Amazon Launches Music Wiki

Wikipedia is an undeniably helpful resource for researching bands, with fairly accurate data that tends to be updated in near real time. Amazon hopes the same sort of thing will happen on its new SoundUnwound site, which borrows a page from Wikipedia's playbook by allowing users to edit information about any band, label, album or song.

To get the ball rolling, Amazon has included music information from its retail site as well as data from the Internet Movie Database and Musicbrainz (an open-source Gracenote-style database that can associate metadata to CDs and digital files). Amazon staff and a Mechanical Turk group built upon this data before the site launched on Monday.

As with Wikipedia, users can edit this information, but not directly. All changes must be vetted by Amazon staff before appearing on the site, so you can forget about retroactively joining Run D.M.C. Rankings charts list the users with the most approved edits for the day, week or of all time, offering a bit of motivation to those want to amass that sort of authority.

SoundUnwound is well laid out and already offers a wealth of information. For example, the page for The Fall -- a notoriously difficult band to cover, given all of their releases and lineup changes, includes lots of ex-band members, an accurate date of formation, and information on no less than 153 releases, including 28 studio albums. There's plenty of room for fans to add trivia as the site expands.

Discographies can be sorted by studio album, single, live album, compilation and EP. And once you drill down to an album page, links appear to purchase the band's songs on Amazon MP3. Relevant YouTube videos are embedded throughout the site as well. But one of the most attractive elements are the Flash-based, scrollable and zoomable timelines that depicts bands' history graphically.

Picture_2 Using The Fall as an example again, to the right is the section of their timeline where guitarist Craig Scanlon, bassist Stephen Hanley and drummer Simon Wolsencraft left the band. By mashing up the band member information with its discography, SoundUnwound lets users draw conclusions about how a band's sound changed as a result of personnel shakeups.

Amazon has taken a bit of heat for not including a way for all of this data to be used on other sites. "I am skeptical about any wiki-style site that doesn't make the user-contributed data freely available," wrote Paul Lamere of Duke Listens. And he has a point; it'd be nice of Amazon to allow this data to flow elsewhere on the internet.

EMI Slashes Operations in SE Asia

EMI Music is shuttering its operations in a string of Southeast Asian markets, handing its distribution and marketing over to Warner Music Group (WMG).

The move, which was announced today and is effective immediately, followed several weeks of industry speculation that EMI might be scaling down its operations in Asia. Described in a statement from EMI as a "multi-year license agreement," it will see WMG market and distribute EMI's worldwide repertoire in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand.

In Indonesia alone, Warner will handle marketing and distribution while a dedicated EMI office will continue to deal with A&R tasks for domestic repertoire -- including new signings. EMI declined to comment on whether new local signings would be made in the other territories, but Billboard understands it is unlikely.

WMG will exclusively handle exclusive all physical and digital distribution of EMI Music releases.

Lachie Rutherford, Warner Music Asia Pacific's president, said in a statement: "EMI's artists will now be able to fully leverage our South-East Asian operations, specifically our marketing teams and vast distribution network of traditional retail, wireless and online partners, through which we've seen great success in recent years."

EMI says it still plans "to develop global digital partnerships" in the territories covered by this new deal. According to EMI's London-based president of Asia Pacific/Latin America Adrian Cheesley: "In Southeast Asia, EMI will retain a small regional team in Hong Kong to oversee the local marketing and distribution of our artists' music, working closely with Lachie and his team."

It is as yet unclear how many job losses are involved; however, it is understood that EMI is currently in consultation with all its employees in the affected markets. An EMI spokesperson would not disclose the staff numbers involved.

The two majors already have a partnership in place covering India, the Middle East and North Africa, where EMI has marketed and distributed WMG physical products since 2005. The new agreement is expected to have no impact on other Asia/Pacific markets -- India, Japan, Australia and New Zealand -- where EMI will continue its wholly owned operations.

Artist Quote of the Week

Art is a way to express yourself and through that you can escape a bad situation
-Russell Simmons

Majors Ink O2 Concert Distribution Deal

Digital content provider New Stream Media (NSM) has inked licensing deals with the four majors, allowing it to record and distribute concerts at London's O2 and indigo2 venues.

