MySpace is in late stage negotiations to acquire music streaming service iMeem, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. MySpace is on a bit of an acquisition spree – they acquired iLike, another music service, three months ago.

We don’t know the price of the acquisition, but this isn’t going to be a big win for investors. iMeem has raised at least $25 million (that we’ve been able to track) plus at least another $10 million in debt. But the difficultly in making a free streaming music service work as a business model forced them to make some hard decisions. Earlier this year they renegotiated label contracts and recapitalized the company, bringing in $6 million in fresh capital.

What’s in it for MySpace – the acquisition of a seasoned team with lots of experience in music. Plus the iMeem and SNOCAP intellectual property.

Facebook’s stance on music is simple: when it’s discovered through friends, people listen to more songs and from a wider variety of artists. That’s why, less than two months ago at its 2011 f8 developer conference, the company announced an update to its Facebook Platform that focused on supporting multiple companies offering similar services.

The company has since found that large music developers have more than doubled their active users. Earlier-stage startups and services with a smaller base have meanwhile seen anywhere between a 2x to 10x increase in active users:

Spotify: Already one of the defining social music apps on the web, they expanded to the US this summer and added well over 4 million new users since f8.
Earbits: Y Combinator-funded startup built by a team of musicians saw a 1350 percent increase in the number of users becoming fans of the band they’re listening to.
MOG: Their uniquely social business model has led to a 246 percent growth in Facebook users since f8.
Rdio: Their strong social ecosystem has expanded with a 30x increase in new user registrations from Facebook.
Slacker: Available across mobile, TV, auto and web, Slacker saw a more than 11x increase in monthly active users in the month following f8.
Deezer: Based in France, they’ve added more than 10,000 users per day since finalizing their Open Graph integration.

“Our hypothesis was that integrating with the Open Graph would accelerate music discovery and make it a more valuable part of the Facebook experience, while improving key metrics for our partners,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “We want to provide an anecdotal summary of what we’ve seen in the two months since launch, even though Timeline — one of the key channels for expression and discovery — has yet to be released. It’s still early, but these results show that the Open Graph can be a powerful discovery mechanism for users and drive significant growth for developers.”

Record labels are pointing to the dramatic rise in music sales in Sweden, just months after the country introduced anti-piracy laws, as evidence of what a similar crackdown in Britain could do to the flagging market.

Figures from the record labels association IFPI Sweden show revenues rose 18% in the first nine months of this year, a significant reversal from seven consecutive years of decline. Much of the rise came after April's implementation of an anti-piracy law and a ruling against the operators of The Pirate Bay, the filesharing site. The two events generated a great deal of interest and deeply divided debate about copyright in Sweden.

"The increase in sales in Sweden, set against the backdrop of innovative new digital services and tighter copyright laws, is encouraging," said John Kennedy, the chairman and chief executive of IFPI.

"It is too early to say if Sweden has permanently turned a corner, but we hope that users there will permanently switch from unlicensed filesharing networks that give nothing back to the music community to great value legal services whose operators recognise continuous investment is needed to discover and promote the talent of tomorrow."

Ludvig Werner, who chairs IFPI Sweden, said even if the new law had not changed people's perceptions of whether copyright owners should be properly remunerated, it had changed their behaviour. A crackdown on illegal sites combined with the spread of legal sites supported by advertising had helped push consumers from one to the other.

"It's like speeding, put up cameras and people will start to ease off the gas pedal. Even if it doesn't change the attitudes, they find legal alternatives because they don't want to get caught," he said.

Record Sales Are Only One Piece Of The Pie

First of all, in today’s and tomorrow’s version of the music industry you can’t determine how successful an artist is simply by looking at record sales. Other revenues streams, all growing in importance, are not taken into account by Soundscan. The unfortunate reality is that historically record labels often determine how much support they will put behind a record based on sales in the first few weeks. If a record is slow or dead in the water, it’s not uncommon that a label pulls all support and pushes another record with a better start instead. This is not only a shame and short-sighted, but also increasingly less smart of a business decision as soundscan metrics lose weight on the relevance scale.

