Steve Lamacq defends BBC 6 Music Tuesday, March 9 2010, 17:33 GMT
By Mayer Nissim, Entertainment Reporter

Our great Blues Songwriter - OLGA, has landed some scenes in the new HBO series titled = Treme, which is set in post-Katrina New Orleans and is centered around the lives of local musicians.  It is presently filming and looks to make a big splash on their network.

Be Well, Play Hard, Make Waves
  
 

Monday Inspirations—Here are 3 weekly ideas for song lyric, poems, instrumental titles, photos, video, short story or anything they inspire you to create.  Use the title if you like & make something!  It is yours for free.  A gift. 

88.  Fat Dog
After reading an advertisement in a magazing about a drug you can buy to give your overweight dog so it will lose weight, my dog started looking fat. :-)  He doesn’t look fat when he’s playing.  But when he begs for my food he looks fat.  Fat Dog.

89.  CHECKLIST
The sound of a hard K gives a word power.  I am reminded of the main character in the novel/movie The Bridges of Madison County - Robert Kincaid.  That name is pronouned with vocal force - 2 hard Ks - Kincaid.

So CHECKLIST makes a great title and is easily pronounced.  I’ve got a checklist for you baby.  One - you’re beautiful, two - you give me chills and thrills and three - you’re all I see tonight, you top my checklist.

90.  Noticeably Quiet
A poetic singer-songwriter lyric title or can be a title for an instrumental piece or a piece of art/photoography/video.  Noticeably Quiet shows how an object can have impact and at the same time be subtle.  A huge redwood tree can be noticeably quiet.  So can a mountain, so can a snowflake, so can a lover sitting across the bed as he puts his shoes on.

Guvera details their service
Category: Music

Free, Ad-Supported Music … With a Twist

Google’s Music Strategy: Past, Present and Future

Google may have lost to Apple in its bid to acquire Lala, a music service that grabs users’ digital music collections and hosts them in the cloud, allowing them to add to those collections for a mere 10 cents per song. But it would be nuts to count out Google in the race to replace iTunes’ pay-per-download model with a cloud-based music service that is easy and attractive enough to convince non-music-buyers to open their wallets.

The tech behemoth has traditionally steered clear of music, reportedly because co-founder Sergei Brin isn’t a music fan — and on at least one level, Google is about addressing its co-founders’ needs. (The somewhat-botched launch of Buzz, which Brin apparently loved, is one example of this).

Apple has owned the digital music market since it essentially created that market with the launch of the iTunes music store in 2003. Since then, the company’s one-two punch of iTunes and iPod has fended off all comers.

But we’re approaching a major inflection point in the short history of digital music, a time when we stop administering our own music collections on local hard drives, and instead build them online, where they can be accessed on a multitude of connected devices — smartphones, netbooks, tablets, computers, televisions, bookshelf systems and cars — without the tedium of managing each and every file transfer by hand.

And, piece by piece, Google is slowly laying the groundwork to be a player in that space.

What Google Has Done

So far, Google’s approach to music has been very un-Google: Send users to the walled gardens of Lala, iLike, Pandora and Rhapsody. Former SeeqPod CEO Kasian Franks told us that lots of illicit music search services use elaborate Google queries to find MP3s on public servers, so Google could have built a music service or vertical search tool that seeks out those files. (Even in China, where copyright views are generally laxer than they are in the states, Google has chosen to compete with the popular Baidu music search engine by linking to a licensed music source that includes a watermark with each download.)

Instead, Google has been playing nice with the music industry — not only with Google music search, but with Vevo, the music video site owned in part by Sony Music and Universal Music Group. Vevo is already working well, tallying 35 million visitors and 13 billion views in December, the first month in which the service was available.

Of course, hardly anyone is going to Vevo.com to view these videos — instead, they’re going to Google’s YouTube. By pushing music searchers toward licensed music services and collaborating with the major labels on Vevo, Google has set the stage for a more aggressive move into the music market, likely to be aided by the labels’ long-standing resentment about Apple pretty much owning the digital music space.

What Google Is Doing

Even before it launches a dedicated cloud-based music service, Google might already be the top cloud-based music company in the world, in a sense, due to the popularity of music streams on YouTube. (It’s even possible to download full MP3s from YouTube without paying a cent, using Dirpy or other tools.)

Following its failed bid (WSJ subscription required) to acquire Lala, Google is considering purchasing a U.S. and Israeli company called Catch Media, as reported by CNET. Like Lala, Catch has the ability to suck a user’s music collection up into the cloud and serve it to them on a multitude of devices. (Melodeo’s nuTsie — an anagram of iTunes — offers a similar feature and could also be a Google acquisition target.)

