UK

According to MusicWeek, popular (and growing, see today's top story) pureplay webcaster Slacker will reportedly launch in the UK within the next three months.

Such a move would make Slacker the largest U.S.-based Net radio outlet available there (Pandora is not licensed in the United Kingdom).

Slacker will come to Britain by way of a partnership with Vodafone, the world's second-largest mobile telecom company.

You may remember that Slacker "relaunched" earlier this year, with a new look, new features, and an ad campaign positioning itself as an alternative to market leader Pandora. It also recently added voice personalities to some of its channels. The article sources Slacker president and CEO Jim Cady recently revealing that "Session listener times on Slacker without a host have been averaging around 29 mins, but with a host personality or presenter session listening is growing to around 79 minutes."

Read the full article here.

An article in the UK's The Guardian reveals British songwriters earned a record £51.7m in UK royalties from digital music services in 2012 -- more than their take from broadcast radio.

"Digital music players are now the biggest single source of income for songwriters in the UK, having overtaken radio last year after previously eclipsing live events and pubs, according to the UK royalties body PRS for Music," wrote the paper.

Read the full article in The Guardian here.

Leading music subscription services are ramping up their global expansions.

GigaOm reports Rhapsody will launch in 16 additional European countries in the first half of this year (but didn't mention which). This is the first "proper international launch" for Rhapsody, which is in the UK and Germany by way of acquiring Napster, (the brand under which it operates in those nations).

Meanwhile, Rhapsody competitors Spotify and Rdio are both rumored to be entering the Japanese market in the coming months. Sony's Music Unlimited is currently Japanese music subscribers' only option. Spotify is in 20 countries worldwide, Rdio in 17.

Read more on the Rhapsody news in GigaOm here; more on Spotify and Rdio in Japan Daily Press here.

We've heard (at the recent House Subcommittee hearing on the Internet Radio Fairness Act for one, but elsewhere too, and often) the recording industry:

• doesn't like the amount of royalties streaming services pay to play copyright recordings, and wants more;
• really doesn't like that U.S. broadcasters don't pay at all; but should, like the good folks of the non-U.S. broadcast world.

So, how much does, say, a UK radio broadcaster pay to play a copyright sound recording per listener, and how does that compare to other services, like Spotify or Pandora?

Enter David Touve (you may remember him as the Washington and Lee University Assistant Professor of Business Administration who estimated that U.S. broadcasters would owe the recording industry $2.5 billion a year if they were required to pay at the webcasting rate here).

Using data from PPL (which collects royalties from UK radio) and RAJAR (which measures listening), and estimating 12 songs per hour, Touve estimates "the value of a single radio play to a single listener in the UK for only that portion of the royalties that are paid to record labels, featured artists, and performing artists" is £0.000073, or $0.00012.

"For comparison, I believe the value estimated above is 1/36th the rate reported by Zoe Keating ($0.0042) [Touve's referring to this] for her receipts from streaming music services (e.g., Spotify), 1/10th the rate ($0.0011) paid by Pureplay Webcasters in the U.S. (e.g., Pandora), and 1/18th the CRB-established default Webcaster rate ($0.0021) in the U.S."

Put another way: Pandora currently -- under the settlement "discount" rate -- pays at a rate ten times what UK radio pays to perform sound recordings.

(The difference in audience size between Pandora and the broadcast industry of a country like the UK, much less the U.S., naturally means the recording industry's take from broadcasters will be much larger. But what Touve is putting in high relief is the discrepancy between the rates.)

Read Touve's latest Rockonomics blog entry here.

Ofcom -- the UK government's counterpart to the FCC in the U.S. -- has published its third "Digital Radio Report" as it anticipates an eventual nationwide "switchover" of all radio to digital platforms.

Ofcom would like the switchover to happen in 2015 -- but they're waiting for 50% of all radio listening to be via digital platforms, and national DAB coverage to be comparable to that of FM (and local DAB to reach 90% of the population and all major roads). (DAB is the UK's digital radio system, along the same lines as, but significantly different than, HD Radio in the U.S.)

For the 12 months ending in June 2012, data from RAJAR show 29.5% "of all radio listening hours were to services delivered over a digital platform."

Listening on a DAB digital radio set was the most widely-used method, accounting for just under 65% of all digital listening hours. Digital television was almost 16%, and Internet radio accounted for over 13%. The most-listened-to "digital only" stations were BBC Radio 4 Extra, 6 Music, and Five Live Sports Extra (all with over a million average weekly listeners).

Interestingly -- and The Telegraph points this out -- just 6.7 million radio sets were sold in this time period, which is an 18.3% drop from the same period last year. The paper attributes this to "radio listening (that) is now online or via apps, and new apps such as the iPlayer and Radioplayer (that) have encouraged more users to listen via their mobiles."

Read the summary of Ofcom's report here; and coverage from The Telegraph here.

RadioPlayer, the online radio platform that aggregates more than 300 UK commercial and BBC stations, has launched its app for the Apple iPhone and iPad.

"Our aim was to create a simple app that showcases the amazing variety of UK radio," said Michael Hill, Managing Director of RadioPlayer. "The fact we’ve built one that’s also beautiful, innovative, and a joy to use, is testament to the power of partnerships." Hill spoke at both our recent RAIN Summit Dallas (here) and at Friday's RAIN Summit Europe in Berlin.

RadioPlayer, which launched in March of last year, reportedly attracts seven million unique listeners a month. The group says an app for Android phones is in the works.

Read more in TheNextWeb here.