Tag archive: Warner

Things are not looking good for music streaming service Grooveshark. After getting hit with lawsuits from Universal Music, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment, EMI — the only company with whom Grooveshark actually had a licensing deal — has now filed suit against Escape Media Group, Grooveshark's parent company, claiming that Escape has failed to make a single royalty payment. While the lawsuit, filed in the New York State… Read More

It's no secret that the music industry is struggling to stay afloat after years of plummeting CD sales, taildragging failures to convert to digital media distribution, pervasive music piracy, and a diverse marketplace where many performers eschew labels for a DIY Internet-based business model. So someone would have to be crazy to invest serious money in a major music label, right? Billionaire Len Blavatnik is hoping that means… Read More

Online music store eMusic has always struggled against the iTunes, Amazon MP3s, Napsters, and RealNetworks of the world by offering literally millions of tracks from independent musicians and music distributors at cut-rate prices via a monthly subscription service. And, while many commercial digital music stores have been swallowed by the sands of time (and misbegotten DRM technologies) eMusic successfully evaded the DRM nightmare and is still… Read More

First it was the RIAA going after file sharers. Now you may no longer be able to Google song lyrics to find that title you can’t think of, as the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) said that three of its members – BugMusic, Peermusic, and Warner/Chappell filed suit against two sites that provide song lyrics, for doing so without paying the NMPA. The sites involved are LiveUniversre and LyricWiki. Some sites do have… Read More

In its bid to expand beyond the universe of user-generated video, Google's online video sharing service YouTube has expanded its deal with Time Warner to bring programming clips from a variety of the company's cable television networks to YouTube. Time Warner networks CNN and HBO already post shorts and clips to the site, but the expanded deal will include additional material from CNN, as well as content from Cartoon Network and… Read More

It's been over a year since Warner Bros. effectively rammed a stake through the heart of Toshiba's HD-DVD format by switching to the Blu-ray camp…but that doesn't mean that the HD-DVD discs Warner Bros. produced suddenly went away. As home theater fans who embraced HD-DVD face the prospect of retiring their HD-DVD hardware, they also must consider whether to re-purchase their HD-DVD titles on Blu-ray media. To ease… Read More

After howls of consumer protest, Time Warner Cable has—at least for the moment—scrapped plans to place caps on the amount of bandwidth its broadband Internet customers can use, and charge for any overages during a given billing period. “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans,” said Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt, in a statement.… Read More

Way “back in the day” the merger between AOL and Time Warner was seen as the dawning of a new media age, where traditional media companies like Time Warner embraced the Internet, latched it on to powerful content production and distribution, and reaped all alleged “synergies” that would follow. Of course, things didn't quite work out that way, with AOL and Time Warner's cultures clashing like milk and… Read More

Media giant Time Warner has taken another step in its efforts to separate its media content production businesses from its media distribution businesses, announcing today that it would be spinning off Time Warner Cable into a separate company. Time Warner expects the spinoff to be completed by the end of the current quarter; the separation will involve a pro-rata divident of all Time Warner Cable stock held by Time Warner itself, but the… Read More

Irish Internet provider Eircom has agreed to a settlement with the four major record companies—EMI, Universal, Warner, and Sony—that will have the ISP shutting down users who are downloading music illegally from the Internet. Under the agreement, record companies will supply Eircom with the IP addresses of users they believe are illegally distributing music via P2P applications or other services; Eircom will give the users two… Read More

Way back in the dark days of 2006, video sharing service YouTube inked its first commercial video deal with Warner Music Group, which agreed to offer music videos, interviews, and other original programming via the service. The deal enabled Warner to receive royalties and advertising revenue from Warner Music Group Videos on the site—even those uploaded in violation of copyright, if Warner chose to authorize them—and individual… Read More

Microsoft is making more moves to make its Zune line of portable media players attractive to holiday shoppers. In addition to rolling out new application software and dropping prices on flash-based models yesterday, Microsoft has introduced a new Zune Pass subscription plan that not only lets subscribers listen to as much music as they want during a month: they can also permanently keep up to 10 tracks per month, and those tracks will be… Read More

After repeatedly spurning Microsoft during much of 2008, reports are now circulating that Yahoo is now considering a combination with Time-Warner's AOL division to bolster its sagging bottom line…and while no deal is on the table, the companies are performing due diligence and looking at each others books to see how a combined operation might work out. Although Yahoo and Time Warner have been in talks about AOL for several… Read More

Earlier this year, Microsoft made a mammoth unsolicited offer to take over Yahoo…which Yahoo famously bobbed and weaved around and, months later, turned down flat. The refusal irritated a group of Yahoo shareholders—including bilionaire Carl Icahn—who felt Microsoft's offer represented the best hope for a big payday on their Yahoo stock. Icahn got so upset that he threatened to run his own candidates for… Read More

Nokia has announced that the United Kingdom will be the first market to be lit up with its its Comes with Music service. The deal will be exclusive to Carphone Warehouse—pre-orders are available today—although Nokia is holding back all the details of the service until a launch event in London on October 2. The first Comes with Music handset will be the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic “Comes with Music” Edition. “We… Read More