Music industry

Vinyl accounts for less than 1 percent of overall music sales, but it's been making a bit of a comeback: sales almost doubled between 2007 and 2008 and grew another 33 percent in 2009, according to Nielsen. That's only 2.5 million records out of a total of more than 370 million albums sold in all formats, but record companies don't see many growing business areas, so they're suddenly jumping aboard.

New vinyl hasn't been this abundant since the mid-1980s--you can even find it in Best Buy and Wal-Mart. I give particular props to independent … Read more

On-demand music service Spotify, which is currently available only in Europe, has been broadly praised by users (including me) for its large selection of music and exceptional responsiveness. Today, Spotify added two new levels of service: Open and Unlimited. The Open tier is more notable because, once again, it opens the service to users without an invitation.

The new levels are the latest step in Spotify's ongoing experiment to broaden its audience without compromising performance. When it launched in 2008, Spotify was free and offered unlimited streams to a PC, but an invitation was required. In February 2009, it … Read more

When I first heard about the proposed merger of music promoter and venue-owner Live Nation and ticket broker Ticketmaster, I predicted that ticket prices for big-name musical acts would rise. Now that the merger's completed and ticket revenues are down for the first part of 2010, Live Nation is admitting that it's hoping to charge higher prices for desirable concert seats.

The reason? Simple economics. As long as customers are willing to spend $500 or $1,000 on front-row seats, why sell those seats for $150 and let a scalper or broker make all that extra money? In … Read more

Once again, it looks as if the recording industry is standing square in the way of giving users what they want: access to their digital-music collections from any device in any location.

Earlier on Friday, a notice appeared on Lala, announcing that the service would be shut down on May 31. Apple acquired Lala in late 2009, and a lot of folks have speculated that Apple would launch its own version of Lala's online-music locker service, which enables users to upload their music collections to Lala's servers, then stream those songs to any Internet-connected device.

(Technically, users don'… Read more

Cloud-based music storage just got a little more appealing.

MP3tunes, the online music locker service headed by controversial tech figure Michael Robertson, is a promising idea. Like Robertson's original MP3.com service, which was purchased and then shut down by Vivendi Universal almost a decade ago, MP3tunes.com lets you store your personal music collection on its servers. You can then access that music from any computer by using the MP3tunes Web site, or from various devices, including the iPhone (through the free Airband app built by Centroid PIC) and Android phones, as well as the Logitech Squeezebox Radio (… Read more

It's an article of faith in the music industry that pre-release album leaks hurt sales. I don't have the statistics to argue the case in either direction, but it makes sense on a gut level: there's less reason for fans to run out and buy a new record, when they already have the uncompressed files on their hard drives.

As if the record industry hasn't tasted enough bitter irony lately, a bunch of album leaks over the weekend apparently came from a service used by music labels to share files with radio stations, media, and other … Read more

With music, there's no bright line between art and commerce. Ever since the dawn of mass media, when big-band radio shows were commercially sponsored, musicians have explicitly endorsed products or allowed their songs to be used in advertisements.

At the same time, there's a notion among some musicians and fans that rock 'n' roll is sacred, and that artists who sell their music to commercial sponsors are less talented or less deserving of fame and fortune. This notion ebbs and flows as the music industry changes and has been particularly strong in certain subcultures--particularly the original punks and … Read more

I first wrote about Muziic, the YouTube-searching music streaming application created by teenage developer David Nelson, last March. Since then, he's updated the app with radio and MP3 playback and survived a squabble with online music video distributor Vevo.

On Friday, Muziic took another big step with the release of its free iPhone app. It's the first free app that lets users search for and play songs on demand on their iPhones. Like the desktop app, Muziic for iPhone gets around content owners' licensing restrictions by taking content from YouTube, which already has a deal with Apple to … Read more

Slacker Radio, the personalized radio service that's available as an app for the iPhone and other mobile platforms, announced that it will let unsigned bands create their own dedicated radio stations on the service.

The mechanics are handled through a partnership with Hello Music: artists create a profile with their name, picture, and bio, then upload a few of their tunes. (Hello Music allows a wide variety of compressed and uncompressed formats.) Hello Music will screen the songs for potential copyright issues--no Zeppelin recordings, please--and recording quality, and submit the necessary information to Slacker. Then Slacker will create a … Read more