Spotted on: Digital Music News It’s nothing new that the music industry is experiencing a steady downward trend in album sales. A few years ago, chart toppers were moving millions of albums a week. This trend isn’t just continuing, it’s advancing. For the first quarter of 2008, albums sales were down 10.7% from the same [...]
Spotted On: The Guardian “When the history of our digital times comes to be written, one of the questions that will puzzle historians is why the record companies missed the significance of the internet.” What a great thought (and a very catchy headline). Here is a summary of the article, with some commentary. Since World [...]
Spotted on: TorrentFreak An interview with the Flashbulb about his recent calamity with iTunes, and putting his album up on BitTorrent. It turns out iTunes is selling his albums without permission, and not paying royalties. The Flashbulb (Benn Jordan) has been releasing albums for 14 years, the last 5 have included various commercial endeavors. The [...]
Spotted on: NYU Archives Here’s a paper titled “Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music”. It’s a study in how blogs and and social networking sites are impacting music sales. The study did not include any analysis on radio or internet broadcasting as a variable. Since this a very long and convoluted [...]
Spotted on: Youtube Who woulda believed that a 20 year old video would provide such great wisdom about music today? The first half of the video is on the music business. The second half is a tirade about sex. Had he mentioned drugs, we’d have the holy trinity of music.
Spotted on: Wired.com (and thanks for this awesome article) In the wake of the announcement that Universal and SonyBMG are uniting to start a new download service to compete with iTunes (which will offer 75% of all music sold in the US), Doug Morris, Universal Music Group’s CEO, was profiled in Wired Magazine the other [...]
Spotted on: The Register Capgemini recently broke down album sales in Britain since 2004. While the report is still confidential, The Register reported on a few details. And what is the reported main source of lost revenue in the British recording industry? Album Unbundling. File sharing came in at 18% of the projection. The iTunes [...]
On the surface, this may appear like an obvious question. Album sales measure the number of people who buy an artist’s music. Let’s look a little deeper at what album and track sales are an actual measure of. Many artists that experience high volumes of downloads on p2p networks also experience brisk sales. The days [...]
The future for musicians looks like more than just great recordings and live shows. The opportunities that the internet provides modern artists is available to everyone, and thus its potential is diluted. One way to get noticed is to generate interest in who you are and what you’re saying. in other words, creating and maintaining [...]
In getting a picture of what’s next for the music business, let’s take a moment to look at reality right now. There are a few reports from mid-2007 that CD sales are way down (15% from the first half of last year), while digital sales are up over 48% (If you find any more recent [...]