This is interesting. Just when we just created an interface to upload your music to EG Radio, record label EMI says we shouldn't! More evidence that they just don't get it! EMI believes that consumers aren't allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service.
Last.fm announced today that for at least one of its affiliates, CD and digital music sales increased by 119 percent after its free, ad-supported music streaming service launched a couple of months ago. If the trend sticks, we may see more full-track previews coming our way from other services.
How the world has gone Digital!! This should tell Hip Hop artists world wide where they should focus their efforts!! Over the past few years, we have watched Apple climb the music sales chart courtesy of the iTunes. Last month we learned that Apple passed Best Buy to become the number two retailer in the the US. Now, Apple has ascended to the top of the charts, surpassing Wal-Mart for the first time ever, according to the NPD MusicWatch Survey.
Warner Music has contracted industry vet Jim Griffin to come up with a plan that could end the music industry's war against P2P. ISP customers could eventually pay a small fee and be able to upload, download, and share all the music they want on P2P. Labels and artists alike would get a cut of the proceeds.
In a recent report by BMI and just recently reported by the NY Post, Ring tone sales are expected to be lower than expected. Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), an organization that collects royalties for song writers and publishers, is forecasting that overall ring tone sales in the US will fall 7 percent in 2008 to approximately $510 million.
This is not Hip Hop, but this certainly the start of where the music industry is headed. The soda company Dr. Pepper is promising everyone in America a FREE CAN OF DR. PEPPER if Axl Rose of the group Guns and Roses releases the long-awaited new G&R album 'Chinese Democracy' in 2008. This is just the start of how Corporate America will begin to get more involved in the music business. Just think, Axl Rose drops his joint, and now millions of people in America flood Dr. Pepper's web site for a free can of soda. Welcome to the FREE Economy!! As music begins to be free with advertisers and companies sponsoring artists, you will soon see that soda will be free and advertisers will pay for space on the soda can and vending machines as you get a free soda pop!
The game Rock Band now allows gamers to buy new musical tracks, released weekly, without having to use the Xbox Live front end. This may open up another revenue stream for artists who are struggling to sell their music. This reaches a demographic of gamers who just simply are not interested in purchasing music, but at $2.00 a pop in a video game, Soundscan is already seeing that gamers are willing to buy and have already seen a correlation in increased digital sales. It will only be a matter of time until you can customize and select your soundtrack on the next release of Grand Theft Auto, and hip hop artists will have the opportunity to make more money in video games.
The Company Research In Motion most notably known for producing the Blackberry, has recently announced a strategic partnership to integrate portable music downloads on your Blackberry. At South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin this week, Toronto-based Puretracks unveiled a mobile download partnership with the portable heavyweight. 
After all the hoopla about piracy draining billions of dollars out of the music industry, it turns out that 2007 was a record box office year as a result!! The MPAA claims that piracy is causing dire harm to the movie business, but the combination of a record $9.63 box office take in 2007 and overheated piracy rhetoric lead us to wonder how bad off the motion picture industry really is.
While this is not Hip Hop, it is extremely relavant to the Hip Hop Music Industry. Alternative Rock artist Trent Reznor released a new Nine Inch Nails record over the weekend and has already sold out his 2,500 deluxe editions at $300 a pop. This is what "competing with free" looks like. He gave his material away for free, but still sold product to put 750k in his pocket. When will someone in Hip Hop do this?
In a recent study done by Nielson Soundscan, the U.S is still the world's largest market for music with over 1/3rd of the market share when compared to all other countries globally. According to the article, sales of recorded music in the U.S. accounted for one-third of the worldwide total in 2006, the most recent year for which full-year statistics are available, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Coming in a distant second was Japan with an 18% market share, while the United Kingdom was third with a 10% share. No other country had more than a single-digit market share.
The $140-million deal would give the new owner 49% of the Latin music market. The acquisition, which is subject to regulatory approval, would more than triple Universal's share of the Latin music market to about 49%. And it would expand the range of the world's largest record company into such popular niches as regional Mexican music, Latin pop, Latin rap and hip-hop. The COO of the company stated the following:
"This deal is about following the changing demographics of the population of the country," said Zach Horowitz, president and chief operating officer of Universal Music, who negotiated the deal. "This demographic is growing at a much faster rate than any other segment of the population. And we will have this treasure trove of a catalog that goes back 30 years and includes some of the biggest artists in Latin music today."
Nearly half of all teenagers bought no compact discs in 2007, accelerating the music industry's painful transition from CDs to digital downloads, according to a report released today.
An interesting read here from ARsTechnica. It appears that iTunes is the world's number 2 Music Retail Store right next to WalMart, and outshining Best Buy and several other Brick and Mortar stores. How the world of music has rapidly changed! This is #2 in sales of music overall - including CDs - not just digital. The article also indicates that kids are just not buying CDs any longer. 
