By RYAN NAKASHIMA (AP) – 22 hours ago

LOS ANGELES — There’s no more need to own songs before being able to listen to them at your convenience.

No more buying music to download onto computers and mobile devices — and certainly no more stacking CDs on shelves. Virtually the whole world of recorded music is at your fingertips at any time, for a subscription, over the Internet.

Services that make this scenario possible haven’t proven very popular yet. But new price cuts and advances in technology could finally drive the idea to the mainstream.

For instance, Rhapsody International Inc. and Thumbplay Inc. now offer the ability, for $10 a month, to choose and play almost any song or album instantly on a mobile device that can connect to the Internet over a cell phone network.

Justin Darcy, a 32-year-old sales director at a resort company in San Francisco, says he consumes so much music it would cost him $10,000 a year if he didn’t have a Rhapsody plan. He calls it “one of the greatest values in consumer goods I’ve ever come across.”

Given the obvious benefit of being able to listen to millions of songs as if they were in your personal stash, why haven’t services like these gotten more use?

Partly because of poor marketing, previously clunky execution and the fact that people are more familiar with compact discs and downloading songs from Apple Inc.’s iTunes music store. People who spend less than $120 a year on music also wouldn’t see the subscription plans as such a great deal.

But the music providers hope they can get more customers by making the services easier to use, taking advantage of increasingly robust cell phone networks to deliver the music. And in general, consumers are getting more comfortable using many kinds of services that rely on files stored on distant computers and accessed remotely, a concept known as “cloud computing.”

The subscription services have come down in price — they generally were $15 a month until recently — and broader adoption could push prices lower still. One big boost could come if Apple begins offering such a service. In December it bought an online music retailer called Lala.com that offers access to songs that users can store in a digital locker. Apple declined to comment on its plans.

The subscription services funnel royalties to recording companies, which are eager for new revenue streams to replace CD sales. That once-lucrative business has been declining for years as consumers have shifted to buying individual tracks or pirating music altogether.

“We are very bullish on the prospects of subscriptions over time,” says Michael Nash, executive vice president of digital strategy for Warner Music Group Corp.

One problem is finding the right price for the service and having as many people as possible sign up. If only hard-core music fans subscribe because it lets them reduce their spending, the music industry might end up cannibalizing its other sales.

Right now the median U.S. music buyer spends about $80 a year — not enough to make these new services a revolutionary deal, according to Sonal Gandhi, a Forrester Research media analyst. More than half of consumers don’t spend anything at all.

She predicts the number of U.S. subscribers for such plans will rise from 2.1 million now to 5 million by 2014. Why not more? Among other things, “not everyone wants to be tied to a monthly bill,” she says. One solution could be for wireless carriers to bundle a music subscription with their monthly services. Nearly 450,000 Vodafone customers in Europe signed up for unlimited access to 2 million songs last year when the plan was added to a wireless data package for 3 euros ($4) a month.

Previous music subscription plans had another problem: They made consumers download songs to their computers and transfer them to approved mobile devices — and none included the iPhone or iPod.

That’s changing. A $10 monthly plan from MOG Inc. will let people stream music instantly on iPhones and devices that run Google Inc.’s Android software, beginning in May.

Users can make unlimited downloads to the device so they have access to music on a plane or in other settings without wireless coverage. MOG’s service also has an intelligent shuffle function that lets people control whether randomly selected songs come from just one artist or many similar sounding ones.

MOG’s CEO and founder, David Hyman, predicts such services will prove so popular that they’ll replace CDs and downloads eventually.

“If you’re the kind of consumer that spends $6 to $10 a month on music, this just blows everything else away,” Hyman says.

Another new service, Thumbplay, works on several BlackBerry models, and there are plans to launch it on Android devices and iPhones soon, also for $10 a month. To ease iTunes users into the service, the application can copy iTunes playlists immediately over the air, saving potential converts the trouble of remaking them.

“The first thing that we want to do is just accept that probably 100 million people out there are using iTunes and make it easy for them to make the transition,” says CEO Evan Schwartz.

Each of these services has a huge catalog that includes songs from all the major recording companies and many independents. MOG has 7 million tracks. Thumbplay boasts 8 million and Rhapsody claims 9.5 million. None, however, has access to bands that have chosen to remain away from digital outlets, such as the Beatles.

There are other ways to listen to music from the cloud, of course. But subscription plans are needed if you want to pick exact songs or albums.

