Keep adding to our playlist in Spotify or the comments below; we might just do a Vol. 2.

CEO Daniel Ek last week said: “We might put it on the stock exchange at some point.” And, when asked about both options - IPO or VC - the company told paidContent:UK it’s “far too early to say” but “all options remain open”.

Spotify is only one exponent of the unlimited music access model, but it’s implementation is seductive. Ek and co-founder Martin Lorentzon say they have invested €8 million of their own money and taken venture capital from Northzone Ventures and Creandum (reported by Times Online to be €13 million). But as its popularity grows, it’s likely incurring heavy outgiongs on royalties - the question is: can Spotify convert enough free users to paid, and can it profit from the advertising served to the majority, free users?

In fairness, royalties and the early development of its advertising business are not the only reasons Spotify may need extra cash. Currently available only in parts of western and northern Europe and Scandinavia, there’s significant room for international expansion now that users are showing love for the idea and once the ad model begins to bear fruit. The question of whether labels may stump up for a new fund raising - and whether they already have equity - still seems open…

“It’s a bit of a wake-up call,” said Ian Bramley, director of the entertainment unit within Ipsos MediaCT. It tested more than 30 digital content distribution models for music, movies and video games in interviews more than 1,000 people over the age of 16.

While there was interest in free models supported by advertising and subscription models, across film, music and the latest generation of console video games, people preferred to download content to own.

One of the most common complaints from the creative industries is that people won’t pay for content online when they can get the content for free through a range of illegal file-sharing services, but the Ipsos study found that two-thirds of people they interviewed who pirated music would switch to official distribution channels if the price was right. “This is a huge opportunity, but it depends on how hard they want to battle against the pirates,” Bramley said.

—Drop prices to entice music pirates: Currently, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) charges £0.79 per track on its iTunes store. Only about 10 percent of respondents were interested in buying tracks at that rate, but interest rose to 32 percent when the price dropped to £0.45. Music fans also want tracks without DRM - digital rights management - so that they can shift the music to the device or format they want.

—Movies popular at £3: For older movies and classic games, the industry and consumers are closer to each other in price, but download prices are too high for new releases. Movie and TV programme download service Blinkbox charges £12 pounds for new releases, but only £2.50 for older films from studios catalogue. The Ipsos survey found that £3 was the “optimal price” for downloaded films, with 36% of respondents say they would be interested at paying for downloaded films at that price.

One of the challenges for video downloads isn’t down to pricing but problems with the technology. People are unwilling to pay higher prices when they can only watch the video on a computer. However, connected TVs are on the horizon, due to hit the market next year. “Those are things that will open up the market,” Bramley said.

In the meantime, the movie industry is facing a challenge to close that yawning chasm between what they are charging and what consumers are willing to pay. To close that gap, the movie industry either needs to reconsider their pricing or add extra value to their digital offerings such as the extras bundled with DVD collections. But for gaming and films, Ipsos sees the most opportunity in looking to the past, releasing classic games and films from studios’ vaults at the prices consumers are willing to pay.

The switch-off happened last week, when Palo Alto-based Playlist.com’s web player began displaying the message: “Due to licensing restrictions, some or all tracks may be unavailable for playback in your country.”

The RIAA filed suit against Playlist.com last year; it was also recently being sued by Universal and Warner, and had its web widget blocked by Facebook and MySpace. It has licenses from Sony (NYSE: SNE) and EMI and hired Van Natta in November, but it was only five months later he upped for MySpace, replaced by John Sykes. It also recently bought parts of the defunct Universal-Sony “Total Music” JV but laid off some people due to overlaps.

There’s no elaboration on what the restrictions are and the company hasn’t given us any info for the last week, but it’s clear Project Playlist is limping along to keep itself away from further lawsuits. It appears to have implemented the kind of territorial licensing framework the music industry likes to operate, which lets some tunes be played in some countries but not others.

Playlist.com compares itself with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), saying “we do not host music files, nor do we make them available”. Instead, it lets users create playlists from tunes hosted elsewhere. But that defence from similar sites around the world often hasn’t convinced labels (the most litigious being EMI); Playlist.com has thus blocked loads of tunes - none of those I tried to play from the UK worked.

Dozens of angry users have peppered the company’s message board - many from artists and band webmasters who own their own songs but have lost the ability to embed playlists containing them. Staff respond: “We are investigating ways to offer audio to restricted locations in the future.”

This isn’t like the Olympics, where NBC has—and as Jeff Zucker stressed to me recently, will continue—to time shift key events to prime evening hours to maintain traffic and ad dollars for an incredibly expensive event. This is a marquee event that NBC will show in time-shifted waves across the U.S. during the day because it can, not for the sake of preserving its audience. (Richard Sandomir did a great job of explaining this.) ESPN (NYSE: DIS) is more than willing to show the match live but can’t either on air or ESPN360.com because of the Byzantine broadcast contracts. NBC will show its broadband stream when it airs the tape-delayed match. It’s all a slap in the face to fans—and to its own crew working hard to produce great tennis coverage.

