Spotify plans to rock the U.S. digital music landscape early next year

A tidal wave is washing over Europe, and it has already begun to transform the digital music landscape overseas. In the next few months, the company expects to make its way to the U.S.

Spotify is a program similar to iTunes that lets users listen to just about any song on demand. For free. The application takes a page from the Google model -- give a fantastic product away and plan to make money from ads.

It also has a "freemium" component -- that is a business model where the cow and milk are free, but the bells and hormones cost extra.

In order to play music on smart phones (including a spiffy iPhone app) or store songs to be played without an Internet connection, users must subscribe to Spotify Premium, a 10-euro-per-month plan. Each subscriber can sync three devices with up to 3,333 songs.

But Spotify has said in prior interviews that it expects the majority of users to stick with the free version. For that reason, U.S. record labels are skeptical, according to a recent story in the Financial Times. Subscription services such as Napster and Rhapsody have failed to attract significant followings.

The Financial Times also claims that Spotify delayed its launch in America due to roadblocks in talks with the labels here. Spotify spokesman Andres Sehr maintains that it's still on track to make its way stateside early next year, as the Swedish company has told Pop & Hiss for weeks.

Because "the U.S. is the largest music market in the world," Sehr said, "it's a long process."

Compared with the back-and-forth with European labels when Spotify was just starting out, this is nothing. "We negotiated with the record labels for two years before we launched," Sehr said.

"We've shown that we're really popular," Sehr said in a phone interview from Stockholm. "There's data, and we see how things work."

"Really popular" might be an understatement. According to firsthand accounts from folks across the pond, Spotify is practically ubiquitous in some circles. Barely a year old, the service hit the ground running in the half-dozen countries it operates in.

We've been testing the software for about three weeks. It blows the doors off of anything on the market and poses a major threat to several music services fighting for attention.

Sonifi iPhone app lets your fingers remix music

As countless bands release iPhone applications offering little more than a mobile version of their websites, electronic musician BT has a bigger goal. He wants to turn his phone into an instrument.

BT, along with a small team of developers at his company, Sonik Architects, built Sonifi, an iPhone app that lets users very easily manipulate songs on the fly.

Brian Transeau, best known by his stage name BT, scored the soundtracks to "The Fast and the Furious," "Zoolander" and "Go," in addition to gaining a significant underground following for his solo releases. His pioneering stutter sound effect influenced the trance genre.

A standard pop group's iPhone app offers little more than a band site, with music streaming, tour schedules, news and photos. MySpace's iLike built an entire business around it.

So, there's something to be said about a musician with a truly original utility. T-Pain has his Auto-Tune toy; Nine Inch Nails has its location-based Twitter app; and now, BT has Sonifi.

The app, available at the iTunes App Store, comes with just one song -- a dance track. But you can spend hours playing with it.

Apple rolls out Web-based iTunes Preview

After Google ramped-up its music search-and-play capabilities, Apple has now quietly opened up its music store today with the launch of  iTunes Preview.

The iTunes outlet has one of the biggest record collections of any store, real or digital, but you wouldn't know it if you weren't on a computer that didn't have the software installed.

The preview feature lets users browse the music catalog by genre and artist. Albums are ranked by sales, as they are in the iTunes program, and pages contain track listings, pricing, reviews, biographies and other info.

Yet in order to listen to 30-second song previews or buy tracks, you still need to fire up the iTunes application.

But this finally provides an accessible way to browse for music to buy -- just in time for the holidays -- while at work or at the library, where administrators often frown upon installing third-party software like iTunes.

You can search for music using Apple.com's sitewide search engine. But strangely, iTunes Preview is having trouble executing searches from its pages. It's a new product, so we'll excuse the bugs.

Search, we suspect, is a big reason Apple rolled out the feature. As Google partners with music sites like Lala, Pandora, Rhapsody, MySpace and Imeem for its Discover Music  search feature, Apple perhaps doesn't want to be left out.

Q&A: BlueBeat’s Hank Risan on selling downloads, the Beatles and 'psychoacoustics'

Until a few days ago, Santa Cruz-based BlueBeat was a largely unknown streaming music site. Then the Beatles catalog went on sale -- at a quarter per song -- and BlueBeat became a national headline.

A federal court in Los Angeles this week issued a temporary restraining order against the site, which  earlier in the week had been hit with a copyright infringement lawsuit by EMI’s Capitol Records, the Beatles’ U.S. label.

