Next Big Sound (a/o May 16th):
Cricket Wireless, owner of Muve Music, has just partnered with the CW to offer promotional support for an upcoming musical competition series called The Next. Under the agreement, contestants on the show choose songs to perform from Muve's catalog of music, and studio-recorded versions of the renditions will be available for download on Muve after the
shows. The Next premieres this Thursday.
Cricket isn't the only wireless service provider with the idea that smartphones are becoming the new hub of people's music lives. Livewire Mobile, a mobile entertainment company that provides a diverse range of products from games to e-books, has just announced a partnership with Canadian operator Public Mobile. The group is offering an unlimited music service called Siren, available across all Android devices. Siren will give users unlimited song and album downloads at a flat-rate plan. That bears similarity to Muve's very mobile-focused approach.
If you're anywhere near Portland later this month, run to the Bandwidth Conference. Among the presenters are Ed Ulbrich of the Academy Award-winning studio Digital Domain, which created the holographic Tupac and is now working on virtual Elvis and other artists. The action happens August 27th and 28th, more at bandwidthconference.com.
Here's a question: Shazam has a monstrous 5 billion tags, according to company. But how many of those are leading to actual purchases? The company has trotted out some fudgy numbers in the past; this time, they've been reluctant to answer the question at all. Stay tuned.
In other news, an Englishman, Anton Vickerman, is being convicted for fraud for allegedly operating a website that links to illegally-hosted TV shows and movies. Vickerman, who reportedly pulled $392,000 from SurfTheChannel, has been sentenced to four years in prison. Some are concerned that the prosecution under the charge of fraud, rather than of copyright infringement, is unfitting, considering the former warrants twice the maximum prison time as the latter. In any case, this is certainly a statement from the MPAA, who teamed up with the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) to bring on the case. The Guardian noted, '[Vickerman] is the first British man to be jailed in the UK for a website that linked to illegal copies of films and TV shows.'
Also, VEVO just introduced its music video platform and mobile apps to Brazil. Brazilians already had access to VEVO’s videos through syndication with YouTube, but VEVO is looking to expand its mobile platform. To further support the expansion, VEVO is tapping a number of partnerships, including Xbox, Pepsi, Samsung, and Axe.
The High Court of Germany has ruled that German ISPs must deliver to rights holders the names and addresses of anyone connected to an IP address that is used for illegal content sharing. This ruling comes as a result of a case between music distribution company Naidoo Records and Deutsche Telekom. Naidoo noticed that a dynamic IP address (one that is constantly changing, to avoid being linked to one user) was illegally offering one of its artist's songs, and demanded that Deutsche provide information on the customer using the address. CIO reports that the decision overturns two preceding cases which said that ISPs only had to provide information the infringement was on a commercial scale.
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