MediaFile

Vevo relaunches with closer Facebook ties

Vevo, the music video company, has relaunched the popular site with a more personalized, social, long-play viewing experience getting closer and further away from that MTV experience at the same time. One of the big changes is that you can now only get the full benefits of Vevo with a Facebook login in, which allows you to create a personalized Facebook playlist and share the videos you’ve watched with your friends on Facebook.

Vevo was the second most watched online video service in the U.S. in January with more than 51.5 million unique visitors watching an average of 62  minutes of video that month according to comScore. It is also YouTube’s number 1 partner.

A reminder that Vevo is owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and the Abu Dhabi Media Company, It also features music videos from EMI and many independent labels but not Warner Music Group, the third largest label owner.

Vevo’s changes are going down similar routes as many other ambitious online services which believe they need to have a significant social presence to grow and keep users involved sharing detailed traffic data voluntarily and adding value for advertisers and other partners.

In some senses you could argue there are ‘no surprises’ from the MTV of the early 21st Century.

Here’s Vevo executive Michael Cerda talking through the changes on Vevo’s blog:

When is an EMI bid not really a bid?

If you’ve covered the music business as long as some of us there are some news cycle days a decade or two apart which seem to merge seamlessly into each other.

For instance EMI, the storied label and publishing home to artists from the Beatles to Coldplay, seems to have permanently been on sale since time began and sometimes you just wish it would be over as a journalist. With each potential transaction there’s the subterfuge and speculation of unnamed deal sources guiding journalists which way the deal might go and this tends to drag on and on for a while.

So you can can imagine our surprise when a press release crossed the wire this afternoon announcing ex-Universal Music and ex-Warner Music executive Jim Caparro has teamed up with Alliance Warburg Capital Management to make an offer to buy all of EMI Group ‘s music and publishing units.

It was almost too good to be true, which meant we had to ask ourselves a few questions:

1) How come Caparro (now chief executive of Yamani Global Equities) hasn’t ever come up in previous discussions with anyone we’ve spoken with  about this process.

2) Since when did serious bidders for in any sizable transaction put out press releases before a deal was done?

3)  Is it us, or is us or is it unusual that bidders for a business as big as EMI would only have registered their website address for Yamani  just in the last month?

TodayInMusic: Warner goes up, up, up on news of race to sell…

Just 48 hours ago we pointed out how Warner Music Group shares had dropped some 11 percent as investors panicked over the extent of the downturn in the business’s fundamentals which were worse-than-expected in the all important Holiday quarter and management gave a gloomy prognosis.  But this is big finance where focusing on fundamentals is for suckers…things turn around pretty quickly and Warner Music is back up.

The World’s No.3 music company crept back up just over 1 percent yesterday as some investors returned and today they’ve returned in their droves and pushed the shares up some 11 percent. Why? Well, they’re likely back because a story in the New York Post rolls out a list of names including many we knew/expected to be among 20 bidders for all or parts of Warner Music, home of acts like R.E.M and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The Post makes the point, as we did earlier this month, that any hopes for a Warner Music sale kind of depend on what happens with EMI Music which was recently taken over Citigroup.  The Post says Citi is ready for the London-based EMI sale sooner rather than later so a race is on.

Either way, management at Warner Music must be happy for now. This baby is likely to yo-yo one way or another on news of the sale process, real and imagined, for the next few weeks.

Watch this space.

TodayInMusic: Warner Music – going down, down, down…?

After posting weak quarterly sales on Tuesday Warner Music’s shares closed down another 1.4 percent on Wednesday meaning its shares have dropped some 11 percent since Monday. As if that wasn’t enough concern, the heavily leveraged No.3 music company was given a heads-up that its debt is about to be downgraded. Ratings agency Moody’s placed ratings for Warner Music Group’s BA3 debt on review for ”possible downgrade” which usually is as good as definite .

Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman tried to put a positive spin on his company’s unimpressive quarterly performance, in an admittedly very tough environment for all music companies.  But even Bronfman, in a conference call with analysts, seemed slightly exasperated with the rate of decline and slowing digital growth, in a quarter which saw rivals grab market share from Warner Music:

“We think the business is extremely competitive all of the time, regardless of the overall environment, which is one of decline, currently. So, we battle for market share, but as I’ve always said, we also battle for margin share. So, we try very hard to be very focused on our margins. Having said that, we had a lot of releases in the December quarter and, by and large, they did not do as well as we expected them to do versus, obviously, other companies.

It’s hard to ascribe that we lost as a result of better releases from other companies, or maybe our releases simply didn’t meet the expectations of their consumers. We don’t know that much that quickly, but we don’t like to see ourselves losing share, and that happened to us in the December quarter. But, as I motioned, we’re very optimistic for the rest of the fiscal year and are seeing progress both in our release schedule and in our actual releases.”

