Google’s YouTube and the Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music label, are in advanced discussions over a licensing agreement that could lead to the creation of a premium site for music videos, according a person briefed on the talks.

The discussions remain fluid and the terms of the agreement, which could not be learned, are still being negotiated. A final deal could still be weeks away, and its terms may be different from those being discussed currently, the person said.

The proposed agreement represent the latest effort by YouTube, the online video service, to attract premium content that might lure higher-priced advertisements. Music videos are among the most popular content on YouTube, but they have failed to produce significant revenue for YouTube or the music labels.

YouTube declined to comment on the talks, but in an e-mail statement it said: “We are always working with our partners to find creative ways to connect music, musicians and fans.”

A spokesman for Universal Music Group, which is owned by Vivendi, could not be reached for comment.

All the major labels have tried to renegotiate licensing agreements with YouTube that were signed in 2006 and 2007.

Music companies have been disappointed with those agreements, which have included a small fee for every video watched and a share of the advertising revenue.

Recently, YouTube added buttons next to some of its videos that fans can click on to buy songs from iTunes or Amazon.com, with a portion of the revenue going to the music labels.

Sony Music Entertainment reached a new agreement with YouTube this year. But discussions with other labels, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI, have dragged on.

In December, Warner Music Group removed its music videos from YouTube saying it “simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.”

The proposed agreement between YouTube and Universal Music Group is more sweeping than existing deals and could include the creation of a site that showcases not only music videos, but also other content related to musicians and bands, according to the person briefed on the discussions.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, alluded to the challenges in hammering out deals with the labels at an investor conference on Tuesday. He said the two sides had disagreed over “how to compensate the music industry for the use of their music in things which are promotional.” Mr. Schmidt said he did not know how the disagreement would be resolved. -NyTimes

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The British government outlined plans on Thursday to bring broadband Internet service to every home in Britain by 2012, and proposed ways to support the music industry and other media businesses by cracking down on online piracy.

The communications minister, Stephen Carter, is eager for the media, telecommunications and technology sectors to pick up part of the slack as other parts of the British economy, including financial services, decline. By 2012, the government said in a report, 20 percent of all commerce in Britain will occur online.

“There is no sector, with the possible exception of energy, that the rest of the economy depends upon more than this one,” Mr. Carter told reporters in London.

The government wants to make broadband a universal service like television, using fixed-line and wireless technologies. About 60 percent of British households currently have broadband.

The report makes frequent reference to President Obama’s economic stimulus plan, which includes billions of dollars for expanding access to broadband. But the British report emphasizes the role of the private sector, calling for steps to remove barriers to further investments.

Matthew Howett, an analyst at Ovum, a telecommunications consulting firm, criticized the report for lacking details on how its goals might be achieved.

“The government must ensure that ‘Digital Britain’ doesn’t become merely a series of reviews, reports and consultations,” Mr. Howett said.

To try to curb unauthorized file-sharing, which the music industry blames for its woes, the report recommends requiring Internet service providers to send warning letters to persistent pirates.

Some British Internet providers have already sent such letters under a voluntary agreement. Under the proposal outlined Thursday, they would be required by law to do so. Internet providers would also be required to turn over personal details of repeat offenders to rights holders, like music companies, so that the offenders could be sued.

The music industry, however, is increasingly reluctant to pursue file-sharers through the courts, fearing a backlash from listeners. The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major record companies, moved to end a multiyear legal campaign against file-sharers, for example.

“We do not believe that the form of intervention proposed by today’s report — suing consumers — is the best way forward,” said Feargal Sharkey, chief executive of UK Music, which represents the British music industry.

Instead, the music industry in Britain has been pushing for Internet service providers to take on more of the burden of curbing piracy. Record companies want service providers to cut off service to persistent copyright infringers, something that Eircom, which provides Internet access in Ireland, said Thursday that it had agreed to do.

In France, legislation that would require service providers to disconnect pirates is working its way through Parliament.

The British report also proposes the creation of a “rights agency,” financed by a tax on broadband providers and content owners, to work on ways to protect copyrighted material.

“It may be that such an independent, objective body may be better able to surmount the mutual tension between rights holders, publishers, search engines and other content aggregators, the I.S.P.’s and the underlying communications network operators and instead broker technical solutions that can command widespread adoption and support,” the report said.

