Mr. Armstrong, 37, was traveling Thursday from Oakland to Burbank. That happens to be the same route that Hollywood director Kevin Smith was flying when he touched off a firestorm via Twitter last year after being removed from a Southwest flight because he, the airline alleged, was too large for one seat. Southwest has also had fairly rigid standards on passenger dress, famously removing a young woman from a flight after crew members found her skirt too short. That story, too, had legs and the woman and her skirt ended up on national television before Southwest apologized.

The Associated Press reported that in Mr. Armstrong’s case, a television news producer on the same flight said a flight attendant approached the singer-guitarist and asked him to hike his pants higher. He responded by asking if there weren’t “better things to do than worry about that?’’

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

But Hulu is still playing around with music videos, at least at the margins. Last month, it began hosting some clips from EMI, which was promoting a new Norah Jones album. Now the site, owned by GE’s (GE) NBC, Disney’s (DIS) ABC, and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox is adding a few more, via Warner Music Group (WMG).

Emphasis on “few”: For now, the only Warner artist you can find on the site is Muse, which is a band, I learned this weekend. The label’s release says you’ll be able to see clips from Jason Mraz and Paramore in the next few weeks, with more coming next year. (Props to CNET’s Greg Sandoval for sniffing this out earlier today).

Meanwhile, if you want to see clips from every other Warner artist, from Green Day to Madonna, you should look to Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, where Warner has carved out a deal to launch a mini-Vevo of its own.

Warner isn’t discussing terms, but given the limited number of artists the company is trying out here, it’s easy enough to get the impression that the label views this primarily as a promotional deal, not one with a big financial upside. Another indicator: My understanding is that under the terms of the agreement, Hulu will take the lead on selling ads against the clips, as opposed to the YouTube deal, where Warner is handling sales itself.

Here’s one of Hulu’s new Muse clips. Not my thing, at least based on what I saw of the band’s performance on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend. But whatever floats your boat. Press release below:

WARNER MUSIC GROUP ANNOUNCES AGREEMENT WITH HULU TO OFFER MUSIC VIDEOS AND CONCERT FOOTAGE

New Partnership Debuts with Rich Content Offering
From British Rock Sensation Muse

New Artist Pages Featuring Jason Mraz and Paramore to Launch in Early 2010

New York, December 22, 2009 — Warner Music Group (WMG), one of the world’s leading music companies, today announced an agreement with Hulu, an online video service that offers hit TV shows, movies and clips at Hulu.com and other online destination sites–anytime in the U.S. The agreement brings an artist-focused online video experience that features music videos, artist interviews, live concerts and rare behind the scenes footage from WMG’s world-renowned artists and labels including Atlantic Records, Rhino Records and Warner Bros. Records.

Warner Bros. recording artists Muse are the first artists featured under the agreement.  Recently, Hulu launched an all Muse artist page (www.hulu.com/muse) that features the band’s appearance on Saturday Night Live’s December 19th holiday episode as well as content from Muse’s sold out tour dates at Wembley Stadium, exclusive interviews and rare deep-catalog videos.

Hulu will also launch artist pages for Atlantic’s multiple Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Jason Mraz and for Fueled By Ramen/Atlantic’s multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated rock band Paramore in the coming weeks.  More artist channels will be announced in early 2010.

In making the announcement, Michael Nash, Executive Vice President, Digital Strategy and Business Development, WMG, said, “We’re pleased to be working with Hulu as we expand our premium ad-supported video strategy to provide our artists with a customized and flexible approach to marketing and monetizing their music, by leveraging the most powerful partnerships and platforms in the industry. Hulu has been a leader and innovator in this space, and we look forward to working with them on creating compelling, content-rich artist channels that will provide a dynamic experience to their fans, while introducing our artists to new audiences online.”

Muse will launch their US tour in February 2010 in support of their fifth studio album, The Resistance, which earned them their highest-ever debut on the Billboard album chart when it debuted at No. 3. The Resistance debuted at No. 1 in 20 countries around the world. Their current single, “Uprising,” has topped Mediabase’s Alternative Radio chart for the past 16 weeks, breaking the record for the longest No. 1 track at Modern Rock for 2009.

Jason Mraz most recently released an all new live CD/DVD titled Jason Mraz’s Beautiful Mess–Live On Earth recorded at the Chicago stop on his Gratitude Café Tour. This comes on the heels of his third studio album, the platinum-certified We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things., which has received multiple Grammy nominations, including most recently Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for “Make it Mine” and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for “Lucky.” Additionally Jason’s song, “I’m Yours,” set the record this year as the longest-running song on Billboard’s “Hot 100” in the 51-year history of the chart.

