Dell has announced that it has signed an agreement with Universal Music Group to offer either 50 or 100 DRM-free songs bundled with new PCs sold by the vendor.
The price is a nice discount as well with 50 songs costing $25 USD and 100 songs costing only $45 USD in addition to the price of the laptop or desktop PC.
A couple catches however are that the bundles aren’t available on Dell XPS One desktops, Inspiron Mini 9 laptops, or on systems selling with Linux distributions or 64-bit Windows XP or Vista.
All the music will be in MP3 form and DRM-free and can be played back on any portable player. The current library is somewhat small but Dell says it is looking to expand.
Result for: umg
Tanya Anderson, the P2P defendant that was accused by the record industry of stealing music but fought the charges and eventually won has just had another victory, having a significant amount of her substantial fees paid for by the bully record industry.
The music industry reps that originally sued her; Atlantic Recording, Priority Records, Capitol Records, UMG Recordings, and BMG Music wanted the usual settlement fund of about $3000 USD but Anderson denied their claims and took it to court. She would eventually have the complaints against her dropped, but not before she was over $300,000 USD in the hole with legal fees.
Because of the fact that the charges against her were dropped, she was entitled to make a claim for attorney fees and did see a victory, although not a full one. According to the judge presiding over the case, “Andersen now requests an award of attorney fees in the amount of$298,995.00 and costs in the amount of $5,387.05.” The music industry however, fought back against that claim and got the award lowered. The judge ordered that “Andersen should be awarded attorney fees in the amount of$103,175. Andersen’s Bill of Costs in the amount of $4,659 should be APPROVED.”
Although not all the money she was hoping for, its still good to see Tanya Anderson get some help to pay her extensive fees.
Result for: umg
According to a Billboard report, Universal Music Group is set to launch their own online music video portal, one that should be set up similarly to NBC’s Hulu movie and TV streaming site.
Citing insider sources, the report says the service would host music videos as well as “artist-focused content and editorial.” UMG said it would also welcome content from other labels.
UMG currently has a licensing deal with YouTube for music videos and other clips but the company says the new site will not affect the YouTube deal.
The UMG channel of YouTube is the second most popular of all licensed deals, with over 2.6 billion videos streamed so far.
