Slacker, the personalized radio Web service, said on Thursday it landed deals with major music companies EMI Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, to make their music available on its yet-to-launch Slacker Personal Radio portable digital player. It already has a deal with Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

Like rivals Pandora and last.fm, Slacker’s radio services Slacker lets users personalize what they hear based on their tastes. But the founders aim to go one step further by letting them take favorite stations on the road via a Wi-Fi-enabled digital music player.

I saw a very early prototype of the player and it looked promising. But will everyday consumers get it?

(Photo: Slacker)

It seems like just yesterday that Doug Morris, chief executive of Universal Music Group, was telling us that being a big company in itself was not really that important. That conversation happened back in July 2006 and since then Universal Music, already the world’s largest record company at that time, has become the world’s largest music publisher by buying BMG Music Publishing and has expanded its recorded music division with several U.S. and international label acquisitions.

What about Morris’s point that being big wasn’t important? Well he meant it was not as important as having hit records. And maybe he’s right. Universal hit a record week according to sales data from Nielsen SoundScan and it is indeed thanks to two highly anticipated Universal hit albums from hip hop stars Kanye West and 50 Cent which sold 957,000 and 691,000 respectively. Wider sales were also boosted by country star Kenny Chesney with 387,000 whose label is distributed through Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

Universal said this makes it the first music company in the history of the U.S business to achieve the highest ever current market share of 51 percent breaking its own previous record of 43.5 percent from the week of March 6 2005.

Putting it in simpler terms: Universal sold one in every two albums in the U.S.

Stunning perhaps, but Billboard puts things perspective. Universal might be having a record-breaking week in market share terms, but overall, music sales are still down 9 percent year-on-year, and this week is easily one of the biggest weeks of the year so far for major releases.
(Photo: Kanye West (L), 50 Cent (R), Reuters file)

The heydays of gangbusters cable industry subscriber growth may be long over, exacerbated most recently by a slowdown in the U.S. housing market. But investors shouldn’t be too concerned the same will happen to the operators’ financials, says one of Wall Street leading cable analysts Craig Moffett, of Sanford C. Bernstein.

On a call with investors on Tuesday Moffett said pay-television penetration rates — which Bernstein estimates have reached as high as 83.3 percent of U.S. households last quarter — is unlikely to rise at the same rate from a “dramatic fall-off” in new homes sold or rented.

A minor growth bump in the next year or so from the digital TV switch over in February 2009 can still be expected, but not much else is expected to jumpstart growth in the near term, he said.

It’s not all bad news, however. “In the end, these businesses are highly resilient to macroeconomic shocks,” argues Moffett. Cable and satellite companies are ”incredibly stable installed-base recurring-revenue businesses,” with most users tied to one or two-year contracts.

Moffett also said cable stocks should be viewed less as cyclical stocks than as staples like food companies for instance.

Cable is also not considered a discretionary expenditure for consumers and is not exposed to the cyclical nature of advertising spending and its stock should not be traded as such, Moffett said.

Some analysts are less certain on this point as we reported last week.
(Photo: Reuters / Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett)

Unless you were under a rock, this week belonged to Apple – for better or worse. We knew it would be but thought just this once Steve Jobs and co. would keep it a simple and just roll out a few fancy new iPods and let peace reign.

That wouldn’t be in keeping with Jobs tradition though. As expected, the new iPods were unveiled to instant critical acclaim, including one with WiFi access to iTunes and free wireless iTunes access at Starbucks.

But all that got overshadowed almost immediately after Apple dropped the bomb on an iPhone price cut by a whopping $200 just two months after launch. The move left investors and consumers in two camps: unhappy and confused and most folk seemed to be in both camps.

Apple’s stock took a hit as investors worried about the lower margins Apple will now face with the iPhone. Consumer watchers were concerned Apple had damaged its fawning fan base by cutting prices so soon after launch. Jobs’s quick decision to offer a $100 store credit to early buyers moderately mitigated the frustration.

