Now this would be one heck of an early present: The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), which represents retailers who sell entertainment products such as music, DVDs and games, has asked the music industry to end digital rights management by Christmas.

The ERA blames digital copy protection for the slow growth of digital music sales in the UK. ERA Director Kim Bayley told the the Financial Times that DRM is “stifling growth and working against the consumer interest.”

As evidence, pre-Christmas sales are not off to a bang-up start. The music industry makes at least 40 percent of its annual revenue in the fourth quarter culminating at Christmas. The traditional sales build up has started later than usual, and it has industry participants like the ERA nervous. Continue reading »

SpiralFrog, the ad-supported music download service that we reviewed back in September, is bleeding cash at a rate of $1 million per month over the last three months.

Marshal Kirkpatrick, over at our sister blog Read/WriteWeb writes:

According to financial filings required by the company’s investors and dug up by Joseph Weisenthal at PaidContent, the company reported a Q3 loss of $3.4 million on revenue of only $20,400, leaving only $2.3 million in the company’s bank account.

Such huge revenue losses based on a measly turnover of only $20,400 doesn’t seem to bode well for SpiralFrog’s business model. It’s hard to comprehend how the company has such high operational costs, although it’s a lot easier to decipher why there has been such low take-up of the service. Getting music for “free” sounds great until you factor in the inconvenience of having to log in regularly to sit through more ads and surveys in order to stop the music you’ve already downloaded from expiring so that it will continue to play. Couple this with the fact that the music only works on a Windows PC through Windows Media Player — no transferring to portable devices, let alone an iPod — and it’s clear that SpiralFrog is no competitor to piracy or other more traditional download services such as iTunes.

The company’s answer? Marketing, marketing and marketing — including ‘hiring’ bloggers.

From SpiralFrog’s SEC filing:

“Execute marketing campaign in the United States aimed at 13-34 year olds, through one or more of the following approaches: hire gorilla marketing firms for unconventional promotions; consumer targeted press releases; advertising on some of the youth community sites; or hiring ‘bloggers’ to attract attention to us on the internet.”

Also see: Music industry: five alternative business models

Two significant bits of music news this week: The Beatles are expected to release their catalog into the digital realm sometime in 2008, and U2 has given fans an unprecedented sneak preview of the unreleased song “Wave of Sorrow” through the Facebook app iLike.

We’ve been hearing about the Beatles making their music available for download off and on for the past year or so, but nothing was ever official. It’s now about as official as it can get as Sir Paul McCartney told Billboard that he’s “pretty sure” the band’s music will go digital in 2008, although he didn’t say when specifically.

“It’s happening soon,” McCartney said. “Most of us are all sort of ready. The whole thing is primed, ready to go — there’s just maybe one little sticking point left , and I think that it’s being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn’t be too long.”

The Beatles are perhaps the highest-profile band not making their music available for purchase online. The solo catalogs of McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are all now available for download. Continue reading »

Back in early October we inquired about the missing-in-action Slacker Player, the portable device from the free Internet radio service that’’s taking a much different approach to digital music than the iPod or Zune. Where the heck was it?

Promised for the second quarter, the Slacker Player was nearing the end of the fourth quarter with nary an appearance. But Slacker just announced the availability of the player beginning Dec. 13, just in the nick of time for the Christmas rush.

The player, which was designed by Slacker and built by Taiwanese manufacturer Inventec, features a four-inch screen for displaying album art and bio information and a touch-screen scrollbar. It can play MP3 and WMA music files downloaded separately and comes in three sizes: 2 GB ($200), 4 GB ($250), and 8 GB ($300).

What’ interesting is that Slacker, which topped one million users in October, is attempting to attract customers through a different experience than Apple and Microsoft, the ones behind the market-leading iPod and high-profile challenger Zune.

“It’s entertainment at the push of a button,” J”onathan Sasse, Slacker vice president of marketing, told InformationWeek, “r“ather than downloading separate music files and managing playlists.”” Continue reading »