Labels maintain new music spend despite sales slump

LONDON (Reuters) – Record labels say they have maintained high levels of investment in new music despite sweeping changes to their business in the digital age and a decade of falling revenues caused by sliding album sales and online piracy.

According to a new study from industry body IFPI published on Monday, record companies invested $ 4.5 billion in A&R (artists and repertoire) and marketing in 2011.

That was down from $ 5 billion in 2008, partly due to a significant drop in the amount record labels were willing to spend on marketing up-and-coming talent at a time of shrinking income.

But the A&R side fell less sharply to $ 2.7 billion last year versus $ 2.8 billion in 2008 despite a decline of 16 percent in the trade value of the industry globally over the same period.

Presenting the report in London, Max Hole, COO of Universal Music Group International, said he was cautiously optimistic that the music business would return to growth soon, helped by the proliferation of digital platforms.

“The stats are getting better, the rate of decline is slowing,” he told reporters.

“There’s every reason to hope that in the next couple of years we’ll reach the low point and start to go back to growth.”

According to the IFPI, in the first nine months of 2012, global recorded music sales had fallen by around one percent year-on-year after a fall of three percent in 2011.

The industry peaked in 1999 when sales were $ 28.6 billion, but has shrunk every year since, reaching $ 16.6 billion in 2011.

“I just feel that we are at a tipping point of lots and lots of services coming on, and services that really are in touch with the consumer,” Hole said, adding that, crucially, the platforms were more attractive than illegal pirate sites.

BANDS WANT LABELS

The report showed that more than 70 percent of unsigned acts in Britain and Germany wanted a record deal, despite the perception that many artists are keen to go it alone with the help of social networking.

Major labels have been accused of being slow to adjust to the challenges posed by digital music and illegal downloads, and relying too heavily on older, established acts to make money.

But the IFPI report sought to underline their role in unearthing new talent in a notoriously risky business.

Revenues invested in A&R represent around 16 percent of industry turnover, compared with 15.3 percent in the pharmaceuticals and biotech sector and 9.6 percent in software and computing.

The IFPI estimated breaking a pop act in a major market typically costs from $ 750,000 to $ 1.4 million, including a $ 200,000 advance, $ 200-300,000 on recording, $ 50-300,000 on videos, $ 100,000 on touring and $ 200-500,000 on marketing.

The Internet has revolutionized the way record labels go about their business, the report said.

A&R representatives today rely on the Internet as much as they do on attending gigs up and down the country to discover the next best thing, although most still want to see an act live before making up their minds.

According to the report, record labels are providing far more digital content as part of their marketing and promotion, and tend to sign deals with artists which go well beyond the shrinking recorded music business.

Brand partnerships, offering songs for use on television, in film and in commercials, and linking up singers from different regions to generate cross-over interest are just some of the ways they can help establish a new act, the IFPI added.

Hole said the recent merger between Universal, already the world’s largest music label, and EMI, would not lead to less A&R spending, but more.

“We have stated quite categorically that our intention is to reinvest in EMI and boost it and we think it will result in more investment in A&R,” he said.

“We operate a multi-label structure and that was something that had declined at EMI,” he added. “We’re going to reverse that.”

(Editing by Steve Addison)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ashley Greene Hopes Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart Drama Doesn't 'Taint' Twilight

11/12/2012 at 09:05 AM EST

When Breaking Dawn: Part 2 opens this week, Ashley Greene hopes fans can concentrate on the big screen action – and forget about the off-screen drama surrounding the film's two main stars.

Of course, over the last several months Twi-hards have been enthralled with the ups and downs of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson's all-too-real breakup due to her cheating scandal and eventual reconciliation.

Asked if she thinks audiences will be affected by the couple's issues, Greene, 25, tells Seventeen, "I don’t know. Hopefully, it won’t taint it and people will still be able to enjoy the movie. I think a lot of people see us as our characters; I really want them to still be able to do that."

Greene – who has had some high-profile romances of her own, with singer Joe Jonas and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark star Reeve Carne – says she understands still feeling love for an ex.

"I certainly have [been in love]," she tells the magazine. "I can still love an ex as a person, regardless if the breakup was bad. I would never wish anything negative on them. It takes more energy to hate them than to wish them well."

As for any behind-the-scenes gossip from the set of Breaking Dawn, Greene reveals that the fun-loving cast "secretly coordinated a surprise dance-off during a scene."