The recommendations are preliminary; they are open to comment, and the government intends to make final proposals in June.-Ny Times

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Nokia, the world’s top mobile phone maker, plans to roll out its unlimited music service in Australia and Singapore later this quarter and is eyeing further expansion in Europe and the United States.

Tero Ojanpera, the head of entertainment and communities at Nokia, told the MidemNet annual digital music gathering in Cannes that the roll out would continue following a good experience in Britain.

“The next two countries which we are going to roll out in the next 10 weeks are going to be in Asia, in Australia and Singapore,” he told the conference. “We’ll be launching there in the first quarter of 2009, in February and March.”

Like any organization trying to sell music, Nokia needs to secure rights agreements with both the recorded music side of the business and the publishing side. Ojanpera said the group had recently secured a breakthrough on a pan-European publishing deal.

“In 2009 we will also be looking at the United States and Latin America,” he said. “That’s the plan.”

Nokia’s “Comes With Music” service offers unlimited music from the four major music labels and many independents. The music can be kept after the yearly contract has expired.

The individual tracks can be downloaded to the phone and a single computer and are free, though the cost of the music is reflected in the price of the phone itself.

Carphone Warehouse, the sole retailer of Nokia’s service in Britain, recently cut the price of one of the phones and analysts speculated that the phone had yet to take off.

Ojanpera declined to say how the phone was selling in Britain but said the service would gain momentum as it increases the number of handsets on which it is available.

He said the company was considering providing some content in exchange for advertising, such as videos and news from music magazines to accompany the sale of music.

“2009 will be a very big investment from our part,” he said.-Reuters

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In moves that will help shape the online future of the music business, Apple said Tuesday that it would remove anticopying restrictions on all of the songs in its popular iTunes Store and allow record companies to set a range of prices for them.

Beginning this week, three of the four major music labels — Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — will begin selling music through iTunes without digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which controls the copying and use of digital files. The fourth, EMI, was already doing so.

In return, Apple, whose dominance in online music sales gives it powerful leverage, agreed to a longstanding demand of the music labels and said it would move away from its insistence on pricing all individual song downloads on iTunes at 99 cents.

Instead, the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in April, while the biggest hits and newest songs will go for $1.29. Others that are moderately popular will remain at 99 cents.

The music companies are hoping that their eagerly awaited compromise with Apple will give a lift to digital downloads. They will be able to make more money on their best-selling songs and increase the appeal of older ones.

And with the copying restrictions removed, people will be able to freely shift the songs they buy on iTunes among computers, phones and other digital devices.

Technologically sophisticated fans of digital music complain that D.R.M. imposes unfair restrictions on what they can do with the tracks they have bought. For example, the protected files from iTunes do not work on portable players made by companies other than Apple.

“I think the writing was on the wall, both for Apple and the labels, that basically consumers were not going to put up with D.R.M. anymore,” said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, a market research company.

Music industry watchers widely applauded the move and said it could help digital music sales, which have shown signs of slowing down just five years after Apple introduced iTunes.

In particular, lower prices for some songs could spur consumers “to buy deeper into the catalog, and expand their relationship with digital music,” said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with the NPD Group.

The music industry could use a lift. Sales of CDs fell 20 percent last year from 2007. About 2.4 billion songs were bought on iTunes in the last year, aided by Apple’s expansion into international markets. But that was not nearly enough to make up for losses in traditional retail stores.

Industry pundits have long pointed to D.R.M. as one culprit for the music companies’ woes, saying it alienated some customers while doing little to slow piracy on file-sharing networks.

Apple has been campaigning against D.R.M. at least since February 2007, when the chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, wrote an open letter criticizing the software. Apple reached a deal with EMI that year to offer music without the copying restrictions.

But it could never reach the same agreement with EMI’s larger rivals. Sony, Warner and Universal allowed other online music services, like Amazon’s MP3 Store, to sell unprotected music, but they withheld it from Apple. Their goal, industry analysts say, was to try to strengthen online rivals to iTunes, which they viewed as having a dangerous level of control over their business.

“Apple definitely wanted to remove D.R.M. from music, but the record labels would not allow them to renegotiate their licensing agreements, because they wanted to help competitors succeed against Apple in the market,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm.

Apple, for its part, appeared to resist variable pricing, fearing it would amount to a price increase for the most popular tracks on iTunes, which constitute the bulk of sales on the service. It has also said the consistent 99-cent price made things simpler for buyers.

