General Notes -- Napster
-- EMusic -- mp3.com
-- RealNetworks -- SDMI
(Secure Digital Music Initiative) -- Other 1999
Stories
General
Notes
Viacom
buys CBS for $50 million.
CD-Rs are selling for $1-$2 each.
The "Big Five" record
companies -- Warner Music, Sony Music, Universal Music, BMG and
EMI
Napster -- 1999
November 1 -- New
music software that aims to make finding MP3 files easier may
work a little too well. Some insiders say Napster promotes music
piracy, while others say it raises security concerns. Users see
it altogether differently...
November 16 -- RIAA has announced plans to sue Napster on
the basis on contributory copyright infringement. An RIAA spokeswoman
was quoted as saying, "We spent many days sampling the Napster
community, and found that virtually all file traffic is unauthorized."
A few weeks back, Napster CEO Eileen Richardson had said they
were working with the RIAA in order to work out any problems,
but, according to the RIAA, repeated attempts to contact Napster
for meeting was not taken seriously so they "had no other
choice but litigation."
December 8 -- RIAA sues Napster, claiming that its software
creates a black market for illegal copies of digital music. The
RIAA charges start-up Napster with violating federal and state
laws through "contributory and vicarious copyright infringement,"
because it has created a forum that lets online users trade unauthorized
music files directly from their PCs. "We love the idea of
using technology to build artist communities, but that's not
what Napster is all about," Cary Sherman, senior executive
vice president and general counsel of the RIAA, said in a statement.
"Napster is about facilitating piracy and trying to build
a business on the backs of artists and copyright owners."
EMusic.com -- 1999
July -- posted music from Epitaph Records, including
Bad Religion, The Cramps, NOFX, Pennywise, Rancid, The Descendents,
L7, and The Offspring. They were selling the songs in mp3 format
for $.99 each.
September 17 -- signed
a major deal with BMI that will allow emusic.com access to some
3 million songs.
October 20 -- Supporters and opponents of the mp3 format
trekked to Capitol Hill to square off in a briefing to senators
and congressional aides. Representatives of emusic.com and the
RIAA described digital music technology to the 120-person audience
and spent 90 minutes lobbing criticisms at each other. Hilary
Rosen insisted that SDMI was needed "to prevent the upload
onto the Internet" of pirated songs. MP3, on the other hand,
isn't up to snuff technologically, she said. "The sound
quality isn't as good as it should be."
Rosen told senators, "The
record industry is not afraid of the Internet. We are not afraid
of piracy. And I don't think the MP3 phenomenon has been a terrible
thing."
November 17 -- announced it would acquire privately-held
CDuctive.com, representing over 350 independent labels across
the dance/electronic, indie rock and hip-hop genres.
December 1 -- EMusic.com
is the leading seller of downloadable music and announced it
will acquire Tunes.com, a the Chicago-based operator of RollingStone.com
and DownBeatJazz.com. With a reported 28 million pageviews per
month, Tunes.com is the third most-visited music network on the
Web.
mp3.com -- 1999
April -- Alanis Morissette acquires 329,328
shares of mp3.com stock.
August -- 15,600 CDs sold
October 7 -- Tina Turner adds The Basement Tapes,
a 14-song compilation album.
October 12 -- Sci-fi conspiracy drama "First Wave"
has become the first television series to obtain its source music
exclusively from mp3.com artists...
November 3 -- The New Music Army is launched, a grassroots
marketing and promotion campaign designed to let fans participate
directly in the online music revolution. Through their participation
in NMA, members will assist bands, earn money from CD sales,
and gain access to exclusive content and promotional opportunities.
November 6 -- As part of an ongoing relationship, MP3.com
has released "These are the Thoughts," an exclusive
track written and recorded by Alanis Morissette. The song, which
is included as a studio version on Morissette's upcoming live
MTV Unplugged album, is available solely on MP3.com, along
with two additional songs...
November 8 -- Payback for Playback is launched,
a promotion rewarding MP3.com artists with $200,000 during November.
Artists who have had music available for download on the MP3.com
web site have been accumulating a portion of these funds based
on the popularity of their music. In the first week of the promotion,
calculations show that artists with the most activity on MP3.com
each earned several hundred dollars per day.
December 11 -- 250,000th song upload, "A Coffin"
by artist Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, (D.R.I.).
December 30 -- acquired online ticketing and event planning
service seeUthere.com.
RealNetworks -- 1999
October 23 -- IBM enlists online multi-media company RealNetworks
to help its bid to create a universal standard for sending music
over the Internet.
November 1 -- RealNetworks' RealJukebox software is found
to monitor users' listening habits and some other activities
and report the information and the user's identity back to the
company. A security expert intercepted and examined information
generated from the program, and company executives acknowledged
that RealJukebox gathers information on what users are playing
and recording.
November 2 -- RealNetworks says that it will cease collecting
some personal information from Net music listeners and will disable
a feature in its software that could have been used to track
users. RealNetworks already had quietly changed its privacy policy
this weekend to disclose the controversial practice of monitoring
RealJukebox users through unique identification numbers assigned
to its software.
November 2 -- Web privacy watchdog group Truste says it
will launch an investigation into RealNetworks' data collection
practices.
November 3 -- RealNetworks announced that it was bowing
to privacy concerns over its RealJukebox software and was removing
the data-gathering aspect from the program...
November 4 -- RealNetworks is scheduled to relaunch its
home page on Monday in a bid to become a Web music destination,
according to sources familiar with the plans. The company plans
to move away from its current emphasis on software downloads
to compete more directly with music sites operated by other Web
music companies such as RioPort, EMusic, and MP3.com...