It’s as though NBC is double-dog-daring people to skip TV. Just a sampling of the tweets here suggests some irked fans will do just that. They’ll be back for the finals this weekend, which are supposed to really be live but that sour taste won’t disappear.

I’m especially frustrated because I experienced Wimbledon in person this year for a few hours. I was at Centre Court when the roof was closed for the first time but I spent much of my time at the Broadcast Centre (on a pass arranged by ESPN) so I could get a better sense of the broadband operations across the networks. I’ll have more on that but for now I need to go back to Twitter or Radio Wimbledon or the like in search of the latest update on the battle of the Andys.

Update: Just to show how absurd this all is, at 1:39 ET, we’re in the third set on broadband as NBC simulcasts its main broadcast feed, but in central time, where I am now, the broadcast is still in the first set—and out west, it’s not close to starting. Meanwhile, at Wimbledon it’s a fourth set tie-break with Roddick ahead two sets to one. No, actually, thanks to everyone but NBC,  we now know that’s a winner for Andy Roddick as Murray’s hopes of playing in front of the Queen Sunday are dashed.

A Sky spokesman (via NMA) blamed a lack of revenue: “Unfortunately Rivals.net wasn’t performing as well as we’d hoped. Therefore, the decision was made to close it.” Popular news site Football365.com is unaffected and Sky of course runs its own Skysports.com.

—MirrorFootball.co.uk: But as one dies, another is born: Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) is preparing a new standalone football site, MirrorFootball.co.uk, which will go live when the new season kicks off in August. It will combine club-by-club news coverage with a collection of historical news stories and pictures from Mirror Group Newspapers’ 100-year old archive. The Mirror says the site makes it “the first true national newspaper sports desk on the web” by filing stories online first, writing blogs and using the ubiquitous Twitter—though papers including the Telegraph and Guardian will no doubt dispute that claim. There will be video and audio content from the Mirror’s journalists and star pundits.

But why does Trinity want a separate football site when Mirror.co.uk/football already has decent coverage and would be a perfectly good platform for more content? The orthodoxy of the new Fleet Street has for years been to expand online within the same domain to help increase an online brand ID—but there must be something Trinity’s marketing people know that we don’t about the commercial success of standalone online newspaper sites.

—ESPNSoccernet: Meanwhile US sports broadcaster ESPN (NYSE: DIS) is hiring a London-based assistant editor for its ESPNSoccernet site ahead of its debut as a UK sports broadcaster next season. It might not necessarily signal expansion, but the Disney-owned company will no doubt want to increase its UK-focused online presence alongside its forthcoming subscription channel.

Remember: you can follow us on Twitter at @paidContentUK, if you are that way inclined…

Jackson Sold 300,000 Units In Two Days, Especially Online
Jackson’s Long Tail Will Mean Chart-Topping Pay Day For Music Sites
Twitter Search Fails Under Thursday’s Celebrity News Rush

We often hear ad agencies’ and online publishers’ views on the outlook for the digital economy, so it’s revealing to hear the views of media planners, who decide which media to use to boost their clients’ campaigns. Seventy-seven percent of the 873 planners polled respondents agreed that online offers a higher degree of flexibilty than other media, but only 44 percent said the medium allowed them to “easily” reach their audience. One third of planners use email marketing regularly, a quarter use display or online search, and only seven percent use more than one social-media tool.

—Discovery (NSDQ: DISAB) Networks: The broadcaster’s EMEA division has created the new position of head of is Nordic channels, to be filled by current Germany channel director Michael Grubinger in August, based in Copenhagen. Discovery’s Nordic channels GM Jan Andreassen will still have overall control. Via C21Media.net.

—Wolfson Microelectronics: Andy Brannan, VP of Nokia’s Sosco division, has been appointed chief commercial officer for Wolfson, a Scottish electronics company. Brannan previously spent eight years at Symbian. Release.

—The number of regular online listeners grew 35 percent in the last six months from 2.9 million in October 2008 to 3.9 million now
—Some 7.8 million people have ever downloaded a podcast, up from 7.2 million in October 2008 and six million in 2008. But just 4.2 million people listen to podcasts at least once a week, and perhaps more importantly, just 28 percent find the time to listen to them. 
—And what chance people will pay for pdocsts? Not much: only 4.5 percent have ever parted with cash for podcasts. The future doesn’t look great for wi-fi radio makers: an inauspicious 7.1 million have heard of them, while only one million people actually own one.

