DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS

Warner Music: Q4 Revenues Grew 2% But Fiscal Year Slipped 3%

Warner Music Group yesterday (December 13) announced improved fiscal fourth-quarter financials and said it posted revenue of $731 million, a 2% increase compared with the same period last year. WMG's quarterly loss narrowed to $18 million from $103 million, or $42 million, while for full fiscal year (which ended Sept. 30) revenue of $2.78 billion was down 3% from $2.87 billion a year earlier. The company's loss of $112 million narrowed from $205 million the previous year. Total digital revenue for the year grew 12.8%, representing 33.3% of total revenue, compared to 28.6% in 2011. "We had a very productive year," WMG CEO Stephen Cooper said in a statement. "Warner Music Group is positioned to capitalize on the industry's more stable recent trends. Among our important achievements, we grew global digital and physical recorded music sales on an aggregate basis, for the quarter and the fiscal year." Cooper noted that growth in digital revenue more than offset physical revenue declines in the company's recorded music business, although this net growth was more than offset by declines in artist services and expanded rights revenue, recording music licensing revenue, and music publishing revenue. [Full story: Hollywood Reporter]

Congressman Introduces "MUSIC Act" To Help Indie Labels   Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) this week introduced legislation designed to make it easier for U.S. independent music labels to access the global marketplace. The legislation, known as the "Making United States Independents Competitive (MUSIC) Act," supposedly will help small labels by connecting them to new audiences and distributors. Specifically, the bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Commerce to help independent labels send their recording artists to international music trade shows. That assistance would include admission costs, support for travel, booth construction, and "touring expenses" related to the foreign shows. According to Billboard, the bill defines an independent label as one with total annual revenues of less than $50 million,  less than a 1% share of the U.S. recorded music market, and one that is not majority-owned by a "corporation, partnership, or other association that has total revenues of more than $50 million in the preceding fiscal year. "This bill would help promote U. S. exports in an extremely competitive industry whose talents cannot be outsourced," Rep. Nadler said. [Full story: Billboard.biz]

Thomas-Raset Appeals $2.2 Million P2P Fine To Supreme Court   Remember Jammie Thomas-Rasset (pictured right)? She's the Minnesota woman who was fined $2.2 million for downloading 24 songs several years ago on the now-obsolete file-sharing service Kazaa. Now, after exhausting all other appeals possibilities, she is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the jury's decision concerning how much she should pay the recording industry. Claiming the fine is excessive, Thomas-Rasset's attorneys assert that, "In a civil case, [she] cannot be punished for the harm inflicted on the recording industry by file sharing in general. While that would no doubt help accomplish the industry's and Congress's goal of deterring copyright infringement, singling out and punishing an individual in a civil case to a degree entirely out of proportion with her individual offense is not a constitutional means of achieving that goal." The case, dating back to 2007, has had a convoluted history, featuring one mistrial and three separate verdicts. One jury fined Thomas-Rasset $1.5 million. [Full story: New York Daily News]

Reznor, Dr. Dre To Launch Music Streaming Service Named "Daisy"   Recording artists Trent Reznor and Dr. Dre (left) this week announced they are partnering to create a new streaming music service to launch in 2013 - but they may be a dollar short and a day late. Digital Trends reports that what sets the new service, known as "Daisy," apart from other music streaming services is that its music discovery system will rely on human expertise, and not automated systems. The problem: such digital music platforms as Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, and TheRadio.com all boast some sort of human "curation" as part of their programming process. But Reznor (Nine-Inch Nails frontman and Chief Creative Officer of the new company) last week likened "Daisy" to "having your own guy when you go into the record store, who knows what you like but can also point you down some paths you wouldn't necessarily have encountered." He also said the platform would rely on "mathematics to offer suggestions to the listener" while it also would "resent choices based partly on suggestions made by connoisseurs, making it a platform in which the machine and the human would collide more intimately." As Digital Trends points out, "this may not be the kind of game-changer to provide the impact necessary to really find any sort of foothold required to stay in business for any appreciable length of time...So the question is, are Trent Reznor and Dr. Dre very smart, or very stupid?" [Full story: Digital Trends]

Social Media Drives Digital Album Sales, Radio Leads Single Sales   According to a new study conducted by analytics and insights firm Next Big Sound, social media sites contribute significantly to music discovery and digital track sales. Specifically, researchers found that the top four metrics that have a strong correlation with single digital track sales are (in order) AM/FM radio spins; YouTube plays, Facebook Fans, and Twitter followers. Interestingly, while terrestrial radio still maintains a strong connection with single digital track sales, when you look at metrics which have a correlation with digital album sales, its role in music purchases is almost reversed. In fact, the primary influencers in album sales are Wikipedia, Myspace plays, Rdio plays, and radio spins. Additionally, the highest correlating metrics for first-week sales of digital albums show a similar result, with Wikipedia page views topping the list, followed by internet radio impressions, Last.fm plays, radio spins, and artist website page views. In analyzing the causality of social media on digital album sales, artists' websites and Facebook are number one and two, respectively, while the number of Twitter followers and tweets sent fall in the bottom three influencers. [Full story: Social News Daily]

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