Ancient civilizations believed that time was not linear but circular and postulated the theory of the Eternal Return.

Fast forward to the 21st century: the era of time as progress. Still, sometimes, it feels like ancient philosophers might have been up to something.

Take the history of the Music Industry in last 10 years and compare it against the “evolution” of the Book Industry in most recent months. You look at the facts and then tell me if I am the only one disoriented in time and space. The phenomenon of this displacement is what we today call deja’vu.

-1998 The first Mp3 players are borne.

-2001 The  iPod’s birth date.

-2001–2003 Competitors rush to produce better “gadgets”:Dell, Creative, Microsoft, Sony. (They will all fail).

-2003 a closed DRM’ed marketplace for downloading music comes out of Apple’s genius. The war is over.

In the 4 years that lapsed between the first portable Mp3 players and iTunes, the music industry went haywire. The only options users were left with, if they wanted to fill their players, were either the clumsy ripping of CDs or downloading music from Napster and the likes. Which also helped shape the perception that music “should” be free (which you can argue in favor or against, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s what it is).

Then iTunes came with its “reasonable” 99cents/single track marketplace and built a monopoly that still lasts after 5 years (and keeps growing with the latest stats showing Apple as the number 1 US music seller and a whopping 25% market share).

How about the Book Industry?

-2005-2008 the first ebook readers hit the market. But there’s a reason why ebooks only represent 1% or, when lucky, 2% of the book market. Those readers are 1) all but usable (chunky navigation, horrible fonts) and 2) there’s no easy way to fill your ereader with books and 3) ebooks aren’t that widespread.

-2008-2009 Amazon hits the jackpot with its whispernet technology. What that means is that the Kindle is not only a better device in terms of interface, but most importantly it is dead simple to buy a book and in 60 seconds read it on your device. Sounds familiar/itunish? And there’s more. The Kindle just like its godfather iPod, is locked with its own DRM.  And let’s not talk about publishers and their fear that the digital books will cannibalize their sales of the pricey hardcovers.  So God bless the new monopoly? Maybe not.

-August 2009:  The war ain’t over yet this time or so it appears at least reading the news this week. Where do our hopes go this time?

1- Google opened up its 1million ePub archive for free. ePub is the non-DRMed defacto standard for digital books, which all readers can read…well except the Kindle, unless you use some geeky trick.

2- This week Sony attack to Amazon started getting serious with the announcement of its upcoming Daily Reader Edition which will come with a wireless connection similar to the Kindle’s one (but through AT&T) and at a cheaper price. The new ereader might also be slick!!- with a much desired touchscreen interface.  On the other hand, Barnes&Noble, which has the advatange of a bookstore, has already a nice mobile app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry and is gearing up for the launch of a wireless ereader sometimes soon in the next few months.

Both Sony and Barnes&Noble are Google partners and have less DRM restrictions than Amazon. There is still some and a lack of interoperability – but you think you could convince publishers to give up on DRM? Another deja’vu?

———————————

-2010 or what’s next? Lessons learned from the Music Industry’s failure with the digital evolution

-One Store and One locked-in pricing policy doesn’t do the trick of convicing the market that they have to pay…

-Free as in digits helps shaping up a whole new industry of added-on services (think TrentReznor and followers, or Coelho). Read Chris Anderson’s Free for more inspiration.

-A new User Experience.

• What are those Kindle notes if not primitive and useless? Shouldn’t I be able to share them, post what I’m reading while I’m reading it, recommend it, borrow my ebooks, gift them?
• My Library in the Clouds. I want to buy books from multiple sources and store them in a place where I can access them anytime as my mood dictates and with whatever reader I might own at that point of time. I don’t want to be the slave of one reader and one store.
• Discovery: build something to beat Amazon recommendations as soon as possible. Make it flexible: sophisticated as the Slacker radio and mass-market as the Billboard charts. To everyone his own…

-A new Generation of e-Writers. With the advent of digital, Music saw an explosion of creativity. Never in history so much music had been produced. Be prepared for the new wannabes of the digital age: give them the tools, the marketing information they’ll need, create the filters to separate the wheat from the chaff. Think TopSpin, ReverbNation, and the likes, only for books.

-New Formats. Remixes, Multi-media, Augmented Reality…digital will usher new forms of creativity and  change the same “writing” concept …which has been stuck for …about 500 years, besides some sporadic innovation from Japan where already half of the books are mobile-originated. But are there the tools? Is someone working on it?

