, it added, “we will be blocking premium music videos in the UK that have been supplied or claimed by record labels.”
PRS for Music, which collects money on behalf of writers and publishers worldwide, said it was outraged by Google’s move.
“Google has told us they are taking this step because they wish to pay significantly less than at present to the writers of the music on which their service relies, despite the massive increase in YouTube viewing,” the group said in a statement.
Neither group revealed how much money is at stake in their negotiations.
YouTube has become an increasingly popular destination for record labels squeezed by declining sales for compact discs. The Web site has deals with three of the four major record labels but some rights-holders have balked at their cut of the advertising revenue.
In December, Warner Music pulled all of its music from YouTube, saying the payments it received did not fairly compensate the label or its artists and songwriters.
It was not clear how long the music videos would stay blocked. Both PRS for Music and Google said they hoped their dispute could be resolved quickly.
The video Leona Lewis’s “Bleeding Love,” licensed by Sony BMG Music Entertainment U.K. Ltd., which has garnered more than 83 million hits, was still visible from the U.K. late Monday.
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by Admin on November 17, 2008
Many methods of copy music from your iPod to the computer involve programs such as PodUtil. This method is simple and there are no outside programs to use.
See Step-to-Step Guide:
1. Plug your iPod in and wait for the computer to recognize it.
2. Open up ‘My Computer’ and under ‘Devices With Removable Storage’, double click and open apple iPod.
3. Click on ‘Tools’ at the top of the window and drag down to ‘Folder Options’.
4. Under the ‘View’ tab, find the subfolder called ‘Hidden files and folders’.
5. Select the option ‘Show hidden files and folders’.
6. Click ‘OK’.
7. Double click on the newly shown ‘iPod_Control’ folder and open up the folder called ‘Music’. These folders are named randomly and your music is impossible to find individually.
8. Select all the folders and copy them to a new folder on your hard drive. You are now done with your iPod. Eject it if you wish.
9. Open up iTunes. In the new folder you created, open up each individual folder labeled ‘F##’ select all the music files in the folder and drag them into your library in iTunes. iTunes will already have the tags stored for these songs so renaming them should not be an issue.
10. Alternatively, Press F3 to enter search, and enter “*.mp3″ (no quotes) to find all the MP3 files at once, then press CTRL+A to select all the found files then copy them to a folder on your computer. This way all the music files are in the same folder which makes it far more simple to import them into iTunes. (If any of your files are in MPEG4 format, you can search for “*.m*” to generate a list of all your songs.) (see Warning below)
Tips
* You can’t drag a whole folder into iTunes. It will not recognize the file tags and you will not know which song is which.
* The detailed folder view in Windows XP will read the tags off of the mp3s and display the proper Artist, Title, and Album information. The columns should show up by default, but can be added if they do not. This may work for other versions of Windows (someone please verify).
* FYI: One more thing to note, If you have bought songs from itunes and the computer you are storing the songs on is not the computer you have purchased the songs from they will be copied but may not be played because of AAC format. This format is protected and may not be played on and other computer unless purchasing a licence which is the same price as the song in the first place
Warnings
If you follow the step #10, to copy all the songs at once, you may run into trouble if multiple songs in different ‘F##’ folders have been given the same random name. For example, you may have several different songs given the same name ‘01Track01.m4a’. When you try to copy them all to the same new folder on your computer, you will either not get all the songs from your iPod, or you will have to manually copy over all the duplicate named ones into separate folders, which is very time-consuming. It may turn out to be faster to use the first method above (copying each F## folder to iTunes separately).
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