This Week In News

ReverbNation Survey: How is the Economic Downturn Affecting Artists?
ReverbNation conducted a survey of artists in an attempt to learn how the downturn was affecting their everyday lives across a variety of factors. There was a general perception among respondents that the economic downturn was affecting them in a negative way, overall. Specifically, artists cited that they were touring less, receiving less money for gigs that have become harder to get, taking fewer lessons and turning to more DIY ways of recording their music. Hypebot.com

Pandora Changes Artist Airplay Submissions
Until recently, Pandora accepted music from indie artists at no cost in almost any form including home burned CD-R's.... Hypebot.com

Michael Jackson Breaks Billboard Charts Records
As predicted, Michael Jackson is once again the King of the Pop charts. Based on preliminary sales numbers from Nielsen SoundScan, the entire top nine positions on Billboard's Top Pop Catalog Albums chart will house Jackson-related titles when the tally is released in the early morning on Wednesday, July 1. Nielsen SoundScan's sales tracking week ended at the close of business on Sunday (June 28) night. Keith Caulfield, Billboard.Biz

Free My Phone
New mobile phones have been called “the Internet in your pocket,” but they’re not. Through exclusive deals for phones like the iPhone and BlackBerry Storm, wireless companies have curtailed innovation, crippled applications, and stuck users with the bill. Free Press

Will File Sharing Case Spawn a Copyright Reform Movement?
Last Thursday’s $1.92 million file-sharing verdict against a Minnesota mother of four could provide copyright refor advocates with a powerful human symbol of the draconian penalties written into the nearly-35 year old Copyright Act. Then again, maybe notDavid Kravets, Wired.com

Study: Twitter Users More Likely to Buy Music
Record labels looking for customers should focus their efforts on the Twitter faithful, according to new data from NPD Group. About 33 percent of Twitter users have purchased a physical CD and 34 percent have bought a digital download in the last three months, the report said. AppScout.com

Spotify Doubles Streaming Quality
Spotify, the Swedish internet radio station that allows users to stream tracks over the internet, is improving sound quality for 'Premium' users. Spotify is free to use, although listeners will find tracks peppered with adverts, just like commercial radio. However, for a £9.99 monthly subscription, users can enjoy ad-free listening. Carrie-ann Skinner, NetworkWorld.com

This Week In News

Sony Agrees to Provide Its Older Songs to eMusic
In another example of struggling major music labels and Internet services finding common ground, Sony Music Entertainment has agreed to make its back catalog of songs available on eMusic, one of the largest music retailers on the Web. Brad Stone, The New York Times

Live Nation to Rollout ‘No Service Fee’ Promotion
Live Nation will eliminate service fees on more than five million lawn tickets and hundreds of concerts for its amphitheaters in a one-day promotion June 3. The 24-hour sales event is being billed as the biggest ticket promotion ever, which would be hard to dispute. "No Service Fee Wednesdays," begins June 3 at 12:01 a.m., offering fans some of the lowest prices of the summer with no ticket service fees on any LiveNation.com-ticketed amphitheater show, and only at LiveNation.com. Ray Waddell, Billboard.Biz

Web Radio Hits the Road
It took a long drive over a holiday weekend -- a setting that should have played to all of radio's traditional strengths-- to show how much trouble commercial FM stations may have in store. The soundtrack for the trip along Interstates 66 and 81 to the Shenandoah Valley town of Woodstock, Va., came not from FM, an XM or Sirius satellite broadcast or such recorded alternatives as CD or iPod. Instead, our musical selection came from an Internet-connected smartphone that streamed Web radio to the nearest speakers through a cheap tape-deck adapter. Rob Pegoraro, The Washington Post

Walmart Shutting Down DRM Download Servers
Walmart.com's music download store went DRM free in February of 2008; and now the retail giant is telling customers that they'll no longer support the DRM laden downloads that they sold them prior to the transition. Hypebot.com

This Just In: Old People Hate New Music
… E Street Band guitarist “Little” Steven Van Zandt is citing the sucktitude of today’s rock ‘n’ roll as the reason the record industry is sinking faster than the Lusitania (“Who are we kidding here? Nobody’s buying records? Because they suck!”). Modern rock’s suckiness, the apparently computer-illiterate Van Zandt claims, can be traced to the fact that this generation’s musicians are eschewing the time-honored tradition of playing cover songs in bars (so’s they can focus on original material, the bastards!) and ignoring the importance of ripping off the popular rockers who came before them. James Greene Jr, Crawdaddy.wolfgangsvault.com

Billboard.biz Q&A: Former RIAA CEO Rosen Talks Napster
When Napster first went live 10 years ago this month, the music industry didn't immediately notice. It wasn't until around September 1999 that the RIAA got wise, and not until December that a lawsuit was filed. Leading the organization at that time was Hilary Rosen, who presided over the case that shut down Napster and all the music industry moves that followed until she resigned in 2003. Anthony Bruno, Billboard.biz

This Week In News

Spotify CEO Talks Portability, Premium Service Growth
Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of music streaming service Spotify, says he wants to build on the early popularity of the ad-supported free model by developing a portable service and attracting users to the premium service. Jen Wilson, Billboard.biz

Analysis: The Orchard Keeps Focus On Long-Term
The latest earnings results from digital distributor the Orchard painted a picture of a company with a focused long-term strategy for an increasingly competitive marketplace. Glenn Peoples, Billboard.biz

The Future of Mobile Music: Will Labels Participate
Phones are frequently viewed as walled-garden alternatives, safe places for controlled media sales. But as phones evolve into handheld supercomputers, is the sordid history of the traditional web doomed to repeat itself? DigitalMusicNews.com

Strapped For Cash, Music Fans Let Go Of CDs
California's Amoeba Records is the largest used-music retailer in the world. The checkout lines often wind deep into the clearance aisles. But not lately. These days, the real action comes from people selling their collections — and using the store as an emergency ATM. April Dembosky, NPR.org

April Album Sales Down 'Only' 9%
U.S album sales were down 9.2% in April 2009 versus April 2008 according to data at Neilson SoundScan. The deficit is a big improvement over the 17.9% deficit in March and the 11.5% deficit in February. Billboard.biz

