I must have missed the news that Getty Images — one of the largest image-licensing firms around, next to Bill Gates’s Corbis — had bought a company called Pump Audio back in June and was getting into the music-licensing business. Then I read this morning on TechCrunch that PumpAudio has relaunched as part of the Getty site, offering a song-tracking and licensing tool called (what else) Soundtrack.

Although the service is starting small, with just 20,000 songs from independent artists, Getty says it wants to expand through deals with the major record labels and others — and knowing Getty, it is likely to do so with a vengeance. Maybe it will even get into the “crowdsourcing” of music, the way it did with photos by buying Calgary-based success story iStockphoto.com.

Whether Getty succeeds or not remains to be seen, but there’s no question that the music-licensing business needs some organization. Insiders — including Spiral Frog CEO Joe Mohen, who I interviewed for this recent piece — say the process of getting all the required performance and publishing rights for a piece of music is byzantine and in some cases almost impossible, since there are thousands of different publishers and no central repository of information. A real “goat rodeo,” as a friend of mine likes to say.

If Getty can help to bring some semblance of order to that process, it will not only benefit anyone who is trying to license music — including perhaps the folks at Saturday Night Live, who had to pull a hilarious video from SNL off YouTube because they apparently failed to get a license for an Aphex Twin song — but will also benefit (theoretically) the artists who make the music.

I was interested in the stuff that Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk have posted about meeting with Getty Images, the giant stock photography company, but not necessarily because I’m all that interested in photography (although I am). The interesting thing for me is how Getty — like a lot of other companies in different industries — is trying to find a way of transitioning its business from one model to another, effectively cannibalizing itself before others can do it.

Scoble mentions how people such as Thomas (or whatever his real name is) and services such as Flickr and Zooomr are a threat to Getty, and they are — although not so immediate a threat that you can draw a direct line between the disappointing financial results the company reported and the rise of consumer photo-sharing sites. And Getty essentially tried to build a bridge between its old business and a new one by acquiring Calgary-based iStockphoto, one of the largest Web-based stock photo services out there (it recently added video as well).

Getty’s business, like that of competitor Corbis (owned by Bill Gates) consists mostly of high-quality, hard-to-come-by photos of celebrities and events, used in glossy, high-quality magazines, and for those the company gets paid anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on use. iStockphoto.com, by contrast, sells photos for as little as $1. And it does big business with small and medium-sized publications, Web sites and so on, with photos for $10 or $50 or $100.

In effect, Getty is hoping that owning iStockphoto can expand its business rapidly enough that it can counterbalance the decline in those hundred or thousand-dollar photo jobs, and prevent the recent financial pressure from becoming a sustained downturn. Other companies will have to find ways of doing the same in their industries, as James Robertson points out.

Who says there’s no Web-buyout action going on in the Great White North? It may not compare with Yahoo buying Flickr or del.icio.us in terms of visibility, but in the world of downloadable stock photography, iStockPhoto.com – based in my former home town of Calgary, Alberta – has been one of the early stars, and so it’s interesting to find out that they have been acquired by stock photo giant Getty Images for about $50-million (U.S.). Thanks to Thomas Hawk for pointing that one out.

Along with Corbis (owned by Bill Gates), Getty is one of the largest players in the industry. If you see a classic or iconic shot in a newspaper or magazine or on a website, there are good odds it belongs to Getty. There’s more information on the buyout at an online photo magazine called Photo District News Online, and much discussion at StockPhotoTalk, run by Andy Goetze, who mentioned a rumour that Getty would buy iStockPhoto in a post three weeks ago.

According to the reports, Getty will continue to operate iStockPhoto.com as a separate unit, run by iStockPhoto CEO Bruce Livingstone and about 30 employees (a nice payout for them). As far as I can tell, this is one of the first signs that the world of big, expensive, global stock-photo companies such as Getty and Corbis has started to pay attention to the small, inexpensive, Web-distributed model being pursued by iStockPhoto, Fotolia.com and others.

As Thomas Hawk mentions in his post, imagine what Yahoo could do if it started trying to monetize some of the photos in Flickr. And if you want to explore this topic further, Alan Meckler of Jupitermedia.com – which also owns a stock-photo company – has some thoughts here, and StockAsylum notes that Getty is trying to soothe the ruffled feathers of its professional photographer suppliers, who might think it is going down-market.