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Tag: Warner

  • Turntable.fm Gets Deals With All Four Major Labels

    Turntable.fm has secured licensing deals with all four of the major record labels (Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI), which will obviously go a long way in making the service more useful to the mainstream.

    Chairman Seth Goldstein announced the news today at SXSW, and tweeted about it:

    Goldstein told Billboard, “This feels like an all-time record speed launch – when we launched we really didn’t come at this from the music industry, it was all new to us. Our model is unique – we’re not a radio service, not an on-demand service. We have interesting aspects that really require some out-of-the-box thinking. We felt that from the get-go the labels were absolutely different from what I’d been led to believe. They gave us a lot of time and attention. Compared to their user base, we’re a tiny service in the broad scheme of things.”

    As it is for many startups (and fans of music, for that matter), SXSW has clearly been a fun event for Turntable.fm. Here’s some video the company posted with its avatar DJing at the event:

    Turntable.fm + SXSW +Avatar DJ + Pepsi + Intel from Turntable.fm on Vimeo.

    They certainly do have a lot to celebrate now, as they become more of a competitor to more established services like Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, and all the rest. Rdio, by the way, just launched a new version of its site and apps, as well.

    Turntable.fm hasn’t even been around a full year yet.

  • Grooveshark sued by EMI Music

    Well, this will probably going to be detrimental to my future work productivity.

    Due to what it claims is a failure to receive any royalty kickbacks, EMI Music Publishing has filed a lawsuit against Grooveshark’s parent company, Escape Media Group. The New York Times explains:

    In the suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, EMI seeks unspecified damages. But in a series of recent e-mails and legal correspondence included with the filing as evidence, EMI asks Grooveshark for at least $150,000 in royalties.

    Grooveshark says its service is legal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal law that protects Internet companies that host third-party material if they comply with take-down notices from copyright holders.

    EMI is the fourth corner of the major music label square – the other three being Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group – that is suing Grooveshark over licensing and copyrighting issues.

    According to a statement provided to The Times, Grooveshark believes that “this is a contract dispute that we expect to resolve.” While that’s an optimistic outlook, this latest legal action against Grooveshark leaves little to look forward to in the future as they’re now involved in litigation battles on four separate fronts. Personally, I don’t like this news and hope Grooveshark can resolve these issues because if they disappear I’m gonna be left without a dealer to get my Philip Glass fix. Having said that, it doesn’t look good for home team.