But don’t expect payments on ITV.com any time soon. Not only has the broadcaster finally settled on the site (and its Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) VOD deal) as an ad-funded TV catch-up vehicle; Fairbairn said ITV is “part-funding the Digital Britain research into the viability of (micropayments)”, so it’s more likely that ITV is merely one of the companies involved in the Digital Britain-mandated Technology Strategy Board’s (TSB) upcoming industry-wide experiments on content monetisation strategies.

If the experiments ever make it to market, Fairbairn reckons: “We are going to need something like an Oyster card system for the internet,” referring to the London Underground pay-as-you-go ticket smartcard. And even if the TSB project yields an industry standard on micropayment methods, it’s not clear that ITV should adopt it - after all, it’s 50-year history has been as an ad-funded commercial distributor.

The aim? Make the Bay nothing less than “the Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) of the file-sharing world”. Pandeya isn’t putting an exact figure on what he could earn from each revenue stream - but, from online ads alone, “we’re talking $40 million” a month…

—Selling networked storage: Just like distributed processing power helps science researchers, Pandeya wants to leverage the hard disc space of his network users: “If you have a hard disk with 100Gb of space, you might only be using half that and we can take just 1Gb. Together, the community creates a gigantic storage space.” Nice idea, but there may be some hurdles… First, cloud storage and server farm prices are rapidly decreasing, so why would corporate clients host content on an unreliable, fragmented community server? Second, will users really be willing? Third, consenting users may be implicated if any illegal material remains hosted.

—Offering ISPs cheaper bandwidth: “File-sharing technology is outdated—the next generation of file-sharing is available and it solves the problem of content providers being paid,” Pandeya claims. He says he can reduce P2P traffic costs for ISPs by ensuring P2P users would download files only from nearby users, rather than half way around the world. Still, this would seem to assume that ISPs are comfortable with P2P traffic in the first place - any effort by ISPs to save money on P2P costs implicitly suggests they’re accommodating to the protocol when, in fact, recent industry agreements show they are increasingly discouraging their customers use of P2P.

—Leechers will have to pay: Pandeya says the company is aware it can’t erect a pay wall around the Bay, but downloaders who don’t contribute either files or their disc space (such is the spirit and nature of many Bit Torrent protocol users) will have to pay something, or choose to become a “good file-sharer”. Pandeya predicts the “super-filesharers”, the subject of countless personal lawsuits across the world, will become “big revenue generators, the big winners”, in the new system. The Pirate Bay revealed this week “many people” asked to have the user account removed, so spooked are file-sharing enthusiasts by possible lawsuits. “The important thing for file-sharers is that nothing changes,” he says. “If we start changing things… they will just go to the next site.”

—Striking content deals to pay rights holders: “Behind the scenes, we’re ensuring the costs are being paid to the content providers.” Unsurprisingly given the litigious relationship with content industry, Pandeya admits there will be doubts among executives about the new model, but he hopes the site can sign legal content deals with all the big entertainment companies, just iTunes, Spotify, Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) have. There could even be a form of DRM to protect files from illegal use, but Pandeya says that “copyright is not the problem” and that when the companies are compensated properly, they won’t be as worried about protecting their content. He says the reaction from top entertainment execs displayed “a sense of humour” about the Bay’s imminent turnaround but he claims to have had “tremendous interest” from the UK, USA and Russia.

—Courtroom drama: The Pirate Bay trial in March found its four founders guilty of assisting copyright infringement and sentenced them to hefty fines and one year in jail. They vowed to appeal the judgement, but Pandeya says he’s buying the Pirate Bay domain, but not the Pirate Bay company which which will still be owned by its founders—and if they want to continue their appeal to the Swedish Supreme Court, that’s up to them. “We’re just simple businessmen, we’re not interested in that,” says Pandeya, who has no interest in spending years in court and will leave legal problems to the founders. But GGF is a listed company and must stay on the right side of the law and it will be an awkward situation if the founders go to court to defend activities which most content companies consider illegal and morally wrong.

As for paying for the deal—the Bay founders are getting SEK30 million in cash and SEK30 million in new GFF shares—Pandeya says the company is raising the cash through a rights issue in which three key investors have expressed an interest and “have the funds ready”. The deal goes before GFF shareholders in four weeks’ time.

Our take: There’s still a huge amount of uncertainty over Global Gaming Factory’s big ambitions can be met. Its claims for legitimising the Bay and making massive new revenues - all while ensuring “nothing changes” for file sharers - would require a kind of online alchemy we’ve rarely seen. The music industry is slowly moving towards models where music is free at the point of use whether streaming or legal downloads—but that’s just one part of a far larger piracy picture that includes film, games, software and audiobooks: all industries that have a long way to go in accepting alternate business models, let alone a legal P2P network.

