Browsing all posts in January, 2009.
95%
A full 95% of music consumed online is downloaded illegally with no compensation to the artist. 95%! This is according to a new report issued by the IFPI. The represents a number around 40 billion illegal downloads. The IFPI had this to say: “Generating value in an environment where 95 percent of music downloads are [...]
Simple Man Cruise
I just had the great privilege of being a musician on the Lynyrd Skynyrd Simple Man Cruise. There were a number of bands on the cruise, including Lynyrd Skynyrd of course, the Marshall Tucker Band, 38 Special, and Molly Hatchet. It was a wild 4 day run of great music. On the business side of [...]
SpiralFrog Biz Model
SpiralFrog, an online ad-supported music streaming site, is running into financial problems. SpiralFrog has been one of the poster-children for alternative business models for the online music industry. Downloads of over 3 million songs are available on the site for free. Advertisements support the cost of downloading the songs. But now, they are running into [...]
Soul Asylum in Peru?
Soul Asylum, the 1980′s alternative rock band out of Minnesota, is about to do a concert in Lima, Peru. Soul Asylum had a Grammy Award-winning single in the 1990′s – Runaway Train. Since the 90′s, there has not been a lot of activity from the band. And in 2005, Soul Asylum tragically lost their bassist, [...]
iTunes DRM-Free
The number one digital music retailer, Apple’s iTunes, just announced that all songs by the major labels will now come DRM-free. DRM is Digital Rights Management. In the past, this meant that if you purchased a song on iTunes, you could only use it on an Apple device, such as the ipod or iphone. Without [...]
Record Labels
The market share numbers for the major labels have been released. They pretty much stayed close to ’07 numbers. Here are market share numbers as of the end of 2008 for the big 4: Universal – 31.52% (down from 31.9% in ’07) Sony – 25.3% (up from 24.97% in ’07) Warner – 21.38% (up from [...]
’08 Album Sales
The final sales numbers are in for 2008 and if you are in the business of selling albums, you are not a happy camper. Album sales (both physical & digital) were down a whopping 14% for the year ($428.4 Million (’08) vs. $500.5 Million (’07)). Physical albums were down 18.2% while digital albums were up [...]
Holiday Sales
Happy Holidays! Well, that’s the mood for digital music retailers. The week of December 22 – 28 had the most digital tracks ever sold for a one-week period. The total was 47.7 million tracks sold during the week. This was a 126% increase from the week before. Not bad. The number of digital downloads for [...]
2008 Peruvian Concerts
It was quite a year for international music artists performing in Peru. As the economy of Peru continues to expand at very high rates, bands are noticing the increase in expendable income and are adding Peru to their list of tour locations. In the past, bands from the USA rarely made the trip to Lima [...]