Paramore’s new album Brand New Eyes, is the follow up to their 1.8 million selling RIOT!. The album, which was produced by Rob Cavallo (Green Day, Kid Rock) and co-produced by Paramore, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and features the hit single “Ignorance.”  Paramore also contributed two songs to the soundtrack for the box office smash “Twilight,” including the Grammy-nominated focus track “Decode.” The band’s THE FINAL RIOT! DVD has been certified gold by the RIAA, making it the first Atlantic Records video/DVD release to be certified gold in more than 10 years. The band just wrapped up a sold out UK tour including a stop at London’s Wembley Arena.

Last December, talks between Warner and YouTube to renew a licensing deal broke down, and Warner’s videos disappeared from the world’s largest video site. Now, as Advertising Age has reported, an agreement is in the works that will bring Green Day, Madonna and their label-mates back to the site.

What hasn’t been reported, so far: The deal terms themselves. Neither company is talking, but sources familiar with the negotiations tell me the new pact will be similar to the one Google’s (GOOG) video unit struck earlier this year with Universal Music Group.

That deal created Vevo, a sort of “Hulu for music videos,” owned by Universal and Sony (SNE). So think of Warner’s deal as a “son of Vevo.”

The big idea is the same: Try to create more value for videos by limiting their distribution and creating a more ad-friendly atmosphere around them, and share ad revenue between YouTube and the videos’ owner. The big points:

• Unlike Vevo, Warner and YouTube won’t be creating a separate site for Warner videos, and Warner won’t be creating a separate company dedicated to its videos. Instead, YouTube will help Warner create a “premium advertising platform” for its videos within YouTube.
• Warner will take primary responsibility for selling its videos, and YouTube will receive a cut of the revenue.
• Warner will no longer receive a licensing fee each time one of its videos is played.

I gather that a lot of this is still being hashed out, and some of this will evolve even after the deal is inked. For instance, Warner needs to figure out how it’s going to sell advertising for its clips, since it doesn’t have its own sales force. Timing is also up in the air: Even after the two sides formally announce the pact, users shouldn’t expect to see Warner videos instantly reappearing on YouTube; it may be that they only get rolled out as the new ad platform is built.

Then there’s the ad platform itself: I haven’t been able to get a concrete definition of what this is supposed to look like, but for now, I’m imagining something like the “channels” YouTube has made for partners like ESPN, except they’d be made on an artist-by-artist basis.

All in all, this sounds like a fair deal. Warner loses a guaranteed revenue stream, but if its contention about the value of its videos is correct, it will make even more than it did under the old arrangement. Meanwhile, YouTube gets to hang onto “premium” inventory without being locked into the kind of  pay-per-play arrangement that helped drive the site’s expenses sky-high.

The potential downside for YouTube: If this works–or if the Vevo deal works–it will have to create similar packages/portals/platforms to retain or attract other “premium” content suppliers, like, say Hollywood studios. But given that the site has had limited success getting those guys on board so far, that’s not the worst fate in the world.

In the meantime, even though Green Day is Warner act, you can still find plenty of its clips on YouTube–it’s just that most of them are odds and ends like this grainy concert video:

A couple of years ago, MySpace was the hottest thing on the Web. But that was a couple of years ago. Now the social network has gone cold: It is losing audience to Facebook and other sites and may well lose a very lucrative search deal from Google (GOOG). Fixing MySpace is the chief priority of Jon Miller, the former AOL boss who was brought on as News Corp.’s (NWS) chief digital officer in March. About a month after that, Miller brought on former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta and a new management team to run MySpace, displacing the site’s founders. Time for Van Natta to tell us just how he intends to save what was once one of the most important sites on the Web. And time for Miller to explain the digital future for the rest of News Corp.–which happens to own the All Things Digital Web site and conference.