Pandora: iPhone Driving Revenue Increases
Is the iPhone inadvertently aiding Internet radio? While Pandora’s main source of revenue is in advertising deals, a growing portion of the company’s revenue comes from affiliate downloads that drive sales in the iTunes Store or on Amazon MP3…and the primary mover in that regard these days is the iPhone. AppScout.com

Best Buy Has Plans to Sell Vinyl Records in Stores
Next time you go to your local Best Buy store you may see vinyl records as part of the product mix. While Best Buy does sell vinyl records online, the retailer thinks it may be time to expand accessibility to its vinyl record offerings by devoting space within their physical stores. Robert Silva, About.com

Think Local, Think Indie at New Digital Music Shop
If you’re hoping to survive in the age of file sharing, it pays to be aggressive if you’re a Mom and Pop record shop. So the nationwide Coalition of Independent Record Stores just swallowed its pride and launched a digital music store: Thinkindie.com. Michael Deeds, IdahoStatesMan.com

How The iPod Changed Everything
While pirates bled the music industry, other businesses rode the tide and collected the booty. Former Apple insiders tell Matt Hartley how Steve Jobs did it. The Globe and Mail.com

mSpot Seals More Deals: CBS Radio, Last.fm Latest
Mobile entertainment company mSpot has now sealed deals with both CBS Radio and Last.fm, according to details shared with Digital Music News over the weekend. Both properties are owned by CBS Corp., and are now being integrated more aggressively. DigitalMusicNews.com

This Week In News

Music Fans Will Buy Songs, Says Head of Free Online Music Site Spotify
Record sales are down, illegal file sharing persists and a whole generation is getting used to enjoying music for free. But Daniel Ek, the man behind Spotify (still not available in the US), the world's fastest growing online music service, is convinced that fans will still pay for songs they love if they are packaged in the right way.
Alexandra Spotting, Guardian UK

CD Baby Payouts Cross 100 Million
Sometimes, simplicity pays, and in the case of CD Baby, artist payouts have now passed $100 million. ... The critical question now is whether avenues like CD Baby can generate serious artist salaries, instead of just impressive aggregated payouts. [FYI, CD Baby founder Derek Sivers is also FMC Board of Directors] Digital Music News

Next Generation iPhone & iPod Touch to offer Low Power & Wireless Radio
The next iterations of the iPhone and iPod Touch are likely to have 802.11n wireless radios inside, offering lower power consumption, longer range and faster data rates. More importantly, it will mean that you can hook your handheld up to your n-enabled home network and not slow everything else down. Wired.com

Is MP3HD the Future of Digital Music?
For all its joys, MP3 is an old format - and it's lossy, which means no matter how high the bitrate you never get a perfect copy of the original audio. Thomson, the firm that helped invent MP3 in the first place, has come up with a solution - MP3HD, and you won't need to bin your existing kit as the file format will still play on normal MP3 players.
Techradar.com

The YouTube DJ Cutting Up Copyright
Kutiman has become an Internet sensation with his mash-up tracks and videos culled from YouTube clips. There is indeed something new about Kutiman's approach to making music: all his songs, and the accompanying videos, have been painstakingly clipped together from YouTube clips of disparate, mostly (defenseless) amateur musicians. YouTube.com

Obama: Stop Filling Administration with RIAA Insiders
Nearly two dozen public interest groups, trade pacts and library groups urged President Barack Obama on Thursday to quit filling his administration with insiders plucked from the Recording Industry Association of America. Groups such as Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Consumer Electronics Association, and the Wikimedia Foundation and, among others, the American Library Association, are demanding Obama to look outside the content industry when filling up his administration.
Wired.com

Drama on Top of Drama: Ticketmaster Scrutiny Keeps Intensifying
The concert industry's favorite bad guy is now getting pummeled. After a Springsteen-inspired flare-up, the investigatory and legal flurry surrounding Ticketmaster keeps intensifying, across several fronts. [For more info on the proposed Live Nation and Ticketmaster merger, check out our earlier post.] DigitalMusicNews.com

Let the Fans Decide: KISS Practices Touring Democracy…

Why not let the fans decide where a band should tour? That is exactly what KISS is now doing, a novel concept that could reshape live gigging. The band has now announced a partnership with Eventful, specifically for upcoming North American dates. "No matter where the fans say - from stadiums to cornfields - if there are enough votes, KISS will be there," the group declared. DigitalMusicNews.com

D.I.Y & the Death of the Rock Star
The industry has long theorized that the current media landscape is simply unable to create the mega-bands of old, on the order of Guns N' Roses, Kiss, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath. Why? DigitalMusicNews.com

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.

Greg Sandoval, CNet News

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

This Week in News

It's been a while since we've rounded up the latest music-tech-policy news. It's easy to get distracted — in case you didn't notice, there's an election going on! Anyway, here's This Week In News: The Halloween Edition.

From MP3 to Audio in 3D
Karlheinz Brandenburg of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology helped develop the MP3 format more than a decade ago, setting the stage for a new era of music consumption. Lately, he's been adding a new dimension to his audio achievements — technology to deliver sound in true 3D.
Jon Healey, L.A. Times

First-Week Blowout: Wal-Mart Pushes AC/DC Past 780,000
Wal-Mart helped AC/DC sell more than 780,000 copies of Black Ice last week, the fruits of an exclusive deal. (Album not available as digital downloads.)
Digital Music News

Lime Wire Signs Lewis Black's Record Label
The renegade file-sharing service will sell Comedy Central albums in its download store. Will the major labels be next?
Devin Leonard, CNN

Finding a Gold Mine in Digital Ditties
Joel Moss Levinson always knew he had a calling in life. But it took cheap video cameras, YouTube and some desperate corporations to show him what it was.
Stephanie Cifford, New York Times

RealNetworks Boosts Music Subscribers; Rhapsody Up
After a period of stagnant growth, RealNetworks has now reached a total of two million music subscribers.
Digital Music News