Meanwhile, NBC Universal, which decided not to re-up with Apple’s iTunes last week, said their TV shows will be available on the soon-to-launch Amazon Unbox digital media store. The fact that it lost a deal with a partner who they claimed would force iTunes to charge $4.99 per show hasn’t affected Apple’s content strategy according to Hollywood trade magazine Variety. Quoting unnamed sources Variety said Apple has proposed to TV companies that they slash retail prices to 99 cents from a current $1.99 per episode. Still wonder why everyone in media was so angry?

If true it could have implications for the music industry. 99 cents for the new Kanye single or episode of “CSI: Miami”?

 Other media and tech news from this week:

• Sony is readying an online video service rive to Apple’s iTunes, seeing video — not music — as its best foot forward in playing a larger role in digital media, according to the Wall Street Journal, which quoted unnamed sources.
• Facebook is to open up the popular social network to public search via engines like Google and Yahoo. The network began notifying members this week they have a choice over whether to keep their listings private to outsiders searching the site.
• After months of rumors of a sale, Time Inc. confirmed it has decided to shutter its Business 2.0 magazine after suffering a decline in advertising revenue. The New York Times said Time turned down offers from the owner of rival magazine Fast Company and other prospective buyers.

(Photo: Reuters)

Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, who took the chief executive role in June, pledged to map a new strategy in the 100 days from July 18. By our reckoning he’s not halfway through that timetable.

But the winds of change are clearly blowing through Yahoo HQ. 

For one thing, the Web media company has decided to overhaul management at its sales team.  Its top sales executive, Gregory Coleman, is leaving the company to “pursue other opportunities,” according to a memo sent to employees by Yahoo President Susan Decker.

Coleman is being replaced by Hilary Schneider, an executive vice president in charge of the Internet media company’s local markets and commerce unit. Schneider’s role will be to head up the newly created “global partner solutions” unit.

Global partner solutions? 

Apparently, the new unit will aim to strike more partnerships with large customers and will be in charge of sales of all advertising formats, including search, corporate brand display, video, mobile, paid listings, etc. But it will also serve customers of all sizes, including marketing to small business customers, according to the internal memo.

The management shift comes as Wall Street is scrutinizing the company to see if can get back on the road of stronger growth across its various sectors of digital marketing and advertising.

But it’s not all tough love for Yahoo. The Wall Street Journal’s influential personal technology columnist Walt Mossberg thinks that Yahoo’s new e-mail might actually be better than Gmail.

We expect more to come from the folks over at Yahoo.

Keep an eye on:

• YouTube sets royaly deal with UK songwriter group MCPS-PRS. According to the FT, the agreement licenses 10 million pieces of music to YouTube.
• Sony unveils U.S. video Walkman and, according to Engadget, the Japanese electronics giant will drop Sony Connect music download service in North America and Europe
• Microsoft to buy group chat firm Parlano.
• LG Electronics launches first premium camera phone
• Monster says millions of users’ data may be stolen

“What we really want to do is in six to 12 months, maybe 18 months, to have every music video ever created up on YouTube,” - Steve Chen, co-founder YouTube in a Reuters interview on August 15 2006.

The music, digital, and old media industries got very excited when Chen shared those words with us almost exactly one year ago.

A month later Doug Morris, Chief Executive of Universal Music Group shot back:

“The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube. We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of million of dollars.”  (speech at an investor conference on September 13 2006)

My how times have changed (at least for some). Shortly after the trading barbs, both sides worked out an agreement, but it was never clear if this would ever amount to anything for content owners. On Thursday, Universal — home to 50 Cent, Amy Winehouse and U2 — declared a small victory.

The world’s largest music group said since it started experimenting with putting its music videos up exactly a year ago Universal now has the most viewed video channel of all with an aggregate of 158 million views.

UMG has overtaken CBS and NBC with its 4,000 music videos up on YouTube. Other major music companies also have their own channels or label channels on YouTube including Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Bros Music.