Video Highlights

Live Blog

• Walt whips out his poll data again. Points out that Facebook and MySpace are neck-and-neck in overall use. But 61 percent of people say they are using MySpace less often than they used to. “Less usage would be bad,” notes Owen. Back to the poll: Why did people use MySpace less? Nearly one third–30 percent–replied: “I got bored.” Owen thanks Walt for the free market research.
• Kara: What happened at MySpace? How did it come to this? Owen: “If you don’t continue to innovate and give people what they want next…people are going to shift interests elsewhere. They’re going to continue to evolve their usage of the Web. The thing about MySpace is, there’s a lot that’s unique about MySpace. We need to seize on that.”
• Walt: Gimme some examples of how MySpace is different/unique. Owen: It’s more open, people share more information more freely, a bigger canvas, the ability to create pages that I don’t like the look of but people do.
• Kara: Jon Miller, tell me about the parking story at AOL. Jon: Did I tell you about this? Ok. A month after I go to AOL, following the merger with Time Warner, I went to visit people. Visited a division of Time Warner and senior staff. Hostile vibe. I tried to defuse it with parable about what happens when your car gets towed in New York, and how the people who work in the car lot didn’t actually tow your car, so please don’t yell at them.
• Kara: You were at Velocity, investing with Ross Levinsohn [who helped News Corp. with the original MySpace deal]. Why did you leave? Jon: I thought there was a big opportunity. Owen: “Jon told me it was so he could get comped at D.”
• Walt: Can you make this work with just advertising? Jon: It’s the central question of our time in the media right now. Free vs. paid. Obviously consumers want everything to be free. Kara: “You’re a Communist.” Jon: Obviously that doesn’t work. “It’s pretty clear that there has to be some recognition of value.” And we’re starting to see that take shape. And there has to be recognition that different things have different value. If it’s all free or all ad-supported, it won’t work. Ask Jeff Zucker about that–he loves the cable business. The real question is how much, and who’s going to pay, and is it going to be bundled?
• The gang draws parallels between the cable business (content plus access) and the old AOL (content plus access). Could that work somewhere else?
• Jon: The $10 wholesale price for a CD isn’t coming back. Maybe it’s $6. Maybe it’s $8. Those changes put big pressure on that business. We’re not just going to come out of the recession and see everyone spend the same money they used to spend.

• Kara: Back to MySpace. What happened? You both were up for Jon’s job, correct? [Pause]. Jon: “I just interviewed by myself.”
• Owen: MySpace is a really big site. Of course I’d want that job. I like building things. I built houses in high school in Palo Alto. At MySpace, there’s such opportunity to build.
• Kara: You were at Facebook, left Facebook, went surfing, then Playlist, then this. Is there a connection?
• Owen: I’ve always liked social networking. Was at a start-up that got bought by Amazon (AMZN). Facebook vs. MySpace: Fundamentally different. MySpace focused on a platform that allows people to be super-creative. Music is a big thing on MySpace. 550,000 people are friends with Green Day. Consuming their albums. We sponsored a secret show. Jon went and scared the band.
• Walt: My kids are musicians and have pages on MySpace. I asked them, and they say they never go there, except to promote the band. They’re both on Facebook and they both Twitter. Is MySpace too closely linked to music, too narrowly branded? Or is that a big advantage?
• Music’s a huge advantage. We have joint ventures with the major labels. But video is a big advantage, too. My job is to bring teams together to figure out what people are doing, and give them the right tools, and if they’re not using it, figure out why or stop doing it.
• Jon: People only change their behavior for a few reasons. One is music. I also think what’s interesting about the Web is you can nail something for a single group, and it can broaden out. For MySpace that was music, and for Facebook that was college.
• Walt: People think all these social networks are for kids. But do you want to aim at a single age group?
• Owen: We have 130 million uniques. But we need to core down and heavy up where you have traction. And we need to focus on younger demographic.
• Is Facebook a competitor? Jon: Yes. But so is everything else. So is Twitter. Walt: Seems like these things naturally evolve from one site to another. How can you recapture that excitement from a few years ago? Owen: We already have 130 million people coming to the site every day. If we can excite them with new products, that can happen.

• Owen refuses to disclose super-secret disruption plan? Not saying, even though Kara threatens to touch Owen’s knee, Bartz-style.
• Jon sings the praises of innovation and liberating employees to let them be more entrepreneurial so they can iterate. There are some recurring buzzwords here.
• Walt wants to know if there are ways to monetize MySpace that haven’t been tried. Jon: In advertising, it means a lot of things. Premium, performance, search, etc. We’ll have things like targeting, and micropayments, and we’ll be able to introduce subscriptions for some products.
• Kara: What’s up with the Google (GOOG) deal? Owen: It’s important, but it’s not the majority of our revenue. Also, it’s half over. So we need to be heads-down focused on our own site. With these long-term deals, you need to figure out how to make them work. This is no different. The most important thing is how is Google going to feel at the end of this partnership?
• Jon: When it comes time to negotiate, one thing to think about is whether we could do an overall deal with Google that wraps in more News Corp. properties.
• Q&A: Sorry, missed the first question. The second question is yet another one from Mark Glaser, who is popping off at every one of these. He wants to know why MySpace is so loud and garish.

