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Interesting marketing by Warner’s Infectious Records; the Subways are giving away their (rocking) new single as an MP3 download….
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I’ve accidentally stumbled into several music-related mashups today, and I thought I might share them with you.
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As a musician, entrepreneur, and consultant, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to create a new “path” for musicians to succeed.
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About 5 weeks ago, I worked with Greg Hester to release a music video that would hopefully help promote his band and grab some new listeners.
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Having recently opened an independent record store, I’ve quickly become acquainted with the challenges that face small stores like mine, and the independent record industry in general.
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The movie and music industries have long had a common problem with piracy. Yet as the infringements migrated from analog to digital, their responses have diverged.
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A New York Judge has denied a request by EMI to force MP3tunes to turn over all music files for its 125,000 users. For now, this means the contents of personal music Lockers will remain private.
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MP3tunes, the online music locker service started by MP3.com founder Michael Robertson, on Thursday launched a new feature that lets users automatically move their digital music between their own computers.
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Digital sales of music represented 10% of the total worldwide music market in ’07 up from 6% in ’06, according to In-Stat. By 2012, digital music sales will represent 40% of all music purchased worldwide.
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When sample clearance fees became big business in the ’80s, up-and-coming producers had to decide whether to use a sample for free and hope for the best, pay the fee or record a soundalike version to qualify for a lower fee.
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New Zealand’s New Technologies and Performers’ Rights Copyright Amendment Bill is a complete overhaul of their copyright law.
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Yahoo! tries ever so hard to be like Google. But it’s always a struggle. Late yesterday, in an apparent attempt to battle the Google-owned YouTube, Yahoo! added video to Flickr,
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This was a big week for the music business. Not only did Apple’s iTunes store pass Wal-Mart as the number-one music retailer on the planet, but social networking site MySpace announced that it will launch a music store to compete with iTunes — MySpace Mu
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I have spent a lot of time studying the pictures in this post. The data illustrated here is not new, of course. We all know music sales are going to Hell in a proverbial handbasket.
Archive for the "Internet" Category
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With talk of Radiohead’s much-publicised thought-experiment into the value of music finally dying down, 2008’s release schedule was in danger of looking somewhat typical by comparison…
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Seems like I’m the only person who thought Sony BMG’s download cards were a good idea.
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We live in a new media world. In fact it’s not that new. Shawn Fanning and Napster screwed everything up in June 1999.
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Propelled by the global expansion of broadband, expanding music catalogs and mobile music downloads, digital music sales will account for 40% of the total worldwide music market by 2012.
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Last.fm releases stats todat that its says proves that free on demand full song streams have a direct impact on sales.
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Up and coming lifestream aggregator Ping.fm (still in private beta), has just added MySpace Status and Blogger support.
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Wired’s Listening Post, Idolator and others have picked up on the story that Hypebot broke yesterday revealing The Orchard’s concerns over indie treatment at MySpace Music. How MySpace and other music 2.0 companies compensate indie artists and labels will
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As CD purchasing declined, Apple’s iTunes strengthened its position as the dominant digital music destination, widening its lead in user awareness over other digital music sources, including MySpace,
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A new generation of middlemen is emerging in the music industry as it continues to morph into whatever it is going to become.
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Graphic designers working in the music industry are facing a crossroads on par with anything the labels are dealing with. Now that album art is viewed at sizes of one-inch-by-one-inch and smaller, how can cover art add meaning to an album?
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The April 19 celebration of independent music retail now includes the release of exclusive limited edition 7″s by Built to Spill, R.E.M., Death Cab for Cutie, and the Black Keys.
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A new Ipsos study of overall consumer brand awareness shows continued growth for iTunes among fee-based music services. MySpace.
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The rapid growth of Internet radio is undeniable. According to Edison Media Research 33 million Americans listen to a radio station over the Internet during an average week.
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One could argue that SoundScan ruined the record business. Oldsters might say the phony charts of yore, manipulated by the labels, were better for the health of the industry.
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Within 2 years, the leading music blogs will become what used to be called ‘Record Labels’.
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GTDInbox is an addon for Firefox that transforms Gmail into a powerhouse of productivity and manageability. GTDInbox gives you a better inbox.
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4These days there are so many music communities out there it is hard to actually choose which ones are worth choosing or not.