It is not clear what broke the impasse, but the deteriorating economy may have put pressure on music companies.

“For the major labels, it was clearly time for them to accelerate becoming digital music companies in a macroeconomic environment that is downright frightening,” said Greg Scholl, chief executive of The Orchard, a digital distributor of music from independent labels.

The compromise gives the recording industry new leverage over their online music sales, Mr. Scholl added. They can start to sell new tracks at the higher price, then gradually drop prices to keep sales moving. Labels could also experiment with bundled packages of songs and even special editions at higher prices.

Harry Wang, director of mobile product research at the consulting company Parks Associates, said, “They aren’t going to get a huge amount of money from this new arrangement, but in an ailing music industry, anything that can provide more money will be better than the status quo.”

Apple said customers would be able to pay a one-time fee to strip copying restrictions from music they have already bought on iTunes, at 30 cents a song or 30 percent of the album price. ITunes customers can achieve the same effect by burning all of their music to a CD and then reimporting the music into the iTunes software, although this reduces sound quality somewhat.

The company also said that its popular iPhone would be able to download songs from iTunes over wireless data networks like AT&T’s. Previously, iPhone owners had to either attach the phone to a computer or connect to a local Wi-Fi network.

Apple reported the changes in iTunes at its keynote presentation at the annual Macworld conference in San Francisco, given by Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing.

Mr. Jobs was not at the event, after disclosing this week that he had a treatable hormone problem that had resulted in significant weight loss over the last year.-NyTimes

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After a 19-month battle over Internet radio royalties, a truce between record labels and webcasters is finally in sight that would allow Internet radio start-ups to eke out an existence for at least a little while longer.

The two sides have signaled that they are nearing a compromise that would lower the royalties that online radio stations pay artists and labels for the rights to stream songs to listeners. On Sept. 30, they jointly persuaded Congress to pass a bill that would put into effect any changes to the royalty rate to which the parties agree while lawmakers are out of session.

Still, even if royalties decrease as expected, webcasters must figure out how to bring in enough revenue to cover the costs.

Whether run by scrappy start-ups or big media organizations, Internet radio stations have never found a way to make substantial money from streaming music that listeners expect to hear free. Modest advertising was enough to sustain many of the stations when royalties were a pittance, but online audio advertising is in its infancy and is likely to suffer as companies cut spending in the economic slowdown.

“Most of the operators don’t have enough audience to generate the kind of revenues they need to cover their expenses,” said Dave Van Dyke, chairman of Bridge Ratings, which analyzes the radio industry. “Only a handful can actually monetize these types of things.”

The royalty war began in March 2007, when the federal Copyright Royalty Board changed the fees that Internet radio stations must pay to stream music. Previously, bigger webcasters with significant advertising revenue paid 0.0762 cents a listener for each song, and smaller stations with less than $1.25 million in sales paid 10 percent to 12 percent of their revenue. The new policy requires that all stations pay a per-song fee that increases each year until 2010, when it will reach 0.19 cents. Until 2010, small stations can still pay a percentage of revenue.

Webcasters argue that the per-song fee is unfair, especially when compared with competitors. Satellite radio stations pay 6 percent of their revenue in royalties, with the rate rising to 8 percent in 2012. Broadcast stations pay nothing to artists and labels, under a longstanding agreement based on the notion that radio provides free promotion for their work.

“It is completely unaffordable for Internet webcasters,” said Tim Westergren, the founder of an Internet radio start-up, Pandora, who has become the de facto leader of webcasters fighting the royalty rates. He has said that the new rates would eat up $17 million of Pandora’s $24 million in revenue this year, forcing the company out of business, though he is now optimistic that a new royalty agreement will allow webcasters to pay less.

SoundExchange, the nonprofit organization that represents the artists and labels and collects and distributes the royalties that webcasters pay, said it was up to the stations to bring in enough revenue to pay musicians. Right now, webcasters are “basically giving the music away,” said Richard Ades, a SoundExchange spokesman.

Internet radio stations face a Catch-22 as long as they must pay royalties on each song they stream instead of paying a percentage of revenue, said Dave Goldberg, an entrepreneur at Benchmark Capital and former vice president and general manager of Yahoo Music. To earn significant advertising revenue, they must offer up large audiences to advertisers. However, the bigger their audience, the more fees they must pay.

