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Corporate Music Has a New Meaning
March 15th, 2010With the rapid decline in record sales and traditional music sales, there is no shortage of new ideas, business models, and attempts to redefine where the money will come from. It’s no surprise that one of the newest entries into the field, “Branded Music”, is being received with mixed reviews. What some people call innovation, others call a sell-out.
Unlike the typical scenario where a corporation licenses an artist’s song for their advertising, branded music involves corporations bankrolling bands to create songs specific to a company or product.
While not a specific music artist, Banshee Music has become a leader in this category, producing “Defend the Dome” for the Atlanta Falcons, and “Bristol NIghts” for NASCAR’s Bristol Motor Speedway.
A few years ago, Toyota started a music label with the intent to extend the brand of their youth oriented Scion cars by association.
Recently, Converse shoes hired Pharrell Williams, Santogold, and Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas to write “My Drive Thru” for the company’s 100th anniversary. Pepsi is doing something similar to create music to promote Mountain Dew.
While I support an artist’s right to a paycheck, and I don’t judge them for accepting a work for hire, this certainly is not going to save the music industry. It’s just one more option for the artist to consider,…and that’s not a bad thing.
Not everybody company has the ability to go hire a pop start to create an audio identity for their brand. Smaller companies with smaller budgets can use royalty free music or contract out a reputable music library to do exclusive custom work for them. This can be a very affordable option.
Pink Floyd and the Changing Landscape
March 11th, 2010The changing landscape of the music world doesn’t come without a few unexpected wrinkles.
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon has sold over 35 million copies. While the songs on Dark Side of the Moon certainly hold up on their own, anyone who has spent time listening to this masterpiece knows that the album is best as a complete piece of work. Each of the songs is a valuable part of the whole.
Pink Floyd always preferred the album concept and therefore largely avoided releasing singles during their career. Instead, they preferred fans to experience the album concept.
Interestingly, their latest record deal was signed with EMI before legal downloads and sites like iTunes came along and stipulates that individual songs must not be sold without the band’s permission. They now argue that the same rule should apply to digital sales. EMI disagrees. As part of a long-running battle between the artist and the label, a judge has sided with Pink Floyd, citing a clause in the contract to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums.”
Because the two sides are still in litigation (which has been running for over a year now), EMI does not have to stop selling the singles online yet. But that may change before too long.
A Successor to MP3s?
March 5th, 2010Let me start by saying I am not predicting the end of the MP3 here. Back in the early nineties, as we were growing our first successful endeavor in the Royalty Free Music sector, we were the first (and possibly ONLY) online music library to offer AAC (also known as m4a). This is the file format iTunes delivers their music in. It’s a great format. It sounds good and takes up less space than an MP3. We were certain that this was the wave of the future and would eventually surpass the MP3 in terms of customer downloads. And WE were on the leading edge. Guess what? Nobody wanted it.
Technology comes and goes. Some sticks and some doesn’t. But this is pretty interesting:
BACH Technology, based in Norway, Germany and China, is set to launch a new digital music file format which can be embedded with additional content such as lyrics, news updates, and images. The new technology, which they are calling MusicDNA and has the backing of the original inventor of the MP3 format, would allow music labels, bands, or retailers to send updates to the music file every time they have something to share such as tour dates, interviews, etc.
The user would receive as much or as little of the information as they want each time they are online. These updates would only be available to those who obtained the music legally. Anyone downloading files illegally would receive only a static file without the MusicDNA benefits.
Chief Executive Stefan Kohlmeyer says the service would hark back to the time when music fans enjoyed looking at the lyrics and artwork on an album. Anyone who was a music buyuer in the days of vinyl knows this was a legitimate part of the experience of enjoying music. This got lost a bit with CDs, and nearly forgotten with the emergence of digital music files.
So are we ready to jump in head first and be the first music library to add MusicDNA files to the our website? Not just yet. But I love the innovation and will continue to monitor it’s success.
The Cost of Information
March 2nd, 2010Nicholas Carr has written an interesting article on the high price we are willing to pay for information. Check it out here.