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Confirming a long-held expectation, Imeem acquired the struggling Snocap digital rights and content management firm.
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Timing is everything in business, and having a visionary idea too early can prove fatal. So it is with Shawn Fanning’s Snocap, which has formally announced today that it’s being acquired by Imeem. Or what’s left of it – most Snocap employees were laid off
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Peer-to-peer (P2P) filtering products are supposed to provide two functions critical to ensuring the continued successful expansion of the Internet.
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As digital revenues have grown and other income streams slowed to a trickle, record labels and artists have begun to question paying digital distributors 10-30% for delivery of music to download stores.
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There’s a lot of money out there in the economy that people used to spend on CDs. The question is, where, exactly, did it go?
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A stark truth facing any aspiring digital music service these days is that working with record labels is going to carry a hefty price.
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Sterogum music blog ads a music video site after new investment.
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Here is an explanatory selection of common technical terms associated with Recording, MIDI, Audio, Computers and Music Technology.
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Beginning a musical career can be difficult if you do not know how to break into the mainstream industry.
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Music video on demand.
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UK Association of Independent Music events listing.
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When it comes to management, joint ventures such as the MySpace Music initiative unveiled on Thursday pose significant challenges.
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Here is a copy of my slides for those that caught my presentation or for those that missed it.
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Most popular posts on B5 Media blog OurDigitalMusic.com.
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A recent Reuters article discussed the missed opportunity by the music industry to capitalize upon searches for bands & artists that result in a visit to Wikipedia.
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The Web enables anyone to communicate with the masses, even serial killers. Charles Manson, convicted murderer and leader of the infamous Manson Family, has released the digital album One Mind over the Web.
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Bandfind is a site that is all about the very things you’re thinking it would be about. Designed as a social network specifically for artists and professionals in the music industry,
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Music Industry Survival Manual: How To Market, Promote and Make Money from Your Music While Keeping Your Rights.
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Written by Martin Stiksel, co-founder of Last.fm. I recently got to thinking about how I engage with the web, and how much more compelling the experience would be if the web engaged more actively with me.
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On Monday and throughout the week Hypebot will be taking an in depth look at the challenges facing digital distributors
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Want to spend your summer out in Ibiza, but need to earn some wedge along the way? Dead set on that gig as a podium dancer in your favourite club on the White Isle? The Ibiza Job Centre has the solution.
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The senior Google executive poached by EMI’s new owners to overhaul its global digital strategy said yesterday that file sharing, for so long deemed the scourge of the music business, was “not necessarily bad”.
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When it first launched, direct comparisons of the Amazon.com mp3 store with Apple’s iTunes store were difficult, largely because of major differences in their respective catalogs.
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Having ceded the file based music opportunity (mp3s and drm’d file formats) to Apple (AAPL), the recorded labels are now getting hip to the much bigger opportunity: Streaming music.
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The BPI has been writing to all the big ISPs with a proposal. It wants them to warn their users that file-sharing is not an acceptable activity – and then disconnect those who ignore repeated warnings to desist.
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Who wants to talk about the band that’s reinventing the wheel on twelve other websites, when you can do it all under one big Radiohead hub?
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You probably know Nicholas Negroponte, the man who tries to supply every student in the developing world with an laptop of 100 dollar, The Children’s Machine, to extend Internet access in the third world.
I was looking at the hard-drive on my laptop yesterday in an effort to try and clear up some clutter so I made an issue of listing all the software apps I actually use on a regular basis and dumped all the ones I never use.
I’m a software junkie I guess so I collect a lot of novelty apps that I dont need at all
Publishing Online
First and foremost one of my most useful online ‘apps’ (well its not actually an app as such, more a service) is my webhosting account. For anyone experimenting with various websites as I do a hosting account is absolutely essential.
Just for the record I choose a Hostgator reseller account (though there are thousands of companies out there offering similar services) which gives me the capacity to host hundreds of websites all with their own online control panels and with a whole bunch of storage space and very generous bandwidth.
One of the most useful aspects of my webhosting account is the fact that I can have a new blog or website online within minutes, literally. Hostgator are one of the many webhosting companies that use an online script installer called Fantastico. You access Fantastico via an online control panel, called CPanel (what else?) and it will install a selection of free scripts with just a couple of clicks basically.