For instance, free services like Pandora’s Internet radio allow you to select tunes by genre or theme and hear them on portable devices, but you can’t choose the precise song or artist you want. Online music services such as MySpace Music allow you to select specific songs or albums — for free, with the site supported by advertising — but you can listen to the tracks only on a computer.

No distributor has been able to combine the elements of Pandora and MySpace Music and launch a free, on-demand, mobile music service. Advertisers aren’t yet willing to pay enough to cover the higher royalties that recording companies charge for mobile song streams.

That leaves many people in the music business hoping that the marriage of subscription plans to better mobility will be the spark that helps reverse the industry’s decline.

“The Holy Grail is going to be cross-platform, meaning that one subscription lets me hear it on my connected device, on my home computer, on my stereo, in my car,” says Donald Passman, a music business lawyer in Los Angeles and author of “All You Need to Know About the Music Business.”

That multi-device capability was the appeal Rhapsody’s service held for Alex Barberis, a 27-year-old software engineer in Miami.

Barberis got a Rhapsody subscription as a Christmas present from his brother, but he was about to cancel the plan because the website was slow and he didn’t have an approved device on which to transfer downloads. However, Barberis changed his mind after Rhapsody released an iPhone application that allows unlimited streaming of 9.5 million songs for $9.99 a month on iPhones and Android devices and works with home stereo systems and in cars.

Barberis says the service isn’t perfect. It hiccups if he loses cell phone reception in his car. But Rhapsody says it will fix that problem soon by allowing songs to be stored on devices for playback outside of cell phone coverage.

“I think overall I’m probably going to try it out for a little while more,” Barberis says.

Source: Google

If you don’t put the titles on your songs, I cannot save two Track 1s into the same file.  I have to make separate folders.  & then I’m not sure what song is what track & I have to take the time to RENAME your song tracks.

& anyways, it always, ALWAYS looks much more professional when any music person opens a CD of songs and sees all the titles on their computer instead of Track 1, Track 2, Track 3 and so on.

Take the time songwriters = and do it right.  Put your titles on each track, and your band’s name or your name.  Composer and performer’s names.  CD title.  All the reference information.  You will then come across as a music professional 
 

If the attempt to combat illegal downloading of copyrighted music and illicit filesharing is taking a “carrot and stick” approach, then the Trustmark is the carrot. The stick will be provided by the Digital Economy Bill, which is likely to be rushed through Parliament before the election. The Bill proposes powers to disconnect people from the internet for persistent filesharing and to close down sites that are offering copyrighted material illegally.

The limited opportunity for a Commons debate on the Bill has angered many, including some internet service providers and several consumer groups. The Open Rights Group says that more than 10,000 people have written to their MPs to complain about the disconnection plans, which they say are disproportionate and open to misuse.

The music industry says nobody would be disconnected without several warnings and the right to appeal and dismisses such concerns as “scaremongering”. The fight against music piracy has been going on for more than a decade with limited success. The pirates had the web to themselves at first because the music industry was slow to wake up to the potential of the internet and hampered by the need to clear legal services with a huge range of rights holders. It took Apple to drive legitimate internet music into the mainstream. By combining the massively popular iPod, the iTunes music store and some tough negotiating with record labels, Apple built an online music service that still dominates the market today.
 
However, it’s a service that simply replicates the offline world. iTunes is a music shop: you pay, you receive, you own – just like buying a CD at the shops. More recently a range of music services have started that use the internet for more than just delivering files. Streaming services, such as Spotify and We7, remove the need for you to own and store the music.

The music is stored on a server – in ‘the cloud’ – and users can stream it to their computer without charge in return for having their listening broken up by adverts. Subscribers can turn the ads off and access their music from a mobile phone. Demand for Spotify is so great that Daniel Ek, its founder and CEO, says “on certain days we are consuming more internet capacity than Sweden as a country”. Spotify deals with this by using peer-to-peer technology. Peer-to-peer services don’t require all of the data to be streamed from a central server but instead spread the load to other users on the network. It’s an approach that has been taken by illicit filesharing sites, in part because it makes it harder to track down filesharers.

The use of the word ’sharing’ is important because that’s an intrinsic part of the appeal. People naturally want to share things that they find interesting and that includes music. Instinctively the music industry wanted to prevent that at first. If your business model is based on selling songs then you need to ensure that everyone who wants your song has to come to you to get it. Daniel Ek says that the new version of Spotify, which is due for release some time in the next few months, will make sharing much more integral to the experience. Next month a new service, mflow, will be launched that puts sharing at the heart of the service. Without its community element mflow is just like the iTunes music store. You can search for tracks, listen to 30-second snippets and then pay to download them.