-The Dawn of the Empire. Don’t be US-centric. Innovation is spreading at the speed of digits. Think of Baidu for music in China. Be prepared for other languages and cultures to take over, legally or illegaly.

Will the future of ebooks be open, multi-cultural and social? Or will the deja’vu’ take over?

———–

Recommended Readings:

-How To Beat The Kindle By Farhad Manjoo

-Does the Book Industry Want To Get Napstered? By Farhad Manjoo

]]> http://snowcrashing.com/2009/08/29/the-book-industry-and-the-music-industry-a-dejavu/feed/ 1 http://snowcrashing.com/2009/07/01/rip-kings-story-tellers-and-pirates/ http://snowcrashing.com/2009/07/01/rip-kings-story-tellers-and-pirates/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:23:25 +0000 Antonella Stellacci http://snowcrashing.com/?p=337

A tough week for the music industry. A quick Death Toll:

THE KING

With Michael, an era is gone. The ‘golden’ era of Super-Stars who can (could) move millions of hearts and dollars…

Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age has an entire chapter dedicated to Thriller, the album that saved record labels from crashing, back in 1982, when sales were drying out in the post-disco age.

The dialogue that follows is between the then-chairman of  CBS Records (then morphed into the now Sony Music Entertainment) and Michael Jackson.

So Yetnikoff pressured his biggest star. With just months left in 1982, he gave Jackson and producer Quincy Jones a deadline: Finish a new album, and make it a blockbuster, by Christmas. They weren’t happy about having to rush, but they obeyed and finished the final Thriller mixes in a month. They turned them in to Epic Records, for release just before Thanksgiving…

“I told you I’d do it,” Jackson told Yetnikoff.“I told you I’d outdo Off the Wall.”

Yetnikoff responded: “You delivered. You delivered like a motherfucker.”

Jackson: “Please don’t use that word, Walter.”

Yetnikoff: “You delivered like an angel. Archangel Michael.”

Jackson: “That’s better. Now will you promote it?”

Yetnikoff:”Like a motherfucker”

It was the right album at the right time: All seven of its singles landed in the Top 10, the album lasted a ridiculous thirty-seven weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and it went on to sell more than 51 million copies—the best-selling album in the world until the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits surpassed it (in the United States, anyway) in 2000. Thriller singlehandedly rescued CBS from its late ’70s doldrums—the company’s net income jumped 26 percent in 1983, to $187 million—pushing fans back into record stores and propping up the industry.

So be it. The King is dead…but to put things in  perspective, of what kingdom are we talking about?

Umair Haque chimes in the post-mourning debate about how rich Michael Jackson and his heirs (potentially) was:

If the world’s biggest pop star only made $25 million a year in total, something’s very, very wrong. Where’s the rest of the money? Why can’t a resource as scarce as the King of Pop capture more value?

After all, that’s not even mega-rich.

The world’s top hedge fund “managers” regularly pull in hundreds of millions. That’s an order of magnitude difference.

—————

THE STORY-TELLER

Another day, another magazine folding. After Blender, today’s the turn of Vibe, the urban glossy founded in 1992 by legendary producer Quincy Jones.

—————-

THE PIRATES

The Pirate Bay isn’t dead yet, but the boat is sinking. Today Variety reported that Swedish video game company Global Gaming Factory X agreed to pay about $7.7 million to buy TPB.
Can a reformed PirateBay survive?

Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) – Music Writer, RollingStone.com and Village Voice on Twitter and the End Of Music Criticism.

BREAKING NEWS

Music Labels Win $2 Million in Web Case [NYT]

Record Labels’ $1.9 Million Win in Thomas Retrial Constitutional?[EFF]

What’s next for Jammie Thomas-Rasset? [Ars]

BUZZ, COMPANIES & TRENDS – MUSIC

Music Charts Won’t Recognise Free Streams Yet [Moconews]

-The Economy of Digital Music- A Harvard Study

• Yet Another Study Shows That Weaker Copyright Benefits Everyone [TechDirt] Download the Full Study here
• Read also Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society [MichaelGeist]
• Harvard Paper on P2P Flawed But Worth Reading [BillBoard]

Virgin Unlimited

• Virgin Media & Universal Launch Unlimited Download Service, But… [Hypebot]
• Analysis: Virgin Media’s unique unlimited music service [MusicAlly]

More Lawsuits and Old Victims

• Another Music Start-Up Sued: EMI Takes Grooveshark to Court [MediaMemo]
• The Seeqpod.com Sale: So, What Does $125,000 Buy, Anyway? [DigitalMusicNews]
• Italy Is The Latest Country To Realize IP Address Alone Does Not ID File Sharers [TechDirt]

R.I.P MySpace?