Those scripts include blog/content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Mambo, Geeklog and Drupal (amongst others). I choose WordPress simply because it has a massive support network, free plugins and themes and its easy to learn and manage.
So an artist management company with multiple bands could have separate blogs installed for each artist in minutes. And sites can be updated from any browser, anywhere. I swear by WordPress, this blog is hosted on that platform and I have used it for almost four years now.
Extra Blogging Tools
I use Windows Live Writer to write posts offline and also the Live Writer Firefox plugin that enables me to quickly write a post on a page I might be viewing if I’m online. If you use Flickr for image hosting then I recommend the Flickr Uploadr app which sits on your desktop and enables you to simply drag images from your hard drive into your Flickr account. Windows Live Writer has the ability to insert Flickr images at a snap too.
RSS Tools
I’ll scan feeds daily to look for inspiration and ideas and the RSS tools I use most are FeedDemon as my main desktop reader, Sage for browsing in Firefox and Google Reader online. Sync all three accounts by exporting all your feeds in an OPML file onto your desktop then importing the feeds into your other readers. If I can get my head round that then so can you! Here’s some YouTube help.
Audio Video Tools
For Torrent files I use UTorrent, for ripping audio and video from web pages I use Orbit. Uploading music to sell online? Then you’ll want an MP3 encoder that’s better quality than the encoder built into iTunes. CDex is a freebie that uses the acclaimed Lame encoder and will also rip to the higher quality Ogg format.
If you want to do simple audio editing (ringtones, mp3 editing) then Audacity is another great free tool with multiple uses like simple recording or encoding old vinyl and cassettes into digital files. There’s even a VST plugin. I use it in particular to try out drum breaks as it has a really neat looping function.
Ripping DVDs? I swear by Magic DVD Ripper used in conjunction with the Cheetah DVD burner. Hey, they’re not system hogs and they just do what it says on the tin.
Related Reading
10 Must Have Office Apps (ReadWriteWeb)
Software-Hack The Day (HackTheDay.com)
Downloads (Lifehacker.com)
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Do your torrent downloads seem to be taking longer than usual? Are you trying to transfer, say, a home video to a friend via Pando and the upload keeps getting stuck?
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So, you’ve decided to create a blog on MySpace – one of the single most effective ways to draw an audience to your profile.
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Combines Flickr, Last.fm and YouTube. Create your own folders, drag your videos, and view videos in a player.
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Procol Harum lead singer Gary Brooker has won back full royalty rights to the band’s worldwide hit, A Whiter Shade of Pale, at London’s Court of Appeal.
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Less than two months after edging out Best Buy and Target for the number two spot, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) says it has now passed Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) as the number one largest music retailer in the U.S.
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Back in the day of the cassette tape, making mixtapes was one of my favorite pastimes. I made them for friends.
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The devil is in the unrevealed and perhaps even un-negotiated details of the just announced MySpace Music joint venture with the major labels.
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If this had happened even one year ago, it would be considered a big deal. But at this point, with iMeem streaming music, with music available free, with major labels having less power than ever before, it merits little more than a shrug.
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Digg-like features are being incorporated into lots of websites, large and small, for a variety of purposes. The latest is a community dedicated to P2P sites, called P2PViNE.
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WE HAVE TO SHARE: Jef with one F (Black Math Experiment) has posted a manifesto titled The Ten Commandments of MySpace Musicians.
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One main reason I visit so many bands’ MySpace pages is because it always turns up at or near the top of a Google search. For Coldplay, the band’s MySpace page is the third result in a Google search (after the band’s own page and its Wikipedia page). The
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Can you imagine carrying virtually every song ever recorded around in your pocket? It’s possible thanks to a new compression technology being developed at the University of Rochester that digitally reproduces music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller tha
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Every week there is more controversy as ISPs continue to limit, throttle and otherwise interfere with P2P traffic.
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The idea of a MySpace Music JV with the labels is about to become reality—at least, as far as announcing it goes, Reuters is reporting and we have confirmed.
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News Corp.’s MySpace (NWS) has settled a long-running copyright lawsuit with Universal Music Group, a deal that gives the social network the go-ahead to launch its own music joint venture.