Long-time Warner Music bear BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield today advised his investors to short Warner Music making the point that even Warner Music’s normally ‘steady as she goes’ song publishing unit Warner/Chappell is beginning to suffer from the fallout in recorded music. (Requires registration):

“Following fiscal Q1 results, we are increasingly confident with our WMG fiscal (Sept) 2011 estimates which call for a 10% drop in revenues and a 9% drop in EBITDA (including the annually reoccurring restructuring charges) and believe it could be worse as WMG is clearly struggling to hit their forecasts.”

Maybe Warner Music’s problems can be solved with its long expected combination in some form with EMI? Both companies are effectively up for sale at present. Warner Music has Goldman Sachs exploring the possibility while EMI is owned by Citigroup – for now.

Today In Music: Spotify U.S. not imminent, “not even in Q1″

We hate to hit replay on this one but following New York Post’s story today that European streaming music service Spotify is close to a deal with Sony Music and thereby close to launch we decided to call a few people to confirm.

It appears there’s still some distance between Spotify and the big major labels my sources tell me.

“It’s not happening anytime soon, they may be close to getting deals done, but the labels are still not confident about their business model,” one person said.

Spotify’s model is simply to offer free streaming of music to millions of fans with the view to converting a decent proportion of them to paying customers for the customizable features. You’ve read this elsewhere of course and here that the labels expect Swedish founder Daniel Ek (pictured) and his team to provide a boatload of cash as a way to reduce their risk on doing a deal.

But our sources argue it’s not as simple as a “show me the money” scenario. The conversations have fixated on whether Spotify will ever be able to get its conversion rate above 10 percent since they claim even in its best European markets its around 6 to 7 percent on average.

Then there’s the fact that there are already a fair few streaming subscription services in the U.S. including MOG, Rhapsody, Pandora, Napster and Rdio among others which Spotify would be competing with — unlike back home in Europe where it is by far the market leader.

When you take all that into account the same person says: “It’s unlikely to be this quarter.”

Today In Music: Labels still looking forward to Google Music, Spotify less so

So 2010 was the year that wasn’t as far as a major revolutionary digital music launches were concerned. Label executives have been hoping fervently for some real competition to take on Apple’s iTunes. Not that they don’t want iTunes to do very well but having one company control 70 percent of recorded music sales in your biggest markets like the US and UK is perhaps not best for industry growth.

This has meant that whenever it looks like there could be real competition — remember the hopes for Microsoft’s Zune? There’s always been an overreaction from the labels in the hype department. Remember how Amazon would be a true digital rival? Today it’s market share hovers around the 15 percent mark.

So when Google started talking to labels about a music servicethe labels got very excited. So far we know Google has proposed a download store and a digital music locker which will allow you to access music you own wherever you are. They had hoped to have it up and running by Christmas but dealing with labels takes time. In the meantime Google has been getting its house in order for become more a content middle-man media company by promising to work harder on issues like copyright.This is likely because it would like to have more mainstream content for its Android wireless phones and tablets if it is to be a more complete competitor to Apple’s iTunes/iPhone/iPad/iOS ecosystem.  We’re hearing the labels are still very confident that Google will get something up and running sooner rather than later despite the delays. Google is also still looking for people to run its music service, though negotiations have been led by Android founder and Google VP of engineering Andy Rubin (pictured, above).

The prognosis for a Spotify US launch is far less positive despite plenty of promise from the European darling of digital music, the labels and Spotify are still far apart on reaching a deal. At issue is the usual old thing: money. Basically, Spotify wants to launch with its free to air service with adverts and hope to make money for itself and the labels by converting users to paying for its slick intuitive service. We’re hearing that the labels, who have done similar streaming deals with a whole range of players like Rhapsody, Napster, MoG and Slacker are not keen to bear the brunt of the risk. In other words offer to pay us more upfront and we can talk.

The labels other concern of course is that if they cut Spotify too favorable a deal they run the risk the likes of Apple and Amazon could turn around and demand similar terms since arguably a free to air service undermines the value of downloads.

Privately some executives are critical of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s (pictured, at right) cocksure public promises  it would launch in the US in 2010 even while negotiations were still going on — and not really getting anywhere significant.

Whichever side of the debate you sit one things clear it  might take even longer than thought for Spotify to get its show on the road here in the US.

Today In Music: Sales down in US and UK in 2010, digital barely up

The numbers are in for two of the biggest music markets and unsurprisingly, sales  are down yet again, continuing a trend of the last decade.