Soundscan Is Incomplete And Inaccurate

Soundscan only measures sales for albums that are pre-registered, and sold at certain retailers. Many indie music retailers and mom-and-pop stores aren’t taken into account, and tour sales often go unreported as well. For certain bands of the indie persuasion this is a major blow to their sales figures. When The National came in at #4 on the overall Soundscan chart (congrats!) it’s entirely possible they could’ve been bumped up a spot if certain indie retailers promoting the record would’ve been taken into account as well.

The more we move towards digital sales, and let us give CD’s sold through brick-and-mortar stores another 3 years, the easier it will be to track all the relevant sales data. Even with today’s technology it shouldn’t be too hard to make some improvements.

Amazon is poised to unveil an on-demand CD printing and distribution service, Wired.com has learned, a deal that could put powerful new physical publishing options in the hands of musicians even as the world goes increasingly digital.

The service is expected to be announced Thursday and will be managed by TuneCore, a novel digital distribution start-up that’s made waves signing the likes of Trent Reznor, Keith Richards and other stars seeking a way out of the label system, as well as slews of garage bands and hopefuls on their way up.

Tunecore will charge just $31 a year in upfront fees to handle a 10-track CD from pressing to delivery, passing all other costs through to the buyer. In other words, the service promises to remove nearly all of the risks of short-run CD manufacturing, which can cost musicians hundreds or even thousands of dollars for discs that rarely sell enough to cover expenses.

For TuneCore, the deal expands its primary business helping indie artists get digital distribution through online outlets such as iTunes, Napster and Amazon MP3. TuneCore will now compete directly with CDBaby, the current leader in low volume CD manufacturing and distribution. CDBaby charges $278 for 100 discs, although it recently lowered its minimum order to just five copies.

Other TuneCore plans in the works include:

Amazon will launch a TuneCore-branded section next month.
A TuneCore widget will soon allow bands to distribute tweets and songs to fans.
If you sell 100 songs in the New York or Los Angeles area, you get to play Le Poisson Rouge or The Roxy, earning a guaranteed minimum of $100 — even if no one shows up.
TuneCore is working on a deal with live music behemoths Live Nation/House of Blues that would give artists who sell a certain number of songs a live gig, also with a minimum guarantee of $100.
If you sell enough songs through TuneCore, MusicNotes will score one of them into downloadable sheet music so that others can learn how to play your music.
Another deal rewards bands who sell a certain number of songs with 16 packs of Ernie Ball guitar strings and 8 packs of bass strings for free, every month.
Yet another deal lets bands who hit certain metrics offer fans the chance to wrap Blackberries, computers and other gadgets with an image of the artist.
A TuneCore iPhone app will soon allow 30-second and full-song streams for participating bands.

When the indie folk-rock group the Decemberists debuted its new album last year, the first place to hear it wasn't on iTunes or MySpace or any of the other big commercial music sites. Instead, the Portland, Ore., outfit played the album live in a webcast carried exclusively on National Public Radio's music Web site (http://npr.org/music).

The Web site, officially in business only since late 2007, has become something of a tastemaking force in the fractured and fragmented music business. Through its blogs, news articles, lists, podcasts, videos and album and concert streams (including a number from Washington venues), the site has attracted a steadily growing following, averaging about 1.6 million visitors a month.

"They've made a really aggressive push to be a go-to place for music," says Dan Cohen, vice president of marketing for EMI, the giant record label. "They've done a great job of becoming that place."

"We're hoping to offer a deep music-discovery experience," says Anya Grundmann, NPR Music's executive director. "There's so much stuff out there. It's our job to weed through it all and find the great music that you don't know about."

First discovered at the age of twelve on YouTube by a huge following of fans, Justin later signed a recording contract with Usher and soon became a mega-music sensation.

But Bieber's stardom also raises a troubling question: why hasn't the music industry discovered more talent on YouTube? Just one Justin Bieber in five years of YouTube's existence is not a good percentage, given the millions of videos and many amateur singers on YouTube.

So what should the music industry do? It's simple. The music industry should use YouTube and other social media more proactively to find new talent -- and a greater diversity of singers. Instead of sitting back and waiting for the next Justin Bieber to bubble up from the crowd, the music industry should set up an official "talent scout" channel on YouTube for amateurs from all different backgrounds and genres to share their music videos and "try out" for recording contracts.

