• Lawsuit Against Google, Sony, Rdio, Beats Electronics and More May End Pre-1972 Music Streaming and Internet Radio

    Music streaming controversy has gotten uglier as a lawsuits have been filed against Google, Sony Entertainment, Rdio, Songza, Apple's Beats Electronics and more on behalf of the music group that owns the catalogues of the Flying Burrito Brothers, Hot Tuna and Purple Sage. The results of the collective legal push could result in thousands of songs written prior to 1972 disappearing from the internet.

  • Google Adds Lyrics to Its Search

    Google is once again looking to change the way we search. The Silicon Valley giant has just revealed its new lyric searching system that allows users to search for song lyrics, and the words will come up as a native Google result. The result pulls from Google Play's growing library of music. A link to the lyrics can also be found under an official YouTube link.One source told "Billboard" how Google was able to get this done, saying, "They're creating the database themselves. They've done direct licensing deals with the major publishers to enable the service, and they're doing it internally at the moment. The data isn't crowd-sourced; there's a team of people working to create the database."This is a huge blow to sites like AZLyrics and Metrolyrics, which have benefited tremendously from the status quo.

  • Apple Deletes White-Power Music from iTunes Following Report; Amazon and Google Have Yet to Respond

    Apple recently took down work on iTunes from bands that was deemed "white-power" or "racial-supremacy" music by the Southern Poverty Law Center in a new report. The company came under fire for offering the hateful music as well as giving customers more options with the "Listeners Also Bought" feature. According to "Rolling Stone" and "Noisey," Apple deleted 30 of the 54 bands last week that the SPLC pointed out in the report, but other online vendors like Amazon and Google have yet to do so."The racist music industry, a once lucrative source of funding for the white power movement, is a shadow of its former self," the report reads. "Over the past decade, it has become increasingly fragmented and disorganized in the wake of the collapse of several major labels and distributors. Concerts have become scarce and those that remain have been driven even further underground. However, the ever-resilient white power music scene has found new hope and new profit amidst the wreckage of a once multimillion-dollar industry from an unlikely source: the world's largest music vendor, iTunes."Apple's Terms and Conditions page for iTunes restricts submissions of work that is "obscene, objectionable or in poor taste," but that apparently was not strictly enforced.

  • Apple Reportedly Set To Relaunch Beats Music In March 2015

    After Apple bought Beats for $3 billion earlier this year, industry experts wondered what the Silicon Valley giant planned to do with the company. Now according to a report in the Financial Times, there appears to be some clarity on what the intent of Apple is with Beats Music going forward. According to the report via Billboard, Apple plans to bundle a rebranded Beats Music into an upcoming IOS that will come standard on the update. Something like this was expected when Apple acquired Beats Music in May. Now it appears that there is a timeline for the new relaunch of Beats Music.

  • Spain Passes Controversial "Google Tax" to Crack Down on Media Aggregation for Sites Such as 'Huffington Post'

    Music Times may opt to block its content from Spanish web services following a controversial piece of legislation that allows the government to levy fines against web services that use bits of media, such as audio and video, without paying for. The process, known as aggregation, has taken journalism by storm as ownership prefer to spend less on creating their own original content, preferring rather to borrow information from outer media outlets and reword it appropriately (linking back to the original material of course for legal reasons).
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