Universal Music Group:Black Eyed Peas

Mariah Carey

50 Cent

Kanye West

Sony BMG Music Entertainment:Kelly Clarkson

Alicia Keys

Shakira

Britney Spears

EMI Group:The Beatles

Coldplay

Gorillaz

Rolling Stones

Warner Music Group:Green Day

Madonna

Alanis Morissette

My Chemical Romance

Challenges: (for each company) Universal Music Group- PayolaIn May 2006, an investigation led by then New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, concluded with a determination that Universal Music Group bribed radio stations to play songs from Ashlee Simpson, Brian McKnight, Big Tymers, Nick Lachey, Lindsay Lohan and other performers under Universal labels. The company paid $12 million to the state in settlement. YouTubeIn May 2007, UMG was accused of abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in order to squelch criticism, by forcing YouTube to remove a Michelle Malkin video critical of singer Akon. Eventually, UMG backed off its claims after being challenged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the same year, UMG was accused of using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to indiscriminately remove content related to the artist Prince, most notably a twenty-nine second home video in which children danced to one of Prince's songs. Recently, UMG has been accused of abusing its power by removing numerous non-profit tribute videos and instrumental covers created by users who use or play songs of bands signed to UMG's labels. On October 24, 2009, Universal Music Group reached 1,000,000 subscribers; the fourth channel on YouTube to attain that milestone.However in December 2009 UMG removed over 10,000 of their videos on YouTube. Critics say that UMG doesn't want other users to post their videos.Pay-per-listenIn September 2007, Universal came up with a new way of tackling music piracy by "paying the pirates", beginning with a pilot of tracks from will.i.am (will.i.am music group).MySpace.comIn December 2007, Colbie Caillat inadvertently announced that The Universal Music Group recently enacted a new policy on MySpace.com that will reduce all songs from artists within The Universal Music Group to 90 seconds Imeem.comIn December 2007 UMG announced a deal with Imeem which allows users of the social network to listen to any track from Universal's catalogue for free with a portion of the advertising generated by the music being shared with the record label. Two weeks after the deal was announced Michael Robertson speculated on the secret terms of the deal and argued that ultimately this was a bad deal for imeem. This speculation lead to a flame war on the Pho digital media email list as imeem representatives denied his claims and dismissed his theories as unfounded.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment- 2005- JulySony BMG was fined 10 million dollars after the New York Attorney General's office determined that they had been practicing payola mostly in the form of direct payments to radio stations and bribes to disc jockeys to promote various artists including Franz Ferdinand, Audioslave, and mainly Jessica Simpson.Epic Records, one of their labels, was specifically cited for using fake contests in order to hide the fact that the gifts were going to disc jockeys rather than listeners .October and November-Main article: Sony BMG CD copy prevention scandalA controversy over digital rights management (DRM) software that automatically installed itself on people's computers and made them more vulnerable to computer viruses that was produced and shipped by Sony BMG ensued. The scandal caused numerous lawsuits and Sony BMG ended up recalling all affected CDs.November 16 - US-CERT, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of the United States Department of Homeland Security, issued an advisory on Extended Copy Protection DRM, citing the XCP use of rootkit technology to hide certain files from the computer user as a security threat to computer users and saying that one of the uninstallation options provided by Sony also introduced vulnerabilities to a system.US-CERT advised, "Do not install software from sources that you do not expect to contain software, such as an audio CD." In its "Top Flops of '05" issue, the enterprise newsweekly eWeek had to create a new category for the "Sony BMG root-kit fiasco." Peter Coffee, of eWeek Labs reported, "The Sony brand name was already in trouble—it lost 16 percent of its value between 2004 and 2005....Now it has taken a blow among tech-product opinion leaders. "We've never done it before, and we hope we'll never have [an] occasion to do it again but, for 2005, eWeek Labs awards a Stupid Tech Trick grand prize to Sony." eWeek Vol. 22, No.502007In October 2007, it was announced that Sony BMG successfully sued Jammie Thomas. The single mother, who made US$36,000 a year, was ordered to pay US$222,220 in damages for making 24 songs available for download on the Kazaa file-sharing network.2008The Federal Trade Commission sued Sony BMG for collecting and displaying personal data of 30,000 minors without parental consent via its websites since 2004, violating the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Sony did not restrict minor children's participation in its websites. Sony paid a $1 million fine.

Warner Music Group- In December 2008, negotiations between WMG and YouTube broke down. As a result, Warner Music Group has continuously blocked or muted videos on YouTube that feature music recordings belonging to its labels or to its publishing arm, Warner/Chappell Music, citing copyright infringement. Although the majority of the blocked videos are not official content of WMG, they include WMG recordings in a minor way normally covered by Fair Use. Many of these claims to copyright violation not only affect artists who are under record labels owned or distributed by WMG, but also to artists who have songs published and controlled by Warner/Chappell, regardless of label. This makes the association between non-WMG artists and WMG much less apparent to YouTube users as music publishers, unlike record labels, generally do not brand themselves to their recordings. Muting also occurred to clips featuring people covering a song by a WMG artist or of a song controlled by Warner/Chappell. The response from YouTube users on affected videos has been overwhelmingly negative towards WMG. Notably, Seattle band Death Cab for Cutie was affected when music videos streamed on their website from their Atlantic Records albums Plans and Narrow Stairs were removed by WMG. The issue and opinion of WMG has since worsened when they began removing and muting songs that are covers rather than just recordings.With the rise of music video games, CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. complained that "The amount being paid to the music industry, even though [these] games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small," and he concluded that "we will not license to those games." However, if they found new and better ways to promote music and new ways to make profit, this would not be a problem. A Wired magazine article claimed that Rock Band publisher MTV Games has boycotted WMG as a result, but both parties have claimed this to be untrue. WMG has not made any new content deals with MTV Games since August 2008. This had led to a backlash against WMG by fans of these games.Many anti-Warner videos have been popping up on YouTube from users with outrage over videos being blocked by WMG. There has even been provisions by these disgruntled YouTube users to boycott any material owned by Warner Music Group.On September 21, 2009, CNET reported that Warner Music Group had possibly struck a new deal with YouTube and WMG videos may start appearing back on YouTube within weeks. It was confirmed on Warner Music Group News and the YouTube Blog on September 29, 2009 that YouTube and Warner Music Group were in a multi-year deal with the two. In January 2010 there have been new reports of YouTube accounts containing covered songs completely closed due to intervention by WMG. This following a contest by Red Hot Chilli Peppers bass player Michael "Flea" Balzary to cover their songs. An end solution seems not to have been found as of January 26, 2010.