Latest Staffing Casualty: eMusic Triggers Layoffs
Independent music store eMusic is now reducing its staff, according to details surfacing late Wednesday. The company confirmed a ten percent cut to the Wall Street Journal, based on a top-level staff of 100. The reductions were characterized as a proactive move ahead of continued economic malaise and resulting pressure on subscriptions.
Peter Kafka, Digital Music News

All You Need Is a Digital Guitar to Join the Beatles
The Beatles made their first foray into digital music yesterday with a video game that will allow fans to play along to their entire catalogue. The surviving members of the band have been resistant to new technology, refusing to allow their music to be downloaded from online stores such as iTunes. Instead, in the band's first significant move into the digital world, fans will be able to transform into any member of the quartet and sing, drum and strum along with their favourite Beatles songs.
Murad Ahmed, Times UK

The Monster Mash(up)
YouTube

This Week In News

Sorry for the radio silence, everyone — we've been getting ready to announce a whole bunch of info about our upcoming events, including the date and venue for "Creative License: A Conversation about Music, Law and Fair Use." Stay tuned for more info! Oh, and here's that news ya ordered:

File Sharing Lawsuits at a Crossroads, After 5 Years of RIAA Litigation
It was five years ago Monday the RIAA began its massive litigation campaign that now includes more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting alleged copyright scofflaws on peer-to-peer networks. But despite the crackdown, billions of copies of copyrighted songs are now changing hands each year on file sharing services. Some are wondering if the campaign has shaped up as an utter failure. Today, the RIAA admits that the lawsuits are largely a public relations effort, aimed at striking fear into the hearts of would-be downloaders. Spokeswoman Cara Duckworth of the RIAA says the lawsuits have spawned a "general sense of awareness" that file sharing copyrighted music without authorization is "illegal." "Think about what the legal marketplace and industry would look like today had we sat on our hands and done nothing," Duckworth says in a statement.
David Kravets, Wired

DailyTech Talks Piracy, Taxes, Orphan Works and More With Independent Music Chief
The music industry is a wholly different beast from your father's music business or even the industry that existed at the start of 1990s. While the advent of CDs and music video brought revolutionary changes of sorts, nothing would compare to what the future held in store in the form of the digital revolution. DailyTech recently talked to Rich Bengloff, a music veteran and president of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), an organization that represents small labels.
Jason Mick, DailyTech

Internet's First Music Festival to be Launched by College Radio Network
Internet radio is taking another step forward this month as the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System's IBS Student Radio Network by Backbone (IBS-SRN) launches the Web's first live music festival, called IBS-Palooza. Increasingly sophisticated college radio clubs combined with advances in Internet broadcasting technology will allow, for the first time, multiple stations to digitally share and play each other's live content and provide valuable exposure to emerging local artists from around the U.S and around the world. IBS-Palooza is intended to break new ground in the areas of both entertainment technology and education. As the first live multi-venue music festival created for the Internet, it harnesses the technologies of both Apple and Backbone Networks to enable live syndication of streaming content among several stations simultaneously.
PRMac.com

Comcast Appeals FCC Web Traffic-Blocking Decision
Comcast is appealing an FCC ruling that the company is improperly blocking customers' Web traffic, triggering a legal battle that could determine the extent of the government's authority to regulate the Internet.
John Dunbar, Associated Press

Amazon, IMDb Launch Music Wiki
Amazon and IMDb have now launched a music-focused wiki, one that allows anyone to enter and edit content. The site, SoundUnwound, also features content from Amazon, Musicbrainz, and YouTube. Artist entries include discographies, biographies, photos, videos, timelines, recommendations, and of course, purchase links to AmazonMP3. A living, breathing music database sounds useful and interesting, though Wikipedia already carries a serious advantage. Whether SoundUnwound can ever rival that dataset remains unclear, especially since Wikipedia delivers a large body of highly-detailed and relevant music listings.
Digital Music News

Music Tastes Link to Personality
Musical tastes and personality type are closely related, according to a study of more than 36,000 people from around the world. The research, which was carried out by Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University. "We have always suspected a link between music taste and personality. This is the first time that we've been able to look at it in real detail. . . If you know a person's music preference you can tell what kind of person they are, who to sell to. ... One of the most surprising things is the similarities between fans of classical music and heavy metal. They're both creative and at ease but not outgoing."
BBC News

This Week In News

Judge Clarifies 'Fair Use' in Suit
U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel refused to dismiss the lawsuit Wednesday, saying Universal needed to first consider whether the clip was "fair use" before demanding its removal. It's the first such legal ruling requiring copyright owners to consider fair use of their material before demanding that Internet sites such as YouTube take it down. The ruling came in the case of a Pennsylvania woman who sued Universal Music Corp. because it forced YouTube to take down a video clip she posted of her toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy." Fair use provisions of the U.S. copyright act allow segments of copyrighted works to be used for purposes of parody or satire or in reviews and other limited circumstances. The judge said he would determine later whether the clip constituted fair use, but he knocked down Universal's contention that the company was within its rights to demand the takedown regardless.
Monterey County Herald

Sampling a Song Can Be Fair Use, Rules US Court
The producers of a film defending the anti-evolutionary theories of Intelligent Design probably did not infringe copyright when they used a sample of John Lennon's song Imagine in the film, a New York court has ruled. Judge Richard B. Lowe III ruled in the Supreme Court of the State of New York that "fair use is available as a defence in the context of sound recordings." Past rulings outlawed the use of even very short music clips without copyright holders' permission.
Out-Law.com

Copyright Law and the Web, Part 1: A Hazy Intersection
Technology often evolves more rapidly than the laws needed to regulate it, especially in the realm of copyright law. Guidelines are in place concerning the ‘fair use' of copyrighted materials, but their interpretations have often left lawyers, judges, corporations and everyday consumers Paul Korzeniowski, e-CommerceTimes

Buyer's Remorse Kicks In; Apple Faces iPhone Class Action
Apple is now facing a consumer class action lawsuit tied to its iPhone 3G, according to filings surfacing Thursday. The lawsuit, entered by Jessica Alena Smith or Birmingham, Alabama, alleges that Apple misrepresented 3G-specific connectivity speeds and capabilities tied to the device. The case, which seeks class action status, closely follows an admission by Apple that the iPhone was experiencing 3G-related connectivity issues.
Alexandra Osorio, Digital Music News

