• Financial Times , Wednesday, September 17, 2008 10 AM

Vivendi CEO Jean Bernard Lévy believes his group will soon see strong revenue growth from its Universal Music Group division -- home of Amy Winehouse, Metallica and McFly -- thanks to new means of raising money from the sale of music. He cites Nokia's plan to charge a premium for handsets that include its Comes With Music service that allows consumers to download unlimited music tracks to their handset for a year.

Other innovations with potential to increase revenue included possible future deals with companies such as Apple as well as existing arrangements with the social networking site MySpace, announced last spring.

Until now, the decline of CD sales in the face of an upsurge of digital downloading, mostly illicit, had led to a decline in global recorded music sales from $36.9 billion in 2000 to $29.9 billion last year. In a recent speech, new media expert Clay Shirky described the music industry as "the skull on a pikestaff as a warning to others about how not to deal with the Internet."

Read the whole story at Financial Times »