- Google Tool to Help News Media Charge for Content
- Apple’s iPod/iTunes Expand the Platform
- A La Carte Download Market Develops Anorexia
- Virgin Media Challenges A La Carte Menu With Buffet Music Service
- Terry McBride Nettwerks At New Yoga Centre
- Ritchie Yorke Reflects: Toronto’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival, 40 Years On
- Paddy McAloon: The Return of Prefab Sprout’s Elusive Genius
- Speech DeBelle Says Stealing Tunes OK, Just Not Hers
- RIP: Canadian Singer Stephanie Taylor
- 100 Fab Beatles Facts
- Elise Estrada’s New Stretch-Rolls Royce Video
- Warner Music UK Signs 3 Men In Uniform
- Broadcasting: Is iPod FM Tagging Good For Radio?
GOOGLE PAYMENTS- New York Times: Google is planning to roll out a system of micropayments within the next year and hopes that newspapers will use it as they look for new ways to charge users for their content.
The revelation was made in a document that Google sent to the Newspaper Association of America in response to a request for paid-content proposals that the association sent to several technology companies.
The Google document, which was first publicized by the Nieman Journalism Lab, indicates that the micropayment system will be an extension of Google Checkout, a payment system that Google rolled out in 2006 and positioned as a competitor to eBay’s PayPal service, the leading system for online payments.
“While currently in the early planning stages, micropayments will be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” Google wrote.
“The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time.”
Ten other companies responded to the association’s request, including Microsoft, I.B.M. and Oracle. But Google’s plans are particularly interesting because of the delicate relationship between the newspaper industry and the company.
iTUNES EXPANDS ITS (CASH) REGISTER – IT ProPortal: Apple has managed to sprinkle a few intriguing features 
on its media platform, iTunes 9, which lead us to believe that the Cupertino-based company isn’t ignoring the threat presented by Spotify, Rhapsody or other web-based streaming services.
The 89MB download has introduced the ability for “avid social networkers” to market their favourite music, film and TV programmes on Facebook and Twitter from within the iTunes application.
In addition, Genius Mixes allows the user to create their own personalised ad-free radio channels based on the music they have in their iTunes library. This is similar to Scrobbling, the automatic track logging system implemented by Last.fm.
Then there’s the fact that you can now share the content you “own” across multiple computers in your house (or domain).
These three features alone almost certainly means that Apple may be looking at turning iTunes into a Spotify-like service in a near future together with enhanced social networking capability with iTunes users being able to join groups and fandom.
But this is not far we guess since iTunes LP and iTunes Extras could well be the perfect lure to create an ecosystem, similar to a social networking website, that allows Apple to sell its songs, fans to congregate online and within a controlled environment be it at their desktop, laptop or mobile devices.
Apple could also potentially launch its own version of Spotify (supported by advertising) and starting to sell virtual tickets to online gigs.
DOWNLOAD ANOREXIA: New data strongly suggests variable pricing on hit songs is driving down sales, even if the margin for the record labels has increased. Since February, US weekly sales of tracks have dropped from the 25 million-per-week range to 21-22 million in July and 20-21 million in August. The downward spiral can be blamed many things but the timeframe parallels the introduction of variable pricing and $1.29 at iTunes for most hit songs.
VIRGIN MEDIA: virgin Media is planning to shake up the music business with an all you can eat downloads service 
that is DRM-free, allows subscribers to keep the tracks as long as they wish and play them on any platform for a single monthly fee.
The service, as yet unnamed, is set to launch sometime before the end of the year.Virgin has not announced pricing but is said to be targeting a figure in line with purchasing a couple of albums a month. A cheaper plan with a limited number of downloads may also be offered for those with less musical ambition.
The Guardian reports that Universal Music is on board with the plan — but it is unclear whether it will be available only in the UK, in all of Europe, or in the U.S. as well.
The announcement follows a similar announcement made my media company BSkyB last year.
