UPDATED: After a long and complicated journey, the Senate passed the Music Modernization Act today by unanimous consent, paving the way for improved royalty payments to songwriters, artists and creatives in the digital era. Next, the bill returns to the House for approval of the Senate version, then it will go before President Trump to…
Vinyl Is Bigger Than We Thought. Much Bigger.
Music industry watchers know that vinyl records have been enjoying a resurgence since their near-death in the mid-2000s, and the market continues to grow. But vinyl sales are actually much larger than what industry figures report, because they don’t count used vinyl sales. Now, thanks to some new data, we know that with used sales taken into account, the…
SiriusXM To Acquire Pandora
In a blockbuster deal sure to shake up car audio, SiriusXM announced on Monday that it will acquire Pandora in an all-stock transaction valued at $3.5 billion, creating an industry leading digital audio company with excess of $7 billion in expected pro-forma revenue this year. The companies said both popular services and brands — SiriusXM’s…
SPOTIFY OPENS THE FLOODGATES: ARTISTS CAN NOW UPLOAD TRACKS DIRECT TO THE STREAMING PLATFORM FOR FREE
The game really did just change. Spotify has today launched a new feature which will enable independent artists to upload tracks to the service directly – without any requirement for a third-party aggregator or record label. The feature currently remains in invite-only beta mode – with a few hundred US artists being ushered in –…
The Sounds of Music in the Twenty-first Century (Part 2)
Modern classical music is bedevilled by what might be called the Kandinsky Problem. Modernist painters, writers, and filmmakers had a far easier time finding a wide audience than composers did. Kandinsky creates mob scenes in museums; the mere appearance of Schoenberg’s name on a concert program can depress attendance. Although composers do not deserve blame…
The Sounds of Music in the Twenty-first Century (Part 1)
When the hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music, in April, reactions in the classical-music world ranged from panic to glee. Composers in the classical tradition have effectively monopolized the prize since its inception, in 1943. Not until 1997 did a nominal outsider—the jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis—receive a nod….
Here’s a fun, dystopian reminder that anything you “buy” from iTunes can vanish at any time
Jokes about the iTunes End User License Agreement have been around for almost as long as the media management service itself, but that hasn’t made the 1500-word document any less labyrinthine to the average reader who just wants to listen to some goddamn music. At this point, most of us just accept that the fine…
Paul McCartney Lands First #1 Album In 36 Years
Paul McCartney achieves his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart in over 36 years, as his new studio effort, Egypt Station, bows atop the list. The set, which was released on Sept. 7 via MPL/Capitol Records, launches with a larger-than-expected 153,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Sept. 13 according…
You can’t play Bach on Facebook because Sony says they own his compositions
James Rhodes, a pianist, performed a Bach composition for his Facebook account, but it didn’t go up — Facebook’s copyright filtering system pulled it down and accused him of copyright infringement because Sony Music Global had claimed that they owned 47 seconds’ worth of his personal performance of a song whose composer has been dead…
Why Vinyl Sounds Better Than CD, Or Not (Part 2)
DANKOSKY: I think our caller Bill, though, from Indiana maybe gets it, one of the points here between vinyl and CD. Bill, go ahead. BILL: Yes. I wanted to agree with the – at least I believe the point that the first lady was talking about, that although the sound of CDs and MP3s and…
