Tuesday, March 24, 2009

This Week In News



Online Music Retailers Slashing Prices
The Boston Globe has a solid piece on the recent trend in falling prices for online music. Services like Amazon MP3 have been aggressively cutting prices, including a $3.99 deal last week for U2's "No Line on the Horizon," with some other album (not track) prices as low as 99 cents. AppScout.com


Counting Crows Leave Label for a DIY Approach Online
The Counting Crows have ended their eighteen-year label relationship with Geffen Records (now part of Universal Music Group), lead singer Adam Duritz says on the bands website. Duritz says the band will go it alone, saying "the internet opens a world of limitless possibility, where the only boundaries are the boundaries of your own imagination." Apparently UMG didn't approve of breaking down some of those boundaries. Duritz added "Unfortunately, the directions we want to go and the opportunities we want to pursue are often things that our label is simply not allowed to do." Michael Arrington, Washington Post


What’s the Real Cost of Free Music?
SpiralFrog met its end just days ago, and already, operators of other ad-supported music services are rushing to put distance between their business models and that of the doomed site.


SXSW: Social Networking Rocks-But Only for Some Bands
Two years after South by Southwest bands first embraced Twitter to reach out to fans, many of them are taking every opportunity to use social networking. We expected that. What caught us off-guard was other artists' reluctance to embrace these tools despite expert assertions that such activity grows a band's fan base and, ultimately, its revenue. Van Buskirk Eliot


The State of the Music Business According to John Mellencamp
John Mellencamp argues the decline of the music industry is not P2P file sharing, but rather SoundScan. Huffington Post


As Rights Clash on YouTube, Some Music Vanishes
In early December, Juliet Weybret, a high school sophomore and aspiring rock star from Lodi, Calif., recorded a video of herself playing the piano and singing “Winter Wonderland,” and she posted it on YouTuBE. Weeks later, she received an e-mail message from YouTube: her video was being removed “as a result of a third-party notification by the Warner Music Group,” which owns the copyright to the Christmas carol. Tim Arango, New York Times

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