Subscription Services

The board of General Motors Corp. agreed Sunday night to create the nation's largest subscription television service by selling its Hughes Electronics subsidiary, the owner of DirecTV, to rival satellite provider EchoStar Communications Corp. for nearly $26 billion in stock and cash, according to people close to the negotiations. The proposed merger would catapult EchoStar ahead of the nation's leading cable company, AT&T Corp. EchoStar, which has 6.4 million customers, would grow to 16.

On the final night of the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, last year, a young folk-rock trio from Denver took the makeshift stage at a church a few blocks away from the main action down on 6th Street. The church was about half full, providing enough room for the band members to run the aisles, stand on benches and play music from a debut album they had yet to release. Attending that show meant missing out on more well-known entities such as Sleigh Bells, Norah Jones and Nas, but that baby band -- the Lumineers -- would go on to become one of the biggest acts in the U.S. As sprawling as SXSW has become - last year boasted more than 2,200 acts across 104 stages - the festival continues to reward those who favor the unknown rather than those who chase the big names.

Beleaguered Napster, struggling to meet the demands of the courts and the music industry, is in talks with Microsoft about using the software giant's technology to help build a secure, copyright-friendly version of its online song-swapping service. Under legal attack by much of the music industry, Napster could use Microsoft's copyright-protecting technology to entice the music industry to supply songs being denied.

Netflix Inc., America's largest video subscription service, is hiking prices as much as 60% in a move that has sparked outrage among its customers but brought smiles to Hollywood studio executives. The service will no longer offer a $9.99 plan that lets users watch an unlimited number of movies online and rent one DVD at a time. Instead, subscribers who want that combination will have to pay a total of $15.98 a month — $7.99 for Netflix Instant streaming and $7.99 to receive discs in the mail.

Netflix Inc., just a few months ago considered the unstoppable titan of the entertainment industry, is suddenly looking more like the Titanic. The company that transformed DVD rentals with its subscription mail service, added easy-to-use Internet video streaming and amassed 25 million subscribers throughout the Western hemisphere has found itself pummeled over the last two months by furious and departing customers, balky suppliers in Hollywood and...

Subscription Services: (800) 252-9141 Travel Section Phone: (213) 237-7730 Fax: (213) 237-7355 E-mail: travel@latimes.com Mailing Address: Los Angeles Times Travel Section 202 W. 1st St. Los Angeles, CA 90012

When is 13 a lucky number? When it's the number of years it's taken for the music industry to post its first yearly increase in global recorded music sales, which is what happened in 2012, according to new figures from the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry . The group's annual Digital Music Report , issued Feb. 26 in London, noted that overall music sales rose from $16.2 billion to $16.5 billion, or 0.3%, from 2011...

Terra Lycos plans to jump into the subscription music business today, offering the Rhapsody online music service from Listen.com. Company officials described Rhapsody--a combination of genre-based radio and personalized Internet jukebox--as a natural evolution of their music services, but it also responds to the subscription services offered by Yahoo and MSN. Listen.

Music is the most mathematical art form, but for classical music station KUSC-FM (91.5), the radio world's arithmetic has turned hostile, spelling nothing but trouble for its ratings. Arbitron, the company that surveys radio listeners to calculate how many tune in to each station, says KUSC has lost more than half its core audience over the last 20 months. Ratings declined moderately during 2010 and the first half of 2011, then went into a tailspin. According to Aribtron's reports, KUSC's average core audience has sunk from nearly 26,000 listeners in 2009 to 9,500 in its latest report - a 63% fall.