However, the service has a Twitter-like element that allows you to follow people and for them to follow you back. You can “flow” music to your followers, which allows them to hear the entire song – not just the 30-second snippet. If they buy it you get 20 per cent of the price, which you can use to buy more music. Once you begin following a few people on mflow your in-box soon fills up with shared tracks, each accompanied by a short message – of 140 characters, like Twitter – from the person who shared it. Pretty soon you have your own personal radio station, programmed by your friends. It’s the first internet music service I’ve come across that has no real offline equivalent.

If the attempt to combat illegal downloading of copyrighted music and illicit filesharing is taking a “carrot and stick” approach, then the Trustmark is the carrot. The stick will be provided by the Digital Economy Bill, which is likely to be rushed through Parliament before the election. The Bill proposes powers to disconnect people from the internet for persistent filesharing and to close down sites that are offering copyrighted material illegally. The limited opportunity for a Commons debate on the Bill has angered many, including some internet service providers and several consumer groups.

The Open Rights Group says that more than 10,000 people have written to their MPs to complain about the disconnection plans, which they say are disproportionate and open to misuse. The music industry says nobody would be disconnected without several warnings and the right to appeal and dismisses such concerns as “scaremongering”. The fight against music piracy has been going on for more than a decade with limited success. The pirates had the web to themselves at first because the music industry was slow to wake up to the potential of the internet and hampered by the need to clear legal services with a huge range of rights holders. It took Apple to drive legitimate internet music into the mainstream.

By combining the massively popular iPod, the iTunes music store and some tough negotiating with record labels, Apple built an online music service that still dominates the market today. However, it’s a service that simply replicates the offline world. iTunes is a music shop: you pay, you receive, you own – just like buying a CD at the shops. More recently a range of music services have started that use the internet for more than just delivering files. Streaming services, such as Spotify and We7, remove the need for you to own and store the music.

The music is stored on a server – in ‘the cloud’ – and users can stream it to their computer without charge in return for having their listening broken up by adverts. Subscribers can turn the ads off and access their music from a mobile phone. Demand for Spotify is so great that Daniel Ek, its founder and CEO, says “on certain days we are consuming more internet capacity than Sweden as a country”. Spotify deals with this by using peer-to-peer technology.

Peer-to-peer services don’t require all of the data to be streamed from a central server but instead spread the load to other users on the network. It’s an approach that has been taken by illicit filesharing sites, in part because it makes it harder to track down filesharers. The use of the word ’sharing’ is important because that’s an intrinsic part of the appeal. People naturally want to share things that they find interesting and that includes music. Instinctively the music industry wanted to prevent that at first. If your business model is based on selling songs then you need to ensure that everyone who wants your song has to come to you to get it.

Daniel Ek says that the new version of Spotify, which is due for release some time in the next few months, will make sharing much more integral to the experience. Next month a new service, mflow, will be launched that puts sharing at the heart of the service. Without its community element mflow is just like the iTunes music store. You can search for tracks, listen to 30-second snippets and then pay to download them. However, the service has a Twitter-like element that allows you to follow people and for them to follow you back. You can “flow” music to your followers, which allows them to hear the entire song – not just the 30-second snippet. If they buy it you get 20 per cent of the price, which you can use to buy more music.

Once you begin following a few people on mflow your in-box soon fills up with shared tracks, each accompanied by a short message – of 140 characters, like Twitter – from the person who shared it. Pretty soon you have your own personal radio station, programmed by your friends. It’s the first internet music service I’ve come across that has no real offline equivalent. The key will be getting enough people on board to make it work.

It’s no longer possible to “sell out” — at least, not within a certain time-cherished understanding of the term. Rockers, rappers and up-and-coming pop titans of all stripes are licensing music and image as an integral part of brand-building, which largely has usurped selling music and concert tickets as many musicians’ professional end goal.

