Ditto Music cap raise?

Ditto Music is no "me-too" digital entertainment venture, with offices in Nashville, Liverpool and soon in Oz. The Parsons brothers who own it 100% have no debt and 30,000-plus customers as they sail past the $1MM revenue mark. Next, they'll revisit the issue of accepting investment capital they're previously declined. The story's here.

BMI hearts Qriocity

BMI is streaming music via Sony's Qriocity platform, release here.

Naxos may prove Classic iMusic venture

Classical-music empresario Jim Selby (left) explains how knowing who is your customer, adopting download sales (now more than 50 percent of the label's sales revenue), leveraging social media where it works and having a modest "Blue Collar" cost structure (Classical artists were never living in 'Rock Star' economy) from the outset has kept Naxos of America in the driver's seat. It's a great story by Wendy Lee in today's Tennessean (goes behind TSN cost wall, pretty quickly)

Universal in download pact

Universal Music announced yesterday it's entered an agreement with FreeAllMusic.com to provide consumers free, ad-supported music downloads from its catalogs.

StartMySong allied with Bandbox

StartMySong has allied with Bandbox to integrate the Bandbox music e-commerce widget to enable singer-songwriters with StartMySong pages to sell their demos and fully produced songs. Today's release here. Earlier VNC coverage on Bandbox here.

RIAA offshores its snooping

Many were delighted to see RIAA sheath the sword it's brandished against downloaders, promising to lighten-up and go back to helping the Music industry get a life. Now comes word from WSJ that RIAA is offshoring its file-snooping to Copenhagen-based DtecNet Software. Could it be because RIAA's previous investigation-prior-to-litigation vendor, MediaSentry (SafeNet), had itself become a bit of a lightning rod for rights issues? Meanwhile, MusicRow mag reports that illegal downloading continues to rise, and legal downloading is doing well, as exemplified by Nashville dowload site NoiseTrade.

Steal this Music

VU's release today: "...First-year students in the 'Stealing in Music City' seminar at Vanderbilt University must devise a workable system for distributing music that delivers content for a reasonable price and allows songwriters, artists and other stakeholders to get paid. “We are challenging the students to re-invent the music industry for a fair model of music distribution to compensate artists, consumers and labels,” said Holling Smith-Borne, director of the music library at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music..." On Nov. 12, also, Gov. Phil Bredesen signed into law a copyright-protection bill intended to discourage illegal downloading and sharing of content.