music

There appears to be relief ahead for at least some small Webcasters that balked at a new requirement to pay higher royalty rates to musicians and record labels.

SoundExchange, the nonprofit record industry spin-off charged with collecting the mandatory royalty payments, said in a Tuesday press release 24 "small" Internet radio outfits have signed agreements guaranteeing they will owe through 2010 the same rates they have paid since 1998. Others are in the process of signing on, SoundExchange said. It was not immediately clear which radio stations had already reached agreements.

Under the deal first offered in May, … Read more

I'm back at my favorite record store and I see a guy approach the owner with a proposition: "I want to buy music to put it on my iPod and then resell the disc to you." Intrigued, I jumped into the conversation, egging the guy on. "That's a great idea. Buy new or used DRM-free CDs, burn 'em to iTunes, and what the hell, burn a CD to keep, and resell the disc." The technique won't be cost effective on every title, but say for example you bought a used copy of Smashing … Read more

Free-music site SpiralFrog made its long-awaited debut on Sunday evening, defying critics who said the struggling company would never get off the ground.

The ad-supported music store opened with more than 770,000 songs and 3,500 music videos from numerous independent labels and Universal Music Group, the largest of the top four record companies.

When the company announced plans in August 2006 to offer ad-supported music free of charge to users media pundits called it an iTunes killer. But in December, New York-based SpiralFrog suffered an executive shakeup, burned through most of its cash and has since acknowledged selling … Read more

In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other's fins for dominance, there's at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark. The tagline? "Everybody gets paid."

As content distribution has mutated from analog to digital, the companies that came into existence to control the distribution have panicked and floundered. Decentralized peer-to-peer sharing made this all possible, but it's also thrown nearly a century of copyright law beyond the deep end and into rough waters.

… Read more

Market research firm eMarketer recently published a study about U.S. consumer spending on music since 1980. Most commenters have seized on the fact that the study shows a higher percentage of people are buying music today than ever, but that those users are spending much less, probably due to the rise of single-song downloads. (eMarketer calls these "MP3 downloads"--in fact, the #1 source of legal downloads, iTunes, offers them in the AAC format, and many other sites offer downloads in the Windows Media Audio format.)

But I also noticed that music spending per capita rose dramatically … Read more

Power Downloader's life is not always spent catching criminals and traveling the world. Every once in awhile, Power has to do tedious tasks like processing documents, adding content to a database, and organizing files. When repetitive work needs to get done on his computer, Power likes to listen to his favorite music to pass the time.

There are several good music applications to choose from, but some are stronger at certain things than others, and Power knows that not everyone uses the same program. Most people's music applications change over time and according to specific needs (like iTunes for managing music on an iPod for example), but one classic program has always been high on Power Downloader's list of favorite music applications: Winamp.… Read more

The 4-year-old company Mercora has re-branded itself as Social.FM, which does two things: 1) Sounds appropriately Webware-ish and 2) explains what the service does right in the name.

Mercora used to be an Internet radio service, but then it launched a music-streaming service for smart phones, "M," last year. It had a $50-a-year subscription fee, but it allowed owners to stream music from their own PC to their phone, as well as access the music of up to five friends.

But now, it's free. And it is utilizing the Internet buzzword of the moment--social--to describe … Read more

An unnamed Yahoo spokeswoman recently bristled at the notion that the company ever attempted a period of "Hollywood-ization" under former chief executive Terry Semel, a former CEO of Warner Brothers. She argued that Yahoo had never done original programming, despite the fact that their original content division, dubbed "Originals," used to be called "Studios" and was headed by former CBS TV executive David Katz. And, not to mention that Yahoo executives publicly announced in 2006 that they were backing away from TV-style programming.

I don't want to get into a semantic squabble here, … Read more

Henrik Franzon is a Swedish statistician who's created a remarkable site called Acclaimed Music. Over the last seven years, he's compiled hundreds of lists that rank music--best albums of all time, best singles of year X, and so on--from every source he comes across--the Rough Guide to Jazz, Rolling Stone, Attitude magazine's top 50 gay albums of all time. (Can an album have a sexual preference?) Then he's aggregated the results, organized them into a sort of "best of the best of" list, and provided links to various views. You can see the … Read more