DOT-DOT-DOT-COM:
THINGS GO BETTER WITH COKE

Musicdealers.com and Coca-Cola have finalized a deal in which the music licensing startup will identify new and emerging talent worldwide and license their songs for a variety of Coke campaigns, programs and events. It also makes Music Dealers the key music sourcing partner for Coca-Cola Music, which is now in 140 countries. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Coke is now a minority shareholder in the company. Said Emmanuel Seuge, Coke’s Director of Worldwide Sports and Entertainment Marketing: “We are excited about the opportunities that come from partnering the world’s most valuable brand with an innovative and game-changing startup and the potential ripple effect that can come of it, especially for the thousands of emerging artists around the world who are looking for a global platform to launch their music.” Added Music Dealers President Eric Sheinkop: “Our values are perfectly aligned—we aim to promote independent artists and share their music with fans around the world. The Coca-Cola Company is a great partner who offers solid support to our artists. When artists record a track for Coke, they put significant marketing leverage behind it. The song gets more exposure worldwide than even big artists get from a record label. This arrangement has literally helped artists launch their careers—not to mention our website.” (OK, we made up the last part, motivated by sheer jealousy). Prior to the agreement, Coke used Music Dealers to find a song “with strong teen appeal” to become the global anthem for Coca-Cola Music. The resulting track was “Can You Feel It,” written by Swedish band You Say France & I Whistle and recorded by U.K. band One Night Only. It was also used in the Coke TV spot Walls, which has since aired in 60 countries… The RIAA and MPAA had nothing to do with the move by one giant ISP to punish some of its own customers AT&T Wireless has confirmed its plans to begin throttling data speeds for its heaviest data users, starting Oct. 1, digitalmediawire reports. The new policy will reduce the network speed of the top 5% of smartphone data users with unlimited data plans. The speed will be restored at the beginning of the next billing cycle, but of course it will get slowed down again should data usage reach that top tier again. “These customers on average use 12 times more data than the average of all other smartphone data customers,” an AT&T Wireless statement explained. “This step will not apply to our 15 million smartphone customers on a tiered data plan or the vast majority of smartphone customers who still have unlimited data plans.” All that led to a pitch, as AT&T then suggested that any customer concerned about being throttled could switch to a tiered plan, under which they would end up paying more for the data they use but never get their speeds reduced. As DMW pointed out, AT&T Wireless was hammered by network congestion and failures after it became Apple’s exclusive carrier with the iPhone, and with the iPhone 5 presumably right around the corner, discouraging unlimited access may be a strategic step to avoid a recurrence of those problems. The statement then turned to politicking: “Even as we pursue this additional measure, it will not solve our spectrum shortage and network capacity issues. Nothing short of completing the T-Mobile merger will provide additional spectrum capacity to address these near term challenges.”… So how much data usage is too much? “We’ve been told that 12,000 emails, 12,000 website views, 4 streaming movies and 5 hours of streaming music will start to put you close to that upper range of usage,” 9to5mac speculates... Which brings us to a point we made a couple of weeks go: that one of the biggest issues nobody is talking about regarding the widespread adoption of Spotify and the other subscription services is that using them on mobile devices will blow you past your plan’s data-usage limit in no time, significantly adding to the cost of the subscription itself… Speaking of mobile devices, All Things D reported yesterday that the iPhone 5 won’t arrive until October, a month behind schedule, and that could cut the number of iPhones sold during the quarter ending Sept. by 2 million units to 20 million, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.