• MySpace Cuts U.S. Staff By Nearly 30 Percent [PaidContent]
• Yes, MySpace can be saved [CNNMoney]
• MySpace Music set for September UK launch [Telegraph]

Imeem and Warner

• Exclusive: Warner Music Group Gets Back Together–Very Cautiously–With Imeem [MediaMemo]

UK News

• Digital Britain: piracy-battling strategy revealed [MusicAlly]
• Spotify joins push to get music lovers to pay for content [NewMediaAge]

Artists

• Let’s Prove That Artists Don’t Need Major Labels To “Make It” [Hypebot]
• The New Black: Mos Def’s T-Shirt Experiment…[DigitalMusicNews]
• Kings of Leon Launch Record Label. [Glasswerk]

Radio

• Sirius unveils iPhone App: reviews not so good (updated) [Reuters]
• Enjoying ‘Jelli’ Radio? Now, Try ‘Jelly’ Radio...[DigitalMusicNews]

EMusic

Q and A: eMusic CEO Explains Controversial Price Increase, Sony Deal [Wired]

BUZZ, COMPANIES & TRENDS – MOBILE

DRM Never Die? Protections Will Remain on Comes With Music…[DigitalMusicNews]

Songbird releases iPhone Sync Workaround [RWW]

Less Well Known Artists Make Use Of Mobile Platforms To Interact With Fans [TechDirt]

Palm Pre struggling to drive downloads from App Catalogue [IntoMobile]

Debate heats up over Apple threat to disable iTunes sync with Palm Pre [ComputerWorld]

iPhone 3G S First Take [CNet]

BUZZ, COMPANIES & TRENDS – SOCIAL MEDIA

Analysis: Twitter Is Effective, But How Effective? [BillBoard]

What’s Ghetto? Pushing Digital Album Sales On Twitter (Video) [TechCrunch]

Music Critic Promises to Tweet 1,000 Record Reviews [Switched]

Your Online Music Marketing Report Card [Hypebot]

READS

The Passion Index - MusicMachinery

How Thomas-Rasset case would have played out, had we not been in the Parallel Universe – Ray Beckerman

How The Recording Industry Changes Its Own Story -TechDirt

Narm Presentations- Enjoy

NARM 2009 State Of The Industry: Michael Masnick from NARM on Vimeo.

NARM 2009 Keynote Interview With Ian Rogers from NARM on Vimeo.

Ok, you’ve read it. Because you MUST read it.

I’m talking of the Steven Jonhson article How Twitter will change the way we live, featured on the current cover of Time.

The last part of the article is  mind-blowing, it is about what Johnson calls “End-user Innovation“.

The speed with which users have extended Twitter’s platform points to a larger truth about modern innovation. When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s. It turns out the U.S. share of both has been in steady decline since peaking in the early ’70s. (In 1970, more than 50% of the world’s graduate degrees in science and engineering were issued by U.S. universities.) Since the mid-’80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the ’80s; now it’s China and India.

But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn’t build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

How could the forecasts have been so wrong? The answer is that we’ve been tracking only part of the innovation story. If I go to grad school and invent a better mousetrap, I’ve created value, which I can protect with a patent and capitalize on by selling my invention to consumers. But if someone else figures out a way to use my mousetrap to replace his much more expensive washing machine, he’s created value as well. We tend to put the emphasis on the first kind of value creation because there are a small number of inventors who earn giant paydays from their mousetraps and thus become celebrities. But there are hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses that find value in these innovations by figuring out new ways to put them to use.

There are several varieties of this kind of innovation, and they go by different technical names. MIT professor Eric von Hippel calls one “end-user innovation,” in which consumers actively modify a product to adapt it to their needs. In its short life, Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter — some of them banal, some of them spam and some of them sublime. Think about the community invention of the @ reply. It took a service that was essentially a series of isolated microbroadcasts, each individual tweet an island, and turned Twitter into a truly conversational medium. All of these adoptions create new kinds of value in the wider economy, and none of them actually originated at Twitter HQ. You don’t need patents or Ph.D.s to build on this kind of platform.

