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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Guess AC/DC and Garth Brooks have something in common after all. They’re both Wal-Mart-only artists. When AC/DC’s new album, “Black Ice,” arrives at market on Oct. 20, it will be sold exclusively in the U.S. at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club.
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Sony BMG (SNE) has signed on to Nokia’s (NOK) new “Comes With Music” program and really, who better than the pioneer of the rootkit digital-rights management scheme to endorse Nokia’s DRM-hobbled prebundled music initiative?
This morning, Sony BMG became the second record label to jump on board the Finnish phone giant’s Comes With Music offering, which–when [...]
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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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In the final paragraph of his February 2007 essay, “Thoughts On Music,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that should the top four music labels allow their music to be sold online without DRM (digital rights management) technology, it would “create a truly interoperable music marketplace”–one that Apple would embrace “wholeheartedly.”
Well, it’s taken nearly a year, [...]
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The per-device royalties Universal Music Group receives for every Zune player sold were apparently substantial enough to buy CEO Doug Morris a bigger set of balls, because he’s out drumming up support for an industry-owned subscription service with which he hopes to loosen Apple’s grip on the digital music market.
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Few industries have greater allegiance to dying media formats
than the record labels. To wit, Sony BMG’s latest attempt to keep sales of CDs afloat, the “ringle.”
What is a ringle, you ask? Well, it’s a new product that conveniently packages a hit song and a digital ringtone in the near end-of-life CD single. For $5.98 or [...]
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Still smarting over the flogging it suffered back in 2005 for encoding some of its music CDs with a harebrained rootkit copy-protection software, Sony BMG lashed out against the company that developed it last week, slapping it with a lawsuit. Sony accuses Amergence Group, formerly SunnComm International, of “negligence, unfair business practices and breaching the [...]
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