Allowing people to make free cover videos--just as Bieber did--would be a win-win for the music industry. Not only would the industry encourage a greater, more diverse pool of new talent to be discovered, but it also could monetize those music videos through YouTube's ad system that inserts ads into videos and enables the direct purchase of the original artist's recording of the musical work contained in a video.

If the music industry fails to act soon, it may well be too late. The Justin Biebers of the world will eventually realize they don't need the music industry to develop a worldwide fan base.

If you thought the life of most musicians was comparable to the blissful and blinged-out existences of Kanye and Rihanna, you've clearly not heard much about our ever-desiccating music industry. According to the latest Nielsen research, only 2.1 percent of the albums released in 2009 sold even 5,000 copies -- that's just 2,050 records out of nearly 100,000, and to fewer people than go to a small liberal arts college.

From the outside, it often sounds fun to be in a band. But before picking up that guitar or microphone, take a look at where the money from a record goes.

SLRP: The suggested list retail price of a CD is currently $16.98, while the standard wholesale price -- what retail stores pay the label per CD -- is about $10. Once the retailer gets the CD, they can sell it for however much they'd like -- hence "suggested." Artist's royalties are a percentage of the retail price. Superstars can get 20 percent of the SLRP, but most get 12 percent to 14 percent.

Packaging charge: 25 percent of the SLRP goes back to the record company immediately for what's called a "packaging charge" -- that's the label literally charging the artist for the plastic case in which his or her CD is sold.

Free goods: In essence, "free goods" are a roundabout way for labels to discount records so stores will be more inclined to buy them. So rather than sell Best Buy 100,000 records at the regular wholesale price, the label will sell them 100,000 records for the price of 85,000. The artist is then paid for the 85,000 CDs, not the actual 100,000 sold to the retailer.

Reserves: Records, especially records by newer artists, are generally sold with the caveat that retailers can return to the label whatever copies they don't sell for a full refund. Thus to ensure they don't lose too much money on artists, record labels will sometimes pay artists for only 65,000 copies out of 100,000 copies, just in case 35,000 (25,000 if you consider the free ones) are returned. If the retailer ends up selling all their copies, the label will then pay the artist the balance owed, which can sometimes take years.

Distributor: Music distributors are entities designed to promote and distribute records. The major labels maintain in-house distributors, while most all indie labels use private distribution companies. For smaller bands' records, the distributor can take as much as a 24 percent cut of the SLRP; bigger bands might only be charged 14.2 percent.

Songwriter/publisher: If an artist doesn't write his or her own music, someone else has to. And someone who writes a song must first go through a music publisher, whose job it is to place that song with a recording artist who will agree to perform it. If an artist buys the song, the writer and publisher then receive 9.1 cents for every copy of the song sold, a sum they must then split.

Personal manager: This manager guides the career of the artist and gets about 15 percent of the artist's gross earnings.

Business manager: This manager is the artist's money man, making sure the musician repays his debts and invests his earnings wisely. A business manager charges 5 percent of an artist's gross.

Lawyer: While it's not always the case-many charge hourly-some artist's lawyers charge 5 percent.

AFTRA and AFM: These are the musicians unions. Singers join AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), while players join AFM (the American Federation of Musicians). If an artist cuts an album, he has to join a union, which will then take $63.90 in base dues plus 0.743 percent of the artist's first $100,000.

Record advance: Unlike touring fees, of which the record company can only recoup half, record advances are 100 percent recoupable. That means that if the label fronts an artist $75,000 to pay for whatever he or she needs to record an album-studio time, new instruments, etc. -- the artist then owes the label that initial $75,000, regardless of whether the record is a success or not.

In an effort to thwart scalpers and dampen ticket reselling on the so-called secondary market, musicians as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, Metallica and Justin Bieber have adopted

As the oxymoronic name suggests, paperless tickets aren't really tickets at all. They're essentially personal seat reservations, secured electronically.

Ticket issuers Ticketmaster and Veritix tout paperless tickets as a way to eliminate worries about lost, stolen or counterfeit tickets, and to banish long will-call lines. "It's the ultimate in convenience if you're a consumer," says Jeff Kline, president of Cleveland-based Veritix.

