Not very much can be viewed on the site yet. The English alternative rock band simply posted a single message that reads: “Testing the weibo”. All due respect, the band’s account has been confirmed to be genuine by Sina.com. The authenticity of the celebrity status also checks with the ‘weibo’. The new account has more than 40,000 followers as of today.
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EMI, the smallest of the four major record labels, posted an after-tax loss in the year to March of $1.2 billion, which is a major increase over the $456 million the company lost during the same period the year before, Wired reports.
This comes after EMI allowed a private equity group run by Guy Hands to buy the historic music company in 2007 and scare off its most legendary artists, the report said, including Radiohead, Paul McCartney, and The Rolling Stones. “That’s not restructuring. That’s getting paid to suck.”
Maltby Capital chairman John Birt said in a statement that he believes EMI has now hit bottom and will do better in upcoming quarters. “He conveniently blamed the previous regime for much of the loss, and explained that the music publishing arm of EMI was doing fine and that revenue actually rose some fiscal quarters,” the article said.
EMI was the first (and, it turns out, the only) major label to offer its downloads DRM-free on Apple’s iTunes Plus service; since then, all four labels now sell these tracks on Amazon MP3, Napster, Rhapsody, Zune, and other online music stores as well. Recently, EMI has been busy signing deals with Nokia, MySpace Music, and others, but is it too little too late?
(Image credit: AP/Remy de la Mauviniere)
Following in the footsteps of Madonna, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, the Pretenders are the latest iconic rock act to take advantage of innovative online distribution methods to create some buzz for their new record.
Madonna went mobile, NIN and Radiohead went free (sort of), and Chrissie Hynde and company are going serial. Break Up the Concrete is being released one MP3 track at a time, one per week, with each track being offered through a different Web site, all leading up to the CD release on September 23, Billboard.biz reports.
Making it worth fans’ time to go on the music service scavenger hunt, the weekly downloads are free. And since they’re in MP3 format, you can put the whole album together at the end and listen to it on any music-enabled phone.
The first track is available on AOL’s Spinner.com and from the Pretenders’ own Web site. Partner sites for the rest of the album include QuickTime, ClearChannel.com, iLike, imeem and a few others.
