It appears that Sony BMG and Warner are close to signing a deal for the upcoming MySpace Music online store that would make their entire music catalogs available to the service.
The service is expected to offer individual pay-for MP3 downloads as well “as ad-subsidized free streams of music and videos.” MySpace Music online is also expected to have downloadable ringtones through Jamba.
The deal has a strange compensation format however. All labels that are part of the service will be paid “a share in the venture dictated by their existing marketshare outside of MySpace.” It is not clear whether sales success from the service will change the format of compensation however. Universal is expected to not make a deal for the time being because it has an ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit filed against the social networking site.
Sony, Warner and MySpace declined comment but the service is believed to be an attempt to dethrone the online market leader iTunes.
Result for: copyright infringement lawsuit
The RIAA has declared complete victory over the infamous Russian music download store AllofMP3 which was accused of selling tracks but not giving any of the proceeds to the artists or record labels.
At its peak, the site had 6 million users who legally downloaded songs and full albums for cheaper than 1/3 the price of iTunes or Amazon. The RIAA said however that the record labels and the artists were not seeing any of this money and filed complaints to get the WTO to shut the site down. In 2007, the site was shut down and the RIAA praised the decision. However, in October of that year, the site was acquitted of any charges and a district court in Moscow confirmed the innocent verdict after an appeal by the record industry group. Despite being innocent, the site shut down and no longer offers music.
It now appears that this week the RIAA dropped its copyright infringement lawsuit against AllofMP3 and claimed victory.
“The site is now defunct and out of business, the result of a successful anti-piracy initiative,” Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman said.
That may be true, but following the media AllofMP3 received, almost a dozen similar sites have sprung up and are currently fully operational. Even funnier, the founders of AllofMP3 have started a new site called Mp3Sparks which operates exactly the same as the now “defunct” AllofMP3 did.
Talking about the dropping of the lawsuit, John Crossman, representative of the site’s owner, MediaServices LLC says, “They [RIAA] never correctly commenced the proceeding in the first place…Maybe it was a rare triumph of good sense.”