8tracks: Muxtape, Without the Legal Muckiness
Missing Muxtape? A small service called 8tracks is trying to fill the void while avoiding the pitfalls. Playing off the same concept, 8tracks lets you upload up to 30 minutes of music into a custom playlist, which can then be publicly shared with other users. You can search for music using artists, genres, or usernames. So how is this legal while Muxtape ran into trouble?
JR Raphael, The Inquisitr

Shareholders to Napster: Try Harder to Sell Yourself
Three investors are launching a fight to get elected to the board of Napster Inc. so they can push for a sale of the West Hollywood-based digital music company. Their campaign platform: Napster's current management is incompetent and busy enriching itself. The company, which has been on the block before, should try harder to find a buyer. "Napster should be exploring all possible avenues of maximizing stockholder value," including a sale, the investors said Thursday in a letter filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "The actions taken by the current board have made that option extremely difficult for potential acquirers."
Michelle Quinn, L.A. Times Blog

Last Week In News?

We just realized that we didn't give you our customary news roundup last week. So we're making up for it with a Monday post of all the happenings in the music-tech-policy universe.

Music Is Here To Stay, But Change Is Needed, Insiders Say
Presenters at a ABA Section of Science & Technology Law session digitally recorded, remixed, replayed and then uploaded their version of the Rolling Stones' "Last Time" before a rapt audience of music aficionados, recording industry executives and lawyers. But the impromptu recording session was more then just a stunt. It showcased many of the pressing legal and business issues that the music industry is facing today as technology and copyright law intersect.
Jill Schachner Chanen, ABA Journal

Online Music Sales Muddle Royalties
The current system for getting royalty payments to musicians in the United States is seriously hampering the introduction of new, innovative music distribution models, and that problem is not going to get any better in the era of the digital download, leading music experts say.
Chloe Albanesius, PCmag

Warner Threatens To Pull Music from Guitar Hero, Rock Band
To hear Warner Music Group tell it, the creation of new markets for music tends to involve the major labels getting ripped off by outsiders. The latest example of this, according to WMG's CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr., is the videogame industry, which he says is unfairly building a business on top of the recorded music industy.
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired Listening Post

RIAA Damages Too High in Innocent Infringement Case
A judge has ruled that a teenage girl who admitted to downloading music over Kazaa will only have to pay damages of $200 per song, instead of the $750-30,000 normally allowed under the Copyright Act (and the $750 per song sought by the RIAA). The reason for the cap comes from Whitney Harper's "innocent infringement" defense, in which she argues that she did not knowingly infringe the record labels' copyright.
Eric Bangeman, ArsTechnica

ArtistData Eases Social Net Overload
Today there are more networking sites available than anyone cares to count which makes keeping them up to date tedious. Virb, Indie 911, Last.fm, and countless others are cropping up faster than lines at the Apple Store. This is where ArtistData claims its niche. Essentially, ArtistData is a one-stop means of updating all of an artist's pages by inputting tour dates to their AD account which automatically updates Myspace, Last.fm and any other site that AD can sync with. ArtistData is increasing this list of companies will sync tour dates with Buzznet, Amie St., Beta Records, and others in the near future.
Hypebot

This Week In News

Photo by flickr user mitchgibis

FCC Says Comcast Illegally Interfered With Web File-Sharing Traffic
A majority of the Federal Communications Commission has concluded that cable operator Comcast unlawfully disrupted the transfer of certain digital video files, affirming the government's right to regulate how Internet companies manage Web traffic.
Cecilia Kang, The Washington Post

Yahoo Relents, Gives coupons, Refunds To Music DRM Captives
Yahoo is trying to make the best of a potentially ugly situation that would leave many of its customers stuck between a rock and a hard place come September 30. The company, which announced last week that it was shutting down the defunct Yahoo! Music Store's DRM authentication servers, now plans to offer coupons to users so that they can purchase their songs again through Yahoo's new music partner, Rhapsody. Yahoo follows in the steps of Microsoft, who only a few weeks ago announced similar plans to shut down their DRM authentication servers, but later reversed themselves and agreed to keep them on until 2011.
Jacqui Cheng, ArsTechnica

Senate, House Merge Separate, Controversial Anti-Piracy Bills into One
With the copyright reform PRO-IP and PIRATE Acts in the rearview, the United States Senate introduced a new bill designed to incorporate the best of both worlds for IP protection, dubbed the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008 (PDF).
Tom Corelis, DailyTech

Pandora Debates With SoundExchange Over Web Royalty Rates
Representatives from Pandora clashed on Tuesday with SoundExchange, the organization that collects royalties for copyright owners in the music business, over these very issues. Pandora reiterated that current royalty rates could potentially put it out of business, but SoundExchange suggested that Pandora was quite capable of paying its way given projected Internet radio advertising revenues, as well as the success of its iPhone app.
Chloe Albanesius, PC Magazine

Sirius, XM tie-up gets FCC approval
Federal regulators formally approved the merger of the nation's only two satellite radio operators last Friday, ending a 16-month-long drama closely watched by Washington and Wall Street. Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.'s $3.3 billion buyout of rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. will mean 18 million-plus subscribers will be able to receive programming from both services.
CNN

This Week In News

Photo by flickr user glsarah

Yahoo! to stop supporting Yahoo! Music after September 30
Starting Oct. 1, customers won't be able to revive frozen tracks or move working ones onto new hard drives or computers, because Yahoo! won't be providing any more keys to the songs' DRM wrappers. Without the keys, the music is stuck. If a user's computer goes on the fritz, say good-bye to Yahoo's music. This situation epitomizes the problem we laid out in our last post about the Library of Congress.
Chris Gaither, LA Times

Mobile Net Radio Opens New Ad Opportunities
With the iPhone's Internet radio applications comes added opportunities for advertisers, says Steve Rubel in an AdAge column. He envisions advertisers targeting users based on music tastes or through GPS-based location, in that way delivering "locally relevant" ads to consumers. "This maybe one of the most promising mobile ad formats and is a space to watch," he states. Additionally, iPhone Internet radio may "disrupt" traditional radio because it transforms the one-way delivery of radio into a two-way interaction—not only matching the in-car listening and music discovery aspects of radio, but adding a degree of personalization.
Paul Maloney, Advertising Age

