Music & Web
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Poor old Spotify . Less than a week after Billboard magazine reported that the music-on-demand service had “rebooted” its negotiations with US labels, rival service Rdio has just opened its doors in both the US and Canada, proudly boasting deals with many of those same labels. But I’ll get to that in a second. First there is a convention – so widely adhered to that it might as well be a law – that if you’re going to write anything critical about Spotity, you have to first acknowledge the amazing slickness of its product. So here we go: Spotify is amazingly slick as a product.
Rdio Gaga: How Spotify’s Inferior Rival Is Playing America Like A Violin
You Are On Pandora: Service Hits 60 Million Listeners, Adding Users Faster Than Ever
MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More Yesterday at the New Music Seminar in New York, the streaming music recommendation service Pandora announced that they now have 60 million listeners registered.This is not the sentiment of one of the countless critics who throw stones at the music industry from afar, usually for vague philosophical reasons, but rather the pragmatic opinion of a true insider: Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, which sold millions of records by hip-hop artists including Club Nouveau, Coolio, De La Soul, Digital Underground, Everlast, House of Pain and Naughty By Nature. In a song called “Labels,” The Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA rapped in 1995 about Silverman, “Tommy ain’t my mothafuckin’ boy,” as part of a general criticism of the same label system that Silverman advocates ending in the below interview with Wired.com. To be fair, GZA calls out a number of other hip-hop labels in that song, and Tommy Boy’s practices followed the industry standards of issuing an advance, and generally never allowing an artist to recoup it in order to make money from the sale of their records.
What’s Wrong With Music Biz, per Ultimate Insider | Epicenter | Wired.com
[UK] Ad-supported music streaming service We7 and Spotify competitor has big plans to go mobile. That much was already known – an iPhone and Android app has been in the works for sometime. Earlier this month, however, CEO Steve Purdham surprised attendees at an event in Manchester by telling them that while the We7 iPhone app was ready, its release was purposely being held back.
We7 delays iPhone app, and says Spotify can’t scale in the US. E
Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music
It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. With that in mind, over the coming weeks ReadWriteWeb will look back on the defining Web trends of the past 10 years . From the dot com boom, to the nuclear winter after, to the passion and enthusiasm of the pre-Web 2.0 innovations (such as RSS and podcasting), to the highs and hype of Web 2.0, to the current era of the real-time Web , to the near future of the Internet of Things .The Orchard Goes Private In Deal Valuing It At $13 Million
Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More How much is a music distribution company worth these days? The Orchard , one of the largest independent music distributors, is going private in a deal valuing the company at about $13 million.
Spotify is Getting Ready for U.S. Launch in Q3
While Spotify CEO Daniel Ek didn't say much about his company's timeline for launching in the U.S. during his SXSW keynote interview, it definitely looks like the popular streaming music services is putting all the pieces for a U.S. launch together. In an interview with Bloomberg earlier today, Spotify's senior vice president Paul Brown noted that the company is "buying server space in random parts of the states and there are licensing discussions too." According to Bloomberg, Spotify its planning to launch in Q3 2010. Judging from the fact that Spotify is starting to set up an infrastructure for its U.S. launch, it looks like the company has cleared most of the hurdles for a U.S. launch or at least feels very confident that the last roadblocks for the U.S. launch can be cleared out of the way easily. Spotify, which currently has about 7 million users in Europe, allows anybody to stream the company's music library for free (with ads) to their desktops.
Shazam getting traction
The Economics Of The Music Industry: A Band Has To Work Hard To
from the i-gotta-get-mine,-you-gotta-get-yours dept richw alerts us to a fascinating essay from a member of the band Fucked Up (different, apparently, than the band we recently wrote about going by the name Holy Fuck ) explaining the economics of SXSW for bands . Actually, though, it's much more than that. It explains the economics of the music industry, with a single point underlined: as a band, you need to figure out how to get money , and stop waiting for others to just give it to you. The key point is made somewhere in the middle: You may have heard that the music industry is sort of falling apart.
Mike Masnick has a post up on Techdirt with this great description of the changes afoot in the music industry (emphasis mine): You may have heard that the music industry is sort of falling apart. It isn’t really a matter of there being less money in the pool – just that the money people have to spend on entertainment (which will always be somewhat of a constant) is just being diverted away from where it historically has gone (record labels and managers). The music industry is by definition an operation invented to divert money spent on music away from actual musicians – the problems that the music industry is currently facing have specifically to do with the fact that the money that would usually flow directly to the bigger economic actors is now going somewhere else .
The fight in the music industry is about where the money flows,
Oh, boo hoo. I too am an artist, and I am sick to death of the lame arguments surrounding this issue. “Oh! those awful pirates!
How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? | Information Is Beautifu
The Sad State of the Old Music Business « Pakman’s Blog: Disrupt
I read with sadness this New York Times profile of Irving Azoff and Live Nation. As my friend Andy Weissman asked, “How divorced is this world from reality?” The article reminds us of the way the music industry worked for many decades: a world of power by those who manage artists and run record companies.Pandora going public?
Universal Music Group Reports 8.4% Growth In Digital Sales For 2
French media conglomerate Vivendi this morning reported financial results, posting a decline in full-year profit but beating estimates because the net loss was much narrower than expected. You can read more analysis of the media and entertainment giant’s performance elsewhere , but there was a particular passage in the press release regarding Vivendi’s music subsidiary, Universal Music Group , that caught my eye. UMG, the world’s largest music company with artists like U2, Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Black Eyed Peas, Rihanna, Eminem, Lil Wayne under contract, as expected finds its revenue from physical product sales (CDs) in a seemingly unstoppable decline.EMI CEO Roger Faxon, pictured here, takes over for Charles Allen, who had only led EMI's recorded music business for about three months (photo courtesy of EMI). Back in the nineties, when CDs were selling strong, we called the major labels the Big Six. After the music business’s major transformation over the past decade, we’re down to the Big Three — officially speaking anyway. EMI, one of the so-called Big Four major record labels, no longer considers itself a “label” per se, but a “comprehensive rights management company” under the new leadership of Roger Faxon, formerly the head of its robust publishing division.