Consider Chris Brown’s smash hit “Forever,” which cracked the Top 10 in seven countries in 2008 (before his career-derailing assault on Rihanna) and went double platinum. At the start of the song’s video, Brown is shown sliding a piece of gum into his mouth before heading out for a night on the town. On “Forever’s” chorus, he croons: ” ‘Cause we only got one night / Double your pleasure, double your fun.” Turns out the song was commissioned by Wrigley to promote — you guessed it — Doublemint gum. Three months after releasing the single, the chewing gum conglomerate aired its “reveal”: a TV commercial version of “Forever” featuring Brown singing about gum and dancing with a pack of Doublemint. The spot generated outcry among music purists, but marketers greeted the spots with awe.

“When the reveal happened, some people got upset,” recalled Steve Stoute, founder of the firm Translation Consultation & Brand Imaging. “But the number of spins went up and Doublemint went up in awareness.” Stoute, who was behind “Forever,” also is responsible for Justin Timberlake’s “I’m Lovin’ It” spots for McDonald’s as well as Beyoncé’s endorsement deal for Tommy Hilfiger’s True Star perfume and the career game plan to treat Lady Gaga “like a brand” in her own right. “Using entertainment assets to introduce products is a platform that needed to get exploited,” said Stoute, a former executive vice president of Interscope Records. “The lines needed to be blurred. When done correctly, there’s consumer acceptance.” Stoute said his marketing company gets several calls a week from “major artists” in pursuit of their own “Forever.

” It’s not selling out, he argues, if there’s an authentic relationship between the music and the product being hawked. “Marketing isn’t successful if the consumer feels he or she is being sold something,” Stoute said. Personal favorite products Mariah Carey’s most recent CD, “Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel,” was accompanied by a 34-page mini-magazine bearing the R&B diva’s image and emblazoned with an Elle magazine logo. It’s a co-production between Carey’s label Island Def Jam Music Group and Elle that features such brands as Angel Champagne, Elizabeth Arden and the Bahamas Board of Tourism intermingled with lighter-than-air Mariah-based editorial featurettes: “VIP access to her sexy love life,” “Fantasy: the five-time Grammy winner goes behind the scenes of her new drama.” Carey pointed out she is personally or commercially invested in everything advertised.

“Angel Champagne, I guess I’m part owner. The Bahamas, we have a house down there,” Carey explained, between bites of caviar at the Polo Lounge. “It all has to do with things that are organic to me. And honestly? I’m a big kid. I thought it would be cute.” Island Def Jam is exploring similar branded CD booklet deals for artists including Kanye West, Rihanna and Bon Jovi. It all makes the Who’s rollicking 1967 concept album “The Who Sell Out” — which featured faux commercials and cover art depicting band members shilling for deodorant and baked beans — appear prescient. (In further irony, the Who’s epochal 1965 single “My Generation” is currently featured in a commercial for Flo TV.)

Scott Lipps, owner and founder of the New York modeling agency One Management, recalls a time not long ago when indie rock acts would sooner pack in their skinny jeans than appear in fashion ads. But now, Lipps has augmented the success of his agency (which represents such A-list glamazons as Bar Refaeli and Claudia Schiffer) with its offshoot One (M), dedicated to help place rock and pop stars in precisely such commercial environments. Among them: Alison Mosshart of the Kills and Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, who were featured in ads for the fashion line J. Lindeberg, and the New York pop-rock band the Virgins, who were photographed for a Tommy Hilfiger campaign.

“People’s views on endorsements, doing magazine stuff — any way to reach fans — it’s all changed. It’s not taboo anymore,” Lipps said. Lipps, formerly drummer for ’80s rock group Black Cherry, remains attentive to the alliance of brand and band. “I’m never going to ask a very cool band to do business with a brand that they would never associate with,” said Lipps. “It’s about finding that right fit.” After the rock quartet OK Go broke into mainstream consciousness with the homemade video for its 2006 single “Here It Goes Again” (featuring the band members performing a synchronized routine on exercise treadmills), they were bombarded with offers to re-create the sequence for TV commercials.

The group developed what frontman Damian Kulash calls OK Go’s “hell-no criterion”: “If it’s a product we feel is demeaning or that cannibalizes the meaning or artistry of our song,” he explained. Still, the band has remained receptive to overtures from corporate America. Last year, the musicians appeared in print ads and billboards for Banana Republic — its spring fashion line campaign that also included such artists as Liz Phair, Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba and Sara Bareilles — attired in natty suits, playing their instruments.

