The History of a Music Business Revolution by Roy Davies from Exeter

Mick Jagger is wearing a cool pink shirt, slim black trousers, and bright red socks. His hair is--well, there's a lot of it. But don't let the look fool you. Mick is all business. That's business with a capital "B," as in the stuff we write about all the time in the pages of FORTUNE.
I'm up in Jagger's suite in Boston's Four Seasons hotel just before the Stones kick off their worldwide Licks tour. Mick turns down the volume on a boom box, packs off two of his young kids with their nannies, and then holds forth on product pricing, economics, and business models. Jagger is eloquent and informed, but he has a disclaimer: "I don't really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson," he says as he leans back on the couch. "I'm a creative artist. All I know from business I've picked up along the way. I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, kind of, but how boring is that?" he says with a grin.

Before I was in the writing industry, I was in the music industry.
While the economics of journalism have changed a lot over the past 20 years — witness the demise of Times Select and the potential demise of the Wall Street Journal‘s pay site — many other aspects of the writing industry haven’t changed much at all. If you are a non-fiction writer who writes books, for instance, the economic setup is pretty much the same as it was, in large part because book publishers still primarily offer hard copies of books to people who pay money for them.

How many copyright violations does an average user commit in a single day? John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, calculates in a new paper that he rings up $12.45 million in liability (PDF) over the course of an average day. The gap between what the law allows and what social norms permit is so great now that "we are, technically speaking, a nation of infringers."

The goal of musicFIRST is to ensure that struggling performers, local musicians, and well-known artists are compensated for their music when it is played both today and in the future. Of all the ways we listen to music, corporate radio is the only one that receives special treatment. Big radio has a free pass to play music – refusing to pay even a fraction of a penny to the performers that brought it to life. musicFIRST (Fairness in Radio Starting Today) is committed to making sure everyone, from up-and-coming artists to our favorites from years-ago, is guaranteed Fair Pay for Air Play.

Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A & R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire." because historically, the A & R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly.
These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave. Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well.

The Scottish star's manager has criticised MySpace and Warner Music for not allowing the singer to stream A Girl Like You, claiming he didn't own the copyright

I don't know about you, but I decided that I would not watch this particular series of The X Factor, because I thought, I'll get worked up, and possibly along the way very sad, depressed and paranoid. I won't watch it, because if I do I'll end up taking it more seriously than perhaps I should, even down to closely monitoring The Xtra Factor on ITV2 directly after the live show, just to look for clues to something – I'm not sure what – in those moments when the extremely impatient professional judging panel, the obedient and dumbfounded amateur contestants and the extremely patient presenter Dermot O'Leary have to hang around after the main show has finished while the fiendishly frivolous Holly Willoughby does her job, which cannot really be described.

new music site - like sellaband & slice the pie with charity element

During The Pirate Bay trial, the music industry placed the blame for the decline in their revenues squarely on the shoulders of file-sharers. Their logic is clearly flawed, but it could sway the verdict if no alternative explanation is presented. So, if piracy isn’t to blame, then what is *actually* killing the music industry?

According to Per Sundin, CEO of Universal Music, the decline in music revenues in the past 8 years can be fully attributed to (read: blamed on) illegal file sharing. If this were actually true, many of us might even respect his decision to go after pirates as fiercely as the music industry is doing right now. However, the past 8 years have seen a lot more changes in the landscape of home entertainment than Per Sundin would like to admit, and some of those changes have had a massive impact on music profitability — much more so than any amount of piracy.

In the latest signal of this conundrum, at least six music blogs were deleted last week by Blogger due to copyright complaints. It's uncertain who made the accusations that lead to the deletions, but the most likely culprit is the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a copyright-enforcement organization which had previously filed copright takedown notices against some of the targeted blogs.

