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The music industry crisis is over!
Leave it to Avril Lavigne and 2.2 million Americans in jail to figure out how to make money off this dying career. Lavigne’s management reports that the singer recently pocketed over $2 million from YouTube — which is money generated from almost 100,000,000 plays of the video for her single “Girlfriend.” But why stop there?
With £1m on its way from YouTube, Nettwerk Management still isn’t done with the Lavigne video. They are now targeting Asia, explains Terry McBride: “We will start a Mandarin website with Mandarin ads and we will make a shitload of money, because 40% of her intellectual property value comes from Asia.”
As for Pack Central owner Bob Paris, he’s found that you can still consistently earn $1 million a year by selling cassettes. It’s easy when your target demographic is locked up:
Cassettes account for about 60% of unit sales, since CDs are contraband in many prisons because the hard plastics can be used for nefarious means. The screws that hold many cassettes together are also verboten, so Paris must manually remove them.
“I have dodged every conventional bullet that has hit most music retailers,” Paris says. “I don’t have to worry about downloading, legal or illegally. The beauty of it is that prisoners don’t have Internet access and never will.”
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Compact Discs: The new business model. →
This week’s standout piece in the Sunday Times wasn’t about Obama; it was about the handful of rappers you’ll see on any given day in New York City, hustling CDs from their hands to yours. I would imagine that their sales skills — which average from $100 to $150 a day — probably correlate with their freestyle rap skills. For example, when a suit-and-tie guy walked past an MC who calls himself Creature, the rapper stopped him by saying, “Counselor, can I help you diversify your portfolio?” The man walked away, but Creature was undeterred. “It’s about keeping the positive energy flowing and finding the commonalities,” he said. “For every hundred noes there are 10 yeses, and that’s a hundred bucks.”Link
Biggie in Bed-Stuy: A Memory. →
This sweet vignette, from the owner Birdell’s — a record store in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood — recalls the young ambition of local rapper and underscores the importance of the brick-and-mortar music shop:
“I got to know Biggie Smalls. He was just hanging out at the barber shop, used to party over there up on St. James Place. He used to come down to the store and say, ‘Birdell, I want you to help me get beats, tracks, ’cause I know you know them old blues and the good music.’ I said: ‘Aw, Biggie, I don’t have time for that. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Get you a record player and I’ll let you go downstairs in the basement.’
“So he and his partner would come every day three or four months straight, every day but Saturdays, and he would say, ‘I’m going to be big one day, Birdell.’ I said, ‘Aw, you ain’t going to be nothing.’”
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The monetary value of music is shrinking. →
This interesting timeline lists some of the major events to provide a precedent for the recent devaluation of the CD and MP3 mediums — including obvious picks like Napster, the Best Buy indie-label controversy, and of course, Radiohead. But I’d argue that the most compelling factor in this unstoppable decline goes back to the introduction of the compact disc: $18 for a product that costs roughly $1.50 to manufacture? It’s as if Thom Yorke were presciently rubbing it in when he sang, “You do it to yourself and that’s what really hurts.”Text
EMI hates new music.
In a profile of Guy Hands, the very rich man running EMI’s music division, the New York Times offered this doomsday statistic for the company: “An analysis by McKinsey and KPMG found that EMI had lost £750 million ($1.5 billion) from selling new music over the last five years.”
About ten minutes after reading this, I came across this quote from Corey Ondrejka, EMI’s new VP of Digital: “I neither buy nor hear much new music. Since 2000 I’ve only purchased five albums — three by Rush.”
You don’t need Scooby Doo to solve this mystery.
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MT9 is the new MP3. →
Has the MP3 finally reached a critical mass? Researchers in Korea believe the reign is over, and they’re marketing what some believe might become a new standard in digital audio:
“Whereas MP3s are merely compressed versions of songs, MT9 has separate controls for each musical instrument. Listeners can tweak the volume for each channel — such as guitar, drums, bass, and vocals — muting or amplifying their favorite parts.”
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Death in Zune. →
MIcrosoft’s Zune stopped being a promising alternative to the iPod the second I held one in my hand and realized that I had no idea how to change the song playing. (Intuitive interface, it is not.) Now retail is picking up on the problem, with Game Stop announcing that it will be pulling the product from its stores:
“Microsoft has allegedly sold two million Zunes since its debut a year and a half ago. If GameStop had fifteen percent of the Zune market, it would mean the company averaged about one sale per store per week. (Apple, by contrast, is selling iPods at the rate of nearly a million per week.)”
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John Darnielle represents for Detroit techno. →
Commenting on Roland and Yamaha’s dismissal of techno legend Juan Atkins for sponsorship — despite having “Detroit Techno” factory settings on their machines! — the Mountain Goat barks, “Without guys like Juan Atkins figuring out how to work your machines and making great sounds with them, they’d be useless crates. You don’t actually think people made tracks like this just by reading your impenetrable manuals, right?”Photo
Take that, Radiohead.
Having already made millions on his last internet download venture, Trent Reznor is offering the new and proper Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, in higher-than-CD quality WAV format for absolutely free.
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iTunes loses 4 million songs in their catalog. →
One eagle-eyed blogger found a major discrepancy in Apple’s recent descriptions of the iTunes catalog. As of last Monday, the music service claimed to have “more than 10 million songs available.” Yet on Friday, the company returned to celebrate its fifth birthday with a new number: This time, only 6 million songs made the cut.Link
It's time for the Time 100. →
Time’s yearly list of the 100 most influential people is out and the author assigned to praise Radiohead is an an interesting choice. Meet Edgar Bronfman Jr., CEO of Warner Music Group:
“When Radiohead announced that In Rainbows would be made available online directly to consumers at whatever price they wanted to pay, many said it signaled the end of the world’s major music labels. As the CEO of one of them, I may surprise you by saying that they were right. The traditional record-label business model — the one based on controlling access and distribution — is dead.”
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Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, speaks at ASCAP Expo and sends a woman into convulsions. →
“I didn’t answer her concern well,” Sivers recalls, “but I said, ‘More people are killed by pigs than sharks each year, but because shark attacks are more newsworthy, they seem more prevalent. Piracy gets all the attention, but I don’t think most of you in this room have lost more than $30 to piracy.’ (I got a big ‘Booo’ from the audience for this.)” He added, “Obscurity is your real enemy. Fight obscurity until you’re a household name, then piracy will be more of a problem than obscurity. Until then, worry about pigs, not sharks.” (via)Page 1 of 2