"We were all in on it, but [the director] Bill Condon didn’t know," says Greene. "[All the vampires] were supposed to charge at each other and destroy each other, and instead we just started dancing! Everyone did it – the Cullen clan and probably 20 vampire extras! It was such an amazing way to end it all."

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British medical journal slams Roche on Tamiflu

LONDON (AP) — A leading British medical journal is asking the drug maker Roche to release all its data on Tamiflu, claiming there is no evidence the drug can actually stop the flu.

The drug has been stockpiled by dozens of governments worldwide in case of a global flu outbreak and was widely used during the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

On Monday, one of the researchers linked to the BMJ called for European governments to sue Roche.

"I suggest we boycott Roche's products until they publish missing Tamiflu data," wrote Peter Gotzsche, leader of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. He said governments should take legal action against Roche to get the money back that was "needlessly" spent on stockpiling Tamiflu.

Last year, Tamiflu was included in a list of "essential medicines" by the World Health Organization, which often prompts governments or donor agencies to buy the drug.

WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said the agency recommended the drug be used to treat unusual influenza viruses like bird flu. "We do have substantive evidence it can stop or hinder progression to severe disease like pneumonia," he said.

In 2009, the BMJ and researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Centre asked Roche to make all its Tamiflu data available. At the time, Cochrane Centre scientists were commissioned by Britain to evaluate flu drugs. They found no proof that Tamiflu reduced the number of complications in people with influenza.

"Despite a public promise to release (internal company reports) for each (Tamiflu) trial...Roche has stonewalled," BMJ editor Fiona Godlee wrote in an editorial last month.

In a statement, Roche said it had complied with all legal requirements on publishing data and provided Gotzsche and his colleagues with 3,200 pages of information to answer their questions.

"Roche has made full clinical study data...available to national health authorities according to their various requirements, so they can conduct their own analyses," the company said.

Roche says it doesn't usually release patient-level data available due to legal or confidentiality constraints. It said it did not provide the requested data to the scientists because they refused to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Roche is also being investigated by the European Medicines Agency for not properly reporting side effects, including possible deaths, for 19 drugs including Tamiflu that were used in about 80,000 patients in the U.S.

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Online:

www.bmj.com.tamiflu/

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Moderates could enhance image of state Legislature

SACRAMENTO — The next class of the Legislature will be stocked with a new variety of lawmaker, the product of a new political order intended to foster moderation, compromise and foresight in an institution not known for such things.

Able to serve longer in one house under revamped term limits, the newly elected will have time to develop expertise. They may well be more accountable to voters because their seats will no longer be safe as they were when districts were gerrymandered to maintain the status quo.

And their moderation, born of more balanced districts and nonpartisan primaries, can serve as a check on Democrats' emerging supermajorities in both houses. That historic development would allow Democrats to sidestep Republicans on tax votes and in placing proposals on the statewide ballot.

Taken together, the changes have the potential to rehabilitate the image of the Legislature, which has taken a beating during years of partisan gridlock, protracted budget wars and short-term solutions that kicked problems down the road.

Ambitious legislators will no longer seek to simply "get a couple of bills passed and create the impression they did something," said Bob Hertzberg, a former Assembly speaker who pushed for the changes. The new rules, he said, force lawmakers to "think longer term, and not just engage in the optics of politics."

The effect of the changes will be felt most in the Assembly. Nearly half of the lower house will be freshmen — the largest number since 1934. The state Senate will welcome 10 new members, all but one of whom hails from the Assembly.

The newcomers will be the first to operate under new rules that allow lawmakers to serve their entire tenure — up to 12 years — in one house. Under California's old term limits, enacted 22 years ago, legislators could have three terms in the Assembly and two in the Senate, for a total of 14 years.

In that system, political analysts said, lawmakers had lost sight of how to govern. Short tenures left them reliant on lobbyists for guidance on complex issues and prompted a perpetual scramble for higher office and cash to fund the next campaign. Lobbyists exercised extraordinary power as both campaign donors and policy advisors, earning a nickname as the "Third House."

Focus will be critical for the new lawmakers as they tackle Gov. Jerry Brown's ambitious agenda. It includes implementing President Obama's healthcare law, overhauling the state's water system, amending environmental regulations to encourage economic growth and promoting California's high-speed rail project.

Many of those legislators will have some freedom to operate independently of their caucuses. The nonpartisan primary system, which allows the top-two finishers to face off in the general election, is expected to ease caucus leaders' grip.

The bosses prize party discipline to deliver critical votes. In recent years, deals on the state budget have been hammered out by the "Big Five," a group composed of those leaders and the governor.

