MySpace Settles With Universal Music

News Corp.'s MySpace has settled a long-running copyright lawsuit with Universal Music Group, a deal that gives the social network the go-ahead to launch its own music joint venture. Universal gets a "huge" cash payment in return for settling the 2006 lawsuit, perhaps in the $100 million range. WMG and Sony-BMG will also get cash from the deal, but much smaller payments. (Silicon Alley Insider)

MySpace and Record Companies Create Music Site

As part of the deal, MySpace will spin out its popular MySpace Music service as an independent joint venture in partnership with Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. EMI, the fourth major label, is not a part of the deal at this time, but people involved in the negotiations said it would probably join soon. The music companies will own minority stakes in the venture and will make their entire music catalogs available. (NY Times, LA Times, Financial Times, Business Week, Billboard, AP, PaidContent, PR)

Buzznet Gets Investment From Interscope-Universal Music; Buys Stereogum; Acquisitions Coming?

Pop culture-focused social media site Buzznet, based in Los Angeles, has raised a big-ish third round of funding, as much as $25 million, we have learned, and that Universal Music-owned Interscope has invested a few million in it. A source close to the company tells us that Qloud, the music application maker backed by Steve Case, has been sold to Buzznet for a “little over their last round valuation. Qloud makes the “My Music” application on Facebook (with similar products on Bebo, Friendster, and hi5), which has 1.8 million installed users. (PaidContent, Mashable)

Imeem Makes Its Own Platform Play For Music Apps. Who’s OpenSocial?

For those of you who thought OpenSocial was going to make things easy for developers who want to create social networking apps once and deploy them everywhere, think again. More splintering is occurring. Tonight, rising music social network imeem (an original member of OpenSocial) is releasing its own software development kit for programmers to create applications on imeem. Imeem is not abandoning OpenSocial, it is just that programmers will be able to build a lot cooler apps using the new imeem Media Platform. But don’t worry, support for OpenSocial is “coming soon.” (TechCrunch, PaidContent, News.com)

The Royalty Scam

Last week at South by Southwest, the rock music conference held every year in Austin, Tex., the talk in hotel lobbies, coffeeshops and the convention center was dominated by one issue: how do musicians make a living in the age of the Internet? It’s a problem our industry has struggled with in the wake of the rising popularity of sharing mp3 music files. Our discussions were brought into sharp relief when news reached Austin of the sale of Bebo.com to AOL for a staggering $850 million. (Billy Brad in NY Times, e-Consultancy)

Yahoo backs Google’s standards drive

Yahoo on Tuesday joined Google’s OpenSocial initiative for common standards for social networks, increasing the pressure on Facebook to join the movement. Google also acted to make OpenSocial appear less a vehicle for its own ambitions, announcing with Yahoo and MySpace the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up by the three groups to promote the standard and its neutrality. (Financial Times)

Songkick Launches New Concert Recommendation Site

Songkick, a startup focused on providing resources and recommendations for live music performances, today unveiled the industry’s first comprehensive live music recommendation site targeted at the live music events market. Songkick scans the web, blogosphere and a user’s music library, and alerts users whenever a band that they like or may like is playing in their area. For every concert listed, Songkick provides one-click access to ticket vendors, providing convenient price comparison for music fans. (PR)

Surrge Rocks the Music Industry

By creating a fan-driven, word-of-mouth distribution channel, Surrge enables artists to recognize the fans who contribute to their success. Those fans are then compensated through Surrge for their promotional efforts. As a result, new music spreads quickly, conversations and music sharing ensues, fan bases grow, and the hottest stars rise to the top creating a true social community “Top 40” effect based on real sales. (PR)

AOL acquires Bebo social network

Time Warner's AOL internet division is buying the social networking site Bebo for $850m (£417m) in cash. Bebo is the third-biggest social networking site in the US, behind MySpace and Facebook. The price-tag is tiny when compared with the valuations of similar websites. Microsoft bought 1.6% of Facebook last year for $240m. (BBC News, PR, Financial Times)

SXSW: A Chat with iLike

In the 16 months since iLike launched, Partovi said traffic growth has been exponential, with 3 million users after the first eight months and an additional 20 million in the following eight months. It's the dominant mu-sic player on Facebook, as well as on Hi5 and Bebo, according to some stats Partovi showed me (there's also an Orkut version on the way). Here's what he had to say about the secrets of iLike's success. (AppScout)