Earlier: Thomas Gensemer, the founder of the Blue State Digital social marketing agency that developed My.BarackObama.com, told Wednesday’s Activate ‘09 summit that, contrary to the belief of many, his firm is not currently retained by the Labour party for a similar campaign push - he appears to be on the Olympics’ books, however…

Gensemer received press attention whilst in the UK in February on what now looks like it was a pitch marathon. Blue State ended up getting work on individual campaigns for Ken Livingstone and John Cruddas, and has been helping anti-fascist org Searchlight combat the BNP online. But Gensemer told Activate: “We’re not currently under contract (to Labour), contrary to some press.”

Another client kindred spirit Gensemer does apparently have - the London 2012 Olympic Games organising committee. The committee’s new media head Alex Balfour told Thursday’s Revolution Forum that Obama’s web strategists are involved in his social media planning held some early meetings with Obama’s web strategists. Balfour last week outlined to us the 2012 online campaign, which will include a “My 2012” online scrapbook to which people can post material from around the web, which may even be featured as murals on real-world Olympic venues.

—“Hulu is offering British broadcasters equity stakes in Hulu UK plus a share of online advertising,” says Kate Bulkley in Broadcast. “It is offering significant minimum guarantees in exchange for a good line-up of shows immediately after transmission on TV.”

—ITV (LSE: ITV) online director Ben McOwen Wilson: “As you’d expect post-Kangaroo, we are looking at a number of possibilities for our archive content. We do think an aggregator in the UK has a role to play.” Via Broadcast.

—The SVP, Johannes Larcher, reckons the “UK is very ready for a product like Hulu ... Project Kangaroo has opened up certain opportunities we would like to exploit.” Via Telegraph.co.uk.

“You’ve got to remember that if I get another two or three deals like this—which will inevitably happen in the next few months—I’m going to have to scale up my business to support that,” co-founder Daniel Doulton told me.

“The nature of the beast is that you have forward-invest to support that.” The company’s $100 million second round funding last March was one of the biggest European VC deals of 2008. Doulton says Spinvox is fine for now, but will “probably” need more cash sometime soon—it all depends on how fast it grows in next nine months. For more, see our sister site mocoNews.net...

He replaces the company’s interim head, Ian Brotherston, who in turn stepped in for Mark Zaleski in April. Zaleski was moved over to the role of non-executive chairman and was charged with heading up international operations. With Tournay’s at the helm, Brotherston, a former BT (NYSE: BT) and AOL (NYSE: TWX) exec, will now manage Dailymotion’s EVP International Strategy. Dailymotion has raised a big $34 million round in late 2007, to expand into U.S., but things haven’t gone well for the site stateside, mirroring the woes of the online video industry. According to a French newsletter Stratégies, Dailymotion’s 2008 revenue at €12.5 million ($16.2 million)—that’s big in France, I hear—and reports have suggested it is looking to raise more money.

Initially, Blyk’s plan was to sell service directly to consumers and piggy-back on Orange’s network in the UK, however, in May it said it was shelving plans to roll out MVNOs in new markets, and instead was focusing on forming partnerships with mobile carriers to resell their service. Orange would mark the first deal of its kind.

Virgin Mobile USA (NYSE: VM) already offers something similar in the U.S. called Sugar Mama. For a minute of ads online, they get a free minute of airtime. Or, for filling out a five-minute survey about brands or products, they get five minutes of airtime. On the phone, texts and picture messages also earn airtime.

In a group as diverse as Pearson, Shore will have oversight over digital strategy for FT.com, Penguin books and the whole of Pearson’s large education publishing efforts.

Currently in beta, Newspaper Club is developing an online system to let people lay up their own news titles - not for the screen, but for print. It’s got an unknown amount of 4iP money to “help people make their own newspapers” - targeting not the big nationals or regionals but “individuals, communities, clubs, societies, companies, friends, gangs - you know; people”. Here’s a pilot copy made for the BBC.

“The ideal audience could be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a printed product rounding up the best of the internet,” 4iP commissioner Dan Heaf tells TCUK, which reckons Newspaper Club has “the potential to completely change the face of mainstream media”...

That’s over-egging it a bit. Community and local charity groups may appreciate an easy way to print newsletters (synergies with 4iP-funded local journalism project Talk About Local are interesting) - but the print-on-demand idea still has no traction at the mainstream, professional level. After all, only hypothetical customers care enough to customise and print an up-to-the-minute set of A4 sheets.

Research In Motion has identified music as one ways to increase the BlackBerry’s popularity among consumers. The company is sponsoring U2’s 360 Tour, which kicked off Tuesday and is being used to promote the album “No Line On The Horizon.” In addition to a partnership with U2, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) has an exclusive with Ticketmaster, which allows people to buy tickets to shows. Other BlackBerry apps that allow people to listen to music includes: Slacker, Pandora and Shazam, iheartradio and Will.i.am’s DipDive.