Now, "if it plays out the way people are expecting, you will have a little bit less of a notion that … top leaders make all the decisions," said Raphael Sonenshein, who heads the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State L.A.

In Tuesday's election, 20 races pitted two candidates of the same party against each other. Contenders in those districts had to please voters beyond their own parties.

In Northern California wine country, Democrat Marc Levine bested incumbent Assemblyman Michael Allen (D-Santa Rosa) in a tight contest, though some ballots remain uncounted. Allen had attacked Levine for campaigning before Republican groups. Levine championed an overhaul of the state's public pension system strongly opposed by labor groups that backed Allen.

"Voters are looking for leaders with solutions to the challenges facing California," Levine said in an interview.

Some Republicans also shifted toward the political middle.

In 2010, Kristin Olsen of Modesto won an Assembly seat after she joined her GOP colleagues in signing a no-tax pledge. This year, running against a Democrat in a newly drawn district, she declined to renew the vow, saying it encumbers lawmakers from showing leadership.

Backers of the new political system are optimistic about the fruits it may bear.

"With more time," said Kathay Feng, executive director of California Common Cause, "we hope these new legislators will develop a greater personal knowledge of issues, deepen relations with legislators on both sides of the aisle and be able to resolve some of the long-term challenges that California faces."

michael.mishak@latimes.com

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

For the latest California election results, go to latimes.com/electionresults and latimes.com/socalresults.

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Changing of the Guard: Chinese Communist Party Faces Calls for Democracy

BEIJING — As the Communist Party’s 18th Congress approached, Li Weidong, a scholar of politics, made plans to observe a historic leadership battle in one of the world’s great nations.

Instead of staying in Beijing to monitor China’s once-a-decade transfer of power, Mr. Li boarded a plane.

“I’m going to the United States to study the elections,” Mr. Li said in a telephone interview during a stopover in Paris. After witnessing the American presidential election on Tuesday, Mr. Li went on the radio for another interview. “I still think China’s politics remain prehistoric,” he said. “I often joke that the Chinese civilization is the last prehistoric civilization left in the world.”

With China at a critical juncture, there is a rising chorus within the elite expressing doubt that the 91-year-old Communist Party’s authoritarian system can deal with the stresses bearing down on the nation and its 1.3 billion people. Policies introduced after 1978 by Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and transformed the country into the world’s second-largest economy. But the way party leaders have managed decades of growth has created towering problems that critics say can no longer be avoided.

Many of those critics have benefited from China’s stunning economic gains, and their ranks include billionaires, intellectuals and children of the party’s revolutionary founders. But they say the party’s agenda, as it stands today, is not visionary enough to set China on the path to stability. What is needed, they say, is a comprehensive strategy to gradually extricate the Communist Party, which has more than 80 million members, from its heavy-handed control of the economy, the courts, the news media, the military, educational institutions, civic life and just the plain day-to-day affairs of citizens.

Only then, the critics argue, can the government start to address the array of issues facing China, including rampant corruption, environmental degradation, and an aging population whose demographics have been skewed because of the one-child policy.

“In order to build a real market economy, we have to have real political reform,” said Yang Jisheng, a veteran journalist and a leading historian of the Mao era. “In the next years, we should have a constitutional democracy plus a market economy.”

For now, however, party leaders have given no indication that they intend to curb their role in government in a meaningful way.

“We will never copy a Western political system,” Hu Jintao, the departing party chief, said in a speech on Thursday opening the weeklong congress.

The party’s public agenda, which Mr. Hu described in detail in his 100-minute address, was laid out in a 64-page report that is in part intended to highlight priorities for the new leaders, who will be announced later this month. Much of the document had retrograde language that emphasized ideology stretching back to Mao and had little in the way of bold or creative thinking, said Qian Gang, the director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong.

Most telling, there was no language signaling that the incoming Politburo Standing Committee, the group that rules China by consensus, would support major changes in the political system, whose perversions many now say are driving the nation toward crisis.

While Chinese who are critical of the current system generally do not expect a wholesale adoption of a Western model, they do favor at least an openness to bolder experimentation.

“To break one-party rule right now is probably not realistic, but we can have factions within the party made public and legalized, so they can campaign against each other,” said Mr. Yang, who added that there was no other way at the moment to ensure political accountability.

Only in the last few years has the idea of liberalizing the political system gained currency, and urgency, among a broad cross-section of elites. Before that, as the West foundered at the onset of the global financial crisis, many here pointed to the triumph of a “China model” or “Beijing consensus” — a mix of authoritarian politics, a command economy and quasi-market policies.

