LimeWire, once the world’s most popular P2P client, was officially shut down last month, following a four-year legal battle against the record industry.
A New York federal court issued a permanent injunction against the site, ruling that LimeWire caused a “massive scale of infringement” by intentionally giving users a platform to share millions of unauthorized music tracks.
At its peak, LimeWire was seeing 50 million monthly users.
Today, the company has sent out a memo scrapping their longstanding plans to open a new legal music download store, meaning there is literally nothing left of the company.
The current LimeWire store will also shut on December 31st, and the company will not accept any new payments, effective immediately.
Result for: music downloads
According to the annual financial report for EMI, smallest of the Big 4 record labels, the company lost 624 million euros (just over $800 million using today’s conversion rates) in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010.
The report is prepared each year by EMI’s owner, Terra Firma owned Maltby Capital, a Terra Firma owned company which purchased EMI in 2007.
Maltby Capital Chairman Stephen Alexander began the report by addressing developments in recent months suggesting Citigroup, the principal lender in Terra Firma’s acquisition of EMI, might take over the company due to an alleged breach of lending terms.
Alexander wrote, “despite the issues around the financing structure and the related public speculation, both divisions of EMI have shown marked progress in their underlying performance during the course of the last twelve months.”
This translates into losing less money than the previous year, which saw a loss of more than 1.7 billion euros. He also admitted having no actual first hand knowledge of the legal proceedings between Citigroup and Terra Firma.
There is a glimmer of hope for the future if they can survive long enough. EMI’s goal, it says, is becoming “a comprehensive rights management company that can take full advantage of global opportunities in all markets for music to the maximum benefit of its artists and songwriters.”
But are they doing enough to make that a reality? The report’s section on EMI’s recorded music division focused almost entirely on a handful of best selling artists. Diversification into new areas like merchandise distribution and their live recording/distribution service, Abbey Road Live, were almost a footnote.
[More]>>
Result for: music downloads
According to a new survey of university students conducted by the University of Reading, the overwhelming majority would prefer to download music than stream it or buy it in-store.
The survey of 10,000 students showed that 75 percent would prefer to download music via iTunes, Amazon MP3 or illegally rather than pay for streaming services such as Spotify.
The source notes the example of TunesPro.com, a legit website which offers music downloads for $0.19, a giant discount off the $1-1.29 that iTunes charges.
Says TunesPro: “We have seen a huge surge of younger people using our site as more and more of torrents and P2P files contain viruses, so our pricing must be competitive enough for the younger students with perhaps less disposable income than professionals. We keep our prices low and concentrate of making money through volume sales. Currently we charge 19c per song and offer a further 10% when a whole album is purchased. We believe this will attract the younger users away from iTunes, which charge almost 6 times more than we do.”
A quick check of the frontpage shows albums selling for $2-3, with lots of catalog tracks for 0.19. Some newer tracks will sell for $1.29, as it is at the discretion of the record companies.