Universal Says It Can Ignore Fair Use In DMCA Takedowns
The question is whether or not filing a takedown notice on content that is used in a way consistent with "fair use" is a misuse or not. Universal Music's claim is that it is not reasonable for the copyright holder to take fair use into consideration before sending a takedown notice. At a first pass, it sounds like the judge agrees. . . the judge and Universal Music may be correct under the existing law. There isn't anything in the law that says the copyright holder needs to take into account the user's defenses. It just says they need to be the legitimate copyright holder (which Universal Music is).
Mike Masnick, Techdirt

MySpace Music to launch in September
MySpace Music will launch in September, according to Chris DeWolfe, the social network's CEO. MySpace announced in April that it planned to launch a music service that would offer songs from three out of the top four recording companies (EMI has yet to join). MySpace said then that the music site, which will offer free streaming music, unprotected MP3 downloads, ringtones, and merchandise, would roll out over a span of three to four months.
Greg Sandoval, Cnet News

Favtape Creates Mixtapes from Your Pandora and Last.fm Accounts
Favtape is another new mixtape creation site, but its standout feature is its automation process, which creates a mixtape based off songs you’ve listened to on Pandora, or those you’ve favorited on Last.fm. Provide Favtape with your Pandora URL or your Last.fm username, and a mixtape will automatically be created for you with a unique URL that can be accessed anytime.
Kristen Nicole, Mashable

This Week In News

Photo by flickr user Adam Tinworth

FCC Chairman plans to recommend censure against Comcast
Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin plans to recommend that the FCC issue a warning against the ISP for imposing "arbitrarily limits" on its subscribers. The recommendation, now circulating internally, would require various disclosure and procedural shifts without applying penalties.
Margaret Kane, News.com

The iPhone and it's impact on internet radio
The new Apple 3G iPhone has received a lot of attention, but the more important story isn't the new hardware, but Apple's application store and the many programs that run on the new phone. Thanks to a few of those programs there's an even larger story - the iPhone may fundamentally change the way people listen to the radio when they're in their cars or otherwise on the go. Two free applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and another program that costs only $4.99, make it possible to listen to live radio on the iPhone from anywhere, including a moving car.
Larry Magid, CBS News

Music 2.0, Part 1: The New Indie Model
The use of Web 2.0 technologies in the music industry has changed the market forever, with musicians promoting themselves online and interacting directly with their fan bases. This has spelled opportunity for a new breed of digital music and media technology providers such as IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance.
Andrew K. Burger, TechNewsWorld

Guns N' Roses to release new song via Rock Back 2 in fall
Guns N' Roses is now delivering an exclusive track to the upcoming Rock Band 2, slated for release in the fall. The song, "Shackler's Revenge," is coming from the long-awaited Chinese Democracy, an album-in-the-making for more than a decade. Game creators Harmonix and MTV Games announced the song's inclusion in the game, as well as released the entire tracklist at the game-focused E3 Media & Business Summit, hosted in Los Angeles.
Digital Music News

Featured artists fear worst from European copyright proposals
The music industry has been dancing with glee since February, when the Internal Market Commissioner announced his proposal to extend the term of protection of copyright in sound recordings in the EU from 50 to 95 years. However, while record companies and session players are rejoicing, the dream for featured performers – artists who are billed on records – now seems to have soured.
Robert Ashton, MusicWeek

This Week In News

Photo by flickr user Matt Callow

Coldplay Smashes Records on iTunes, In More Ways Than One...

Apple declined to offer hard figures, though digital album totals of Viva La Vida across various retailers topped 288,000, according to figures supplied by major label executives. Of that, iTunes carries a commanding percentage, one that may have pushed past 275,000, according to a separate estimate.

Paul Resnikoff, Digital Music News

Legal, British P2P 'by end of year'
Legal broadband subscription services that permit file sharing may appear on the market by the year's end, according to music industry sources - after government intervention brought both music suppliers and ISPs to the table. The UK would become the second country after South Korea where the music business has agreed to offer licenses to file sharing services in a bid to reverse declining revenues.
Andrew Orlowski, The Register

Warner Bros. LP+CD Bundle a Clever Twist
Here's an interesting article about a way to tackle the fatigue that comes with dynamic range compression: For the release of Mudcrutch, the new album by the reunited early '70s band that features Tom Petty, Warner Bros. has released two versions. The CD package will contain an album remastered for the "realities of the marketplace," which means it has the sort of loud, compressed sound that caters to iPod headphones. The vinyl LP will include a CD that was made from the vinyl master, which is quieter and more dynamic.
Glenn Peoples, Coofler

House Subcommittee Votes Yes On Royalty Bill
A U.S. House subcommittee passed a bill Thursday that would require radio stations to pay royalties to artists for playing their music. The Performance Rights Act passed on voice vote in the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. The next step for the bill is a vote by the full Judiciary Committee. It is possible, but unlikely, that the bill will reach the House floor this year, according to a Dow Jones report. (Read more about the Performance Right here.)
Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

Prince Sues Musicians For Making A Tribute Album For His Birthday
Fifty Norwegian musicians, who teamed up with a Norwegian record label to create what they thought was a nice 50th birthday present for Prince: a "tribute" album with 81 covers of Prince songs. They figured that it would be a nice gesture to send Prince a copy. What they didn't expect was for Prince to turn around and sue the label and all fifty musicians. He's also demanding that all copies of the album be destroyed. There is a question of compulsory licenses here -- as Norway requires about $0.10/song, and with 81 songs, that's about $8 per album. The label believed that since it wasn't making any money on the album, it didn't need to pay.
Mike Masnick, Techdirt

Starbucks Dumping CDs
Starbucks, which has been scaling back its once-grand ambitions to turn itself into an entertainment hub, is about to shrink its plans yet again. We hear that by September, the chain will have dumped almost all of its in-store music retail offerings.
Peter Kafka, Silicon Alley Insider