So far the service has yet to launch, largely because whipping up an accord from the Big Four labels is proving difficult. Universal is on-board with Virgin, but Sony, EMI and Warner aren’t clamouring to sign-on, fearing the buffet-pricing will cannibalize existing digital music sales.
Meantime, sales of iPods are slowing. It remains to be seen whether the new offerings announced yesterday will stimulate the market, but evidence suggests replacements are boosting Apple sales more than a cache of new
customers.
Twin this information with a real decline in online track sales (see separate story) and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the buffet is a more popular and profitable than an a la carte menu.
TERRY TAKES TOP BILLING: Terry McBride’s Nettwerk Music Group (NMG) seems to garner more news headlines 
about nascent business models, the joys of yoga exercise and defections from the company’s management roster than it does about the artists under its verigated corporate umbrella.
The latest headline to cross our screen plugs RoyaltyShare, the digital sales and mechanical and artist royalty processing software, which NMG has adopted/endorsed.
Today, Terry is in hometown Vancouver where he is a guest-speaker s at the Grand Opening of Flow Wellness Centre, Canada’s largest yoga and wellness centre. We wish him joy to the world.
40 YEAR REVIVAL: The 40th anniversary of the Toronto Rock `n’ Roll Revival is coming up this Sunday. Scribe Ritchie Yorke has written a detailed memoir set to run in the Toronto Globe & Mail either Friday (tomorrow) or Saturday. “I had a lot to do with making the Lennon appearance happen,” author/promoter Yorke tells us. Of course, the Globe was were Yorke penned a history book worth of feature articles about Stax, Atlantic Records, Muscle Shoals, Apple Corp., and the rise of Canada’s music industry several decades back. College radio station CIUT 89.5FM is also doing an in depth broadcast about the event on Sunday. Big history, big stuff!
AC/DC BACK ON TRACK: Ticketmaster CEO Irvin Azoff has announced that Van Halen would be touring in 2010. It was mentioned during Azoff’s Q&A period during a Bank of America Merrill Lynch media, communications and entertainment conference in California, It’s unknown whether the tour will be in support of Guitar Hero: Van Halen (due December 22), a new album or both.
ELVIS COSTELLO received the Outstanding Achievement Award in recognition of his long career at the GQ Men of the Year Awards in London.
RIP: Stephanie Taylor, part of The Girlfriends, an all girl group that performed weekly on The Bobby Vinton Show that aired weekly on CBC TV. She was then married to Eric Robertson, the producer of many Roger Williams albums. She also toured with Hagood Hardy as a member of The Montage, and had a prolific career doing studio work and commercials. — Thanks to Al Mair for this.
FREE SPEECH – Daily Record : Mercury prize winner Speech Debelle has urged fans to download music illegally – as long as they pay for hers.
The cocky rapper, real name Corynne Elliot, walked off with a £20,000 cash prize as well as the prestigious honour. She appeared to miss the irony of pocketing a hefty cheque from the music industry as she encouraged file-sharers to rip off other artists.
She said: “There is a recession. People are angry and don’t have the money to spend on rubbish.
“They should download music for free when it is rubbish. A lot of music sounds the same all day on the radio. Now people will hear my album and know you can make music that’s different. The sincerity has shone through.”
100 FAB BEATLES FACTS - NME: A January 1963 NME review described The Beatles’ second single, ‘Please Please Me’ as “a really enjoyable platter, full of beat, vigour and vitality – and what’s more, it’s different.” - 99 more here
SIMON COWELL, never shy of a headline-baiting quote, says The Beatles would have failed the auditions for The X Factor. The pop mogul said he would have turned down the Fab Four – unless they dropped drummer Ringo Starr.
BRING ON THE FUNK - Globe & Mail: ‘Oh, we have a very swinging company, working hard from day to day,” 
Smokey Robinson cheerfully sang in 1961, “Nowhere will you find more unity than at Hitsville, USA.”
