News

Everyone’s favorite commercial radio experiment is rumored to be on the outs, only because a government cap on ownership and "joint sales agreements" may force Clear Channel out of their partnership with the frequency’s owner.

From BoingBoing: With all the buzz about whether to lock up your MP3 downloads, one reader points out that dance labels have been thriving thanks to paid downloads of unlocked MP3’s.

Lots of my clients and other webloggers have been going nuts about the Grammy that was awarded to a download-only release. That, in itself, is great news. What excites me even more about the winning project is that it was…

By most accounts, clubs in New York City are back to the same level of business they enjoyed before the city enacted its smoking ban. This shows me even more that when bans like this get introduced in other cities,…

More evidence of the pressure live venues are under… Tonic in NYC presents avant-garde and experimental work, not usually the most profitable business to be in. But they’re one of the few "curatorial" clubs I talk about in seminars, one…

I’ve been telling our clients and conference call listeners for some time now that the payola scandal fallout would actually make it harder to get attention for emerging artists at commercial radio — already an "eye of the needle" situation.…

Universal’s actually going to pull it’s artists’ videos from any on-demand service that doesn’t pay it a new royalty fee (above the fees already paid out to the PROs and to SoundExchange, which eventually get to artists). So let me…

Remember last year when I did a set of ta;ls about how we’re moving back toward a patronage-based music culture, much like we experienced from the Renaissance on through the late 19th century? Here’s some more evidence: commissioned songwriting is…

Here’s a great idea: vocabulary-rich hip-hop compilations distributed by a leading test prep center. What kinds of alternative sales channels can you think of today?

Bob Baker’s finally lending his considerable experience to the blogosphere, and he weighs in on the debate that the Future of Music book is stirring up — imagine a world where new music downloads flow as easily as… tap water?

Even though it’s about film, it applies to all entertainment… "It’s a huge, huge learning curve with a lot of human wreckage behind." – Steven Soderbergh, in the New York Times.

Wired’s Chris Anderson is expanding his theory of the "Long Tail" to book form, and is blogging the process. Read the original article to see why it’s an important theory for you to be thinking about.