Charting the decline of the music biz
But perhaps a bigger reason, Bordowitz says, is the industry’s reaction to the new technology. In essence, that reaction was to ignore it when it was just a menacing cloud on the horizon and then attempt to squash it — rather than partner with it — when it arrived. “There are a lot of issues the record business ignored,” Bordowitz says. “When things are going well, it’s human nature to ignore any possible problems. And things were going very well in the early ’90s.”

Music Discovery Gets Social
Tim Westergren, chief strategy officer at another music site, Pandora, said that as an independent musician, he often felt left out by the major record companies. His site analyzes songs based on their musicological characteristics and helps users find songs that are similar to the ones they like, even if they’re from obscure bands. He said the site is encouraging users to buy more music. “People are starved for more independent music,” he said.

Lawmakers introduce a bill to amend the DMCA
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public’s right to fair use.

It’s no surprise that the RIAA doesn’t like the bill.
the RIAA said the bill would effectively repeal the DMCA. The bill would “allow electronics companies to induce others to break the law for their own profit,” it said in a statement. Advances such as digital music sales, online games, on-demand movies and e-books can be traced to DMCA protection, the RIAA said.

The DMCA, after all, gives the RIAA the power to sue students.
The association has sent three times more copyright complaints to universities this academic year than it did last year. The complaints ask the schools to take down unauthorized content being shared on their network.

And suing students at college is good, because it solves the problem of accidentally suing the parents who haven’t done anything wrong.

Record labels lose out as bands become brands
Although sales of CDs are falling sharply, British artists are riding the crest of a creative wave – live music has never been more popular, festivals are selling out in record time and brands are paying millions to associate themselves with up and coming acts. It is a new music marketplace where the artist’s brand is becoming as valuable as their recorded output.

Advertising to the File-Sharing Crowd
Marketing departments at major record labels have quietly discussed the potential of marketing to peer-to-peer audiences for years, Garland says. After all, at any given moment, big file-sharing networks such as Gnutella, eDonkey, and FastTrack often have a million people on them searching for record label content.

On the subject of DRM:
• DRM will go away this year.
• If the major labels get rid of DRM, online sales will likely double within the first few months.
• We need a price war for online music to evaporate the free market. The tipping point for this to happen is somewhere between $0.49 and $0.25.
• The RIAA’s litigation is based on fear and control.

P2P effect on legal music sales “not statistically distinguishable from zero
A new study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.

CPCC Goes For Broke
The blank CD increase represents an astonishing request as the CPCC is now openly asking that more than half of the retail price of blank CDs to be comprised of levy costs. A backgrounder on the CPCC notes that blank CDs cost about 50 cents and that the levy currently comprises 21 cents of that cost. That is an enormous cost – 42 percent – and the collective wants to increase that by an additional 28 percent. This is a staggering market distortion …

They’ve got the music in them — and in their garage
At $30-and-up per hour, cutting an album in a professional studio can run into thousands of dollars. For unsigned, do-it-yourself musicians, setting up a pro-quality home studio is the ultimate fantasy.

The RIAA’s response today seems to have missed the mark:
Jobs did mention the possibility of Apple licensing FairPlay to competitors in his letter, only to dismiss the option out of hand due to Apple’s concern that such a move would inevitable lead to leaks of proprietary technology. “Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players,” Jobs wrote. The RIAA dismissed such concerns in its statement: “We have no doubt that a technology company as sophisticated and smart as Apple could work with the music community to make [interoperability] happen.”

In unrelated news …

Shrinking Physical Space Boosts Independent Digital Sales
Just recently, The Shins (Sub Pop) scored a second-place finish on the US-based album charts, a result that included strong digital album sales. Overall album sales for the group totaled 119,000, of which 35,000 were digital. Those percentages are increasingly common for independent artists, and shrinking floor space at big box retailers will further the trend.

The Rise of the Song
You’ve got to spend only a short time online to realize that songs, not albums, are the principal medium of exchange on the Internet. Every time someone buys a portable digital-music player (and 1 in 3 music buyers owned one last year, up from 1 in 4 in 2005), that person has one less reason to buy CDs. What’s less clear is how this is reshaping our ideas about popular music, and what, if anything, may replace the conventional album — or the conventional single, for that matter.

Quantegy Says Goodbye to Magnetic Tape Lines
We have to face the current role that tape plays in the industry …

Indies aim to grab share of online sales
Indie labels account for some 80% of new music releases in major markets but only about 30% of total revenues, according to industry data for 2005, partly because the majors spend more on marketing and have — until recently — maintained tight control over distribution channels.

World’s first 1 terabyte drive
Hitachi’s storage division has unveiled what it claims to be the world’s first one terabyte 3.5 inch disk drive.

Digital Music Consumers Are More Involved Music Fans
The vast majority of online music service users reported that enjoying music over the Internet expanded their musical tastes, allowing them to discover new artists and explore new music genres.

MySpace cut download quality
… since the back end of 2006 all mp3 downloads have been automatically converted to 96kbps/22Hz, regardless of the quality of the mp3 which was originally uploaded.

Musical mash-ups, once fought by record labels, are going mainstream
Some record companies are moving from suing mash-up artists to offering their own “official” mixes. And simple software is making homegrown mash-ups easier than ever to create and circulate via the Internet.

Music industry may do more with mp3
Because consumers can potentially make unlimited copies of MP3 songs, the major record labels have seen the format as a threat to their business. But instead of continuing a battle that many think the industry is losing, some analysts think the labels are about to embrace the technology and figure out how to make money off of it.

Music of the Hemispheres
The subtlest reason that pop music is so flavorful to our brains is that it relies so strongly on timbre. Timbre is a peculiar blend of tones in any sound; it is why a tuba sounds so different from a flute even when they are playing the same melody in the same key. Popular performers or groups, Dr. Levitin argued, are pleasing not because of any particular virtuosity, but because they create an overall timbre that remains consistent from song to song.

Year’s chart-topping album fails to crack 4M sales
… in a sign of how piracy, a la carte single sales, the closing of retail stores and a host of other issues have eaten away at the music industry’s core product – consider that [this year's best-seller] wouldn’t even have cracked the top five in 2001.

Oldies but goldies benefit in digital revamp of charts
OCC chart director Omar Maskatiya said it changed the rules in consultation with the record industry once digital downloads began outselling physical releases in November.

Beatlemaniacs publish books on their own
Now, if mainstream publishers reject their work as too specialized, even the most Beatles-obsessed authors are finding audiences for their books by publishing them themselves. But don’t even think the phrase “vanity press.” Many of these self-published books are lavishly produced and packed with original research that makes them invaluable to Beatles scholars

American PTA Seeks Ban on 1970s Porn Music Composer
Angry American parents of high school, and some middle-school, students hope to take a 10-million-name petition to the United States Congress in an attempt to ban a music-download website which sells the music of the iconic German porn composer, Klaus Harmony.

(Here’s Klaus Harmony’s Myspace page. Chicka-chicka-wow.)

Free Music Next Year?
SpiralFrog [...] drew attention in August, when it announced plans to distribute music downloads from Vivendi’s Universal Music Group for free, via an ad-supported Website.