The Nashville Feed

I'm at the beach for the week so I'll be doing some linkfests and light postes until after the 4th holiday. Enjoy and don't work too hard. - mdave

Music Business & Sales

The Changing Face of the Music Industry - Tenneseann.com

• Music Row faces new realities
• Falling CD sales force retailers to try new strategies
• Music fans can hear more music, spend less money
• New routes take music to the fans

Rock's New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don't Sell - Rolling Stone
TV, games, tours and more: How smart bands thrive today

Report: Amazon MP3 Gains Don't Affect iTunes - PC Magazine
Gains for Amazon's MP3 service have not significantly affected Apple iTunes sales, due largely to the different demographics the two services attract, according to a report from NPD Group.

Hair metal grows back on the 'Net - Seattle Times
..for many, love for hair metal was not destroyed — just tucked away along with 1989 tour memorabilia. Now, the Internet is allowing these fans to find their inner teenager, dust off their fandom and relive the days when rock stars dressed like rock stars, and music was delivered irony-free, one power-chord at a time.

Anyone Seen My $4.2 Billion? - Esquire
There's a lot of money out there in the economy that people used to spend on CDs. The question is, where, exactly, did it go?

Social Media

Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web - Read Write Web
Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that's composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X'ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retirement and Gen Y takes root in the workplace, we're going to see some big changes ahead, not just at work, but on the web as a whole.

Analysis: Facebook, Twitter, Google and The Future Of The Web - Digital Media Wire

Another linkfest for you today.

Report: Amazon MP3 Gains Don't Affect iTunes - News and Analysis by PC Magazine
Gains for Amazon's MP3 service have not significantly affected Apple iTunes sales, due largely to the different demographics the two services attract, according to a report from NPD Group .

Anybody See My 4.9 Billion? : Teenage Music Purchases - Chuck Klosterman
There's a lot of money out there in the economy that people used to spend on CDs. The question is, where, exactly, did it go?

How can I sell my music online? | New Music Strategies
When I go and give lectures and seminars, this is by far the most frequently asked question by the musicians in the audience. There are variations on this theme, but essentially it boils down to this very simple question: now that there’s this internet thing, where’s the money and how do I get at it?
What’s the best way to sell music online?

Fine On Media The Wisdom Of The Commenters - BusinessWeek
When I’m coldish and kvetching and dizzy from decongestants, it’s nice that some smart commenters can stop by and make arguments better than I could make even if I weren’t totally coldish and kvetching and etc.

Radiohead allows fans to remix new single | Technology | Reuters
LONDON (Billboard) - Radiohead is using the Internet for another initiative built around its chart-topping album, "In Rainbows."

The UK rock act has teamed with iTunes and GarageBand for an interactive project that allows fans to rework the album's second single, "Nude."

Are Always-Connected Consumers Really Virtual Crackheads? - Advertising Age - The Media Guy
Look out! The internet is ruining your life! Again!

Last week the blogosphere busied itself with obsessing over the publication of an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry by Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health & Science University, in which he argued that internet addiction should be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The Year's Hottest New Music Stars - Forbes.com
Some recording artists toil for years without ever scoring a big hit. Then there's the fortunate few who skip all the dues-paying hardships and skyrocket straight to stardom.

That pretty much sums up the experience of Sean Kingston, Colbie Caillat, Flo Rida and other new music acts on our list of music's hottest new stars.

These crazy bloggers still think they understand the music business | Internet Marketing News and Blog | E-consultancy.com
In an op-ed piece in the New York Times on Saturday, British musician Billy Bragg suggests that social networks like Bebo and MySpace should pay royalties for the music that is made available through their services.

He argues against the notion that the "free promotion" provided makes a royalty unreasonable, pointing out that radio stations, which also provide "free promotion," pay royalties.

Can't wait for a linkfest post? Follow what I'm bookmarking on del.icio.us.

Technorati Tags: linkfest, itunes, music business, how to, news

I've got a bunch of links to share and enlightn you today. CRS (Country Radio Seminar) is this week in Nashville and all the Music Industry here is focused on that. So todays linkfest is heavy on radio and where it's going. Do you even listen to the radio anymore? I do but mainly talk on NPR. Maybe I'm getting old. Enjoy!

Radio's S.O.S. - Portfolio.com
As CBS earnings show, cheap and limitless internet options are undermining broadcasters' business models.

