Music industry

There has been a lot of commentary following last week's New York Times op-ed by Dick Brass, a former Microsoft executive who claims that the company is bogged down by process and infighting, and has hence lost its ability to innovate.

One of the most interesting follow-ups comes from Groklaw, which dug up some e-mails placed into the public record a few years ago during an antitrust case against Microsoft. (These materials have been a treasure trove of interesting and sometimes-embarrassing internal communications, including then-Windows chief Jim Allchin's 2004 admission that he would have bought a Mac over … Read more

The Zune forums are alive with complaints that a bunch of music has suddenly disappeared from Zune devices. The reason: it appears that Microsoft has pulled a bunch of music from the Zune Marketplace. If users downloaded this music to their devices via the subscription-based Zune Pass service, then it apparently disappeared when they synced their device. (I'm talking about subscription-based "tethered" downloads, of which users get an unlimited number per month. The Zune Pass also offers 10 permanent MP3 downloads per month, and those downloads have not been affected.)

I'm not a Zune Pass subscriber, … Read more

There's an interesting spat going on between Tom Silverman, who founded hip-hop/dance label Tommy Boy Records and runs the New Music Seminar for new artists to learn about the music industry, and Jeff Price, the CEO of TuneCore, a service that helps musicians place their songs on iTunes and other digital-distribution outlets.

In a three-part interview with Musician Coaching, Silverman dismissed the idea that the Internet is helping new musicians break. For purposes of this argument, his definition of "breaking" is selling more than 10,000 copies of an album in the year of its release, … Read more

The major record labels continue to prove that they absolutely have no idea how the Internet works or how to capitalize on it.

This week's story involves the rock band OK Go. Four years ago, the band shot some quirky homemade videos and posted them on YouTube. Users saw the videos and embedded them on their own Web pages. OK Go was able to cut through the noise created by thousands of album releases every year and become well-known in certain circles, if not exactly world famous.

Now, the band is promoting its new album, "Of The Blue … Read more

Free All Music, whose unusual business model is to show users a short video advertisement in exchange for letting them download an unrestricted MP3 file, began private beta testing of the service last month.

The process of watching ads, then downloading MP3s, is surprisingly painless. The site will limit you to a certain number of downloads per period (right now, users are permitted 10 downloads to start, plus an additional 5 every week, but those numbers could change before launch). Through a secondary advertising system, Free All Music shows banner ads noting that particular users have downloaded songs "sponsored&… Read more

My favorite free online music site, Grooveshark, relies on users to post their own recordings, then makes them available to anybody else who visits the site. This gives Grooveshark the broadest and most diverse selection of any service out there--I've found recordings on Grooveshark that are lacking even on paid services such as MOG and Rhapsody--but it puts the company in a legal gray area. Grooveshark has told me that it pays appropriate copyright fees, but content owners don't always seem to agree.

In October, Grooveshark settled a lawsuit filed by record company EMI, but now it … Read more

Muziic, the YouTube-based music application created by teenage programmer David Nelson, has been an impressive piece of work with one drawback: the desktop application only runs on Windows. Not anymore! On Christmas day, the company officially launched a Web-based version of its service, and it compares very favorably with other free online music services.

Like the Muziic desktop app and U.K.-based TubeRadio.fm, the new Muziic Web player draws its content from YouTube, and allows you to queue songs and save playlists. But it's got a couple of interesting wrinkles.

First, you can get content from Vevo … Read more

Bill Gates has said that prognosticators often overestimate the amount of technological change that will happen in a year, but underestimate the changes that will take place over a decade. With the Zeroes coming to an end this week, and Steve Guttenberg's recent column questioning the viability of recorded music in 2020 as inspiration, here's my pick of 10 trends in music and technology that will shape the next decade.

Songs instead of albums Musicians will always find ways to record their music--it's a fundamental drive, like painting for a painter or writing for a writer. But … Read more

Yesterday, I compiled my list of the five most welcome products for digital audio that came out in 2009. Today, I'm following it up with my list of the year's five biggest digital audio duds.

Zookz. The breathless pitch got me interested: a mysterious online service was getting ready to compete against subscription-based download service eMusic. But where eMusic limits users to a set number of downloads, this mystery service would offer unlimited music and movie downloads. How could this be? Wouldn't users just download all the material they wanted then cancel their subscriptions? How could content … Read more