Legal News

Second Circuit Keeps Alive Sad Ghosts of PressPlay, Netmusic

By Ashby Jones

Pressplay and Netmusic — two defunct online music stores you’ve likely never heard of — were, by most accounts, spectacular failures. In a 2006 article, the magazine PC World deemed the pair, which were the collective efforts of a bunch of big music labels, the 9th worst tech products of all time.

Reads the PC World blurb:

PressPlay charged $15 per month for the right to listen to 500 low-quality audio streams, download 50 audio tracks, and burn 10 tracks to CD. It didn’t sound like an awful deal, until you found out that not every song could be downloaded, and that you couldn’t burn more than two tracks from the same artist. MusicNet cost $10 per month for 100 streamed songs and 100 downloads, but each downloaded audio file expired after only 30 days, and every time you renewed the song it counted against your allotment.

Yes. These sound terrible, especially given where we sit today, with the excellent services offered by iTunes, Amazon and eMusic.

But the forces behind PressPlay (the logo for which is pictured) and MusicNet must be kicking themselves all over again. On Wednesday, the Second Circuit reinstated a price-fixing suit against the record companies behind the two services, each of which lived for only short periods of time earlier in the decade. Click here for the WSJ story; here for a story from Information Week; here for the opinion itself.

In the opinion, authored by Second Circuit judge Robert Katzmann (judges John Walker and Jon Newman also signed the opinion), the panel overturned a lower court’s decision dismissing the case, saying an amended consolidated lawsuit in the case stated enough of a factual claim to be allowed to proceed. The decision vacated an October 2008 ruling by Manhattan federal judge Loretta Preska and remanded the case to the district court for further proceedings.

Defendants in the case include EMI Group Ltd.’s EMI Music North America, Sony Corp. and its Sony BMG Music Entertainment unit, Bertelsmann Inc., Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group Corp.

A lawyer for the record companies didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment. Warner Music Group declined comment.

The case, which consolidated a variety of state and federal lawsuits first filed in 2005 and in 2006, alleged the major record labels in the U.S. conspired to inflate and maintain the price of digital music, in part by fixing a high price and restraining the availability of Internet downloads.

On the topic of music downloads, We snapped up Vampire Weekend’s new album, “Contra,” the other day, and have so far been rather disappointed. We’re ready to dump it alongside the 2009 Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective offerings in the “overhyped and underwhelming” file.

Records from last year we liked much more: Neko Case’s “Middle Cyclone,” The XX’s debut record, and Japandroids’ “Post-Nothing.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 14, 2010 (boomark / email).