Requiem for Old-Time Radio - Business Week
Hit hard by the music world's fragmentation, it's handicapped in making a Web transition

Music exec: "Music 1.0 is dead." arstechnica.com - (In case you missed this last week.)
Five hundred top members of the music business gathered today in New York to hear that "music 1.0 is dead." Ted Cohen, a former EMI exec who used the phrase, opened the Digital Music Forum East by pleading with the industry to be wildly creative with new business models but not to "be desperate" during this transitional period.

More teenagers ignoring CDs, report says- LA Times
48% of teenagers bought no CDs at all in 2007, up from 38% in 2006. Music downloads continue to grow, though, with iTunes leading the way.

RIAA plays both sides of the street in music royalty debate - arstechnica.com
Readers will no doubt be shocked—shocked—to hear that the RIAA works for its own self-interest, but a recent Public Knowledge piece suggests that the organization is being more than usually self-interested in two current debates.

SXSW Showcasing Music Torrents
The following are torrents that contain all the released music from the annual South by Southwest music festival in Austin, TX.

According to New Study, Musicians Like to Sing About Drugs and Sex - Rolling Stone (File this under "no duh")
According to a new study conducted by medical researchers, thirty-three percent of popular songs contain explicit content and forty-two percent of songs hint at substance abuse. Rap was the most frequent offender, with seventy-seven percent of songs making reference to drugs or sex, with country music a surprising silver medalist with a thirty-six percent explicit content rate.

Can't wait for a linkfest post? Follow what I'm bookmarking on del.icio.us.

Technorati Tags: linkfest, crs, radio, music business

Let's start the New Year catching up on some good music news shall we? Regular posts beginning again this week.

Facebook climbs the social scale - Guardian UK
The networking site continues to grow as a platform for building business, though Google has still seized the lion's share of online advertising

Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply - Wall Street Journal
Rise in Downloading Fails to Boost Industry; A Retailing Shakeout

Ho-ho-horrible: album sales plunge 20 percent this Christmas -Arstechnica.com
To some music lovers, the fact that Josh Groban's Noel was the highest-selling album of 2007 is all the proof they need that major-label music is dying. To shareholders and label execs, though, the numbers are more important, and the numbers are grim: music sales are down 21 percent this Christmas season.

Speaking of digital...

The Death of High Fidelity - Rolling Stone
In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever

Aspiring radio hosts need only a computer & phone - Reuters
Anyone with dreams of being a talk radio star -- ranting about sports and politics, chatting with callers, sharing recipes or car-buying tips -- can play host on their own show, right on the Web.

Trent Reznor on Year Zero, Planting Clues, and What's Ludicrous About Being a Musician Today - Wired.com
Wired contributing editor Frank Rose interviewed Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor at his house in Beverly Hills on October 18, 2007.

It's about time for radio to pay.

Congress considers bill to make radio "pay to play" - Arttechnica.com
Radio has always had a strange exemption under US law: it doesn't need to pay the performers of the music it plays. Internet radio needs to pay. Satellite radio needs to pay. Digital music stations transmitted over cable lines have to pay. But not radio.

Todays linkfest is all over the place today from MySpace Records to Newspapers to Social Networking with Cookies and finally Op Ed battle over segmented media. Enjoy.

MySpace push kicks off with free album - Media Guardian UK
MySpace will release an album to users for free next year as part of a campaign to create a mass-market, advertising-supported free music service.
The site will offer the ninth album by Southern Californian punk band Pennywise in full, with no charge to users, from March 25.

Digital Platforms Add Revenue to Newspaper Coffers - Advertising Week
Ad Spending on News Sites Up 21.1% in Third Quarter

That's why online improvement is crucial for the industry, which is desperately trying to shift the emphasis from those depressing paid-circulation and print-ad-revenue stats.

Making Social Connections and Selling Cookies - New York Times
Pepperidge Farm, owned by the Campbell Soup Company, is introducing a campaign with the theme “Connecting through cookies.” The centerpiece of the campaign is the Web site, artofthecookie.com, which is meant to help women — the target audience for Pepperidge Farm — improve their social lives.

Found the two following articles via Coolfer.com. It's good music business read.

The Segmented Society - New York Times
...cultural history has pivot moments, and at some point toward the end of the 1970s or the early 1980s, the era of integration gave way to the era of fragmentation. There are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock. There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2.

