By Rachel Metz, Technology Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --A month after irking part of the independent recording community by launching its online music service mostly with major labels, MySpace Music has made a deal to almost double the amount of indie tunes available through the service.
In an agreement announced Thursday, the San Francisco-based Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) – a digital distributor of tunes for several thousand labels – will make its library of more than 1 million tracks available through MySpace Music.
IODA founder and Chief Executive Kevin Arnold said he expects songs from its catalog to start showing up through MySpace Music in December. IODA’s catalog includes tunes from soul group Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.
The distributor’s tracks will join several million songs that are available for MySpace’s roughly 120 million users to hear for free on the site.
Of these songs, about 1.3 million come from one independent music distributor, T he Orchard, while most of the rest are from the major labels: Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Inc., Universal Music Group and EMI Music. Those labels have an ownership stake in the service, which gets its revenue from ads on the site and the sale of songs through Amazon.com Inc.’s MP3 downloading service.
Other independent labels have been upset at being left out of the launch of MySpace Music. They also have pointed out that if they were to join the service, the major labels that own a slice of it would profit from the independent labels’ success.
Arnold is a board member of one group that that expressed disappointment – London-based music rights licensing agency Merlin, which represents more than 12,000 independent labels.
Arnold said IODA had been talking to MySpace for months about becoming part of the music service. There is “definitely some discomfort” in the independent music community about the major labels’ equity stake in MySpace Music, he said, and his group generally shares that concern.
Still, “it’s also much more important for us to really find a strong deal that’s going to make our labels money now,” he said.
Frank Hajdu, executive director of MySpace Music, said the service is trying to bring in as much content as quickly and efficiently as possible.
“Many, many services that have been launched, they build their content catalogs out over time. If you wait indefinitely, you’ll never launch,” he said.
Hajdu said MySpace Music is continuing to talk with Merlin and independent music distributors about adding their content.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More