Early last week, a six-month promotion period, during which U.S. users were exempted from Spotify’s five-plays-per-song, 10-hours-per-month limits, was due to end for the first of the service’s American adopters, if reports were to be believed. But that apparently hasn’t yet happened.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and other search engines “overwhelmingly” direct music fans to illegal copies of copyrighted tracks online, a coalition of entertainment industry groups has told the government.

Chasing the post-download digital music opportunity, veteran services are seeking scale to fight dominant newcomers, whilst strangers from outside the space are launching their own new services with mixed success.

As its co-owner HMV (LSE: HMV) struggles to manage a fall in physical sales, digital music retailer 7digital is borrowing a trick from new music services like Rdio by introducing web-based streaming.

The six-year slowdown in digital music’s commercial growth rate ended in 2011, when digital trade revenue grew eight percent to $5.2 billion, according to the IFPI industry umbrella group’s annual Digital Music Report.

Facebook is lagging in the video-streaming race, with YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Hulu all making major investments to acquire and develop original video content. But if Facebook can reach an exclusive deal with Vevo, the web’s largest aggregator of music videos…

It is a busy week for digital media news in the Far East, ahead of the Chinese New Year on January 23. Notably, more new e-book services are coming, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is sued for assisting e-book piracy and the door is open to foreign investment in digital music…

In October, Coldplay withheld its new album from streaming services like Spotify, Rdio , We7 and Mog. But that absence is not indefinite.

HMV’s CEO says the slowdown in plastic music and movie sales is itself slowing down - even though its Christmas was nearly a tenth worse than the previous year.

2011 UK music sales volume figures are in, showing a continuation of the same patterns, according to Official Charts Company data (via BPI).

This is the last in a series of posts that highlighted key people, companies and trends to watch in 2012 in the sectors we cover most, from publishing to legal, and from mobile to advertising. Not too long ago, TV Everywhere was a bold concept being evangelized by Time Warner…

The European Commission says 2011 progress against its digital agenda ambitions has been “mixed”.

Some countries in Europe, like France, are looking at ways of extending their copyright protection laws to streamed media, in addition to existing laws against unlicensed downloads. Other countries, it seems, are going in quite the other direction, as a recent decision in the Netherlands shows.

A report out today, taking its cue from the new Timeline feature that is now getting rolled out to Facebook’s 800-million-plus users, alleges that Facebook will be using its new homepage format as a new vehicle for selling advertising. The question, however, is whether this is actually a development beyond…

Digital music is now mainstream, thanks in part to the MP3. Will the e-book market be next to produce a one-size-fits-all format—a format that is universally readable, freely sharable, and with a reasonably good reproduction quality? The answer to this question, for at least in the foreseeable future, is: not…

It’s taken ten years, and a last leg up by way of an acquisition of a competitor, but Rhapsody says that it has finally reached one million subscribers for its music services in the U.S.

Apple’s and Android’s stronghold on the U.S. smartphone market has been the case for many quarters already, and figures out today from Nielsen show how that has translated into a domination of the business of mobile content as well: phones based on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)…

Nearly 12 years after it first launched, iTunes Store has gone live in Brazil and 15 other Latin American countries, as the region’s consumer digital content market takes off.

Spotify and Pandora (NYSE: P) may be the music brands people think of today when it comes to streaming services. But with only five million consumers using services like these today, there is clearly an opportunity for another player to emerge to try to pick up more. Enter a new…