Warner Music said it had invested around $110 million to increase its stake in artist management company Front Line Management, whose clients include Jimmy Buffet, Neil Diamond and Christina Aguilera.

"While the overall music business, including management, touring, sponsorship, merchandising ..., is growing, the recording business at present is not," Bronfman said.

EMI has invested almost as much in a British management firm, and Warner recently hooked up with rap management powerhouse Violator for merchandising deals. Still, as analysts have pointed out, it's hard to imagine anyone but the most naive or desperate thinking that a major label has its best business interests at heart, allowing it to have even partial control of management decisions regarding non-CD revenue in an era where everything other than recorded music is where you make your rent money. Meanwhile journalists and promoters can look forward to even bigger headaches when dealing with major label artists' always approachable publicists and managers.

Music Companies Seek New Money In Old Partners [Yahoo via Reuters]

..,The promotion for the "Challengers" album is the most aggressive the label has offered to date. Matador hopes to sell 250,000 copies of the album, which [Patrick Amory, Matador's general manager] called a "very good" figure for an indie label. The group's 2005 release, "Twin Cinema," sold 160,000 copies.

So far, it has been effective. More than 1,000 people have prepaid for the executive package of "Challengers," Amory said.

A quarter of a million may seem like an awfully lofty goal, but it could happen, especially since the Pornos appeal to just the sort of music nerds who would want to hear as many alternate takes as possible. That said, the group's name still makes our parents very, very uncomfortable, so that demo may be lost to them forever.

Pumping up promotions [Chicago Tribune]

Pump splits the licensing fees evenly with its artists. Mr. Ballew's arrangement with Pump earns him anywhere from $8,000 to $40,000 every six months, representing about 25% of his income. It's a far cry from the world of pop radio and sold-out tours. The songs Mr. Ballew writes for Pump are often much shorter than traditional pop songs, and have goofy names like "You Broke My Monkey" and "Pink Passenger."

"A lot of my early uses were in pornography," Mr. Ballew says with a chuckle.

Other notable Pump clients include the Food Network and MTV, the latter of which also technically counts as pornography nowadays. The deal is for an estimated $42 million, and we're assuming Getty is hoping that the combination of resources will be appeal to content-needy advertising agencies and TV producers, but we think they're really thinking of the legions of kids who have discovered artful new ways to combine music and photography.

Getty Is Primed To Acquire Pump [WSJ]