XM Satellite Radio and EMI Music Publishing Agreement on Pioneer Inno
XM Satellite Radio and EMI Music Publishing today announced that they have resolved the lawsuit brought by EMI Music Publishing against XM over its Pioneer Inno, a portable satellite radio with advanced recording features. The companies did not disclose terms of the agreement.
Trading Markets

"I Don't Value Music Made From Sampling"
Mashup artist Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, is another artist to try the 'pay whatever you want' Internet release model. However, his 55-minute album consists of over 300 samples from other artists, with many current and past hits. No stranger to current controversies in copyright, Gillis also appeared in the documentary Good Copy Bad Copy.
uaudio, MetaFilter

Net Neutrality Advocates Call For Fast, Universal Access To The Net
The United States' anemic broadband penetration rate has led to the formation of a new lobbying group whose goal is to build the political will to bring a more determined, coherent approach to the problem. Many members of the group, including its chief non-profit organizing entity Free Press, have been allies in the fight to shape public opinion and build wide-spread support for the concept of net neutrality.
Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired Threat Level

This Week In News

Radiohead to Prince: Unblock 'Creep' Cover Videos
After word spread that Prince covered Radiohead's "Creep" at Coachella, the tens of thousands who couldn't be there ran to YouTube for a peek. Everyone was quickly denied _ even Radiohead. All videos of Prince's unique rendition of Radiohead's early hit were quickly taken down, leaving only a message that his label, NPG Records, had removed the clips, claiming a copyright violation. But the posted videos were shot by fans and, obviously, the song isn't Prince's.
CNN Money.com

A Year After iTunes Plus, Apple Faces Stepped-Up Competition
DRM-free music is more prevalent than ever, but does it matter? For all that they appear to have embraced DRM-free music, Sony, Universal, and Warner continue to withhold the unencumbered tracks from Apple, choosing instead to back iTunes's rivals. It would seem that Steve Jobs' proposed future of DRM-free music (Apple would adopt an entirely DRM-free catalog "in a heartbeat," presuming the four major record labels would let Apple do so) has quickly become a reality — if not in quite the way he envisioned.
Dan Moren, MacWorld.com

Musicians Push for Better Sound Online and on Disc
As more listeners turn to music downloads and the compact disc seems headed for history's scrap heap, a growing number of artists are making a renewed effort for better-sounding tracks, online and on disc. It's generally accepted that regular MP3 music files compromise CD sound quality for convenience and portability. (Some listeners argue that even CDs are less than optimal.) Last year, Amazon and iTunes made concessions to upgrade the quality of their download tracks.
Mike Snider, USA Today

The Filter Has Launched
The Filter, a personalized content filtering system, has finally opened its doors to everyone and officially launched. The service was pioneered by musician Peter Gabriel and, at its beginning, was not much more than a playlist creation tool for iTunes. Today, The Filter has morphed into a larger recommendation system that finds not just music, but also movies, TV, and internet videos, customized to your personal tastes.
Sarah Perez, ReadWriteWeb

Dead Men Do Sell Nikes
They may lack arch support, but Converse shoes have never wanted for tour support, given their traditional popularity among rock musicians. Nike, which owns Converse, plans to strengthen the branding connection between music and the Converse shoe line in the mind of the shoe-buying public by releasing footwear branded with insignia for The Grateful Dead, Kurt Cobain, The Doors and The Beatles.
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired Listening Post

This Week In News

Berman, Leahy Introduce Radio Royalties Bills
U.S. Rep. Howard Berman and Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation today that would require radio stations to pay performance royalties to recording artists and record companies. Backers include both Republicans and Democrats, the RIAA and a host of recording artists. Opposing the bill is the National Association of Broadcasters, who have considerable clout when it comes to influencing policy. And the NAB vigorously opposes the performance royalty. FMC supports royalty parity, so we think that performers should get paid for terrestrial spins. For more info, check out our factsheet on the Public Performance Royalty.
L.A. Times BitPlayer Blog

State of the Music Industry
Last week's NARM conference (National Association of Recording Merchandisers) featured a compelling presentation from Nielsen SoundScan called the "State of the Industry" (PDF). Some highlights: in 2007, 450,344 of the 570,000 albums sold were purchased less than 100 times. 1,000 albums accounted for 50% of all album sales. Interestingly, the music industry had its biggest sales week since they started keeping records, with 58 million units sold in the last week of 2007. Also of note: 13% of all album sales come from American Idol and the Disney franchises. Telling stuff.
Duke Listens Blog

Project Playlist: Another Lopsided Settlement Ahead?
Web-based music app Project Playlist is being sued by the major labels, a common scenario for music startups. The lawsuit is backed by all four majors and accuses Project Playlist of massive copyright infringement. The focus of the suit is concerns whether Project Playlist is actually liable for infringement. PP's architecture allows users to create playlists by linking to content hosted across the internet, a solution that taps into the massive — but highly decentralized and chaotic — library of media assets online. But the filing may be part of a familiar negotiation dance, one that frequently features a dropped lawsuit in exchange for serious licensing overhead and equity stakes for the majors.
Paul Resnikof, Digital Music News

When DRM Detonates Your Music Collection
Imagine if you had a bedroom full of CDs and decided to buy a new player one day, only to discover that none of your albums would play on the new system. That is more or less what has happened to people in America who bought music downloads from Microsoft. Last month the company announced that from August 31 this year songs bought from MSN Music, its online music shop, would no longer be transferable to machines other than the ones the files were registered to. This means that, come September, if you want to transfer songs from your main PC to a laptop or a new computer you haven't registered, you won't be able to. If your computer dies, your painstakingly assembled music collection dies with it.
Alex Pell, Times UK

Colleges Fret as RIAA Pushes for State Anti-P2P Laws
The entertainment industry's efforts to get universities to be more proactive about policing peer-to-peer piracy are spreading from Capitol Hill to the individual states. Earlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a Hollywood-backed proposal buried in a higher education reauthorization bill that would require universities receiving federal financial aid funding to devise plans for "alternative" offerings to unlawful downloading. That otherwise wide-ranging bill won't become law until House and Senate politicians agree upon a compromise version. Meanwhile, the debate over the proper role of higher education institutions in fighting piracy has shifted to some state legislatures.
Anne Broache, CNET