Unlike a conventional ticket, Ticketmaster's paperless tickets can't be transferred from a buyer to a second party (Veritix's technology allows for transfers). The inability to pass along a seat creates what's become known in the industry as the "grandma" problem. Since a paperless ticket buyer has to show up at the door at the same time as the rest of his or her party, it's almost impossible for a grandma living at one end of the country to buy a paperless ticket as gift for a grandchild living at the other end

Ticketmaster says its paperless system is designed to undercut scalpers, such as those who scooped up large blocks of tickets to Miley Cyrus's concerts last year and resold them at extraordinary prices. The system ensures that tickets end up in the hands of fans, not speculators, a company spokesperson says, and at the prices established by the performer.

It has been a decade since piracy and the arrival of iTunes – which destroyed the notion of an album in favour of single, downloadable tracks – but the music business has found nothing to repair lost CD sales.

"The record industry is now in a very serious situation," says veteran protest singer Billy Bragg, who lobbies for the rights of performers through a body called the Featured Artists Coalition. "Partly these are problems of the industry's own making, but the result is there is no longer, for example, the record-shop culture that has proved so important at the start for so many musicians." Nor is it just small record shops that are in trouble – the fall of Woolworths and Zavvi has been followed by problems for HMV – which last month said it would be forced to close 60 stores in the wake of a profit warning following poor pre-Christmas sales.

Even established names wonder at the values of the new musical economy. Billy Bragg said: "I've recently recorded half a dozen new songs – and I gave them away on my website. Meanwhile, I've got six different types of T-shirt that I sell for about £20 a time when you add in postage. I have to say I sometimes wonder what business I'm in."

EMI's videos on Vevo will join content from Universal Music Group, which holds the largest stake in the new venture. Sony Music Entertainment is also an equity partner along with Abu Dhabi Media Co., an arm of the Abu Dhabi government.

Faced with declining sales of compact discs, recording companies are experimenting with new ways of distributing their music online through ventures such as Vevo. It will show videos for free, supported by ads.

YouTube will receive a fee for providing Vevo with technology, but will not share in advertising revenue.

Vevo has hired its own ad sales team and is led by CEO Rio Caraeff, a Universal digital strategy executive. About 20 advertisers have signed on, including McDonald's Corp., MasterCard Inc., Unilever PLC and Nissan Motor Co.'s Infiniti brand of luxury cars.

The Vevo Web site and player will also have links to allow viewers to buy songs from Amazon.com or Apple Inc.'s iTunes. Links to artist merchandise will point to Bravado, Universal's online retailing company.

On Tuesday, video start-up Vevo is scheduled to launch. Supported by three of the top four largest record companies (sources say EMI has agreed to provide content to the site) and backed by the technological muscle of YouTube, Vevo is a Web site that will feature videos from many of the world's biggest recording stars, including U2, Cold Play, the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, Avril Lavigne, Bruce Springsteen, and Pearl Jam, according to the site's backers.

Much of the music industry, including a score of independent labels that have recently signed on to the project, think it's time for music videos to take the next step in their evolution. They want a standalone site packed with high-definition clips from marquee acts.

Don't look for any user-generated content on Vevo, according to Doug Morris, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, the man who came up with the idea for the service. He said he wants to offer music fans as well as advertisers a more polished digital stage. That's one of the main reasons the venture was built, to charge advertisers premium rates in exchange for premium content.

"What we're really doing is taking back control of everything," said Morris, who operates the largest of the top four recording companies. "This is us taking control of our future...Vevo enables us to provide consumers with about 80 percent of all the music videos in the world. So, this is really like MTV on steroids. We're starting with that kind of audience. But now we're in control of it. We don't have to go through a middleman anymore."

New York-based Vevo is a partnership between Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. EMI Group is close to taking a stake as well, according to Bloomberg News . Google's (GOOG) YouTube is also a partner. Abu Dhabi Media is an investor. The service, from which the partners will share advertising revenues, will make its debut with 15,000 videos.

Vevo's goal is to become a central hub for videos of a premium quality "that enhance the music experience for fans," says Rio Caraeff, Vevo's CEO and a former top digital executive at Universal. Video streams of Sony and Universal artists alone top a billion hits a month on YouTube, adds Caraeff. All of that traffic will shift to Vevo.