When Mr. Goldberg was at Yahoo, for example, 5 percent of users generated 40 percent of costs, he said. “Unfortunately, we were incentivized to not have them listen so much, because we couldn’t sell enough ads against those few people.”

Advertising is also hard to come by for small stations without large listener bases. SomaFM, a San Francisco-based Internet radio station with 450,000 listeners, found it could make more money by soliciting listener contributions, like public radio, than it could from advertising.

Even so, a plea on the site says the station will fall $35,000 short of its budget this year. Last year, the station made a $20,000 profit on $250,000 in revenue and put all of it into improvements for the station, said Rusty Hodge, the site’s founder.

The business is costly even for big companies. In June, AOL teamed up with CBS to combine Internet radio offerings, in part because AOL found it challenging to monetize its 250-channel radio service, said Lisa Namerow, vice president of AOL Radio. CBS now sells ads for AOL’s stations.

Mr. Westergren said Pandora could stay afloat on ad revenue if royalty rates were not so high. But on Oct. 16 he laid off 14 percent of his staff, citing “the current economic turmoil.”

In general, luring advertisers has been challenging for Internet radio sites. Display ads, the only type Pandora runs, do not work well with radio, Mr. Van Dyke said. “Most people, frankly, who are listening to Internet radio minimize the browser so they’re not seeing the ads,” he said. Furthermore, many people tune in on mobile devices like the Apple iPhone, making it even less likely they will see an ad.

Stations that insert audio ads into the listening stream risk alienating users. When SomaFM tried running them, it received many complaints and listenership dropped off sharply. “Since there are services out there that are ad-free, there is a reluctance to be the first one of the major ones to put an in-stream ad in,” said Doug Perlson, chief executive of TargetSpot, the largest Internet radio ad network.

TargetSpot offers advertisers the ability to fine-tune pitches based on sex, age, location and favorite music genres — a level of specificity unavailable from broadcast radio. Over the long haul, Mr. Perlson said, he expects such specialization to take off.

Charging users to listen has not proved to be profitable. Pandora and AOL tried it for a short time, but could not get people to sign up.

Online stations do make a bit of money when listeners click through to Amazon.com or Apple’s iTunes to buy a song they have heard, though such referral fees account for less than 5 percent of revenue at most stations.

If Web radio fades away, the biggest victims could be the independent musicians who are not played on most broadcast stations.

Josh Fix, a San Francisco musician who lived in his office for a while to save money, credits Pandora for raising his profile. He recently signed on with an independent label and will embark on a European tour in February to promote his album, “Free at Last.”

“It’s almost impossible to get on the radio,” he said. Online, though, “someone hears the music on Pandora, blogs about it and then others pick up on it.”

Mr. Goldberg of Benchmark Capital said the labels would be hurt if Internet radio disappears and the 54 million listeners go elsewhere. “People are still going to listen to free music,” he said. “They’ll just go places where the labels don’t get paid.”-NYTimes

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Britons who have only ever used Apple’s iTunes to buy digital music suddenly have a new and attractive toy: a Nokia mobile music service which offers thousands of tracks for free.

Nokia’s new “Comes With Music” phones are not just a boon for the Apple-averse: parents, worried about piracy may also take to the subscription service.

“Comes With Music” phones make their global launch in Britain on October 16, offering unlimited music from the four major music labels and many independents which can be kept after the yearly contract has expired.

The individual tracks can be downloaded to a single computer, and are free — although the cost of that music is reflected in the price of the phone itself.

But with millions of consumers already tuned into their iPods or the more recent iPhone from Apple, Nokia will have some catching up to do. Due to anti-piracy software, the tracks will not play on an iPod.

“While the Comes with Music offering is a proposition that Apple lacks, the new device and the scope of the service are still significantly behind,” Nomura analyst Richard Windsor said, explaining that it would only be available on a few Nokia devices compared to Apple’s wider range.

“(But) the price of the device and the service are relatively attractively priced and we think that there will be good demand.”

The sleek 5310 XpressMusic phone is the first handset to be launched with the offering. The music, which spans genres from hip-hop to classical, is available through the phone for the 12 months of the contract, and thereafter users can either buy individual songs on an a la carte basis or buy another “comes with music” phone if they want continued unlimited music.

Anyone buying a new phone would have to transfer their existing tracks from the computer to the new phone.