NSM -- the venues' digital content partner -- has signed deals with Universal Music, EMI, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG in the U.K. to transmit recordings of concerts via digital TV, mobile networks and the Internet. The deal with Sony BMG also includes distribution in continental Europe.

NSM's contract with AEG, operator of the O2 Arena and indigo2, already gave it first option to provide digital platforms for events at the two venues. It has previously recorded live shows by the likes of Elton John, Keane, Kaiser Chiefs and the Sugababes, making them available to download via O2 Active, a mobile service from the venues' mobile carrier sponsor O2.

In June, NSM teamed with U.K. content-production company Spin TV to produce "Live at indigo2," a series of events transmitted on commercial digital-TV network ITV2, and available for audio and video download through online retailer 7digital.com.

And the major-label licensing agreements will create further digital opportunities, according to NSM's managing director, Abigail Hemingway.

"It gives us a stronger platform from which to propose ideas to artists performing at the O2 [Arena] and indigo2, and to create better content from the events," she tells Billboard.biz. "It allows us to be more creative."

Hemingway says deals with several indies are also in place. Future plans include streaming events live.

Outsourcing

The name for this might not be so appealing, but it’s actually a very effective method of collaboration. It is especially useful when multiple musicians are involved. One person is the primary writer, arranger, or producer, who works with other musicians possessing particular skills (instruments, arranging, mixing, production) that contribute specific parts to the piece. An excellent example would be a producer of dance music laying down an instrumental track, then asking a vocalist to write and record a vocal part, or a country writer recording piano and vocals but working with a guitarist for acoustic and electric lines.

Outsourcing can be done either on or offline, and should not be confused with simple session playing (work for hire). In this case, though the primary writer can be doing the most work overall, they are not actually writing every part. Other musicians are still writing, performing and contributing, and their level of involvement can extend past their own parts. A vocalist can help craft the arrangement and instrumentation of a given section, for example, to make their vocal part fit in well.

This method of working is really the only viable one for larger collaborations, where it would be impractical to use either of the first methods of collaboration due to time, geography, or technical restraints. It enables multiple musicians to work on the same piece simultaneously without stepping on each other’s toes, provided the primary arranger maintains clear perspective of the “big picture” for the song.

Despite the name, outsourcing does not necessarily mean that the primary arranger is doing the most work overall, or that they have the most important role. They may simply be crafting a basic arrangement, while other musicians flesh out the instrumentation, add new writing, and then finally produce and mix the track.

courtesy of soundtempest.net

Co-Publishing Deals

1. Typical Scenario. This type of agreement is typically used for writers who are in groups already signed to a record deal. This type of agreement covers the original material on the group’s records. Normally all of the members of the group who are songwriters will be signed to this type of agreement with the same publisher.

Just to be clear here, I’m talking about a publishing deal with a publishing company not affiliated with the record company. Today, it is much less likely than it used to be that a record company will demand a publishing deal as part of a record deal.

2. Material Covered by the Deal. All of the original songs on the group’s first record, then the publisher will have the right to options on the original songs on anywhere from two to four of the follow-up albums, hence for a total of 3 to 5 albums, with the exact number depending on what the parties negotiate.

3. Copyright Transferred. The songwriter normally transfers one-half of the copyright ownership to the publisher and retains the other one-half ownership. In other words, the song is co-published (and the copyright is co-owned 50-50) by the third party publisher and the writer’s own publishing company.

4. Income Sharing. Normally, the third party publisher will collect all income and then pay to the songwriter and the songwriter’s publishing company 75% of all publishing income.

5. Term. As already mentioned, co-publishing agreements are usually for a certain specified number of albums.

6. Advances. Advances are almost always paid to the songwriter in the case of co-publishing deals. For groups newly signed to major label record deals, the initial advance from a major music publisher is typically in the $150,000 - $500,000 range and sometimes higher, with additional advances being paid if and when the publisher exercises its options for the follow-up albums.