• Owen: I don’t like a lot of the loud stuff either, so we need to work on personalization.
• Kara: What about Facebook’s fascist approach, where it works the same for everyone?
• Owen: We are going to look different and feel different than everyone else, and that’s good.
• Jon: The tendency when you fall behind in product areas is to think that you have to catch up by checking boxes. I think that’s wrong. You should leapfrog and focus on emerging behaviors, and go for the big moves. Question: Lessons from AOL? Jon: Yes. Everything I did I should have done faster and sooner.
• Ethan Smith from The Wall Street Journal wants to know about music and MySpace. I don’t quite follow it. Oh, it’s about labels complaining about that they’re not making enough money from MySpace. Edgar Bronfman Jr. is the most vocal here. Owen: I’ve talked to Edgar and it’s a complex partnership, and we’re figuring things out together, just like Google.
• Quentin Hardy from Forbes wants to know about organizational behavior theory. Jon: Keep market-facing. That’s the No. 1 thing. It must also be metrics-driven. You have to know how your stuff is being consumed, by whom and how they’re doing it. Once you start doing that, you’ve got a shot. You also have to make sure you’re looking at the right metrics. Page views, for instance, may be the wrong metric, if generating page views upsets your customers.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090527/jon-miller-and-owen-van-natta/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090521/warner-music-videos-back-on-youtube-if-you-know-where-to-look/ http://allthingsd.com/20090521/warner-music-videos-back-on-youtube-if-you-know-where-to-look/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 12:44:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7585 In a post I wrote yesterday about Warner Music Group’s debt offering, I noted that the music label was still sparring with Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, which meant that its videos aren’t available on the world’s biggest video site.

No way, says reader Joy Sherman, who insists that they’re “all over” YouTube, and pointed me to a clip from WMG’s new Green Day album.

And sure enough, there’s the video for “Know Your Enemy,” the new single from one of the label’s biggest acts.

But I’m not sure about the “all over” part. I can find one live version that’s pretty good. But the other clips I’ve found with the same label are either bait and switches or appear to be disabled in some way.

So. You can find some Warner’s stuff on YouTube, some of the time. But aren’t all of  Warner’s videos–and songs–supposed to be off of YouTube altogether, the result of a licensing dispute that flared up in December?

No official comment from either the label or the video site. But the unofficial story seems to be this: YouTube has variety of methods to take down content that’s not supposed to be on the site, including its ContentID system, which can automate the process for copyright owners that use it–that’s why YouTube wasn’t completely overrun with clips from NBC’s Olympics coverage last summer and why very little footage from ABC’s Oscars coverage made it onto the site earlier this year.

And Warner Music Group (WMG) is a ContentID user. But the system isn’t foolproof, and it’s bound to work much better when YouTube and the content owner are working together instead of fighting over royalties and revenue splits.

So here’s the Green Day video that’s not supposed to be on YouTube, and may not be for much longer once I post it. So enjoy while you can:

And, per MTV VP’s John Loscalzo’s request, I’ll note that Viacom’s video site has a perfectly legally version of the song that won’t get taken down. You can see it here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090521/warner-music-videos-back-on-youtube-if-you-know-where-to-look/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090520/warner-music-doubles-up-on-debt-another-emi-bid-coming/ http://allthingsd.com/20090520/warner-music-doubles-up-on-debt-another-emi-bid-coming/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 12:31:06 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7540 Turns out not everyone is convinced that big music is dying: Investors have snapped up $1.1 billion in debt issued by Warner Music Group–double the amount the company had originally planned on issuing when it announced the offering yesterday morning.

Details on the new notes, which mature in 2016, are available here, and there’s more fine print here. But the broad strokes are that the offering will allow Warner to bolster its balance sheet, and remove investors’ concerns about its ability to finance existing debt load. Those concerns had prompted Warner to dump its dividend a year ago–long before dividend-slashing became trendy.

But the most interesting part of the offering, per Pali Research analyst Rich Greenfield, is language allowing Warner to redeem the notes early “if a major music transaction occurs.” Translation: Warner still isn’t giving up on the idea of combining with EMI Music Group, a merger the two labels have been trying to pull off for nearly a decade.

Hey! Also, there’s a new album out from Green Day, one of Warner’s biggest acts. I’d show you  a YouTube clip, but Warner (WMG) and Google’s (GOOG) video site are still sparring, so the label’s videos aren’t on the world’s largest video site. So here’s Green Day 1.0 (per “High Fidelity”): Stiff Little Fingers, circa 1980:

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