How do you make money streaming digital music? One way is to provide the electronic guts that allow other services to operate - and to take the financial risk.
Omnifone, a British company whose technology is used by various digital music services, including Sony's Music Unlimited, Rara.com and BBM Music (for BlackBerry phones), announced on Tuesday that it had turned a profit for the first time. For the year that ended in April, its revenue was $47.2 million, up 118 percent from the year before, and its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were $6.1 million. Omnifone was founded in 2003.
Those are still relatively small returns, but they of fer some encouragement in a marketplace in which most players, even major ones like Pandora and Spotify, are not profitable. Omnifone's music platform is used in digital music services in 28 countries, the company said, and as part of its earnings announcement the company also said that it was buying Global Media Bank, a Swedish database and content management company - in other words, guts within the guts. The price was not disclosed.
Growth for Vevo: The numbers keep going up for Vevo, a source for music videos online whose majority owners are Sony Music and the Universal Music Group.
The service, which has material from those labels as well as from EMI - but not from the Warner Music Group, the fourth major label - streamed 40 billion music videos around the world in the year that ended in June, with 9.3 billion of them viewed in the United States. According to an announcement this week, an average of 103 million videos are streamed each day.
Also import ant to Vevo is that its mobile audience is increasing quickly. In the second quarter, 1.3 billion videos were watched on mobile systems, which the company said was nearly double the number from the first quarter of the year. Vevo has a deal with YouTube to host its videos, although the company is reported to have discussed whether to move to another platform.
Warner Music recently started its own channel on YouTube, the Warner Sound, which has become one of the most popular channels on the site.
- On Wednesday, Vevo also announced a partnership with Virgin America to provide 30-minute blocks of videos on the airline's in-flight entertainment channel, Virgin Produced. Each segment is also to include “a musical tour†of one of the airline's destinations.
Karmazin Hints at Exit From Sirius: On Tuesday, Liberty Media increased its stake in Sirius XM Radio yet again, to 49.7 percent. Last month, Liberty told the Federal Communications Commission th at it intended to take over Sirius by buying a majority of its shares.
The relationship between Mel Karmazin, Sirius's chief executive, and John C. Malone, who controls Liberty, has been strained, with both men making barbed public comments about whether Mr. Karmazin would hold on to his job. Speaking at a media conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Mr. Karmazin suggested that he may soon be stepping down.
“My instincts today are that Liberty does not need me,†Mr. Karmazin said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. His employment contract expires at the end of the year.
A Hologram Fades Out: Digital Domain, the company that found itself suddenly in the spotlight in April, when its technology was used to project a hologramlike image of the rapper Tupac Shakur at the Coachella music festival, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday, 10 months after going public.
Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter .
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