After rumors emerged last month, Universal Music Group and Google subsidiary YouTube have made it official: the two companies are working together to launch a new premium music video Web site dubbed Vevo. Vevo will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Universal, and will be supported through advertising revenue that will be split between the two companies. The hope is that by building a premium site, top music and entertainment brands will be more comfortable distributing material through Vevo than they are in the Wild-West environment of YouTube…and, of course, that Vevo will be able to charge premium ad rates for the site.
Tag Archive: Doug Morris
DOJ Launches Inquiry into Total Music
The U.S. Department of Justice has reportedly launched a preliminary investigation into “Total Music,” an idea originally floated in October of last year by Universal Music president Doug Morris. The basic idea: build the cost of subscribing to unlimited digital music for a fixed period of time into the cost of hardware players. Under Total Music, hardware makers would essentially by subsidizing the cost of subscribing to the music service; Universal has been talking about a subscription fee in the range of $5 a month, which would add about $90 to the cost of a music player expected to be in use for 18 months. Universal has been talking with other music labels in an effort to get them to back the idea.
DualDisc Format To Launch In October
“DualDisc is a two-sided disc made up of a CD on one side and a DVD on the other. In addition to a full album on the CD side, the DVD side provides the full album in enhanced sound (such as Surround Sound and/or DVD-Audio or LPCM stereo), and also includes a wide range of special features, such as music videos, interviews, photo galleries, web links, concert footage and lyrics.
Napster 2.0 makes tracks
Premium members have downloaded or streamed over 2 million tracks during the first week of the new service, and the Company estimates that it will have in excess of 80,000 Premium subscribers by theend of the year.
Demonstrating the broad appeal of the “all access” nature of its Premium service, Napster and Penn State University today announced that Penn State will purchase access to Napster’s Premium service for its students. Napster will add thousands of paid subscribers, and Penn State becomes the first university in the nation to offer their students legal access to the world’s largest library of digital music via the Napster Premium service. Penn State plans to roll out access to Napster to its students in January and plans to extend access to the music service to members of its alumni association in the future. Penn State boasts the largest alumni association in the country with nearly 150,000 dues-paying members.
iTunes music store hits 5 million downloads
In addition, over 46 percent of the songs have been purchased as albums, and over 80 percent of the over 200,000 songs available on the online store have been purchased at least once. Applealso announced that it will ship its one millionth iPodâ„¢ this week. Apple introduced the third generation of its ultra-portable digital music player in April, and it has become a huge hit with musiclovers worldwide.
“The iTunes Music Store is changing the way people buy music,†said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Selling five million songs in the first eight weeks has far surpassed our expectations, and clearly illustrates that many customers are hungry for a legal way to acquire their music online.â€
iTunes music store sells over 1 million
Over half of the songs were purchased as albums, dispelling concerns that selling music on a per-track basis will destroy album sales. In addition, over half of the 200,000 songs offered on theiTunes Music Store were purchased at least once, demonstrating the breadth of musical tastes served by Apple’s groundbreaking online store. Apple also reported that over one million copies of iTunes4 have been downloaded, and that it has received orders for over 110,000 new third-generation iPods since their introduction a week ago, with music lovers snapping up more than 20,000 of them fromstores in the U.S. this weekend.
“In less than one week we’ve broken every record and become the largest online music company in the world,†said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Apple has created the first complete solution for the digital music age—you can purchase your favorite music online at the iTunes Music Store, mix your favorite tracks into playlists with iTunes, and take your entire music collection with you everywhere with the super-slim new iPods.â€