As for Chen, well, he’s got another four months to get every video ever made on the service.

Tech blogs have been buzzing this week with speculation that Comcast, the No. 1 U.S cable operator, is blocking BitTorrent traffic moving over its broadband network.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing technology used to share files such as music and movies. Some sites use the technology to distribute pirated movies, while big movie studios are also relying on it to sell films. 

Several bloggers, led by TorrentFreak, have claimed that over the past weeks Comcast users have started to see their BitTorrent transfers cut off, download speeds slowed down and an inability to see their downloads.

A Comcast spokesman denied that the company was blocking BitTorrent or any other application. “We don’t block access or throttle speed or traffic to BitTorrent. We’re not traffic cops.”

That denial has been rebuffed by the bloggers who seem convinced that Comcast is abusing its power.

BitTorrent declined comment.
(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle)

All those illegal music downloads don’t just harm the beleagured music industry, they also damage the wider U.S. economy, according to a new report.

Here’s an excerpt from the Lewisville, Texas-based policy thinktank Institute Policy Innovation:

Piracy also causes significant and measurable harm to the upstream suppliers and downstream purchasers who also would have benefited from the sale of legitimate, copyright protected sound recordings. Indeed, the harms that flow from pirate activities produce a cascading effect throughout the economy as a whole. These harms include lost output, lost earnings, lost jobs and lost tax revenues. - The True Cost of Sound Recording Piracy to the U.S. Economy.

As a consequence of global music piracy, the U.S. economy loses $12.5 billion a year and 71,000 jobs, says author Stephen Siwek . By Siwek’s estimates, 26,860 jobs would have been added in the music industry or in downstream retail industries, while 44,200 jobs would have been added as a result in other U.S. industries.

As a result of piracy, U.S. workers lose $2.7 billion in earnings annually costing Uncle Sam $422 million in tax revenues annually.

The report has already been panned by some doubters who believe it was funded by the music industry.

But IPI spokeswoman Erin Fitch says the report was paid for by its “general support funds for Intellectual Property program”. Fitch says the thinktank’s policy is not to disclose its sponsors, though she says IPI, which was founded by former Congressman Dick Armey,  has worked with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and could do so in the future.

When is a test still a test?

That was the question we were forced to ask after Universal started rolling out its range of DRM-free partnerships with nearly every major digital media online retailer in the U.S. so long as your names not Apple or Steve Jobs.

Universal Music Group, which is by far the biggest music company in the world with over a third of all music sales and owner of the biggest songs publisher as well, has told journalists that the roll-out with stellar names like Wal-Mart, Google and Amazon is still just an experiment. The idea is that Universal, home to 50 Cent, Amy Winehouse and the Black Eyed Peas, needs to be sure that dropping copy protection will not cause rampant digital piracy unlike now, when there is er, rampant digital piracy.

Industry analysts dont see this as a test and also dont think dropping DRM will solve the industrys woes. Others tell MediaFile it can only be a matter time before No.2 Sony BMG Music Entertainment and No. 3 Warner Music Group succumb to the call. EMI of course led the way by announcing it was dropping DRM in April.

So online video kings YouTube and rap mogul/thirst-quencher  spokesman 50 Cent are getting into bed to choose the next big hip hop star or if theyre really really good, the next Vitamin Water salesman.

YouTube is inviting up-and-coming artists to submit original videos to http://www.youtube.com/ontherise from Aug. 10-17. The rapper and other judges, including  rapper and part-time Gap model Common, and someone called Polow da Don, will select 20 finalists to be presented to YouTube users on Aug. 29. Users get to vote from then until Sept. 7.

There are top shelf artists on YouTube that havent been heard. This contest will give them a chance to rise to the top of the game, said 50 Cent. Its a shot to claim a spot as an MC. (Old metaphors die hard.)

The winner will be flown to New York to record a single for G-Unit/Interscope Records, a $10,000 gift card from Guitar Center and their video will be featured on the homepage of YouTube.