I gave serendipity a chance today at SXSWi, opting to attend a session solely because the title caught my eye—Making Sure The World Doesn’t Suck: How Independent Content Can Save The Media. The payoff: a lively session, although the topic often felt like an umbrella that anything could fit under,…

Universal Music Group was early to tap into the whole music gaming phenomenon by partnering with Tapulous to make iPhone apps for artists such as Lady Gaga and Souja Boy Tell ‘Em. Now it’s branching off and working with others to create even more gaming applications. The record label’s latest…

If you were hoping that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek would use his South by Southwest Interactive keynote to announce a launch date for the U.S., no such luck (although Rafat has a source who says possibly end of May). Ek’s biggest bit of news: Spotify now has more than 320,000…

So the deal has happened, at a slightly higher price: eMusic owner JDS Capital’s private equity arm Dimensional Associates, which has been negotiating with online indie music distributor The Orchard for a few months now, is buying the part it didn’t own, for $2.05 a share, valuing the company at…

Sonos, which sells a digital music system that can be used to play music throughout a home, has raised $25 million in a third round of funding from Index Ventures. The funding was first reported by TechCrunch earlier this week and confirmed by Sonos CEO John MacFarlane in an interview…

The album’s not dead yet - well, not in Pink Floyd’s case at least. A judge has ruled in favour of the prog rock band, which went to the UK High Court for the right to have its material sold online only the form of albums, not individual singles, which…

In another bit of EMI news, less vital to the company’s future than today’s latest change at the top, OK Go and Capitol Records have parted ways after nine years through mutual agreement. OK Go asked; EMI agreed. OK Go is best known for its viral videos—and was touted by…

In 2008, Terra Firma hired the guy who ran the company which makes Cillit Bang and Air Wick to turn EMI Music around. But now the record label finds itself seeking a reported £100 million to avoid breaching banking covenants. So now executive chairman Elio Leoni-Sceti is on his way…

Litigious EMI may have avoided a court showdown with yet another digital music startup (it’s settled a case over lyrics data with TuneWiki), but it’s also fighting a case brought against it by one of its own artists… Pink Floyd has two beefs, according to some rather bare-bones reporting of…

David Dorn doesn’t flinch when the C word—“cheesy”—comes up during an interview about Rhino Entertainment. He embraces it, talking about the two extremes of the Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) catalog division—a “really great sense of humor” that can result in something like Golden Throats, the series of compilations featuring…

The long-rumored Sony (NYSE: SNE) Playstation phone is now becoming a reality. Sony is developing a new lineup of handheld products, including a smartphone that would be capable of downloading and playing PlayStation games, as well as connecting to Sony’s online media platform, reports the WSJ, which quotes people familiar…

Thumbplay has hired an exec away from Apple’s iPhone ranks to bulk up its team as it attempts to transform the ringtone company to a full-track music download service for the phone and PC. Pablo Calamera, who oversaw the launch of Apple’s MobileMe cloud services, will serve as the company’s…

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) just announced the 10 billionth iTunes music download sale. An impressive statistic for sure, but not the end of the story.  As Apple often does with download milestones, it gave a prize to the 10 billionth download customer and revealed that the song downloaded was Guess Things…

RealNetworks’ Bob Kimball, who was named acting CEO last month when founder Rob Glaser abruptly stepped down, got a nice salary increase with his promotion, according to the company’s 8-K filing. When Kimball was corporate EVP, he made a $370,000 base salary with a target bonus percentage of 75 percent.…

Berkeley, CA-based music service Mog.com, which recently launched its subscription music service with good review, is taking a new VC round to finance an entry to the UK market, promising to undercut the much-hyped Spotify and CBS-owned social site Last.fm, we have learned. The second round closed at around $10…

Music Mastermind, which is building tools designed to let amateurs put together and then share tracks, has raised $4.85 million in a first round of funding. The company—which is led by former Virgin Records CEO Matt Serletic—says it will unveil “a series of evolving console, mobile and social gaming products”…

At the Digital Music Forum East in New York today, Thomas Hesse, President of Global Digital Bus., US Sales & Corp. Strategy at Sony (NYSE: SNE) Music Entertainment was the keynote interview, and he gave a lot of details on the company, state of the industry, and how he sees…

About three years ago, power pop band Ok Go were catapulted to fame after its independently-produced music video for the song “Here It Goes Again” caught fire on YouTube. Fans began embedding the video, which featured the band dancing on treadmills. The band’s success appeared to point the way for…

Pali Capital’s Rich Greenfield opened the paidContent 2010 conference at the TimesCenter with a note of skepticism about the recent spate of media joint ventures, such as Hulu or the recently-launched YouTube music video channel Vevo. Moderator Quincy Smith, ex-CBS Interactive (NYSE: CBS) exec now partner, Code Advisers, put the…