So to recap these are some of the best examples of end-user innovations: America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter.

I would add one

So this begs the question: Can you really stop end-users innovations? Can you “influence” them, “manipulate” them?

The post-Napster generation of “innovators” is still looking for an answer…

Forget about home theatre surround sound, iPod docking stations and the new-wave all-in-one music systems. It’s time to get ready for the next revolution, the return of the vinyl record – the favorite physical format of indie music collectors and audiophiles.

December 2008’s issue of Rolling Stone revealed vinyl sales are up 60 per cent from 2007 in the United States alone. Nielsen SoundScan reported 15 percent year-over-year growth in 2007 and 89 percent in 2008, making the 1.9 million vinyl albums purchased last year the most since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.

This year is shaping up to be even better, with 670,000 vinyl albums sold through mid-April. Add that those figures are often times conservative, as many independent retailers do not report their sales to SoundScan; and more than two-thirds of vinyl albums are sold at indie operations. Patrick Amory,  of indie label Matador Records, claims, “We can’t keep up with the demand.”

By contrast, CD sales have fallen  20 percent  for the past few year as we all know…

Vinyl is cool again!  But for who?

It is evident that the phenomenon is affecting not only or primarily the technophobic middle-aged consumers, but also younger generations who are developing a taste for records. Albums ranking in the top 10 for 2008 included Radiohead’s In Rainbows at number one, Fleet Foxes’ self-titled release, Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy and the B-52s’ Funplex! Amazon biggest sellers for vinyls have been so far alternative rock, followed by classic rock albums.

Amazon had introduced a vinyl-only store as of October of last year, and increased its selection to 150,000 titles across 20 genres. In April of this year, BestBuy announced that it is planning to devote eight square feet of merchandising space in all of its 1,020 stores solely to vinyl, after a test in 100 of its stores around the country proved successful.

A digital download or stream is a “disposable” experience. A vinyl is a ritual, it’s a “collector’s” ritual. It nurtures a sense of belonging, of deeper connection to the music world. It’s like a blessing, an entitlement: I have this record, I own it, it’s Mine,therefore I am a Music Person (more than if i didn’t or if you don’t).  And showing it to your selected music-friends is part of this experience.

Vinyls as Robert Benson writes in his insighful post:

-have better quality sound

-satisfy the need of collectors

-make music a ritual, a “true” experience for the music lover

-often times come with perks as free downloads of the digital format. Indeed, labels like Matador Records have begun including coupons in record packaging that can be used to download digital versions of the album’s songs. According to Matador the coupons have been a big hit.

In the words of Refe Tuma at Creative Deconstruction: Digital files are nearly worthless as a product. You can’t see them or touch them. They are infinitely reproduce-able and instantly available. If over abundance commoditized a physical product, inite-ness devalues a virtual product completely. Vinyl on the other hand can’t be easily reproduced, and is a much more sensory medium.

Again the lesson seems to be that given a real Reason To Buy, users- even the kids so often blamed for “stealing” music, will do so.

Last week, TRVSDJAM, the combined force of Travis Barker and DJ-AM, released their newest mixtape via Twitter, offering a free download of their newest mixtape in exchange for a tweet.

By tweeting “Download the new #trvsdjam mixtape ‘Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella 09′ in exchange for one tweet! http://twitter.trvsdjam.com/”, tweeters receive a free download via an application built by Culture Jam Labs.

As you can see in the pre-populated tweet, a special hashtag – #trvsdjam – is included in the twit, with the goal of making it a top trending topic on Twitter.

A brilliant and innovative use of Twitter as a Marketing Platform.

How did the campaign go?

Travis Barker and DJ AM have a combined 230k+ followers on Twitter.

By looking at TweetMeme it appears that so far 12,350 have retweeted the message. That translates into a 5% conversion rate.

The Twist chart shows the trends over the last few days. Clearly there was a peak as soon as the twit was broadcast, then the buzz quickly dried out.

So how do you measure the success of such a campaign?

-Buzz: the story definitely picked the interest of the music community and the social media one. The coverage includes big names as Hypebot,  MusicAlly, ProHipHop, TechCrunch, Mashable, and the list could go on…just try googling it.

