what a day that was: music business

-All this nonsense about cord-cutting is way overblown. Instead of Netflix and others taking a chunk out of the existing pie, the pie simply got bigger. A lot bigger.

The Most Important Thing You Will Read All Day

via the Lefsetz Letter, a really interesting look at how the music industry has become a blockbuster oriented business. So much for the Long Tail.

The numbers certainly do not come close to the trusted ’80/20 rule’ that many managers live by, which supposes that 80 percent of the sales tend to come from 20 percent of the products on offer. For music albums, it is close to an 80/1 rule – if we can speak about a rule at all. Even if we take a conservative estimate of what would be on offer in a bricks-and-mortar store at any given point in time, Anderson’s predictions that long-tail sales will rival those in the head are far off.

2013-10-04

Hypebot: Breaking Bad Was Very, Very Good For Badfinger

Breaking Bad Was Very, Very Good For Badfinger's

Spoiler alert.

2013-07-27

MP3.com Domain For Sale For $1M+, Is It Worth It?

MP3.com Domain For Sale For $1M+, Is It Worth It? [Michael Robertson] via Hypebot

Interesting read from the founder of mp3.com way back in the day.

2013-07-10

The Daily Swarm - Magna Carta Holy Hacked!

Does this mean that albums have jumped the shark, now that they can be hacked?

2013-04-02

The Trouble with FACTOR

Great analysis of the problems with the taxpayer funded musician support system.

2012-10-12

Did Y'all Hear That?: Clip Of The Week

2012-07-30

Buried RIAA Report Shows the Majority of Music Piracy Happens Offline...

Ha! Why is this not surprising?

The Daily Swarm - Buried RIAA Report Shows the Majority of Music Piracy Happens Offline...

2011-11-11

The consolidation continues

Hot on the heels of announcing that CDs may be phased out altogether next year, there's this bit of news that the major label pool just got smaller (again)...

Super-Conglom Vivendi Buys EMI's Recorded Music… Publishing to Sony…

2011-11-02

Wither the compact disc?

A couple people mentioned this story to me yesterday... Apparently the major labels are planning to stop mass producing compact discs some time next year.

This article appears to be the original source of the story.

I don't think compact discs will disappear entirely until another format, possibly Blu-ray, takes over as the dominant audio delivery format. There will certainly be demand for high quality audio... Perhaps places like HD tracks will take off. There are a few problems with a site like this... files won't necessarily play on all devices, and even if you could, what's the point if you're going to be listening off of laptop speakers? You'd need a proper player, cables, speakers, etc etc.

Too bad for the CD, but the labels really shot themselves in the foot when they didn't drastically bring down prices with the rise of digital downloads... for the big picture on that story, you should read Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self-Destruction. Great book on what happened to the industry.

2011-08-25

"Golden Age" song analysis

Hey, it's the song that's in that Heineken commercial!

Asteroids Galaxy Tour "Golden Age" Song Analysis

Also: 'Heinekin' shows up as a spelling error while 'Heineken' does not. I guess Blogger has a brand-spelling dictionary too?

2011-05-10

Trust Google with your music collection

Google Music Beta to stream 20,000 songs for free, official!

Seems almost like they're laying a trap for pirates... but that's just me being paranoid I suppose...

2011-05-03

Graph showing music industry sales in the last ten years

Ten Years of Music Industry Change, In 10 Seconds Or Less... [via Daily Swarm]

2011-04-15

Could Google buy the music industry?

Interesting article here: Why Google Should Buy The Recording Industry

the music industry is economically quite small and unimportant compared to the computer industry. And yet somehow -- through honed lobbying and old boy networks -- it wields a disproportionate power that enables it to block innovative ideas that the online world wants to try.

After that, Google could buy Spotify, then we'd be all set. I like the idea of paying for music like a utility, I wonder how well it would work in practice.

2011-03-31

RIAA lobbyist becomes federal judge, rules on file-sharing cases

[Link]

More from the puppet theatre!

The news, first reported in a piece at TorrentFreak, nicely illustrates the revolving door between government and industry. And it reminds us just how complicated questions of influence can be.

2011-03-30

Can't buy me mp3's

Website pays $1M fine for selling Beatles tunes
My Dad sends me this link, saying "Compare what they sold and what they were fined."
Within the first week, more than 2 million Beatles songs were purchased online for $1.29 apiece and 450,000 albums were sold.

So let's do the math, and we're assuming US figures...
2,000,000 songs @ $1.29 = $2,580,000
Which alone is pretty crazy, unless we also assume that the 450,000 albums are separate from that figure, and assuming $10 per album... We're talking over $7 mil total here.

It makes you wonder how much money the big labels really lost by not jumping on the digital bandwagon earlier, and how damned desperate they've become to save their dying business model.

$1 million lawsuit for as much as $7 million actual damages... ties into how insane that LimeWire lawsuit was... $75 TRILLION? Really?

Really?

2011-03-23

Is it April 1st already?

Limewire Being Sued For 75 Trillion
"plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877.'"