PIRACY FIGHTER

But the 5310 will only initially be available on a pay-as-you-go contract for 130 pounds ($228.70) through the independent British retailer Carphone Warehouse, or without a SIM card on the Nokia website, which may put off those who are used to monthly deals.

A SIM card is a removable data chip that identifies the user on a mobile network.

The sophisticated N95 smartphone with 8 gigabytes of memory – a capacity of about 2,000 songs – will also carry the service, but its price or type of contract has not yet been revealed.

An industry source told Reuters that the phone would be available on a monthly contract on the operator 3 UK in time for Christmas.

The launch follows a push by the music industry to reinvent itself for the digital age after years of falling CD sales and rampant piracy.

The global music industry has been experimenting with several versions of free all-you-can-eat music in the last 12 to 18 months in a bid to compete with piracy including free streaming music on social networks like MySpace Music, Imeem and Last.fm.

The presence of an “all you can eat” service also comes at an interesting time for digital music in Britain, with the government increasingly looking to tackle online piracy.

With the threat of punishment ringing in their ears, parents could be encouraged to opt for a service like Nokia to avoid their children using illegal alternatives.

Nokia is not the first company to offer music through a mobile, but analysts believe the “all you can eat” package will be very tempting, especially from such a big player.

“The intended range of phones indicates Nokia’s commitment to becoming the leading distributor of mobile music by displacing its rival, Apple,” said CCS Insight analyst Paolo Pescatore, “This is a huge task, but Nokia is in better shape than other pretenders to Apple’s crown, given its dominance of the global phone market.” -Reuters

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In a bid to steal the spotlight from Apple’s new iPod lineup, Microsoft has just launched free software to convert every Zune player in the company’s current product lineup — including a new device with 120GB of storage capacity — into a wireless-savvy music machine.

During Zune’s initial design, Microsoft engineers created a platform that can be updated through the release of software upgrades, noted Brian Seitz, Microsoft’s group marketing manager for Zune.

“We made an early bet with the FM player and wireless capabilities of the device,” Seitz explained. “Now we can build on those hardware features by delivering great software.”

Users equipped with the Zune 3.0 software update can download music directly to their players, either over a home wireless network or through Wi-Fi hotspots at more than 9,800 McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S., courtesy of Internet access provider Wayport. Zune aficionados will be able to purchase the popular tunes played by their favorite FM radio stations.

Microsoft’s Zune 3.0 software release matches data already embedded within the signals of many FM radio stations — called RDS and RT+ feeds — with the four million songs available from the Zune Marketplace. Users simply click on any song they hear to instantly tag and purchase it.

“This Zune technology puts two things together that have been dying to get together for years — discovery of new music on FM radio and the purchase of music, which is getting to be more and more digital,” said Jeff Littlejohn, an executive vice president at Clear Channel Radio.

Littlejohn also notes that Clear Channel, which owns 450 U.S. stations enabled for RDS feeds, is working with other broadcasters to further standardize the technology.

“We see this as an industry coalition,” Littlejohn explained. “This needs to be ubiquitous to reach its potential, and Zune brings so much depth to the game, since it’s so connected and focused on the listener.”

Zune 3.0 also integrates a new social-networking capability that automatically relays the user’s most up-to-date personal playlist to designated friends whenever the player is within range of a compatible wireless network.

Playlists called “instant collections” enable users to more easily explore specific music themes and genres, or even choose from a list of available audiobooks. The Marketplace tab on the player’s menu screen instantly connects users to top songs and recommendations from the Zune editorial staff.

“You can search for an artist and download anything from the marketplace, but we also have this great editorial team plugged into the industry, and we’re finding ways to plug them into the community, too,” Seitz said.

Microsoft intends to introduce a new “channels” feature that the software giant describes as a hybrid between a playlist and a podcast, to which users can subscribe. The Billboard Top 100 chart, Fader magazine, KROQ in Los Angeles, and KEXP in Seattle are just a few of the brand-name offerings expected to be on tap.

Prospective Zune buyers are being given a wide range of players to choose from. The Zune player lineup ranges from an entry-level device with 4GB of storage to a new model featuring a 120GB hard drive, which Microsoft says is capable of storing up to 30,000 songs, 25,000 pictures, or a 375 hours of video.-NewsFactorNetwork

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Come next week, owners of Microsoft Corp’s portable music player Zune will be able to download music wirelessly and tag and buy songs they hear on the device’s built-in FM radio, Microsoft said on Monday.