-TwitterBuzz: the initial twit reached an audience of 230,000, the combined followers of Travis and DJ AM. It was re-twitted roughly 12,500 times. Assuming the average number of followers is still 70 as stated in a January poll,that translates into a reach of close to 900k users! Not trivial for an operation that probably costed the two musicians less than $5k (the development of the app).  According to Twitterholic, a Twitter tool that keeps tracks of your followers, both Travis and DJ AM kept growing their “followership” but at a rate that is pretty much in their average for the last few weeks. So this doesn’t seem to be a secondary byproduct of the initiative, but probably it wasn’t in the plans either.

-Conversions/Sales: as stated before, conversions could be measured against the total number of followers at a 5% rate or against the total reach, at a about 1.5%. How many of those downloaders were already followers? How many non-followers? How many were real fans? How many of those downloads will translate into new fans that attend live performance and buy the artist’s music? Will they be able to keep messaging to those users? Send them a follow-up?

These seem to be legitimate questions, and it’s up to each musician to gauge the success of his own initiative based on his goals.

Early Twitter conversations were tagged as life-casting and mind-casting, because early adopters were mainly geeks. But always more and more musicians are jumping on board, embracing the potential of Twitter as a marketing tool and new medium, what I would rather call a “FanCasting” because it is not really about sharing your personal life neither your knowledge. It is more about building and nurturing the Tribe of your True Fans, as brillinatly explained by Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin.

There are plenty of examples of musicians who use Twitter to connect with their fans and engage them, offer free music,  twitt a live show.  And many examples of companies supporting and educating artists in this new effort: TopSpin, ArtistsHouse and Plugola are just the first who come to mind.

To conclude heres An inspirational video from a few months back: Steve Lawson interviewed by Andrew Dubber

Steve Lawson from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

Last week at the All Things Digital: D conference hosted by Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, music mogul and Ticketmaster Entertainment CEO Irving Azoff, talked about the status of the music industry today.

Artists (and presumably their labels, managers, etc.) no longer make money off the release of their actual music. “Recorded music is more a marketing tool than a revenue source” for acts now, said Azoff. Today,“recorded music is down to less than 6%” of major musical acts’ revenues, he claimed.  Artists walk in to his office, Azoff said, “who used to make $300,000 to $500,000 a year in royalties [from selling recordings]. And now that’s diminished to less than $50,000” a year.

The money is made off their live shows and merchandising The digitization of music and downloading has not killed the music business, it has reshaped it immensely.

It is not about the product, but the packaging and distribution. Azoff stressed that music artists must be brands, with a capital B. He cites new deals like his client Aguilera working with Procter and Gamble to launch a line of fragrances.

How about the music start-ups where TicketMaster has a stake as Playlist Project and iLike? According to Azoff, they can survive, and they’re excellent marketing opportunities. But they’ll have to find other ways of making money. Can they? “I don’t know.” Advertising? “I don’t know.

Azoff is obivously speaking out of his personal interest as Ticketmaster CEO, nontheless the talk has interesting ideas. Just skip over the non-answers on the TicketMaster-LiveNation merger.

Here’s the full video:

Everything (and nothing) can be said about the music industry. Chances are you heard it before,  or you said it before, or it was discussed in a conference, or twitted and blogged…

So when you buy a book on this topic, the best you can hope is to re-learn something or understand its historic or human motivations.  And there’s certainly that to be acknowledged to  Greg Kot’s book, How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music.

But more than the learning, Ripped stays with you because it is not a dry theory, but it lives the lives of the hundreds of persons and facts that Greg Kot, a Chicago Tribune music blogger since the 1990s, collected as an insider.

The book itself is slim and reads fast (especially on the Kindle .  The style is light and entertaining.

————————————————————

The Pre-MP3s/Pre-Napster Era

Music used to be “A business for the Few” (Not always the right ones). The Few being: the 4 Big Record Labels who ended up devouring all the smaller, indipendent players, and one big Radio conglomerate (Clear Channel) who thrived in the era of payola. Add the increasing pressure from WallStreet to produce profits fast and what you get is a screwed consumer who gets spoon-fed a selection of  hit-machine artists and with little or no alternatives to cultivate his music passion.

