Music Business Roundup: Dept. Of Justice Proposal, BMG Partnership, & More

Each week on Songwriter U, Songspace recaps the top stories in the world of music business. Here’s everything you need to know from the week ending on July 31st.

Department Of Justice Proposes New Rule
The announcement that the Department of Justice is considering a new piece of legislation caused a lot of discussion in the industry yesterday. The proposal includes a new rule that would allow any partial owner of a song to license the entire work – essentially saying that you would no longer have to have each share’s approval to be granted a license. For example, this would allow a song with four co-writers to be licensed by just one writer, without consent or knowledge of the other three. It appears to be an uninformed proposal that disregards how the licensing process normally works.
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BMG Lands A New Partnership
The music publishing company BMG has a new partner: BroadbandTV. The goal of the partnership is to give BMG artists more exposure by having more opportunities for online video. BroadbandTV owns two major YouTube music channels, which could be great spaces for BMG to promote their music.
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Sony Music’s Quarterly Revenue Explained
One interesting aspect of Sony’s good revenue report for the second quarter, is that it was likely impacted by the dollar having a strong valuation against the yen. Overall music revenue increased by 8.5% from last quarter according to the report.
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Miranda Lambert Empowers Females
Lambert has announced a new scholarship fund to go to one female student attending the Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business at Belmont University. The fund’s first round of money was raised from profits of Lambert’s recent 3rd and Lindsley show, which featured many prominent female songwriters from Nashville. The scholarship aims to empower females going into the music industry.
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Alibaba Takes On Amazon
The e-commerce giant Alibaba has put a lot of funding into a new cloud based service that aims to challenge Amazon. This news comes after their announcement of a new music division last week.
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