Since reading this article regarding Last.Fm's move to stream free music, I am convinced that this business of music and radio is rapidly changing. Last.Fm is the nets most interactive Streaming Music sites that enables viewer to share their listening habits of music with others, as well as listen to music from some of your favorite artists. Since making the move to provide streams of music for free, the web site jumped in popularity to include a 59 percent surge in unique visitors, and a 58 percent increase in total pageviews over the past month.
Well, now there is simply no excuse for not downloading ExtravaGangsta Radio's podcast to your iPod and listening to us while your on the subway or on the road. The iPod shuffle is now a cheap $49.00!! What was $79 just a few minutes ago is now just $49. I suppose that Apple is set to announce something bigger and better soon.
Report: Imeem To Acquire Snocap February 14, 2008 - Digital and Mobile
The CD is dead and the industry is facing the prospect of a download only era. Music industry mavens know that this business strategy is not suited to the labels. The free file sharing Peer to Peer genie is out of the bottle and already in the hands of the public. The ability for the labels to stake their claim in the download arena and successfully compete with LimeWire, MySpace and other free services is doomed. Flash drive designer and manufacturer Flash Drive Direct has penned a treatise that describes a new and viable replacement for the CD that will appeal to the download demographic and offer a richer media intense delivery system. Vancouver, Canada (Billboard Publicity Wire) February 14, 2008 The CD is dead. Sales have plummeted nearly 50% over the last 4 years and a whole generation of consumers are now no longer even familiar with the CD as a concept or the idea that a record store is the place to find the "next big thing".
Record labels have reacted either by standing by and watching as the retail industry tanks or by litigating to death their very own consumers in a futile effort to put the download genie back in the bottle.
"This generation wants to buy its music, what they don't want to buy is a CD," states John Graham, long-time music industry analyst and current director of Flash Drive Direct (http://www.flashdrivedirect.com/) design and manufacturing house (http://www.flashdrivedirect.com/). "What the labels have failed to recognize is that the download consumer still wants to buy a tangible tactile product. They are the wealthiest youth generation in history with an estimated annual disposable income of over 20 billion dollars. They lay claim to some of the largest discretionary retail spending. Note the sales of Mac's, iPods, cell phones, $200 jeans and more," concludes Graham.
"The retail experience for the download generation is alive and kicking. The difference is that today's downloaders grew up on MP3 files not CD's," Graham goes on to say. "When MP'3's came along they were first played almost exclusively on computers. However, necessity being the Mother of all inventions, retailers then created the MP3 player industry. As a result the CD player and the CD retail business went the way of the Dodo."
A recent Harvard study on retail trends cited an anomaly in the download generation's retail therapy that was not anticipated. It found that consumers 14-29 would buy music from a retail outlet if two things were changed. One being that the retail environment better represented their personal expression of taste and secondly that if the music were loaded onto a digital device such as a flash drive they would buy it.
The study went on to say that on a secondary level of understanding "the consumer had veered away from the CD as it offered little in the way of new media interactivity". The consumer had found that the CD only offered a 1 dimensional experience and had no "bells and whistles".
John Graham of Flash Drive Direct goes on to explain, "the problem with the CD in recent years was not just a lack of a solid CD's worth of material but the high cost the consumer paid for what amounted to nothing more than a $15 expense for 1-2 singles, a bunch of filler and no killer! The labels only have themselves to blame for much of this."
The new delivery device that will recapture the spirit of the vibrant 80's and 90's CD sales boom is the digital flash drive. To date many artists have released limited edition and on-line sales of flash drive albums. However, there were 2 consistent failures in these tentative approaches. Firstly the retail environment had no rack space to best showcase the drives and perhaps more importantly the artist and labels did not grasp the enormous range of expression that the flash drive offered.
The drive would contain the tunes but what has not been fully understood was what else the flash drive offers. The drive not only delivers songs but videos, print files of all of the artist's previous CD covers, tour posters, band bio's and more. It also could easily be formatted to link to outside websites where the consumer could buy tickets, visit the band's website, download coupons and link to a wide variety of on-line and real world experiences. The flash drive is much more impactful as a retail tool when viewed as a web portal, multi- media storage and song delivery device than just a mere replacement for the CD, as the CD was for the LP.
Flash Drive Direct does work for the corporate world along with new media ventures with record labels, film studios, television and more.
Well it looks like someone finally did some research and study on the correlation between the buzz on an album on blogs, and social networks and album sales. According to a recent article on ARS Technica, the amount of online "chatter" about an upcoming album release directly correlates to higher physical album sales, according to two researchers with New York University's Stern Business School. Professor 