The Wired Revolution

Then, the MP3 format emerged and it freed both the consumers from the monopoly of the music labels as publishers and the artists, providing them with more “opportunities to be heard”. Napster subverted the old rules allowing consumers to access millions of songs for free, and at the same time artists discovered that giving away albums for free on the internet could lead to more sales to shows and merchandise. Apple would push the revolution a step further by making music portable.

This story is told by Kot by means of episodes. He cherry-picks bands and singers who have either won a viral following on the Web ( Death Cab for Cutie, Conor Oberst and Lily Allen), or developed innovative Internet strategies (like Radiohead) and Trent Reznor. E-zines as PitchFork also get to be the subject of a few chapters, since they ended up playing a big role in making independent music a force to be reckoned with.

—————————————————

There are some missus in the book that detractors will easily pick on: these artists are only a few fortunate ones, how about all the others? Is this model fair towards everybody or is it an ecosystem again for the few?  How can copyright be reformed instead of being demolished?  The list could continue, but it’s pointless.

The book is great for what it is and doesn’t pretend to be more than that.  I am glad I read it and recommend it to anyone who likes good books!

You can enjoy an excerpt on the RadioHead here.

BREAKING NEWS

-The Power of Music

Trent Reznor And Twitter Help Raise over $850,000 for Fan in Need -For donations: NIN Store

-Towards a PanEuropean License? Diverging views

EU pushes music industry to open up online rights

Elbonia: Your next (and only) music destination?

-Good news for music streaming sites

For the US: Big Music’s ‘friendlier’ new deal NYT Versions and P2P One

For the UK: Welcome Back YouTube, Pandora? PRS Lowers UK Per-Stream Rates… But Read the Fine Print? Pandora Cries Foul on PRS…
BUZZ

Video: Spotify’s Amazing Android App

Cloud Construction: Spotify Teases Android App…

TRENDS

About the Royalties War Music Industry Sees Nightclubs as a New Source of Revenue

How Twitter is Changing Music

Indie Labels Experience A Major Renaissance Amidst The Upheaval

Mobile Music Keeps Humming As Music Industry Shrinks

Quarterly Data Confirms: US Radio Stations Suffering…

’80s and ’90s bands a big part of summer tours

COMPANIES

Palm Pre Round-Up: Twitter Support Galore; Coming To Verizon; First Impressions; Syncs With iTunes

Microsoft unveils Zune HD and Xbox integration

Nokia Ovi Store: re-reviewed

EMI FInancial Troubles: WSJ and NYPost

About the Last.fm vs TechCrunch Saga

YahooMusic Changes Boost Traffic

MySpace Music Opens Doors On New Weekly Series

Find Concerts for Your Favorite Bands with Songkick

ARTISTS

Jay-Z and Eminem spin a musical game out of ‘DJ Hero’

Placebo reveal private pre-release album playback

Ministry Of Sound Use Engagement Advertising

Applying for your first job in the music industry

7 Insider Tips On Getting More Gigs For Your Band

PassionPit The Orchard Special Sauce Meets Passion Pit…

Loving it!!!

Dr. Dre Teases Long-Awaited “Detox” With Dr. Pepper Ad

ChesterFrench  and How Band Rewards Fans For Burning Their CD And Giving It Away

U2 manager: ‘Ultimately free is the enemy of good’

What You Can Learn From The Pearl Jam Live Experience

READS

The culture of copying

Resnikoff’s Parting Shot: When Digital Reality Sets In…

Interview: Steve Knopper of Rolling Stone and Appetite for Self-Destruction – Part1 and 2

Billboard Interview with Pandora Founder Tim Westergren

Leadership 2.0, and How Not to Achieve it - Umair Haque  on the status of the Music Industry

Music Publishing Terminology by Garry Velletri, Senior VP at Bug Music

QUOTES

Umair Haque

Why is the music industry stuck protecting a rotting core? Because what’s standing in its way is the RIAA. The RIAA is like a megacore, a Voltron of coreness. Because it’s a coalition of record labels, it prevents every label from exploring new strategies, business designs, organizational models, or ideals. The RIAA prevents every record label from learning to interact with others in newer, better ways.

Record labels are caught in a prisoner’s dilemma, and the jailer is the RIAA. Like autoworkers are held fast by unions actively working against their long-run interests, so record labels are trapped by the RIAA. A smart label would break the chains of this self-imposed imprisonment — because until they do, they can never act as leaders.

TWITTER MUSIC CHART

The 99 most popular songs on Twitter