November 10 -- While RealNetworks was celebrating in New
York Monday the re-launch of its Web site and a new version of
the RealPlayer, back at corporate headquarters in Seattle the
firm was being served with a class-action lawsuit over the widely
publicized privacy flaw in its RealJukebox music player. Jeffrey
Wilens, the plaintiff in the suit, accuses Real of invasion of
privacy, trespass, and unfair competition. An attorney who practices
consumer protection law, Wilens alleges that Real violated state
business statutes when it failed to pay RealJukebox users the
market value of the information it captured from their computers...
December 23 -- Yahoo! Broadcast, the portal's streaming
media unit, is moving to drop support for RealNetworks' RealAudio
and move exclusively to Microsoft's Windows Media format, perhaps
as soon as the end of the year.
SDMI (Secure Digital
Music Initiative) -- 1999
October 16 -- "I don't mean to say that the secure
digital music initiative group will disband soon. On the contrary,
it looks like they are ready to redouble their efforts, issue
a bunch more press releases, publish some more specifications
and keep trumpeting their version of the future of online music.
They are more committed than ever to their goal of providing
a secure mechanism for the protection of artists!..."
December 10 -- The leader of the group creating copy-protection
standards for online music said listeners might have to contend
with as many as 20 different digital-music formats, even after
a security standard is adopted.
Other
1999 Stories -- Chronological
October 15 -- Radio
station KIIS-fm opened on webradio.com with webcast, the revolutionary
internet-only "plug-in free" superstation...
October 30 -- The
British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and the RIAA released statements
reinforcing the efforts of the International Federation of Phonographic
Industries (IFPI). The IFPI, along with 1400 record producers
and distributors in 70 countries, released a statement "announcing
actions against hundreds of infringing sites in more than 20
countries worldwide." The IFPI said it will target two groups:
"people who are uploading infringing material onto the Internet
commonly in the MP3 format -- to be downloaded for free or for
payment; and Internet service providers who may be hosting illegal
Web sites and ignoring warning letters informing them that these
sites are infringing copyright." The BPI said it will specifically
target music sites that use pornography as an advertising vehicle,
and claimed that music pirates on the Net are "luring users
to sites using the names of stars, but then are forcing the user
to watch horrific scenes of teenage sex as part of the process
of accessing the illegal music for downloading."
November 6 -- Judge
Thomas Penfield Jackson rules that Microsoft wields monopoly
power in personal computer operating systems.
November 8 -- Shift.com interviews David Bowie -- "I
had a Rio last year! They've been taking my music and bootlegging
my shows for ages. I know all the sites that have my bootlegs
and all my MP3s. Actually, I don't give a flying fuck. I like
the internet and I like the community."
November 17 --
The Beck album, Midnite Vultures, appears on the Internet
a week before its release date.
November 12 -- Seagram's Universal Music Group is planning
to launch a Web site to discover and sign unknown bands...
November 9 -- 71 students at Carnegie Mellon University
had their in-room internet connections cancelled when it was
discovered they were posting copyrighted MP3 files to the school's
network.
November 14 -- In reaction to the RIAA's recent MP3 crackdown,
the University of South Carolina Spartanburg is now monitoring
its network using software that can search for music downloads.
The RIAA recently contacted the school about a student who had
turned his PC into a jukebox and was selling pirated MP3s. Since
the music was copyrighted, the RIAA was reportedly ready to take
the student and the university to court...
November 16 -- To
compete with streaming media leader RealNetworks and the rash
of firms delivering independent music in the popular mp3 format,
Microsoft is putting its stake on standards and partnerships
that protect copyrighted music in the Digital Age...
November 22 -- According to EMI, the Internet is not
a threat to major record labels and, regardless of actual music
sales, merchandise will account for 85 to 90 percent of music
industry revenue. Of the top 20 most frequently trafficked music
sites, six are owned by major record labels.
November 24 -- Platinum Entertainment has become the second
record label as many weeks to dangle recording contracts in front
of artists as a means of promoting an unsigned artist-oriented
web site. The label's new HeardOn.com site, which launches Dec.
15, will offer four recording contracts a year valued at $250,000
each...
November 24 -- College student Jeffrey Gerard Levy will
have to give up his home Internet account and CD burner as punishment
for illegally distributing MP3s and other copyrighted material
online. Those were provisions of the two-year probation the 22-year-old
University of Oregon senior was handed. Levy pleaded guilty in
August, becoming the first person convicted under the 1997 No
Electronic Theft Act, a federal anti-piracy law...
November 25 -- Music Business International predicts
that by 2005:
- the sale of music online will
yield $5.2 billion in revenue
- $635 million will be in downloaded
music.
- digital downloads will account
for 16 percent of total music sales in the US
- brick and mortar retail stores
will remain popular
- global music industry will
total $46 billion
December 2 -- Why aren't online music distributors coughing
up performance and mechanical licensing fees like everybody else?
Simple: They don't have to. Not to independent artists, anyway,
who -- unlike their label-backed counterparts -- often lack both
business savvy and bargaining clout. Eager for exposure at any
cost, many indie artists sign contracts giving away those rights.
Without exception, online music distributors assert that they
are, in fact, giving musicians something of value in exchange
for the music they receive: Exposure.
December 16 -- The Justice Department is investigating music
television network MTV for possible antitrust violations. The
department is looking into long-standing complaints from record
companies that MTV's control over the airing of music videos
harm record companies and limits would-be competitors...
December 23 -- MP3 is the second most popular term on the
Net...
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