Catch Media differs from Lala in that it evolved from a system developed to allow customers of one bank to withdraw money from another bank’s automated teller machine — whereas Lala used to focus on helping people trade used CDs online. If Catch Media figured out how to let you withdraw money from a competing bank’s ATM, perhaps it can figure out how to make all of our music playing devices access the same online music collection — also for a small fee. The same way we pay (albeit grudgingly) to access our money from a third-party ATM, we could pay to access our music collection on a connected device whose manufacturer lacks a relationship with the online music service, dissolving the bond that glues Apple’s hardware to its music store.

How Google Could Unseat iTunes

If music is broken, perhaps Google can fix it (see search, e-mail, document collaboration, long tail advertising, maps, phones, and so on). And Apple’s widely publicized dropping of DRM about two years ago means that most of the music iTunes users have on hand can be transferred just as easily to a Google cloud-based music service as an Apple one. The door is wide open for Google to poach iTunes users, especially if it does the following:

Lower prices, even if it means losing money initially. Lala currently sells streaming songs for 10 cents apiece — a price Apple might be uncomfortable with, seeing as it generally sells music for ten times that. Google has no such cannibalization worries, so it should price streaming music at 10 cents or even lower. As with Gmail, which is free until you hit the storage limit, or YouTube, which lost money for the first few years, Google would have to be willing to eat a loss in order to win in the long term.

Make cloud-based music collections portable, so that if someone is dissatisfied, they can take their music (or rather, the data representing it) to another cloud-based service. So far, there’s no big database that would allow people to grab their tunes and split. However, Google scored very well in our quick data-portability survey, which leads us to believe it would do the same for music. If any company would be willing to make its music subscription transferable, it’s Google, considering its history in other areas.

Charge consumers micropayments to access large cloud-based collections, but not small collections. Users won’t try it if they have to pay upfront, but the labels won’t condone the service unless it charges users something to access their collections, hampering Google’s ability to sell music as part of the plan. As with Gmail, this could be a low yearly fee for collections above a certain size.

Do something in the living room. Forrester Research analyst Sonal Gandhi, whom I will interview later Monday at a NARM Salon in Manhattan, claims the reason half of the U.S. population doesn’t buy digital music is because over ten years after companies first began offering home-networked audio hardware, the category has yet to take off. If Google’s going to beat Apple (which already has Apple TV and Airport Express) to the cloud, as far as music goes, the living room will have to be part of the equation. Alliances with companies such as Boxee and television manufacturers would help a great deal in this regard.

Continue to leverage search. Vevo is successful because people look for videos on YouTube, while Lala and iLike probably owe no small part of their traffic to Google’s practice of placing them at the top of its search results. Meanwhile, Apple only recently created web pages for iTunes albums, and I’ve never seen one appear in a Google search result. Search gives Google a tremendous advantage in the race against Apple to own the cloud-based music space.

Source: Wired

Music industry failing to promote legal alternatives to piracyThe music industry is failing to promote legal alternatives to piracy, according to a leading consumer group.

Almost 10 million copies of Lady Gaga?s single Poker Face were downloaded last year

Nine out of ten consumers that are aware of music services, have only heard of two established brands – iTunes and Amazon, according to the research.Consumer Focus, the Government-backed watchdog, sees the growth of the legal online music market as the best way to tackle online copyright infringement, but it claims that the music industry is failing to promote the many legal alternatives.

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The consumer body surveyed 1995 adults and found that four in ten people are unable to name a single online music service at all – despite there being over 20 services on the market.Consumer Focus has called for an ‘all you can eat’ music scheme so internet users can enjoy unlimited, legal music downloads for a small additional monthly fee.Jill Johnstone, International Director, Consumer Focus, said: “The music industry is shooting itself in the foot by not promoting legal online music services. If file sharing is causing the damage the music industry claims, why aren’t they putting more effort in to promoting the legal alternatives?“Before we go down the enforcement road it is only fair to ask the music industry to do more to make people aware of the legal options.”The IFPI, the trade body that represents the recording industry, estimates than 95 per cent of downloaded music last year was not paid for.The Government’s Digital Economy Bill, not yet law, contains measures to disconnect persistent offenders through a process of graduated warnings.The consumer body has also called for reform of UK’s copyright licensing system to make it easier for online music services to offer copyrighted works to consumers legally.They claim that reform would encourage the growth of more legal alternatives such as streaming, “all you can eat”, micropayment, advertisement or subscription based models.The music industry said it was a “fallacy” to imply that awareness of legal music services is low.Geoff Taylor, the chief executive of the BPI, the record industry trade body, said: “It’s just not credible to suggest that people who are downloading illegally haven’t heard of iTunes, Amazon or other legal music services.“Our much larger, more recent and targeted online survey shows that awareness of legal music services among internet users is almost universal. The measures in the Digital Economy Bill are precisely what is needed to encourage illegal downloaders to move across to those legal services”.