R.E.M.'S New Album Will Premiere Worldwide Exclusively via iLike

Warner Bros. Records’ R.E.M. and leading social music discovery service iLike announced that Accelerate, the best-selling rock band’s 14th studio album, will stream in its entirety exclusively on iLike and its syndicates beginning March 24th. A first for the company, the iLike Worldwide Listening Party will continue through March 26th, six days before the album’s North American release on April 1st, 2008. (PR, Times Online)

Social Networking: New Ways For Radio To Communicate

At Monday afternoon's "Social Networking: The New Radio?" panel at Radio Ink's Convergence conference, moderator McVay Media Assoc. Consultant/New Media Rockie Thomas noted that social networking --popular websites like MySpace and Facebook -- is about creating conversations, and said, "We're broadcasters. It's what we do." Social networking, she said, lets radio have a two-way conversation with its listeners. (Radio Ink)

Google, Microsoft Said To Be Preparing Bids For Digg

User-generated news site Digg has been working with influential investment bank Allen & Co. (the ones that recently got Slide a half billion dollar valuation) for a few months now, and pitching big tech and media companies on a sale. Digg CEO Jay Adelson is calling this post “completely inaccurate. My source, which as I said is very, very good, sticks with the story. (TechCrunch, Digital Media Wire)

5.9 billion video clips viewed online

More than 116 million viewers logged on to watch online video clips to the tune of more than 5.9 billion video downloads in January. On average, viewers spent more than 120 minutes with online video and downloaded more than 50 streams per person. Most users, however, continue to land on video pages through general interest portals (86%)the traffic from communities and social networks increased to a 25% share. Photography based sites drove about 20% of video traffic while online games and video/movie sites drove about 16%. (BizReport)

RIM Co-CEO to Music Industry Execs: “Don’t Disintermediate Yourselves As Hit-Makers”

Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research in Motion, maker and developer of Blackberry devices, outlined his vision for the company as leveraging the convergence of social networking and multimedia in a morning keynote at the Canadian Music Week's digital music & media summit. He also challenged the music industry to embrace social networking to reach fans of all genres and sub-genres of music: "Don't disintermediate yourselves as hit machines", Balsillie said to the room of music industry professionals. (Digital Media Wire)

More than 200,000 Bands Using iLike to Manage Social Net Profiles

iLike, the leading social music discovery service, today announced that more than 200,000 musicians, including leading artists from all genres of music, are actively using the iLike Universal Artist Dashboard to manage an online presence syndicated across Facebook, hi5, Bebo, and beyond. With 23 million users, iLike is now the leading music application on leading social networks. (PR)

YouTube most popular networking site in the UK

YouTube is now the most popular social networking website in the UK, overtaking the user-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia with 10.4 million unique users during January. The Google-owned video-sharing site saw a 56% increase in traffic from January the previous year. Nielsen Online estimates that nearly two-thirds of UK web users - or 20.8 million people - visited at least one of the top 10 social networking sites. (The Guardian)

MTV and MySpace band together

Music channel MTV has struck a deal with social networking site MySpace to create a weekly chart show. The show, called The MySpace Chart, will be shown on the MTV2 channel. It will feature the best music videos as voted for by viewers watching the channel and MySpace users of the forthcoming mtv.co.uk/myspacechart website. (The guardian)

Facebook Bolsters Music Offering

Facebook today unveiled a new music section designed to let artist create profiles that showcase their music, videos, photos and other details. Participating artists can post songs for fans to stream, provide a full discography of previous works and sell tickets or merchandise. (Billboard)

Last.fm Becomes Fastest Growing Free Online Music Network in the U.S

Last.fm, the CBS Corporation-owned social networking music Web site, released figures today that showed it to be the fastest growing online music network in the U.S., as their free-on-demand music service saw a unique listener increase of 92% since it was launched four weeks ago. In addition, since the launch of free-on-demand, unique visitors continued to show sustained growth, up 59%, while page views increased 58%. Last.fm receives more than 21 million active users worldwide every month. (PR)