May 15, 2012

...I looked at the available tracks on iTunes for 10, randomly selected, top tier artists (see figure). The startling key takeaway is that on average just 10% of the tracks listed for an artist is actually music by that artist. And bear in mind that many of those tracks are duplicates. The average U2 song for example, is listed multiple times ranging from original albums, remastered albums, EPs, greatest hits, compilations etc.

It's an interesting game that Shutterstock is playing. Individual customers pay an average of about $3 per image. That's dirt cheap, but they make up for it on volume, bringing in $120 million of revenue in 2011. On the producer side, my read of their SEC filing is that they paid out $39.3 million in royalties to 35,000 contributors. So the mean contributor is making something like $1,100 a year by posting their work on the site. (I don't know exactly what the distribution looks like; we only know that no entity received more than 10 percent of the royalties paid out.)

Labels: iTunes, Long Tail, Occupy This Album

May 01, 2012

What they've done is create a site that is a separate front end for AMG's database, where you can pay for the opportunity to correct it.

If you stop paying, your Professional Profile will revert to a Basic Profile and the updates and corrections you entered will no longer be included in your profile.

Some members of the ensemble, most notably the guitarist Glen Campbell and the pianist Leon Russell, later became stars in their own right. But as hired hands the musicians had no ownership stake in or legal claim to the songs they recorded, and record company executives who may have felt a debt of gratitude for their contributions at the time have long since departed. As a believer in copyright Mr. Tedesco is philosophical about his situation.

"The reality is that I want to pay," he said. “But the problem is this business. There are just so many people involved, so much turnover, and so many licenses and contracts, at least two different parties for every song, the label and the publisher." He said there were more than 400 different rights holders to be dealt with.

The design philosophy of Dieter Rams, Braun's legendary designer, has shaped the feel and the look of Apple's latest products more than any other body of ideas. Since joining Braun in 1955, Rams--who likes to describe his approach to design as "less, but better"--began collaborating with the faculty at the Ulm School of Design, which tried to revive the creative spirit of Bauhaus with a modicum of cybernetics and systems theory. Eventually Rams produced his own manifesto for what good design should accomplish. His "ten principles of good design" encouraged budding designers to embrace innovation and make products that were useful but environmentally friendly, thorough but simple, easy to understand but long-lasting, honest but unobtrusive. Rams wanted his products to be like English butlers: always available, but invisible and discreet.

Labels: Albumcredits, Dieter Rams

April 27, 2012

all prices as of 4/18/2012

Labels: Amazon, used CDs

February 21, 2012

Studies show that the appeal of piracy has waned in France since the so-called three-strikes law, hailed by the music and movie industries and hated by advocates of an open Internet, went into effect. Digital sales, which were slow to get started in France, are growing. Music industry revenues are starting to stabilize.

For all the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, earnings are on track to post a 6.6% year-on-year rise in the fourth quarter. Once Apple's earnings are factored out, the expected fourth-quarter gain shrivels to just 2.8%, according to UBS.

It was a Vegas choreographer who clued him in to the importance of writing his own songs: Arrange someone else's composition and you get paid once; write the original song and every time it is performed or a record is sold you get a royalty.

When a distributor of one of Granz's labels complained that one of his artists sold too few copies, Granz roared that if just 1,500 people wanted to hear the musician, that was enough -- and he fired the distributor.

Labels: copyright, file sharing, music piracy

February 10, 2012

"The British Phonographic Industry has said that $135 million is lost each year through home taping. Now that figure is absolutely hypothetical. It is money that was never spent and there is no way of knowing if it ever would have been."

"In fact, the indications are that home taping is most prevalent among age-groups who share records and tape them simply because they can't afford to go out and spend money frequently on new albums."

"Music is one of those things that the more you know about it, the more you want. But if you kill off the interest of young people, you will lose a future generation of adult record-buyers."

"It is clearly demonstrable that the blank tape business, illegally used or otherwise, has improved awareness of music, increased demand and directly stimulated the expansion the industry has enjoyed in the last five years."

Labels: Friday Flashback Fun, home taping, music piracy

February 06, 2012

Now the dilemma isn't just, should you spend money on the CD ($14.99 list price) or a digital copy (also -- frustratingly -- $14.99). It's also, how much are you willing to commit to buying in? Will a few dropped bucks on a handful of the best individual tracks suffice? Or will "A Different Kind of Truth" be the perfect Spotify streaming album, not good enough to pay hard money for but worth a mouse-click when you've got a spare few minutes? Or should you just ask your computery friend to Sendspace you a pirated copy?

Labels: cherry picking, music economics, Spotify, Van Halen

January 27, 2012

"It's nothing new," said Gonzalo Garcia, director of technology, marketing and communications for the South Kent School, an all-boys boarding school in Connecticut, though he said the "shocking news" was the $15 price. Currently, students pay $20 to $60 for a 180-day rental or splurge as much as $100 for a higher-end title.

Labels: digital music pricing, ebooks, ReDigi, used digital content

January 19, 2012

Labels: Google, SOPA