That track record may be one reason why Warner Music Group (WMG) has so far balked at joining Vevo. Another may be that CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. believes Vevo's portal-like approach takes away from the only brands that matter in music: the artists. That's why any video that Warner syndicates to other Web sites drives fans to the artists' own sites. This makes business sense for Warner because half its talent roster is now signed to so-called 360 deals in which Warner owns a greater share of the artists' rights. Warner stands to gain from any concert tickets or merchandise sold on these artists' Web sites.

One advantage the Vevo model will offer, however, is that it can draw large audiences on a scale attractive to top-brand advertisers, says Vevo CEO Caraeff. Even before the launch, 20 advertisers have signed on, including AT&T (T), say Caraeff. Vevo also aims to give advertisers the opportunity to partake in interactive features with fans, such as creating branded playlists with fans. And by offering a separate channel on YouTube—with its own dedicated advertising sales staff—Vevo can offer a safe environment to lure advertisers that might be skittish about YouTube's racier material, Caraeff says.

This is by far the most interesting angle to the deal. iLike is the most popular music application on Facebook, and is the de facto Facebook Music app. That company will shortly be owned by MySpace, Facebook’s primary competitor. That puts Facebook in a lose-lose situation. They can let iLike continue to dominate the music scene on Facebook and let MySpace own all that. Or they can ban iLike and lose all credibility with their platform - everyone would know iLike was banned because of the acquisition by MySpace. And it doesn’t have to be an outright ban. Facebook has plenty of subtle ways of trainwrecking an application they don’t like. Keep an eye on this.

This deal also shows what a top Facebook app is worth. Most of iLike’s activity comes through Facebook. They have 10 million monthly active users, and 31 million total Facebook installations (iLike has a total of over 50 million registered users). MySpace has valued that and the rest of iLike at $20 million, but has to factor in the possibility that Facebook will derail the application, subtly or overtly. If that risk wasn’t there, my guess is iLike would be worth 2-3x as much.

MySpace Music, a joint venture with the music labels, isn’t going too well. The venture will lose at least $20 million this year on the back of massive royalty payments to the labels, and when the Google search deal ends next year the financial prospects of MySpace Music may get much, much worse.

With music videos being so popular, one of Google's first moves following the purchase of YouTube was to shore up deals with all four major record labels, giving them a cut of revenue for streaming videos that included their music. There was no direct legal reason to do so, especially in the United States, where the

However, the major record labels tend not to remain pleased for long, and if someone else is making any money at all, they tend to feel that they must be losing some.

Before YouTube, hosting your own videos was a complex and expensive process. You often had to set up your own (expensive) media server, and users had to install proprietary software like RealNetworks' media player. On top of that, you had to pay a ton of money for bandwidth on every stream. YouTube gave all that away and made the user experience significantly better. It's not hard to make the argument that the music industry should have been thrilled with the free service that Google/YouTube provided.

The end result, unfortunately, has been that almost everyone loses. Musicians get less exposure. YouTube gets less usage. Fans are left in the dark (or hunting around on less reputable sites for music videos). YouTube was a huge opportunity for the record labels, and they spent years messing it up.

2012′s event takes place from 28 to 31 January, featuring talks, exhibits, gigs and more as people from the worlds of music, technology and marketing get together to help shape the future. The Next Web will be there, and as you’d expect, we’ll be keeping a particularly close eye on the startups involved.

The startups taking part in 2012 have been announced, and they’re divided into three categories: Music Discovery, Recommendation & Creation; Marketing, and Direct to Consumer Sales and Content Monetisation. We’ll be taking a closer look at the best of the bunch when we touch down in Cannes for the event in January.

You may recall quite a lot of attention paid last summer to eMusic's decision to raise prices at the exact same time that it added its first major label music (from Sony Music) to its service.

Of course, eMusic kept making things worse and worse by censoring critics (and then lying about doing so) while also quietly taking away features without letting people know. The whole thing was a mess.

Musicians on eMusic are upset to discover that despite the price increase, they're still making the same amount. So now, not only has eMusic pissed off its users, but also musicians as well. At least Sony Music is happy.