The order set back, at least initially, a novel legal argument advanced by BlueBeat that songs produced through digital regeneration are akin to songs performed by “cover” bands and therefore do not run afoul of copyright law. BlueBeat had argued in court filings that its downloads were legal because the company had created entirely new versions by a computer through a process called “psychoacoustic simulations,” which makes the recreated songs sound just like the original recordings.

“We analyze them and then synthesize new songs, just as you would read a book and write an article,” BlueBeat Chief Executive Hank Risan told Pop & Hiss on Friday. The site’s “intention,” he added, “is to create a live performance, as if you are there listening to the actual performers doing the work as opposed to a copy or a phonorecord or CD of the work.”

But the court didn’t buy it. On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge John F. Walter sided with EMI. “Plaintiffs have ... produced sufficient evidence demonstrating that defendants copied protected elements of their recordings,” read the ruling. “Indeed, screenshots from BlueBeat’s website show track titles, with the same names as the plaintiff’s copyrighted works.”

A spokeswoman for EMI said the company would not comment on the legal proceedings.

Lawyers for Capitol called BlueBeat’s justification “nonsensical” and “completely false,” and that it “deliberately misconstrues the Copyright Act … and ultimately confirms that defendants are in fact copying, distributing, and publicly performing plaintiff’s copyrighted and pre-1972 sound recordings without license or authorization.”

“In essence,” Capitol’s reply states, “what defendants seem to be arguing is that because they copied plaintiffs’ sound recordings using their own proprietary technology, they have created a ‘new,’ ‘independently fixed’ sound recording. That is wrong.”

My colleague Randy Lewis and I worked together on this story for Saturday’s Business section, which also offers the opinions of some legal experts on the matter. Below, you will find the complete Q&A with BlueBeat’s Risan.

The company’s founder called me and said he was willing to discuss the issues on-the-record. What follows is the result of our 40-minute conversation, in which Risan goes into detail on “psychoacoustic simulation.”

BlueBeat, a 20-person company, Risan said, dates to 2002, but sold downloads for only about one week. At the start of our conversation, Risan, a mathematician who told The Times in 2003 that he has made and lost millions of dollars trading securities, said he had licenses with all the major music publishers.He added that his right to sell downloads was protected under the federal Copyright Act.

That’s where we pick it up.

You say you have licenses to sell music because of the federal copyright law, but you don’t have any agreements with any record label?

No. We don’t transmit their recordings. We’ve created independent recordings that don’t require it. Even so, we do pay royalties to SoundExchange for the EMI content that we transmit, as well as to the publishers of the EMI content, which we perform.

To the untrained ear, the recordings on your site sound pretty similar to the original recordings.

They do sound similar, to some extent. If you actually listen to our 320 [Kbps MP3] recordings versus the actual CDs, you’ll hear a remarkable difference. They’re created with the intention of recreating a live musical performance. When you listen to them, they’re done in a virtual soundstage of using psychoacoustic simulation, and the intention is to create a live performance -- as if you are there listening to the actual performers doing the work as opposed to a copy or a phonorecord or CD of the work. 

'It Might Get Loud' director Davis Guggenheim stands behind digital distribution

 
Director Davis Guggenheim tracked three generations of guitar virtuosos in his "It Might Get Loud," focusing on the philosophies behind the sounds of Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White. Sound in the film is paramount.

Yet when "It Might Get Loud" is released on home video, it won't be with a giant Blu-ray or HD push that advertises the latest in high fidelity. Instead, the film will be distributed digitally by Apple's iTunes store, which will sell "It Might Get Loud" exclusively from Dec. 8 through Dec. 22.

"I used to think that the quality of downloading music on iTunes was a barrier for me," Guggenheim said. "I just didn’t think it would be good enough. But in the last year, I’ve put 75 movies on my laptop … There are some movies you need to see in a theater or see on Blu-ray. I think for some fans that’s important. I think some people will need to see this on Blu-ray, but some will need to see it on a Tuesday night at 11 p.m. on iTunes. I don’t think it’s an either/or thing." 

Beatles downloads for 25 cents? For now.

The Beatles catalog remains the digital Holy Grail -- one of the few iTunes holdouts. Even as the band has made its music available for a video game and licensed works to commercials, the Beatles remain one of the few acts to not place its music for sale on the world's No. 1 digital retailer. 