House Passes Copyright Enforcement Bill
By a vote of 410 to 10, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed legislation that would allow law enforcement authorities to seek the forfeiture of property used in copyright infringement. The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act, or PRO-IP Act, would also create a new Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement representative, often called a copyright czar, in the White House. The bill would also expand a U.S. Department of Justice program that gives local law enforcement agencies grants to fight computer crimes, including grants for copyright infringement enforcement.
Grant Gross, IDG News

RIAA Representative Forecasts a Comeback for DRM
[Psst — don't tell the market!] RIAA representative forecasts a comeback for DRM At the Digital Hollywood conference, where entertainment industry representatives are meeting to discuss technology and trends in digital content delivery, David Hughes of the RIAA made bold statements about the future of DRM. Despite a clear move toward selling DRM-free music by every major label Hughes, the RIAA's Senior Vice President of Technology, says DRM is far from dead, and even intimated that it's nearly impossible to make money on digital music without it.
Rich "Vurbal" Fiscus, AfterDawn.com

This Week in News

Why Mainstream Can Kill
Last week Starbucks announced that it was leaving the music business. Sales have been shockingly low: one journalist calculated that they add up to about two CDs per store, per day. Why did this fail so spectacularly? Paul Resnikoff argues that the Paul McCartney-and-Alicia Keyes combination was too mainstream to be interesting to consumers. Starbucks was more effective when they highlighted talented but unknown artists. He compares that model to music in the video game industry, which prides itself on being cutting edge.
Digital Music News, April 24th

The iPod Plateau: Why Paid Downloads Could Soon Suffer
iPod sales have finally leveled off, rising just one percent during the last quarter. Apple has now sold 150 million iPods, and it’s possible that they’re reaching the saturation point. New iPod sales lead to a spike in iTunes downloads in late December and early January, but that effect could flatten as sales plateau. This is good news for rivals, but since iTunes holds an 80 percent market share it may be bad news for the paid download industry as a whole.
Digital Music News, April 23rd

RIAA Releases 2007 Year-End Shipment Statistics
The RIAA has released statistics for sales and dollar values for 2007. A PDF file of all of the numbers can be found here. Some of the highlights, via Coolfer:

• CD shipments dropped 17.5% while the dollar value of those shipments dropped 20.5%.
• The vinyl records saw shipments increase 36.6% with a 46.2% increase in dollar value.
• Cassette shipments (net) dropped 41.2% with, oddly, only an 18.4% drop in dollar value.
• Kiosk downloads increased 28.5% by units and 38.1% by dollar value.
• Subscriptions to music services (using a weighted annual average) increased a mere 0.7% while their dollar value dropped 2.6%.
• Mobile increased 14.6% by units and by 13.6% by dollar value. Mobile includes master ringtones, ringbacks, music videos, full track downloads and "other mobile."
SonyBMG Makes Back Catalogue Available For Free Online
SonyBMG agreed to partner with We7.com to offer free streaming music from its back catalogue, including big names like Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. Users will have to listen to a short advertisement per album, and can also pay to download the songs.
Angry Ape. 4-28

Coldplay to give away next single for free
Coldplay will become the latest act to try giving away their music for free, according to Reuters. The first single from their upcoming album, “Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends,” due in June, will be made available for download from the band’s website.
Reuters, 4-28

This Week In News

ASCAP Launches 'Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers
To remind the public, members of the music industry and U.S. legislators of the central role and rights of those who conceive and create music, ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) today officially launched a "Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers." The full text of the Bill of Rights can be found here. According to a press release from ASPAC, the initiative is aimed at building awareness of songwriters' role in the creation of music. The declaration includes 10 core principles, such as "We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate."

Record Store Day is this Saturday!
Record store day has received plenty of press, but we'll plug it here as well. This is the first such event, designed to generate awareness of the plight of independent record stores. Indie stores around the country will have in-house performances, special sales, and other promotions. You can see a full list of participating stores at the event's official website.

Amazon MP3 store's gains not coming at iTunes' expense
Amazon's MP3 store is growing rapidly, and it appears that it's actually increasing the market for paid music downloads rather than just taking customers from iTunes. A new study indicates that just 10% of Amazon MP3 customers had previously downloaded music from iTunes. Of course, at this point Amazon has 1/10th the downloads of iTunes, but it's still an encouraging sign in the face of flagging CD sales.
Ars Technica, 4-15

In the US, 58% of music isn't paid for

Back to bad news: a new study indicates that 58% of music was acquired without paying in 2007, up from 52% in 2006. While paid downloads increased from 7% to 10% of all music, that wasn't enough to make up for CDs dropping from 41% to 32%.
Guardian UK, 4-18-08

TuneBoom Pro Apparently Inflates Artists' MySpace Plays
A company called TuneBoom Pro claims to inflate artists' MySpace play counts, offering various packages on a sliding scale that ranges from $147 for 1,000 plays to $747 for 300,000 plays. Also, artists could spend $50 for PacSys Traffic Master software and boost their count manually. TuneBoom claims to have worked with major labels to boost play counts for its artists. This casts considerable doubt on MySpace play counts as a measure of an artist's popularity.
Wired, 4-14

TV shows bring in the money for the music industry
While album sales may be in decline, revenue from TV licensing deals is exploding: one publisher says it's tripled in the last six years. The increase is due in part to reality shows, particularly shows like American Idol and Dancing With the Stars, which pay large fees. Further, they can boost sales: downloads on John Lennon's "Imagine" increased by over 600% after it was performed by an American Idol contestant.
Hollywood Reporter, 4-10-08

This Week In News

Happy Friday, everyone. You know what that means: This Week In News. (And you thought it was gonna be another post about OK Go, didn't you?)