It wasn’t a hit, but The Motown Company Song portrayed a communal environment at the Detroit-based pop-music factory that, true to its flipside capitalistic motivations, had its first chart success in 1959 with Money (That’s What I Want) , a syncopated and blatant R&B demand for cash written by Motown founder Berry Gordy, Jr. Money (sung by Barrett Strong; later famously covered by the Beatles) was released on the Tamla label, a precursor to the Motown company that churned out hit after hit in the 1960s.
Most of those tunes – radio-friendly rhythm and blues that told of heartbreak and romance three minutes at a time – featured the backbeat of the Funk Brothers, the house band of 13 or so musicians that included guitarist Eddie Willis (that’s his signature lick at the beginning of Stevie Wonder’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered ) and bassist Bob Babbitt (you know him from the menacing bass line of the Temptations’ Ball of Confusion).
On the occasion of Motown’s 50th anniversary and an appearance by the surviving members of the Funk Brothers at this weekend’s Southside Shuffle in Port Credit, Ont., Willis and Babbitt recall the label’s glory days and the people who made the studio at Motor City’s 2648 West Grand Boulevard grand:
GLAM POP: Filipino-born, Vancouver-based pop singer Elise Estrada stretches cred in her the new video hyping her 
latest single, One Last Time, with The Beat 94.5 FM DJ Jonny Staub playing the love interest in this groanmatic epic. The gloss and glamour vid opens with her pouting in the back of a stretch Rolls Royce limo, then pans to her exiting and signing autographs for a posse of fans. It’s pure 80s excess and E.Entertainment vapid, but presumably her record company, which footed the bill, and the 20-something’s manager knows what her core audience wants.
Much On Demand debuted the new Estrada video which was shot over a weekend using Bryan Adams’ recording studio in Gastown, and a multi million dollar Penthouse in English Bay as set locations.
One Last Time is Elise Estrada’s 7th single off her debut album, with the other 6 reaching Top 10 status and Two number One Hits!
Beginning August 28, Estrada will also be hosting a brand new TV show on Much Music called Love Court.W atch the video here
MUSIC CAFE - Variety: Chip Sutherland, who manages Canadian artists Feist and Sloan and is financing the lion’s
share of the Music Cafe this year, believes the venue should not just exist for music supervisors but all industry creatives. He says it’s often the filmmakers themselves who make key music decisions on films.
3 AMIGOS - The Sun: Fed up with pop charts full of weedy boy bands? Well, here’s a trio of real men aiming for No1.
All three are serving soldiers who have witnessed the horrors of war first-hand, from Afghanistan to the Gulf.
And now Trooper Ryan Idzi, Sergeant Major Gary Chilton and Sergeant Richie Maddocks – who are known simply as The Soldiers – have signed a recording deal with Warner Records with the album debut coming out this October.
PREFAB SPROUT - The Independent: Paddy McAloon remembers it all too well: 23 January 2006, when the maverick genius behind Prefab Sprout was last able to sing his own songs. So how, asks Craig McLean, has he managed to create a new album in spite of a hearing disorder that has made his life a ‘nightmare’?
Paddy McAloon, pop’s great lost voice, is leaning forward, singing softly to me. The song is a duet he wrote with Barbra Streisand in mind. “Barbra, do you think that we can change the world with music?/ If a sane man overheard us he’d shout ‘Two straitjackets please’/ Because all we’ve got is music/ It’s a wonderful ambition/ But our only ammunition/ Is a bunch of do-re-mis…”
The singer and songwriter who is Prefab Sprout pauses, then sings the lines he imagined Streisand singing back to him.