Fun Music Quotes Part 3
March 1st, 2010“Beware the lollipop of mediocrity; lick it once and you’ll suck forever.” - Brian Wilson
“There’s people making babies to my music. That’s nice.” - Barry White
“You have Van Gogh’s ear for music.” - Artemus Ward
“I’d love to see Christ come back to crush the spirit of hate and make men put down their guns. I’d also like just one more hit single.” - Tiny Tim
“I only know two tunes. One is ‘Yankee Doodle’, and the other isn’t.” - Ulysses S. Grant
“When an instrument fails on stage, it mocks you and must be destroyed.” - Trent Reznor
“They should be shot.” (on the Backstreet Boys) - Noel Gallagher
“In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.” - Robert Schumann
“I may not be a first-rate composer, buy I am a first-class second-rate composer.” - Richard Strauss
“I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m forty-five.” - Mick Jagger
Fun Music Quotes Part 2
February 25th, 2010“If you wanted to torture me, you’d tie me down and force me to watch our first five videos.” -John Bon Jovi
“I like to think of us as Clearasil on the face of the nation. Jim Morrison would have said that if he was smart, but he’s dead.” - Lou Reed
“I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that either. So I’ll keep it.” - Quincy Jones
“Listen Edith, I know you’re singing, you know you’re singing, but the neighbors may think I’m torturing you.” - Archie Bunker
“I love to sing, and I love to drink scotch. Most people would rather hear me drink scotch.” - George Burns
“All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.” - Louis Armstrong
“I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know.” - James Brown
“The only thing better than singing is more singing.” - Ella Fitzgerald
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” - Steve Martin
“If your lifegaurd duties were as good as your singing, a lot of people would be drowning.” - Simon Cowell
Fun Music Quotes Part 1
February 24th, 2010“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” - Mark Twain
“I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.” - Elvis Presley
“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.” - Voltaire
“Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?” - John Cusack
I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down’.” - Bob Newhart
“Give me a laundry list and I’ll set it to music.” Gioacchino Antononio Rossini
“I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.” - Elton John
“No opera plot can be sensible, for in sensible situations people do not sing.” - W.H. Auden
“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding, sings.” - Ed Gardner
“I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.” - Alfred Hitchcock
Apple, Music, and the Cloud
February 23rd, 2010Apple recently acquired Lala. Early predictions were that they would place iTunes in the cloud and jump head first into on-demand streams.
According to Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com, Apple is more likely to enhance it’s existing download collections with cloud access rather than a wholesale conversion to the cloud. According to Robertson, an upcoming major revision of iTunes will copy each user’s catalog to the cloud making it available from any browser or net-connected iPod, iPhone, or iPad.
So for now, forget about a subscription based system from Apple. Rather than replacing the download with the cloud, Apple is going to complement the download with the cloud. It’s still your collection of music. It will just be easier to access, backup, an synchronize.
Why is this good news? After the installation, your music will be sitting safely on your hard drive AND backed up onto an Apple-supplied cloud. This sounds like a much better solution than having your entire collection in the hands of an unstable startup like Imeem which could be unrecoverable if anything goes wrong.
The Year of the App
February 19th, 2010Three years ago none of us had ever heard of a Mobile App. Now, according to the research firm Gartner, mobile application stores are expected to generate revenues of nearly seven billion dollars during 2010. Yes, that was a B.
This figure is a combination of the $6.2 billion spent on the applications themselves and $.6 billion generated through in-app advertising.
Analysts also predict that mobile application stores revenue will grow to nearly $30 billion by the end of 2013. This can only mean good things for Apple, who currently dominates the mobile phone industry with the iPhone and has the most robust app store in the world.
Justice Department Upholds File Sharing Penalty
February 18th, 2010The Obama Justice Department has submitted a filing defending a large damages award for copyright infringement on a file sharing case. Joel Tenenbaum was found guilty of sharing a large number of songs on Kazaa and ordered to pay the record labels damages in excess of $22,000 per song. Tenenbaum has asked the court to either reduce the damages or grant him a new trial, arguing that the damages amount is unconstitutional.
According to the Department of Justice filing, “In establishing the range (of damage amounts: $750 to $150,000 per infringement), Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe they will go unnoticed.”
As we continue to see over and over again, copyright infringement is serious business. The next time you want a song from your favorite artist, go ahead and whip out a buck and get the song properly. If you are synchronizing music with any type of audio and/or visual production, make sure you’ve properly secured a synchronization license from a reputable production music library. Not only is the penalty for not doing things the right way very high, it’s noble to do the right thing.