Facebook has taken its first real steps into the music business

Facebook is finally getting into the music business.
                                             

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t selling songs or music streaming subscriptions. But his company has signed a deal with Universal Music, the world’s largest music label, that the two companies have been working on for some time.

For users, the deal means that if they upload a homemade video clip to Facebook or Instagram that has a part of a Universal song in the background, the clip can stay up without generating a takedown notice. That has obvious benefits for Facebook, as well (but to spell it out — Facebook wants to do anything it can to encourage people to make and share content on its services).

And for Universal, the deal means that the company now has a significant new revenue source — neither side is commenting on financials for now, but industry sources assume Facebook wrote the music a label a very large check as an advance, and that Universal can make more over the course of the multiyear deal.

Crucially, the deal does not give Facebook the right to create its own version of Vevo, the music video service owned by the music labels that generates most of its views on YouTube. On the other hand, now that Universal has its first licensing deal with Facebook, it opens up the door for other stuff down the road.

Perhaps most important for Universal is that it now has a credible bargaining chip when it talks to Google’s YouTube.

For years, the labels and YouTube have been in a symbiotic-but-strained relationship: The labels’ product generates lots of views for YouTube, which says it pays the labels plenty of money in return. But the labels have consistently complained that YouTube doesn’t pay them nearly enough.

Now Universal (and eventually the other big labels) can more credibly tell YouTube that they will take their product off the world’s biggest video platform and move it to the worlds’ biggest social network.

Not a coincidence: The press release announcing the deal quotes Tamara Hrivnak, the Facebook business exec who negotiated the deal with Universal. Up until last year, she was in charge of negotiating similar deals for YouTube.

Lots more music where that came from

There's been a parade of British piano virtuosos this fall at the Union College Concert Series, starting with Benjamin Grosvenor at the beginning of November, and followed by Paul Lewis in the middle of the month. The run culminates with the Welsh-born Llŷr Williams, who will be making his local debut on Sunday, Dec. 3.
Williams' program is a kind of sampler of his obsessions. The first half features Debussy (Suite Bergamasque) and Beethoven (Sonata No. 53, "Waldstein"). After intermission, it's vocal music via Liszt with a set of his Schubert song transcriptions followed by a lengthy take on Bellini's opera "Norma."
                                                     

Three years ago Signum Records issued "Wagner Without Words," a two-disc set of Williams performing at the keyboard music from every major Wagner opera, plus other odds and ends by the composer. Most of the opera transcriptions come from Liszt. For the sake of completeness, Williams' audio producer Judith Sherman persuaded him to include his own original take on "Parsifal." Scheduled for release next year is a 12-CD box set of the complete Beethoven Sonatas. After that comes a Schubert collection, which is still in the recording phase but will probably amount to six or seven CDs.
Asked how he manages such a quantity of music, Williams replies, "I don't know any secret to memorizing a vast amount of literature. I just work at it as a normal person would go at a job, with seven to eight hours a day practicing as a regular routine."

"The music is in the fingers and in the head, a combination of the two," he explains. "Everybody relies on the muscle memory, but it mustn't take over. You always need the brain working out where it's going next and what's important."
Sometimes all systems fail, even for virtuosos at the top of their game.
"Memory slips happen all the time, but it depends on how bad they are," continues Williams. "The fugue in Beethoven's Opus 110 is a nightmare. If that goes wrong, there's no way to find your way out. It's a good idea to take music for that, to just have one piece of paper on the piano for security. That's the most extreme example."
There are a couple of monuments of the repertoire -- Ives' "Concord" Sonata and Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata — where the beauty and pleasures of the music took their time in revealing themselves to Williams.