“Patrick, you’re forgetting that the heart responds to music/ That the heart responds to music is an undisputed fact/ So let’s change the world with music/ This is not a foolish notion/ It’s not logic but emotion/ That compels the heart to act…”
Now, the chorus. “Let’s change the world with music/ Let’s be a little naïve/ Let’s change the world into something they’ll want when we leave…”
McAloon, 52, sits back in his chair in the drowsy lounge of a hotel in the centre of Durham. “So,” he says in his lilting Geordie accent, softly clapping together his white- glove-clad hands (he has eczema, he explains), the lyrical sentiment is “kinda [that of] a Coca-Cola commercial, but with sincerity. As in, this is a silly thing and it could never ever happen in a billion years. But everyone likes to think they can make some sort of difference.”
BROADCASTING: CTV has asked the Commission to alter CP24’s condition of license so it can do more “general entertainment and human interest” programming.
The Commission denies an application to amend the broadcasting licence for the national English-language specialty television service known as Slice in order to amend conditions of licence relating to levels of Canadian content and Canadian programming expenditures.
The Abbotsford (BC) Heat of the American Hockey League is pleased to announce a broadcast partnership with Rogers Broadcasting and Country 107.1 FM. With this agreement, the Abbotsford Heat will have all of their hockey games, home and away, broadcast live on Country 107.1 FM. In addition, Roger’s Broadcasting and their affiliate stations; including Country 107.1, STAR 98.3 FM and News1130, will partner with the Abbotsford Heat on promotions, marketing and online platforms.
iPOD FM – Blogging Nick Piggott: Of course, everyone’s excited about Apple including radio in one of their devices for 
the first time. That’s clearly good news. It would be amazing news if it was a DAB Radio in Europe, and an HD Radio in the States, but let’s work on that one. Baby steps.
Let’s assume that Apple don’t incorporate functionality into their devices unless they think users are going to go “wow – cool”. As Mark Ramsay says, Apple didn’t just throw an FM tuner in there; they “enhanced radio”, so it includes pause/rewind and tagging.
Adding this kind of functionality costs real money (in material and engineering time), so we should be pleased that Apple see that as a worthwhile investment. Yes, Radio is still cool, and still valued even by the cool kids who buy Apple iPod Nanos. This is a “radio” that 15-24s will love to have.
James explains a bit about how the existing Apple iTunes Tagging works. It’s a system designed to do one very specific job, for one specific group of stations and listeners.
It transmits Apple iTunes Catalogue IDs in spare RDS ODA (Data) groups, using a form of encryption (discuss…). The radio station incorporates the iTunes IDs into their FM RDS transmission, the iPod Nano receives/decodes this, and when you hit “Tag” it stores the ID/Artist/Title in memory. When you sync up your Nano with iTunes, iTunes converts that into proper store links, and offers you the downloads. It works. Listeners can tag songs on the radio, and buy them in iTunes. A similar service is also available on HD Radio, and was launched earlier, IIRC.
So what’s not to like. Isn’t this the perfect demonstration of innovative revenue generation in a digital media world?
Maybe, but I don’t think it was initially designed with the listener in mind. It looks like a system designed to turn radio listeners into Apple iTunes customers. There’s nothing wrong with that, incidentally. The rather depressed radio business got a bigkick out of being able to announce a tie-up with Apple, who are highly regarded. There’s significant kudos is being allowed to play with the smartest boys on the block. James has pointed out the weaknesses in the existing system. It doesn’t scale terribly well (although HD appear to be also transmitting different tagging information to support Microsoft’s new Zune HD), and it only works for iTunes and material that’s in iTunes.
There another weakness in the system, in my opinion.
If you look at how the meta-data moves around, it goes in one direction only. From the radio station, via FM, the Nano, iTunes and to Apple. After the radio station has splurged the meta-data out on the broadcast platform, it has no control or visibility of it from that point onwards. There has to be a contractual relationship between Apple and each Radio Station for Apple to pass information about the songs sold back to the radio station. I have no idea how detailed that information is. Does it list every transaction, by every device, by time of day? Does it report transactions, or tagging events, or both? Or do they just get a $ total each month and a cheque for the affiliate fees?
