It's a long old story

Once upon a time, in the music industry, artists were producing their own work to their audience which threw more or less money to the most efficient musician… 

Music for Charity

Labels’ action

Universal Music and the other music Majors are supporting Japan to help the country to back on its feet. The concept of this charity through music is to raise funds in selling a compilation, “Song for Japan”, which is composed of 38 hits and classic tracks. You can buy the album on iTunes since Friday, 25^th March.

Bad results for UMG within Vivendi Group

Universal Music Group is a part of a powerful French company, VIVENDI. It takes 70% of the global turnover in the music industry in North America, where the company is particularly strong.

UMG promotes artists as U2, Amy Winehouse, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Lil Wayne, Jack Johnson, Eminem, Mylène Farmer and Roberto Alagna.

The company has the most important catalogue of registered music and you can find great artists as ABBA, Louis Armstrong, Alain Bashung, James Brown, Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, Frank Sinatra, Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Marley, Nirvana, Luciano Pavarotti, Édith Piaf, Michel Sardou, The Police, The Rolling Stones, Caetano Veloso and Herbert von Karajan.

iTunes vs. Spotify

The service proposed by Spotify  is a kind of revolution in the world of music streaming.

It is an impulse for iTunes because even though it has more users (150 m subscribers in the world), Spotify which has a big advantage: it offers the possibility to share your music on Facebook or Twitter!

Spotify face a big issue. While trying to make contract with EMI in order to launch its service in the US, Apple isn’t scared.

Music brands' strategy to face streaming service

What strategy should adopt the four Majors music brands to face the fast growth of streaming?

The Majors (Universal Music, EMI, Sony and Warner) want to control the Music Industry and help the music to keep value.

To do so, streaming service websites, like Deezer, Spotify, We7, etc, have to pay a tax to use the music catalogue of a music brand. These taxes are high and new startups cannot make a lot of profit from sales.

The Majors also force streaming service websites to pay an expensive price for each title, as a “streaming rate”.

To use the catalogues streaming service websites have to get an authorization and you can imagine it is very hard. It took 2 years to Deezer to get it!

CD or not CD ?

As expected, the music industry sector is moving and rather frail.

We’ve heard last week HMV “is planning to shut 40 HMV stores and 20 Waterstone's bookshops in an effort to cut costs” according to the website thisisfakediy.co.uk.

It is not the only one! “The last US HMV closed five years ago, Tower Records stopped trading soon after, and the last Virgin Megastore finally closed its doors 18 months ago” says the Guardian.