The music “industry” gets more and more interesting every week. In a nation like Australia where the tyranny of distance has always given record companies an edge by sheer fact of their providing distribution logistics, the internet is now turning all that on its head.
A YOUNG Australian heavy-metal band that has had no airplay on mainstream radio stations has sent shockwaves through the music industry by making it into the Top 10 of the ARIA charts. [via Sydney Morning Herald]
Of course these kinds of stories never apply to artists who appeal to grown ups, but the young punks of today are the bored middle-aged people of tomorrow. Makes me glad I don’t have shares in a record company!
Filed under: Music News
Just when you thought the record companies might finally be beginning to “get” it, the CEO of Universal, Doug Morris, in an address to Merrill Lynch investors’ conference revealed that, nope – it’s still just all about the money.
“The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube,” said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars… How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly” [Via Wired News]
It’d be great to think that the method of “dealing with these companies” would be to embrace the communities built there and to recognize it as the MTV of the next generation and simply to appreciate the free promotional opportunities for their artists (as they, in fact, did with MTV in the last generation), but of course, doing that would mean there’s no market for their pay to own videos available through iTunes music store and the like. (A hangover from the fact that they dropped the ball on music downloads, discuss.)
My suspicion is that Doug Morris’s solution, rather than being one which will satisfy music fans and in so doing build artist loyalty and potential future business development for all concerned, but will be something that involves lawyers and letters of intimidation and outcomes more satisfactory to the rarified sense of morality possessed by the kind of pin-striped, spread collared old farts who attend Merrill Lynch Investors’ conferences.
Technorati Tags: Competition, Music, My Space, News, Universal Music CEO, Youtube
In a study conducted in the UK, researchers found that Hip-Hop fans are more likely to have had multiple sexual partners over the past five years and were the least likely to be religious or (horror) to recycle. To me there’s no real suprise in that, frankly. The study found that 37.5 percent of Hip-Hop fans had had more than one sexual partner in the the past five years, whereas fans of country music who’d had more than one sexual partner in the last five years was merely 1.5 percent.
Which just goes to prove… if you’re going into the music business to pick up, don’t sing country! – Herald Sun
Technorati Tags: Odd News