But the way in which China weathered the crisis — with the injection of $588 billion of stimulus money into the economy and an explosion of lending from state banks — led to a spate of large infrastructure projects that may never justify their cost. As a result, many economists now say that China’s investment-driven, export-oriented economic model is unsustainable and needs to shift toward greater reliance on Chinese consumers.

Constant lip-service is paid to that goal, and on Saturday, Zhang Ping, a senior official, reiterated that stance. But it will not be easy for the new leaders to carry it out. At the root of the current economic model is the political system, in which party officials and state-owned enterprises work closely together, reaping enormous profits from the party’s control of the economy. Under Mr. Hu’s decade-long tenure, these relationships and the dominance of state enterprises have only strengthened.

“What happens in this kind of economy is that wealth concentrates where power is,” said Mr. Yang, the journalist.

The 400 or so incoming members of the party’s Central Committee, Politburo and Politburo Standing Committee, as well as their friends and families, have close ties to the most powerful of China’s 145,000 state-owned enterprises. The growing presence of princelings — the children of notable Communist officials — in the party, the government and corporations could mean an even more closely meshed web of nepotism. It is a system that Xi Jinping, anointed to be the next party chief and president and himself a member of the “red nobility,” would find hard to unravel, even if he wanted to.

Mia Li contributed research.

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Matthew McConaughey Is at His 'Absolute Lowest Weight'

By Sarah Michaud

11/10/2012 at 05:00 PM EST

Weight-wise, Matthew McConaughey is at his lowest point.

The actor, 43, was snapped looking shockingly frail Friday as he caught a flight from Los Angeles to New Orleans, where The Dallas Buyer's Club is set to begin filming Sunday.

McConaughey has lost 30 lbs. – and gained a mustache – for the role. In the movie, he plays a mid-1980s AIDS patient who seeks out experimental HIV drugs to prolong his life.

"Matthew starts shooting this weekend, so he's at his absolute lowest weight," a source close to the actor tells PEOPLE. "In a month, he'll begin to put it back on."

Around the time he gains the weight back, McConaughey will gain a new family member as well – wife Camila is set to deliver their third child this winter.

• Reporting by ELIZABETH LEONARD

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Malaria vaccine a letdown for infants

LONDON (AP) — An experimental malaria vaccine once thought promising is turning out to be a disappointment, with a new study showing it is only about 30 percent effective at protecting infants from the killer disease.

That is a significant drop from a study last year done in slightly older children, which suggested the vaccine cut the malaria risk by about half — though that is still far below the protection provided from most vaccines. According to details released on Friday, the three-shot regimen reduced malaria cases by about 30 percent in infants aged 6 to 12 weeks, the target age for immunization.

Dr. Jennifer Cohn, a medical coordinator at Doctors Without Borders, described the vaccine's protection levels as "unacceptably low." She was not linked to the study.

Scientists have been working for decades to develop a malaria vaccine, a complicated endeavor since the disease is caused by five different species of parasites. There has never been an effective vaccine against a parasite. Worldwide, there are several dozen malaria vaccine candidates being researched.

In 2006, a group of experts led by the World Health Organization said a malaria vaccine should cut the risk of severe disease and death by at least half and should last longer than one year. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes and kills more than 650,000 people every year, mostly young children and pregnant women in Africa. Without a vaccine, officials have focused on distributing insecticide-treated bed nets, spraying homes with pesticides and ensuring access to good medicines.

In the new study, scientists found babies who got three doses of the vaccine had about 30 percent fewer cases of malaria than those who didn't get immunized. The research included more than 6,500 infants in Africa. Experts also found the vaccine reduced the amount of severe malaria by about 26 percent, up to 14 months after the babies were immunized.

Scientists said they needed to analyze the data further to understand why the vaccine may be working differently in different regions. For example, babies born in areas with high levels of malaria might inherit some antibodies from their mothers which could interfere with any vaccination.

"Maybe we should be thinking of a first-generation vaccine that is targeted only for certain children," said Dr. Salim Abdulla of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania, one of the study investigators.

Results were presented at a conference in South Africa on Friday and released online by the New England Journal of Medicine. The study is scheduled to continue until 2014 and is being paid for by GlaxoSmithKline and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

"The results look bad now, but they will probably be worse later," said Adrian Hill of Oxford University, who is developing a competing malaria vaccine. He noted the study showed the Glaxo vaccine lost its potency after several months. Hill said the vaccine might be a hard sell, compared to other vaccines like those for meningitis and pneumococcal disease — which are both effective and cheap.

