Editorial

Site Update: You may notice the plane tilting slightly toward the cliffs…

Announcements

For folks who have been asking… YES! There is still a 2010 edition of Grow Your Band’s Audience on the horizon. Not only have I been taking extra time to update the case studies, I’ve been reworking the original manuscript into a format that’s going to work well on the Kindle and the iPad. And [...]

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Top Ten MTV Specialty Shows

Editorial

By the late 1980s, MTV’s programmers weren’t content with scattershot ratings, so they experimented with original series and specialty programming blocks. Today, MTV’s harshest critics blast Jersey Shore and The Hills as having nothing to do with rock and roll, but each one of these groundbreaking series dealt with similar complaints: #10: The State In [...]

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Announcing the Music Management Boot Camp

Announcements

Over the past few months, I’ve seen a huge surge of interest in my third book, Music Management for the Rest of Us. It could be that a bunch of folks are thinking about pursuing music industry careers, in the wake of crazy layoffs all over the United States. But it’s also likely that more [...]

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Don’t Underestimate the Power of an Audience

Editorial

It seems like the music journalism community has decided that this is the week they can finally pile on Taylor Swift. In the past 36 hours, I’ve read headlines about her “career-ending” Grammy performance, bloggers and columnists have called for her to hand back the statues (not just the one that broke) or retire altogether [...]

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2010 Grammy Awards Recap

Editorial

Everyone I know has a newfound respect for P!nk. Apparently, she’s been doing the wire act from last night’s Grammy Awards as an encore in her live set for some time now. That it was the standout moment in the telecast says a lot about what the music business has to do to attract and [...]

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Talent2K Complaints Return to My Inbox

Editorial

Some things show up in four year cycles, like the Winter Olympics, leap years, and complaints about Talent2K. In the past few weeks, I’ve found myself again facing a stack of mail asking whether Talent2K is “legit,” whether they’re “reformed,” or whether they can deliver on the promise of a record deal. Contributors to spinme.com [...]

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Can Spotify Satisfy American Copyright Laws?

Editorial

Lots of friends and colleagues from abroad have hyped up Spotify to me, and I don’t doubt that it’s an awesome service. As we hear more about Spotify, especially involving mobile apps and in-car services, I fear we might be getting ahead of ourselves. Specifically, I worry that users’ fervor for the system overlooks the [...]

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Technical Heads-Up: New Newsletter Address

Announcements

I am trying out some new software, so if you’re subscribed to our weekly newsletter, you will get some mail from me with the return address: newsletters [at] joetaylorjr.com Thanks for helping me keep my inbox organized!

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Reader Mail: Do Teachers Really Get Three Months Off?

Off-Topic

Musicians who check out spinme.com for music business news may want to skip past this post — it’s about one of my extracurricular projects. As always, I am so flattered and excited when I get to write for my friends at Yahoo! about careers. My editors asked me to look into some jobs that offer [...]

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Free $25 for spinme.com readers [sponsored]

Announcements

For two years running, the American Idol Songwriter competition has brought a HUGE traffic spike to the site. Here’s an easy way to help us pay the bills and earn $25 for about three minutes’ work. Steve Case, who once helped launch AOL, is starting up a PayPal competitor. He’s offering $25 for each new [...]

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