Future of Music - music industry, music business, digital music and free music downloads. Music Conference - Licensing & Rights | Boston - Rethink Music. REPORT: What The Second Decade Of Digital Music Will Look Like [SLIDES] How Do We Benefit From Streaming? Can We? There’s been quite a raging controversy over Spotify over at Hypebot as musicians across the industry chime in with their opinion on the streaming service. Zoe Keating, Cellist and brilliant DIY musician, talks about how independant artists are treated unfairly. That’s it. That’s my complaint: fairness. If Spotify would level the playing field and make the distribution equal to all artists. I would lay off (since I am sure that my constant complaints are a total priority for them!). But just to pay tracks from major labels more because they are major labels, that is so OLD. Four indie labels have already withdrawn from the service. For a stream on Spotfy…. Spotify responded to Projeckt by changing the subject: Spotify does not sell streams, but access to music.
But is this current royalty structure sustainable? 1) Streaming services are similar to radio in that both benefit major labels with more money and muscle than independant bands. A minor win. This is a mammoth moral dilemma. Owch. Sean Parker On Spotify, The New Music Business & Why Most Bands Should Never Sign With A Label. One Big Database Could Help Recording Artists Pay Rent. In over a decade of digital music writing, one of my favorite pieces is a Wired.com article called “4 Reasons Music Needs One Big Database.” My argument there was that if every song had a unique identifier attached to it — the same identifier, regardless of the service where the song appears — it would solve all sorts of problems for music fans and the industry.
One Big Database would not only ease mergers and acquisitions within the digital music industry (see most recently Rhapsody/Napster), make subscriptions portable (and therefore much more attractive), and lead to better APIs and music apps, but it would also make more money for artists when they need it most by adding transparency, accountability, and scaleability to the various ways artists are paid for recorded music. Case in point: the poster pictured above, which I photographed on my way to moderate a panel at the CMJ conference.
This is a major issue. Photo: Eliot Van Buskirk. 4 Ways One Big Database Would Help Music Fans, Industry | Epicenter MySpace Music’s acquisition of imeem revealed, for the umpteenth time, a major problem with the music business — not piracy, nor the ongoing failure of pure-play ad-supported music services, but rather that each digital music service grows in its own data silo. This impacts us in all sorts of negative ways. In this latest example, some imeem users are upset that their carefully constructed playlists are gone, for now anyway. MySpace Music plans to reconstruct them on its own site(s), but it admits that the job will be arduous and time-consuming. The solution to this and other problems dogging the music industry could be forehead-slappingly simple: one big, free, public database with, at the very least, song titles in one column and unique identifiers in another.
When online and mobile music services build their own content databases out of the labels’ catalogs, they would have incentives to use the same numbers to identify each song, for the reasons laid out below. 1. 2. 3. 4. See Also: