“Without music, life would be a mistake” — Friedrich Nietzsche

By manolo / November, 29, 2010 / 0 comments

here a really good article on The Future of Music

The second week of December witnessed an unusual flurry of activities from the music industry.

On December 8th, Vevo, a New York-based online music video portal backed up by Vivendi’s Universal Music Group was officially launched. Considered to be the “Hulu-for-Music-Video”, the new venture has seen EMI and Sony Music, two of the three remaining majors, joining the company’s ownership since then. Google will take a cut of the advertising revenue in exchange for running the infrastructure. EMI is hedging its bets and broadcasts some videos already onHulu, the successful online joint venture between NBC, Fox and ABC that mostly offers TV shows and movies for free in the US.

The very same day, MySpace Music, a joint venture between MySpace (owned by News Corp) and major labels has completed the acquisition of Imeem, the streaming music service for an undisclosed amount yet rumored to be an inconsequential U$1 million in cash. Imeem started in 2003 as a social network based entirely around music and had managed to build a vibrant community of more than 16 million users worldwide. Threatened by a potential lawsuit from the independent music consortium The Orchard, Imeem decided to seek some help from its competitor MySpace.