David Brooks Mourns Passing Of Simpler, More Innocent Time In Media; Is Troubled By Crazy Noise The Kids Listen To; Raises Concerns He Is Actually 400 Years Old - Fine on Media Blog
(John Fine of Business Week in response) I went to high school in suburban New Jersey between 1981 and 1985. Commercial radio formats stunk. At that time, I knew there was this thing called “punk rock”—Rolling Stone acknowledged its existence, even, although it barely wrote anything about it. But knowing it existed didn’t mean you could, you know, find it.

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Todays linkfest is Social Media and Wisdom of Crowds inspired. The following linked articles covers topics that you should be aware of when it comes to promoting your brand and music online. If you don't want to wait for the link posts you can visit my del.icio.us page which I add new article links every day.

New FaceBook feature challenges LinkedIn - CNN/Money
Professionals are flocking to Facebook ,and soon they'll be able to divide their business life from their social life.
A seemingly innocuous change is coming to Facebook that could pose a threat to business networking site LinkedIn: the ability to separate your work "friends" from your social ones.

What's Your Facebook Strategy? - Editor & Publisher
Third-Party Applications Can Help You Tap Its Massive Audience
You can only envy Facebook's traffic, unless you're Google or Facebook rival MySpace. A sophisticated and slick "social utility," the website has grown to 42 million members. It's no wonder. Facebook is a truly useful and fun social networking tool -- and it's addictive.

Could Twitter become the ultimate buzz tracker? | The Social Web - ZDNet.com
For those of you that aren’t already convinced that Twitter, Silicon Valley’s favorite micro-blogging platform, might actually be useful — word comes via TechCrunch about a soon-to-be released new feature: real-time search!

Where MySpace and Facebook are headed? - Fortune
For all of Facebook's recent successes, MySpace continues to thrive. That's the theme of my recent big Fortune story on the MySpace/Facebook battle, "As Facebook takes off, MySpace strikes back." Meanwhile, innumerable permutations of the seductive social networking model continue to arise, because this is increasingly the kind of Internet that users are showing, with their behavior, that they want.

MySpace: Hot or Not? - Read/WriteWeb
MySpace is responsible for putting social networking on the map. Despite the site's notoriously bad design and poor navigation, millions of people flocked to it because it provided a simple, yet powerful way to self-express and to connect with others online.

What evolutionary psychology says about social networking | The Practical Futurist - MSNBC.com
The Internet world is relentlessly enthusiastic in its embrace of the latest and greatest, and this year’s new flavor has been social networking. Between MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Bebo and scores of lesser start-ups, social networking seems poised to take over the Internet.

How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web's Hottest Platform - Wired
He didn't have much choice but to sell. It was summer 2006, a little more than two years after Mark Zuckerberg had created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room as a way for him and his friends to better connect with schoolmates. In the intervening years, he'd raised $37.7 million from venture capitalists and transformed his modest Web site into a certified social phenomenon. College kids across the nation clamored for access, which Zuckerberg doled out, school by school. By mid-2006, about 7 million users, most of them college students, had a Facebook account.

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Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, music industry, online marketing, social media, facebook, myspace

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Another link-fest brought to you today by the letter N or the “Need” to catch up on news. Actually, I have a bunch of articles to share that really don’t need a blog associated with it. So as we normally said its “Stuff to read cause we say.” I promise it’s good stuff.

Music exec says business model is 'done'
Rick Rubin, the man who coaxed some of the best studio performances out of the Beastie Boys, L.L. Cool J and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, threw the curtain open on the music industry this weekend. What was exposed was perhaps more uncertainty and frustration than many may have expected.

Bands turn to internet for funds
A new website is offering bands financial support for recording sessions while giving fans a chance to buy into their success. (No link just video below)

Wired 15.04: The See-Through CEO
Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog. In the new world of radical transparency, the path to business success is clear.

How social can we get? - What evolutionary psychology says about social networking
The Internet world is relentlessly enthusiastic in its embrace of the latest and greatest, and this year’s new flavor has been social networking. Between MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Bebo and scores of lesser start-ups, social networking seems poised to take over the Internet. Indeed, some digerati have suggested that Facebook, by allowing developers to write mini-applications called widgets, might become the new Internet.

A Baffling New Phenomenon: Customized Ringtones
At last week's presentation for journalists in California, Apple unveiled a refreshed iPod lineup and several secondary developments. One of them, which I didn't have room to cover in my iPod review today, involves the availability of custom ringtones for the iPhone. (personally i agree with David Pogue, ringtones are a rip-off. why should I pay for music again to be used as a ringtone when i bought it already for my ipod- mdave)