Is it possible that the EMI and Apple Corps. would completely bypass name brands such as iTunes and Amazon and go straight to a little-known digital download discount website? Unlikely, but for now, the Beatles catalog -- and pretty much every other known artist in the major-label stables -- is available online at BlueBeat.com.

"We're looking into it" was the only comment from an EMI spokeswoman. At the moment, users can stream the Beatles' remastered CDs, as well as purchase any Beatles song for 25 cents.

By the numbers: U2's 360 concert at the Rose Bowl and that giant screen

U2 put on one heckuva performance at the Rose  Bowl Sunday night, but it was hard to ignore the elephant in the room.

There was one aspect of the production that literally overshadowed Bono's salience and kept the crowds talking for hours into the night -- that huge screen!

INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: U2 360 tour: Stadium in the round

Willie Williams, the designer of the round screen, told The Times that the scale is "absolutely the least interesting thing about it."

We're not so sure about that.

Pop & Hiss caught up with Barco, the company that manufactured the massive LED screen that, international music sensations aside, is practically the centerpiece of the 360 Tour. We gathered some statistics on the production that will probably blow your mind.

Chamillionaire not a geek, but he plays one on Twitter

Over the last decade, Hakeem Seriki  has lived up to one-half of his stage name.

After dominating the iTunes charts, winning a Grammy Award in 2007 and nurturing his music label on Universal Records, Chamillionaire certainly has money in the bank.

But the rapper is fulfilling his self-professed transformation. In chameleon-like fashion, he appears to be changing -- from feared underground-rap up-and-comer to a technology-consumed geek.

Like many celebrities, Chamillionaire has taken to Twitter. He uses the service to promote things such as his new single, "Good Morning," which shot up  iTunes when it was released Tuesday.

He spends a great deal of time on Twitter, conversing directly with fans and sending dozens of tweets some days. That time commitment is one of the reasons Miley Cyrus says she ditched Twitter.

Perhaps surprisingly, the platinum-selling rapper is a regular at technology conferences. He showed up at Digital Hollywood last year and sat on the panel of judges at TechCrunch50 last month. Pop & Hiss met up with Chamillionaire a few weeks ago at 140: The Twitter Conference in Los Angeles, where the rapper participated in panels the first day and, unlike most celebs, returned the second day to listen.

Looking around the room, Chamillionaire, with his backward cap, T-shirt and gold chain necklace, isn't hard to pick out from the sharply dressed twenty- and thirtysomethings. We predict the vast majority have Jack Johnson on their iPods.

Why is Chamillionaire here?

Better than 'Guitar Hero'? 'Brutal Legend' packs 100+ heavy metal songs

Metalheads will have to learn to operate a game controller while throwing up the sign of the horns. The new Electronic Arts game, "Brutal Legend," has a pretty heavy soundtrack.

With more than 100 songs from 75 bands, the video game, which is scheduled for release on Oct. 13 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, has one of the biggest libraries of big-name licensed songs out of the box.

Jack Black voices the main character, who wields a flying-V axe (for you non-musicians out there, "axe" means guitar) and an, um, axe -- a literal axe. Metal legends Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Halford of Judas Priest lend supporting voice roles.

For a full track list, click "Continue reading."

Reports: France's controversial three-strikes law gets approved; Elton John joins U.K. debate

The sharing of music via the Web has become a hot topic this week in Europe. As major pop stars debate proposed legislation in Britain, the French parliament today approved a controversial Internet piracy bill, according to multiple news reports from the country.

The bill, writes 24-hour news service France 24, is "one of the toughest ever drafted in the global fight against the illegal downloading of films, music and computer games." Backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, the anti-piracy legislation could ultimately lead to the suspension of a user's Internet account.

It has faced toughed opposition in France, including an anti-constitutional charge last spring from the Socialist party, which promised, according to this Reuters report, to mount a second challenge. The party objected to an earlier draft of the bill, which would have created a separate entity with the power to sever a user's Internet access. The approved draft today would put that control in the hands of a judge, who on the third strike could hand down an Internet ban, a fine or a jail sentence.

Ominously, users would also be held responsible for the actions of third parties who piggyback onto their Web connections and use it to illegally download copyrighted works. France24 writes that citizens could be found guilty of "negligence," and face a month-long suspension of Internet service or a fine of up to 1,500 euros ($2,219).

The news from France comes as more artists are speaking out about proposed anti-piracy legislation in England. The government is currently considering tougher measures on those who share music, including the suspension of one's Internet account.

Elton John added his voice to the debate today.