US:

According to numbers from Nielsen SoundScan, total album sales, traditionally the heartbeat of the industry, were down 13 percent in the 52 weeks to Jan 2 this year. Over 326 milion albums were sold in all formats including digital versus 374 million a year  ago. Overall music sales, when you include albums, singles, music videos and digital tracks was down 2.5 percent. Music sales were helped a bit by digital track sales holding steady up 1 percent to 1.17 billion units but that’s a far cry from the double digit percentage growth seen in recent years.

The top dog in the label business is still Universal Music Group with a 30.84 percent market share of album sales, followed by Sony Music Entertainment with 27.95 percent, Warner Music Group at 20.01 percent and EMI at 10.18 percent. Others, which represent independents, are at 11.02 percent. Interestingly only Universal and the troubled EMI grew market share slightly this year, EMI likely had a Beatles digital bump as well as some rare US hits like Lady Antebellum (top selling physical album).

Top selling album was rapper Eminem’s Recovery but the top-selling artist overall was pop-country star Taylor Swift (pictured above) . Top selling digital song (which is essentially the top-selling song overall) California Gurls by Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg (4.4 million units sold).

UK

EMI promotes publishing guy to oversee Capitol and Virgin labels in US

(Clarifies earlier post to show McCarroll is not replacing Melrose/Brooks)

EMI, the smallest and most troubled of the four major music companies, took its latest step towards re-focusing under new leader Roger Faxon by appointing the current head of North American creative at EMI Music Publishing  as president of   the Capitol and Virgin label group in North America.

McCarroll is credited with signing artists like John Mellencamp (pictured, right), Death Cab for Cutie, Panic At The Disco and songwriters like Toby Gad who wrote Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “If I Were a Boy” for Beyonce.  Former A&R executives Steven Melrose and Leonard Brooks are leaving the company while EMI Music Publishing’s A&R team will continue to be led by president of North American Creative Jon Platt.

It’s not often that music publishing executives move over to recorded music. In fact, despite the steady revenues and profits from publishing even as CD sales tumble, publishing departments are often treated by label colleagues like a poor stepchild. But as we all know times have changed. Regular revenues and profits will get you a lot of leverage these days at a music company. Through all the trauma of EMI’s restructuring, sale and legal battles, EMI Music Publishing has managed to be a relatively steady ship.  In the United States EMI Publishing manages songs and repertoire for artists including Beyonce, Fergie, Jay-Z, Norah Jones, Pink and Kanye West.

Faxon himself was until very recently CEO of EMI Music Publishing and has been gradually reshaping the wider EMI in his own image since taking over as group CEO in June.

(Photo: Reuters)

Warner’s music comes to Hulu, still not on Vevo

Warner Music has just announced that it has signed up to offer music videos, live shows and interviews of its artists on the popular online video site Hulu.

This is interesting as Warner Music is the only one of the so-called big four major music companies that hasn’t signed up to put its music on Vevo, the premium music video site jointly owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media Company. Vevo is built on the technology platform of YouTube. Warner and YouTube have recently fallen out then settled over licensing terms.

Ultimately, this is about business for Warner. As the only publicly traded music company, Warner Music Group seems keen to occasionally go a different route from its other major label rivals as its executives will argue they have shareholders to answer to.

But are people going to go to Hulu for music videos? That remains to be seen. Warner exec Michael Nash said in the press release that Hulu offers its artists a “customized and flexible approach to marketing and monetizing their music”.

Warner artists like Muse, Jason Mraz and Paramore will be among those to feature in the deal. The news comes after EMI signed up with Hulu in Nov. EMI also signed up put its artists videos on Vevo, though it is not an equity partner.

(Photo: Reuters)

eMusic is in talks with other majors after Sony deal

Long time independent digital music retailer eMusic has finally got its mittens on some major label music after signing a deal with Sony Music Entertainment — and the company says it is still in talks with other majors like Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI to see if it can get more.

From the third quarter eMusic will have catalog from names like Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, Johnny Cash and Outkast. Catalog music here means songs older than two years.

eMusic, which is an independent retailer owned by JDS Capital Management, competes in a tough market led by Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.com MP3. But it has has held its own and even claimed to be the No.2 digital music retailer on some measures in the recent past.

It has managed to gain market share by being the digital retailer of choice for music on independent labels focusing on the grown-up end of the market.

Some see this deal as the latest sign that the major labels are finally getting round to the idea of becoming more flexible and prepared to work with a wider range of retailers on less onerous terms licensing terms.

eMusic, for instance, sells its service as a subscription offering the ability to download 24 tracks for prices starting at $12 a month or 50 cents a song. This compares with the 99 cents a track that iTunes typically charges customers, though it does not tie customers into a monthly commitment.