Transmission: Music Industry News & Updates is a new feature on the Manitoba Music website that will offer a semi-regular summary of music industry news from across the country and around the globe. Below is the second installment and look forward to providing future roundups of relevant and interesting industry happenings. We hope you enjoy it.
Transmission: Music Industry News & Updates is a new feature on the Manitoba Music website that will offer a semi-regular summary of music industry news from across the country and around the globe. Below is the first installment and look forward to providing future roundups of relevant and interesting industry happenings. We hope you enjoy it.
A roundup of recent music business happenings. Find out more about social media predictions for 2012, are music executives actually buying music?, the challenging problem of copyright management, and more...
This week's roundup of music business happenings. Find out more about the death of the CD, cloud-based music service comparisons, the ten dos and dont's on Tumblr, and more...
Spotify is not available in Canada, but in countries where is it licensed to operate, it's turning a lot of heads and gaining a lot of fans.
The service offers streaming audio of music that the user picks from a huge catalogue of (mostly) major label releases. Spotify isn't so much about discovery or social networking, like other streaming audio services. It's more like a library of music that users can access at any time, not to download and own, but to listen to.
The idea of streaming music, rather than buying it, downloading, and storing it, is becoming more and more popular, as broadband becomes faster and more ubiquitous. But the real jump in streaming audio comes when it becomes more accessible on personal devices like cell phones. And that's where Spotify is right now.
The Swedish music company plans to launch an iPhone app very soon. The big question is whether Apple will turn down the app's application, because it poses too much competition to the iTunes store.
Last week I wrote about a downward trend in peer-to-peer downloading - many observers see this in part as a result of the increased use of free and easy streaming music services such as imeem, Pandora, Last.fm, and Spotify. Why download and store files, when you can have access to anything you want, from any location, on demand?
Well, in the last few days, much has been written about the sorry state of business for these services. In the UK, where the artists are much more organized and active in demanding that they be written into the deals (not just as a footnote in their labels' deals with these services), google/youtube is currently in a battle with the PRS, claiming that they can't afford to pay artists for content. Other streaming music companies are lining up behind google, hoping to benefit from the behemoth's bargaining clout. Meanwhile, the companies themselves are still scrambling to come up with a homerun service that users actually like and use. The much heralded MySpace music, for example, was a major flop and is in the process of re-inventing itself again.
In many cases, it seems to me that it's inking deals with the major labels that is at the heart of...