Snowcrashing

Weekly Digest on the Music Industry – May 17, 2009

Posted on 18. May, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

BREAKING NEWS

French National Assembly Adopts 3 Strikes Law

iLike Launches Custom iPhone Apps, Syndication Platform To Help Artists Connect With Fans

Imeem About To Expand iPhone Music Storage By Way Of The Cloud

—-

OPINIONS AND REPORTS

Seth Godin: Another View Of Free

Bruce Houghton: Despite The All The Gloom And Doom I’m Still Optimistic About The Music Industry

Is the Long Tail really long?

Not just a matter of semantics:about “pirates” and “theft” in the music industry.

Spotify CEO interview ortability and subscriptions to a social music experience as key future developments.

Continue Reading

Weekly Digest on the Music Industry – May 2, 2009

Posted on 03. May, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

BREAKING NEWS

A week dense of social networks ‘ announcements

FACEBOOK COLONIZATION

April 28th is a date to remember. Facebook launched the Open Stream API: it’s the start of the Facebook experience extending beyond the Facebook walls. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream.

One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop.

Another example is a demo of Silverlight+ Facebook Stream, that has wowed the lucky Techcrunch viewers: Microsoft Shows Off The Power Of Facebook’s New APIs

Continue Reading

The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet

Posted on 02. May, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

If you talk about the Music Industry, one word you will hear for sure -and a lot- is Crisis. In its most positive connotation, a crisis is a turning point that triggers some radical changes. So with a crisis come opportunities.

That seems to be the gist of the speech Mike Masnick, editor of TechDirt, gave at the at the Leadership Music Digital Summit.

In front of an audience, featuring RIAA top execs and the 4 big labels, Masnick, who is a long time advocate of the “Free Music” theory, talks about the latest and greatest from Trent Reznor, the front man of NineInchNails ,who has been experimenting with disruptive models where record labels and copyright are not needed anymore.

Continue Reading

Pirate Bay Guilty Verdict – So What’s Next for the Music Industry?

Posted on 17. Apr, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

It’s official. A Swedish court has found four men behind the BitTorrent tracker the Pirate Bay guilty of assisting in making copyrighted material available and sentenced each of them to a year in jail. They were also ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.54 million) to the film and music industries by Stockholm district court. Plaintiffs included Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros., EMI Music and Columbia Pictures.

The Swedish and international music industry has welcomed today’s (April 17) verdict against Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde. The Pirate Bay is the most notorious site used for searching P2P downloads of music and films, claiming 22 million users in February.

Continue Reading

Google China Launches a Free Music Service. March 30 2009: A Day To Remember.

Posted on 04. Apr, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

It’s been official for 24 hours now: Google has launched an ad-supported free music search in China, with the backing of more than 140 record labels, including the Big 4.

The Google service allows Chinese consumers to search for music, link to the Web site of a Beijing company called Top100.cn and download licensed music from that Chinese site, which has signed contracts with the music industry. Screenshots for non-Chinese readers have been made available by Music 2.0. It looks pretty slick, with lyrics, a flash player, upsell of ringback tones. Tracks are DRM free and high-quality (192kbps).

Continue Reading

Spotify new business model

Posted on 04. Apr, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Since its launch in October 2008. Spotify has been getting lots of plaudits from users and bloggers.

From TorrentFreak to  TechCrunch, the service seems to have impressed people who have tried it with its speed, usability, and depth of songs. Spotify seems to be the new European Mecca for music.  Yes European only, since it isn’t officially available in the U.S. yet (though a Digg commenter did provide a way for people to try it out Stateside, at least temporarily). Right now it can be accessed in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.

Continue Reading