"If it turns out to have a clear 30 percent efficacy, it is probably not worth it to implement this in Africa on a large scale," said Genton Blaise, a malaria expert at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel, who also sits on a WHO advisory board.

Eleanor Riley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the vaccine might be useful if used together with other strategies, like bed nets. She was involved in an earlier study of the vaccine and had hoped for better results. "We're all a bit frustrated that it has proven so hard to make a malaria vaccine," she said. "The question is how much money are the funders willing to keep throwing at it."

Glaxo first developed the vaccine in 1987 and has invested $300 million in it so far.

WHO said it couldn't comment on the incomplete results and would wait until the trial was finished before drawing any conclusions.

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Marine Capt. Matthew P. Manoukian killed in Afghanistan

Matthew P. Manoukian, a captain in the U.S. Marines, came from a family committed to public service and the law. Both his parents are judges — his father, Socrates Peter Manoukian, a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge, and his mother, Patricia Bamattre-Manoukian, a state appellate court justice. His uncle, William Bamattre, was the fire chief of Los Angeles for 11 years.

Manoukian grew up in Los Altos Hills in Northern California with a keen sense of history and how America has provided a safe harbor for refugees. His paternal grandfather survived the Armenian genocide in Turkey, started a new life in the United States and made sure Matthew understood the costs of unchecked oppression, relatives recall.

"As a little kid, he always was sticking up for his friends. If friends were getting pushed around, he would jump in the middle of it," his father said. Later, as a young man, Matthew would wonder why the United States did not act more forcefully in the 1930s and '40s to protect European Jews from the Nazis.

At his alma mater, St. Francis High School in Mountain View, school President Kevin Makley recalled Manoukian as a good student and "a hard-nosed football player but the kind who knocked the opponent down and then reached over and helped him get up."

His background, along with a strong taste for physical action and adventure, was an important influence on his desire to join the Marines, something he first talked about when he was 7 years old.

The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, made him want to immediately drop out of his political science studies at the University of Arizona and enlist. But he was told he needed knee surgery first for a football injury and another operation to remove a spinal cord tumor, his father said.

After recovering from those surgeries and earning a bachelor's degree, the 6-foot-3 and muscular Manoukian joined the Marine Corps in 2006 as an infantry officer and was deployed twice to Iraq.

In 2007, he suffered a concussion in a blast from an improvised explosive device but hustled to save a fellow Marine nearby by applying a tourniquet on the wounded man's leg, officials said.

He later attended elite training before being assigned to the 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion, based at Camp Pendleton, and served in Afghanistan. He also was a first degree black belt in the Marines' martial arts program.

Manoukian, who learned Arabic, hoped the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan would help establish law-abiding societies and "provide confidence to the locals who were being intimidated by various factions there," said his uncle William Bamattre. He also worked hard to keep his unit safe, added Bamattre, who recalled seeing parents of younger Marines thanking Manoukian during Camp Pendleton visits.

In early August, the San Diego Union-Tribune published an article about improved security in Afghanistan. In it, a Marine special operations leader named Matt, later identified as Manoukian, expressed pride that village boys had stopped pretending to be Taliban insurgents and instead played policemen. "Matt" likened the change to the old American West, saying: "It wasn't cool to be a sheriff. It was cool to be a bank robber until Wyatt Earp came along and started making a name for himself and for lawmen."

On Aug. 10, Manoukian was having a pre-dawn meal with Afghan officials during the holy month of Ramadan in Helmand province. A renegade Afghan police officer opened fire, killing Manoukian and two other Marines, according to an account provided by the Marines.

Manoukian's military decorations included two Purple Hearts, two Navy-Marine Corps Commendation Medals and two Combat Action Ribbons.

Manoukian, who was 29, was planning to attend law school next year after shifting to the Marine reserves and possibly to work later as a public defender. Besides being influenced by the family tradition of serving as lawyers, he saw in Iraq and Afghanistan how the law provides a society "access to justice and freedom," his mother said.

A memorial service at St. Francis High attracted more than 2,000 mourners on Aug. 18, and a scholarship fund was established in Manoukian's memory there. The death "impacted this entire community, not just the school," school President Makley said.

Manoukian had a longtime relationship with his high school girlfriend, Melissa Graybehl. In addition to his parents, other survivors include his two younger brothers, Michael and Martin.

larry.gordon@latimes.com

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