As we recently reported, German collecting society GEMA has been in dispute with YouTube for more than a year now over licensing rates. Licensing talks between the two broke down last May and GEMA asked the German court to issue an injunction to force YouTube to remove any videos containing one of 75 songs owned by publishers represented by GEMA.
According to GEMA the injunction was needed on urgency grounds, because there is currently no licensing agreement between YouTube and GEMA. According to GEMA member writer are losing money everytime their music videos are being played on YouTube.

Last week the Regional Court of Hamburg refused to issue the interim injunction. The court said it was not convinced by the urgency argument.

GEMA has a month to appeal this injunction ruling if they wish to do so.

GEMA will most probably proceed with their other legal actions against YouTube.

Sales of digital albums grew 51% in both unit terms and value terms in first half of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009. These details come from German music association BVMI and show that 4.7m digital albums were sold in the first six months of this year compared to 3.1m in the first six months of last year.
Billboard reports that these sales generated €41.5m (£34.1m) compared to €27.5m (£22.6m) a year earlier.
Sales of single track downloads were 29.7m (up from 22.9m) and generated €30.4m (£24.9m).

As you may have noticed or heard, YouTube is currently blocking a selection of videos on YouTube Germany. This is because negotiations between the German collecting society GEMA and YouTube have broken down.

YouTube gives the following explanation:

" Our policy has always been to only monetize music in territories where we have collecting society deals. Therefore, we show no ads in these
countries (red.: Germany)  or even block videos."

YouTube’s contracts with several European collecting societies expired over a year ago, and most have renegotiated with the Google-owned site. For example, Great Britain’s PRS for Music agreed upon a rate of £0.00085 per streamed track.

GEMA, however, is proposing a significantly heftier collection rate of € 0.1278 (£0.11) for every song up to five minutes, and more for longer tracks and those with ads. Up till now the German collecting society has refused to budge on its requirements for a new deal with YouTube. GEMA wants YouTube to account for YouTube’s revenue growth by demanding shares of advertising revenue.

The videos being blocked by Youtube in Germany are randomly selected by GEMA. It does not matter  if the copyright owner of the blocked video is a member of GEMA or any other collecting society.

The negotiations between Belgium collecting society SACEM and YouTube also fell through, but SACEM has not requested YouTube to remove any videos from YouTube Belgium (yet).

Stay tuned for more news...

And EPM Online just signed deals with these online stores:

• France Telecom/ Orange (www.orange.com);
• OneCluster, (to be launched in September 2010 - www.onecluster.com);
• Thumbplay (www.thumbplay.com);
• Aim4Music (www.aim4music.nl);
• Satellite (www.satelliterecords.com);
  

More to follow soon!

In the past few weeks EPM Online signed deals with the following online stores:

• YouLoad, Germany - (http://www.youload.de/)
• My Clubbing Store, France - (http://www.myclubbingstore.com/en/)
• So Mixx, Spain - (http://www.somixx.com/)
• Traxsource, USA - (http://www.traxsource.com/)
  

More to follow!

Music streaming service Spotify launches in the Netherlands and introduces two new products.

Today is the day Spotify launches in the Netherlands: Spotify’s 7th European market.

Spotify indicated that it plans to launch in the US later this year.

The company also announced two new products that will be available next to their existing free ad-funded tier and the premium subscription tier.

These new products are:

* Spotify Unlimited; which offers ad-free and unlimited streaming access on your computer for £4.99 GBP or € 5 Euros a month. Unlike Spotify Premium (£9.99/€ 10 a month), this tier does not let users cache tracks for offline line play.

* Spotify Open; is a capped version of the existing ad-supported free access version of Spotify. Users do not need an invite (as they currently do for Spotify Free) and can play up to 20 hours of music every month.

For more information on Spotify's new products please visit: http://www.spotify.com/int/blog/archives/2010/05/18/open-and-unlimted/

http://www.theCMUwebsite.com report that dance music website Data Transmission recently surveyed 200 label execs, pluggers, publicists and producers about all things piracy and digital, and found that, while often not so vocal about these things, the independent dance sector is facing much of the same issues as the rest of the music industry. While some dance labels that have traditionally sold more vinyl than CD may be slightly less badly hit by the boom in digital piracy in the last ten years, and despite certain niche dance download stores doing very well, just under 75% of those surveyed said they felt their businesses had been adversely affected by the growth of online piracy.With regards solutions to the piracy problem, just over half backed the three-strikes system lobbied for by the major labels and some rock indies, which will theoretically see persistent file-sharers have their net connections suspended. However, more of those surveyed felt there were other ways that internet service providers and search services like Google could and should help content owners track and reduce online piracy.

In theory the non-three-strikes bit of the copyright section of the DEA (which was heavily watered down, of course), could be used to force those who run file-sharing services to make efforts to stop the transfer of illegal content via their systems. However, it is unlikely such legal pressure could be put onto ISPs and search engines under the current wording of the DEA.

Some search engines, of course, already operate 'takedown systems', usually based on their obligations under US copyright law. Asked by Data Transmission about such systems - where copyright owners can ask the likes of Google to remove links to illegal sources of their content - only 38% said they knew how said systems worked.

Despite their concern about rampant online piracy, most of those surveyed did obviously also recognise the potential of the internet as a sales and marketing tool. The survey specifically asked about the potential of services like Spotify. 44.2% said they thought they were beneficial, 15.6% damaging and 40.3% neither one or the other.

You can read the survey results and comments at: www.datatransmission.co.uk/Features/596/ <http://www.datatransmission.co.uk/Features/596/

Apple plans to shut down its newly acquired online music service Lala.com at the end of May.

What Apple plans to do exactly with Lala.com and/or its technology is not known yet.

More news to follow!