Overall CD sales are plummeting after eight years of unflagging erosion. Digital music sales now account for 15 percent of recording industry’s revenues worldwide and 30 percent in the United States, according to recent data from The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And those numbers are climbing faster than ever. Consider: This past June, Apple said it has sold some five billion songs on its iTunes Store. Clearly, physical media are giving way to the Internet as a means of music distribution. What better time, then, to reinvent the music industry’s business model for physical media, as SanDisk hopes to do with its new microSD memory card album format?
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If YouTube aims to someday host every music video ever made, as co-founder Steve Chen once claimed, it better get crackin’. Because the market’s getting crowded.
This morning PluggedIn Media launched a new service for streaming HD-quality music videos. Backed by Overbrook Entertainment–Will “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” Smith’s production and management company–PluggedIn will offer some 10,000 [...]
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Well that didn’t take long at all. Less than a month after Amazon.com began peddling DRM-free music for considerably less than you’d find it on Apple’s iTunes store, Cupertino silently dropped its price to match.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the company is reducing the price of DRM-free [...]
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Well, this is sure to set a cat among the pigeons who still believe they have a God-given right to control the retail distribution and pricing of music.
Recently freed of its contractual obligation to major label EMI Group, top-selling British rock band Radiohead is releasing its seventh studio album, “In Rainbows,” on Oct. 10 as [...]
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