In Austin, the home of the South By Southwest(SXSW) music festival, anyone with a wireless internet connection suddenly has 600 new songs in his/her online iTunes database, absolutely free of charge. SXSW organizers are providing the songs to the shared database as a promotional tool for this year’s festival, which runs March 17-21 and features … Continue reading “Swapping Files, Selling Music”
“As other technology companies scramble to match the success of Apple’s online music store, iTunes, which sells songs for 99 cents each, a different online-music economy is emerging around the sale of recordings of live performances – often with no restrictions on how they can be played or shared.” Jam band Phish and mainstream rockers … Continue reading “Live, Local, And Immediate”
“In a week when it was repeated that cassettes will no longer be sold because CDs have so secured the market, the predator that will soon swallow the compact disc flashes its teeth again. On Monday, Coca-Cola launchesmycokemusic.com, a legalised music download website for Britain, imitating Apple’s iTunes online record-shop, which itself plans a spin-off … Continue reading “Unstoppable Digital – CDs’ Days Are Numbered”
With the campaign by the American recording industry to eradicate online music piracy through lawsuits against the pirates having a demonstrable chilling effect on sites which enable illegal file-trading, the British Phonographic Industry is saying it will soon begin a similar campaign of its own. As industry-backed download sites such as Apple’s iTunes begin to … Continue reading “Monkey See, Monkey Do”
You want free music? Legally? Coming right up. “You’re going to see lots of free music given out via third-party companies. It’s not going to be Apple and iTunes driving the business. It’s going to be companies like Pepsi and other third parties that are promoting digital music on bottle caps and on labels. Indeed, … Continue reading “Free Music? On Its Way”
How did Apple get recording companies to buy in to the iTunes download store? “We told them the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. MusicNet was gonna fail, Pressplay was gonna fail. Here’s why: People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, … Continue reading “Steve Jobs: Recording Companies Need To Be Educated”
We’ve all heard about the way Apple’s iTunes music download service is revolutionizing the industry. But could it revolutionize our social interactions as well? “Thanks to the ability of Apple’s iTunes to share music collections over local networks, it is now possible to judge someone’s taste in music — or lack of it — in … Continue reading “A Whole New Way To Be Shallow”
“In a dramatic move that gives a thumbs up to the music industry’s efforts at creating legal alternatives to file sharing, McDonald’s plans to give away up to 1 billion songs in a marketing campaign, according to sources familiar with the matter.” The company will buy the tracks (at 99 center per) from iTunes.
Is MTV threatened by music download sites like iTunes? The music channel plans to launch a service of downloadable MTV. “There’s no doubt it’s a strong brand, with a strong profile of viewers. But they can’t rely solely on their brand come next year … After iTunes launched in April, MTV should have been like … Continue reading “MTV Downloadable?”
The economics of the recording industry are changing. “The success of iTunes has made clear to the music industry an uncomfortable truth: many people want to buy single tracks, not albums. Apple’s data show that its customers bought 12 singles for every one album at iTunes. That compares with 0.02 singles per album in American … Continue reading “Single-Minded – Recording Business Changing Priorities”