The software company is introducing a host of new features on September 16 for the Zune, its answer to Apple Inc’s iPod digital music player, which dominates the market and has sold more than 100 million units since its 2001 launch.

Microsoft will also introduce Zunes with storage capacities of 16 gigabytes and 120 gigabytes, with two new color schemes — blue on silver and black on black.

The news comes one day ahead of an Apple event, where the maker of the Mac, iPod and iPhone is expected to roll out a new iPod Nano and may give an update on iPhone sales.

The new Zune feature, called “Buy from FM,” lets customers tag and purchase songs they hear on FM radio stations using the FM tuner and the device’s wireless capability.

The 16-gigabyte Zune will be priced at $199 and the 120-gigabyte Zune has a price tag of $249.99. Microsoft already sells Zunes in 4GB, 8GB and 80GB sizes.-Reuters

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TM Net music service is dead but still alive.

In a respond to TheStar article here, TM Net said that it is revamping the music download service- Hypp Tunes.

Full article after the jump.

From TheStar:

TM Net is revamping its online music ­download service to provide “a wider selection of songs and an improved service,” according to a spokesman for telecommunications giant Telekom Malaysia.

The spokesman said on Monday that the service, which was offered on TM Net’s BlueHyppo website and which went silent from July 1, would be relaunched at a later date. The service was first offered in September 2006.

Telekom Malaysia, of which TM Net is a subsidiary, was responding to a music industry source who had claimed that TM Net was pulling the plug on the download service (see In.Tech, July 22). According to the source, the ­service was likely being terminated because it was only selling about 40 songs a month since its launch.

In order to be successful, a music download service would need to sell at least 50,000 songs monthly, according to music industry ­executives.

The executives had also suggested that TM Net’s service could do with more publicity.

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Looks like TM Net’s music download service, Hypp Tunes is no longer available.

Wait!!! Firstly, do you know that TM Net has a music download service? Ok, probably not…..

Anyway here’s what appears on its website-http://music.bluehyppo.com:

According to TheStar report below, over RM2 million was spent on Hypp Tunes but there were only about an average 40 songs that were sold every month since September 2006.

I believe that over RM2 million could have been put into good use by improving broadband service in the country. At the time of writing this article, it has been more than 24 hours since my Streamyx is down.

Surprisingly, GuaMuzik is doing good. Here’s what Alexa says.

I wonder what services will go down next? Bluehyppo?

From TheStar:

TM Net is closing down its music download service by the end of this month, according to music industry sources.

Its Bluehyppo website — where the music download service was offered — carries an announcement that the service has been suspended until further notice.

The Internet service provider, which is a subsidiary of telecommunications giant Telekom Malaysia Bhd, did not return calls for comment.

According to the music industry sources, the TM Net service is likely being terminated because it was only selling about 40 songs a month since its launch in September 2006.

In order to be successful, a music download service would need to sell at least 50,000 songs monthly, the sources said.

The music download market in this country is estimated to be worth RM144mil. Music downloads are expected to make up 20% to 25% of the revenue recorded by the local music industry this year.

TM Net’s service had offered songs by international and local artistes, priced at about RM3 each, and had about 100,000 pieces when it was launched. The start-up cost for the service would be more than RM2mil, claimed the sources.

Several music industry executives that In.Tech spoke to, said TM Net should be congratulated for trying to encourage Malaysians to download music legitimately, but it was an uphill task from the onset.

The biggest hurdle, said Sony BMG managing director Adrian Lim, was the lack of public awareness for TM Net’s service.

“After nearly two years, many music fans in the country still do not know about the service,” he said. “More is known by the public about the ISP’s streamyx service than that there was a huge repertoire of songs available for download at BlueHyppo.”

Sandy Monteiro, Recording Industry Association of Malaysia chairman, said a lot of marketing programmes need to be run to constantly promote music download services to the public.

“You have to push and keep pushing,” he said, citing rival service Guamuzik as an example of how it should be done. “Guamuzik is always creating a lot of activities to increase awareness of its service.”

According to Lim, TM Net should have taken its cue from the local cellular-service operators which are bundling music downloads with their cellphone service.

“This raises awareness for the song downloads part of the business,” he said. He believes TM Net’s download service could have been more successful if bundled with its streamyx service.

“I’d pay attention if TM Net says I can get five free song downloads a month from BlueHyppo if I signed up for a streamyx service package,” he said.

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