Battle Hymn
As music wars continue, ASCAP lays out a "bill of rights" for songwriters. ASCAP, the oldest organization representing songwriters and artists in the United States, is set unveil a "bill of rights" for songwriters and composers to ensure that musicians get paid for music distributed on the Web. The document, which ASCAP unveiled Thursday morning in Los Angeles at its annual conference, the ASCAP Expo, comes as the music industry is moving to dramatically reshape its future.
Sam Gustin, Conde Nast Portfolio

5 Things You Didn't Know: Copyright
Copyright constitutes only one aspect of intellectual property law, but since copyrights are far easier to obtain than patents or trademarks, for example, they tend to affect a significantly larger portion of the population. The arrival and evolution of both the internet and the web have altered the landscape of laws protecting intellectual property. Since they are repeatedly bringing these statutes into mainstream news, we felt it was an appropriate time to present five things you didn't know about copyright.
Ross Bonander, AskMen.com

1000 True Fans Is All You Need
The long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales. Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail? One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans.
Kevin Kelly, The Technium

What Can You Legally Take From The Web?
Web sites and bloggers beware: copyright law applies to you too.
Kirk Teska, ieeespectrum

Full Text Of Orchard's MySpace Letter To Labels
Digital distributor The Orchard sent an email expressing concern over how MySpace Music may be treating indie artists and labels. Here is the full text of the original email from Orchard CEO Creg Schol.
Hypebot

Guitarati Sees A Rainbow Where Others Se Music Genres
Guitarati unveiled its dramatically different method for organizing music Tuesday and it turns out to be ... color. We've had our eye on the music site since February, when its operators promised to "unfold a different way of music discovery that will blow the audience off their feet." Now that the first iteration of the concept is online, we're impressed by the freshness of the approach, but we're still on our feet, so to speak. [Sort of like a high-tech mood ring?]
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired

And here's some oddball stuff:

Rocker Eyes "Holographic Touring" to Save Planet
Serj Tankian, the frontman for Los Angeles rock band System of a Down, is so dedicated to saving the planet that he wants to launch a virtual concert tour to reduce his carbon footprint. "I've had an idea for a long time, which might sound a little crazy, but I really want to look into holographic touring," Tankian told Billboard. "I think we could reduce our need to travel if we could project ourselves into meetings and concerts. We have the technology, and we're not using it right now.
Billboard

Song Charts: Can You Decipher the Titles?
Music fans have developed an unlikely new internet craze — devising charts to illustrate song titles and lyrics. The meanings of popular hits are hidden within pie charts, bar charts, graphs and tables, which other pop anoraks have to decipher to reveal the name of the song. The craze began on the photo-sharing website Flickr but has now spread across the internet. More than 700 so-called "song charts" covering almost all styles of music have already been submitted to the original Flickr group.
The Telegraph UK

This Week In News

We usually post these on Friday afternoons. So we're either late or early, depending on how you think about it. . .

Can 1,000 fans replace the music business?
Kevin Kelly thinks so. He argues that a musician can make a perfectly good living with just $1,000 “True Fans” who are truly dedicated. He assumes that each is willing to spend $100 a year, netting the artist a nifty upper-middle class salary even without being immensely popular. And “Lesser Fans” who will pay out less still add to the income.
Kevin Kelly, The Technium

Economist Will Page disagrees. He points out that it’s difficult to get fans to pay the artist directly. The revenue would most likely come through iTunes, record companies, merchandise printers, etc. So the artist would end up with only a fraction of that $100,000. He points out that everything the artist creates would have a cost, so the profit margin would be significantly lower than the full amount. Additionally, he questions whether most fans are OCD enough to spend their entire yearly music budget on a single band.

Reznor vs. Radiohead: Innovation Smackdown
We’ve covered Trent Reznor and Radiohead's experiments in alternative methods of releasing albums. Now, Wired gives you the chance to vote for the experiment you like better.
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired

BMI Eyes Ringback Tones For Mobile Growth
BMI expects ringback tone sales to jump by 50% this year to $210 million. For those who are not hip to cell phone jargon, ringbacks are the ringing heard by the caller as they wait for a call to be answered. Ringtone sales, however, are expected to slips 7% to $510 million.
Anthony Bruno, Billboard

Report Buyer: New Report Highlights how Music is a Key Drive in the Mobile Phone Market
A new report indicates that cell phone sales far exceeded personal music players like iPods, 941 million to 300 million in 2007. Interestingly, half of the cell phones were considered “music phones”—that is, phones with enough memory that the user can use them as music players. This is driving an increase in mobile sales of whole tracks and streaming audio. In all, mobile music sales are expected to hit $6 billion in 2008.
London Business Wire; Broadcast Newsroom

Last Week In News

A full version of This Week in News will be out on Friday, but here are a few highlights from last week.

Should musicians be paid by social network sites?
After AOL bought social networking site Bebo for $850 million, songwriter Billy Bragg wonders why artists don’t receive royalties. He reasons that musicians help attract users, and the sale of the website for such a staggering sum clearly indicates that these users have significant monetary value.
New York Times, March 22nd

UPDATE: Here's a piece from e-consultancy.com which doesn't agree with all of Bragg's points, but still makes a strong case for why musicians deserve to be paid for recorded works. The author also debunks some of the pervasive myths among the "music should be free" crowd.

Fans take "wiki" over MySpace for music info
A new survey indicates that fans looking for information about a band turn to Wikipedia more often than MySpace or the band’s official website. Promoters and artists focus on the latter two sources, but consumers are twice as likely to click the Wikipedia entry as the band’s MySpace page. Musicians, take note.
Yahoo, March 22nd

Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs
This idea has been floated before, but now it’s being taken seriously by the RIAA. Record labels are beginning to warm to a plan to charge a flat fee ($5 a month is the usual suggestion) to allow internet users to download music for free legally. The money would, in theory, go to the artists. Skeptics contend that charging everyone assumes that all people are criminals, and would even cost people who have no interest in music.
Wired, March 13th

Musicians seek extra ways to connect with fans, build market
Faced with rapidly declining sales, more and more artists are cramming their CDs with extras, like studio or concert footage or bonus tracks. Singer Ann Murray says that it was odd to have cameras in the recording studio, and “making of” features immediate bring to mind the depressing “Let It Be” movie. But these extras can help mitigate the drop in CD sales.
The Canadian Press, March 21st