Recently, I was sent an analysis of Radiohead's In Rainbows pay-what-you-like venture and Nine Inch Nails' digital giveaway of their album The Slip – including an account of how they fared against Torrent websites such as Pirate Bay. It was written by Will Page, chief economist for MCPS-PRS, with the help of Eric Garland who runs BigChampagne – a company that measures legal and illegal downloading – so it was quite heavy reading.

alking to The Times a fortnight ago, Billy Bragg, pop’s most recognisable exponent of democratic socialism, sought to make an important distinction. “The record industry is in trouble,” he said, “but the music industry is thriving.” Had file sharing affected him? Not at all, he beamed.

A few weeks back, as I was having dinner with a media-industry colleague at a trendy restaurant in a trendy New York neighborhood, I realized that the music coming over the sound system was transporting me to another time -- specifically, 1986. As song after song by various "it" bands of the moment, such as Black Kids and the Virgins, played, it was as if we were listening to a time-warped or parallel-universe version of the "Pretty in Pink" soundtrack. Because really, the "it" sound of the moment would work seamlessly in just about any John Hughes movie circa the mid-'80s.

Susan Boyle, Lady Gaga and Take That helped the British music industry to grow in value for the first time in six years, according to official sales figures released today.

Record labels, which have faced a slump in CD sales and a long-running battle against internet piracy, experienced a rise in income from music sales from £916 million to £929 million in 2009, the British Phonographic Industry said.

The surprise increase marks the first time that the growth in income from digital services such as iTunes has outweighed the decline from sales of CDs. Income from digital singles and albums leapt by 53 per cent, to £154 million, while physical formats dropped 6 per cent to £740 million.

My name is Raghav Gupta but most people call me Rags, my nickname, which has stuck since 2nd grade. My family and I moved to the US from India when I was 7.

I work at Brightcove, the Internet TV startup, where I'm VP of International Partnerships, based out of London. I also serve as an advisor to some digital media or online service startups, such as MocoSpace, and help them with fundraising, business development, product and strategy. Prior to this I was a digital media consultant and worked with companies like NPR, kSolo - the online karaoke startup and Musikube. Up until March 2005, I'd been at Live365 Internet Radio as a member of their management team, for the past 5 and a half years.

Before that, I was at Mercer Management Consulting.

Before that I was in college at Princeton where I majored in Operations Research.

Professionally, I am interested in things having to do with the intersection of technology, media, entertainment and commerce. Especially in how the internet and related technology are empowering consumers to do things they could never really do before. Personally, I love seeing new places and cultures, experiencing new cuisines, consuming media (books, movies, music), and playing sports (squash, yoga, soccer).

Like a billion other people, I download things illegally. I'm also an actor, writer and director whose income depends on revenue from DVDs, movies and books. This leads to many conflicts in my head, in my heart, and in bars.

At the Midem Festival in Cannes in 2008, McGuinness made a forceful speech calling on governments to compel internet service providers (ISPs) to introduce mandatory “three strikes and you’re out”, internet service disconnections of serial file-sharers. He accused Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others of “building multibillion dollar industries on the back of our content without paying for it” and of being “makers of burglary kits who have made a thieves’ charter to steal music from the music industry”. Strong stuff. Since his speech, governments in France and Britain Ireland, have introduced the “three strikes” law. And the music industry has continued to decline while the ISPs continue to flourish, shrugging their shoulders in apparent indifference to the fate of an industry on which they have fed for so long.

one of the 8tracks development team

Hypebot kindly alerts us to an unintentionally hilarious GQ column by U2 manager Paul McGuinness, supposedly on "how to save the music industry." Of course, that's not what it's actually about -- because the music industry doesn't need saving. Last we checked, it's doing great. As, by the way, are McGuinness and U2. McGuinness has been making similarly wrong arguments for quite some time, and we try to debunk them each time. It seems that we bloggers have finally gotten under McGuinness' skin, as he lashes out at internet bloggers in this piece, specifically for the criticism they gave of his Midem speech in 2008 (criticism such as mine).

The report is called Music Product Manifesto: The Product Features That Will Save Recorded Music. (I know – I hate titles like that too.) This time around researcher Mark Mulligan focus on music product innovation. “In 2009, the album celebrates it’s 100th birthday and yet remains the centerpiece of the recorded music product portfolio,” Mulligan writes. “The time has come for a radical overhaul of the recorded music product range.”