Source:The Telegraph

Dispute Heats Up Over Proposed New Fees for Playing Songs on the Radio
Category: Music

Dispute Heats Up Over Proposed New Fees for Playing Songs on the RadioBy JOSEPH PLAMBECK

Kesha may be the voice of her hit single “Tik Tok,” but when her royalty check arrives for its play on the radio, the money is for her role as co-writer of the song. For more than 70 years, royalty payments for air time have flowed to the songwriters and music publishers but not to the musicians or record companies. Now there is a renewed drive to revisit that arrangement, and in recent weeks the volume of the discussion has increased several decibels.

“I don’t want to be a person that is so close-minded that I won’t look for a solution,” he said. “But we want to look at this so that it’s revenue neutral for radio but helps the record industry.”

Source: NY Times

Music’s lost decade: Sales cut

in half….

 ….

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — If you watched the Grammy Awards Sunday night, it would appear all is well in the recording industry. But at the end of last year, the music business was worth half of what it was ten years ago and the decline doesn’t look like it will be slowing anytime soon.….

Total revenue from U.S. music sales and licensing plunged to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research. In 1999, that revenue figure topped $14.6 billion.….

 ….

Although the Recording Industry Association of America will report its official figures in the early spring, the trend has been very clear: RIAA has reported declining revenue in nine of the past 10 years, with album sales falling an average of 8% each year. Last decade was the first ever in which sales were lower going out than coming in.….

“There have been a lot of changes over the past 10 years,” said Joshua Friedlander, vice president of research at RIAA. “The industry is adapting to consumer’s demands of how they listen to music, when and where, and we’ve had some growing pains in terms of monetizing those changes.”….

The two recessions during the decade certainly didn’t help music sales. It’s also a bit unfair to compare the 2000s with the 1990s, since the ’90s enjoyed an unnatural sales boost when consumers replaced their cassette tapes and vinyl records en masse with CDs.….

But industry insiders and experts argue that the main culprit for the industry’s massive decline was the growing popularity of digital music.….

“The digital music business has been a war of attrition that nobody seems to be winning,” said David Goldberg, the former head of Yahoo music. “The CD is still disappearing, and nothing is replacing it in entirety as a revenue generator.”….

The disease of free….

The battle for paying digital customers may have been lost before it had truly begun. In 1999, Napster, a free online file-sharing service, made its debut. Not only did Napster help change the way most people got music, it also lowered the price point from $14 for a CD to free.….

“It’s pretty easy to give away something for free,” said Russell Frackman, the lead attorney for the music industry in its 1999 case against Napster. “It’s not that the music industry thought the technology was bad, it just objected to the use to which it was being put.”….

 ….

Click here to see Napster video:….

http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/….

 ….

 ….

Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) iTunes is credited with finally getting people to pay for digital music, but it wasn’t unveiled until 2003.….

In the time between Napster’s shuttering and iTunes’ debut, many of Napster’s 60 million users found other online file sharing techniques to get music for free. Even after iTunes got people buying music tracks for just 99 cents, it wasn’t as attractive as free.….

“That four-year lag is where the music industry lost the battle,” said Sonal Gandhi, music analyst with Forrester Research. “They lost an opportunity to take consumers’ new behavior and really monetize it in a way that nipped the free music expectation in the bud.”….

Now just 44% of U.S. Internet users and 64% of Americans who buy digital music think that that music is worth paying for, according to Forrester. The volume of unauthorized downloads continues to represent about 90% of the market, according to online download tracker BigChampagne Media Measurement.….

“People will steal music regardless, so it’s not worth trying to fight against something where the fight’s already over,” said Dan Ingala, founder and lead singer of the band Plushgun.….

When Plushgun released its album “Pins and Panzers,” it was the most downloaded album on the popular peer-to-peer Web site What.cd with more than 10,000 illegally downloaded tracks.….

“It’s just a matter of adjusting,” said Ingala. “At the same time, it’s helping us create an audience.”….

Where we’re headed….

The problem for the music industry may actually be its greatest opportunity. Despite the great decline in sales, the Internet has exposed consumers to more music than ever before. But that accessibility has been difficult to monetize.….

The music industry has tried to keep up by licensing ringtones, licensing music on popular Internet radio stations like MySpace Music and Pandora and licensing music videos on YouTube. Digital licensing revenue reached $84 million in 2009, and it is expected to grow substantially in the coming year. (See correction below.)….

Licensing fees don’t make up for the volume of total lost sales, but Gandhi says the fact that the music industry is finally embracing these new technologies and revenue streams means the industry is finally getting it.….

She said the combined effect of interactive multimedia, a growth in digital licensing and services such as Lala, which was bought by Apple in December, will ultimately help give sales a boost.….

“The industry is actively doing a lot of things that are putting us back on the right path,” said RIAA’s Friedlander. “We’re switching to an access model from a purchase model.”….

Forrester forecasts music industry revenues will continue to decline until it reaches about $5.5 billion a year by 2014, as new revenue sources begin to lift sales again.….

Correction: An earlier version of the story incorrectly reported the figure for digital licensing revenue as $84 billion when it should have been $84 million. ….

Source: CNN