“The recording industry has so entirely bottomed out, advertising is one of the only distribution methods that still works,” Kulash said after returning from Japan, where he did a photo shoot for the fashion brand Uniqlo. “The music side has a deep ambivalence. It’s a pretty major paradigm shift that requires a rethinking of how we see what we do.” He added: “I wish we never had to get in bed with that stuff. It doesn’t feel particularly good to wear the marketing hat. But our record label isn’t paying to put up billboards across the country.” It’s become fashionable Fashion designer John Varvatos faced a similar reluctance when he approached Ryan Adams about appearing in print ads and billboards for his streetwise clothing line in 2005.

But after convincing the alt-country singer-songwriter that there would be “nothing fakey about him appearing in the clothes,” Varvatos went on to land Iggy Pop, members of Velvet Revolver and Cheap Trick, Perry Ferrell of Jane’s Addiction and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry for subsequent ads. Varvatos said attitudes toward commodifying stardom have changed. “I was besieged by people wanting to hook up with us,” Varvatos said. “There are a lot of people coming after us now. It’s almost the opposite problem now. We have to filter out.” The designer was quick to dispel the notion, however, that the performers in his ads were selling out their images in return for some hefty payday.

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Willie Davis for The New York TimesThe CareFusion Jazz Festival lineup emphasizes up-and-comers like Mostly Other People Do the Killing, with Peter Evans on trumpet, Jon Irabagon on saxophone and Moppa Elliott on bass.

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty ImagesTalib Kweli of the jazz-hip-hop collective Revive da Live.

“More than 20 times in the past year,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. In Brooklyn, which he reckons he hasn’t visited more than two dozen times since 1960, he’s been to Zebulon and Barbès and the tiny Puppets. He’s been spending time at the Jazz Gallery, on Hudson Street in the South Village. And there he was last month during the crammed, chaotic Winter Jazzfest, settled in for a long night at Kenny’s Castaways on Bleecker Street.

“I’ve got to change my way of listening,” he said. “I’ve got to listen to what the musicians are trying to tell me and whether they’re doing it well.”

Some of what he has heard will be found in the first CareFusion Jazz Festival, a major jazz festival in New York this summer, produced by Mr. Wein. It will run from June 17 to 26, and its schedule is to be released on Thursday at carefusionjazz.com.

All this reconnaissance is a change of course. For a long time Mr. Wein ran the fairly formulaic, big-ticket JVC Jazz Festival in New York and relied on employees of his production company, Festival Productions, for programming ideas. The festival imploded under debt last year after Mr. Wein sold Festival Productions. But now he has a new (if smaller) company, New Festival Productions, and he’s taking on much of the programming himself.

The sponsorship by CareFusion, a medical technology company, amounts to about a half-million dollars, said Mr. Wein, almost comparable to what JVC provided. That will cover severalCarnegie Hall bookings that are his predictable standby hits: the pianists Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock, the bossa-nova pioneer João Gilberto, the trumpeter Chris Botti. But the schedule also includes a lot of club concerts by jazz’s younger challengers: Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society; the quartet Mostly Other People Do the Killing; a large ensemble culled from the jazz-hip-hop collective Revive da Live, including the rapper Talib Kweli; a new trio of the pianist Jason Moran, the guitarist Mary Halvorson and the trumpeter Ron Miles; and bands led by Eric Revis, Matana Roberts and Craig Taborn, among others.

“What is jazz today?” Mr. Wein ruminated. “It’s a different world. As a producer I have to recognize that. I don’t have a lot of older people in my festival now, except at Carnegie. I don’t want the old names this year. I’ll do them another year.”

The new festival’s emphasis on clubs is significant. In the JVC days Mr. Wein concentrated his bookings in larger theaters: Carnegie, the Beacon, variousLincoln Center rooms. As an add-on, in some years he approached Manhattan clubs like the Village Vanguard, offered them free festival advertising and let them book their own rooms as usual. In return, the clubs would hang the festival’s banner on their stages.

“JVC became basically a Carnegie Hall festival, with a few little side things,” he said.

But this year Mr. Wein is consulting with the club owners, paying the musicians and letting the clubs keep the door money. In one case — the Jazz Gallery — he’s helping book the club throughout the festival and putting on a larger concert at Symphony Space by an ad-hoc band called the Jazz Gallery All-Stars: a crew of excellent musicians associated with the small club, including Roy Hargrove, Claudia Acuña, Ambrose Akinmusire and Gerald Clayton.

The focus on clubs is a good sign for the festival: it is an investment in jazz’s daily working life. Because clubs are where jazz culture lives, this move seems likely to benefit everyone — musicians, clubs, audiences and maybe even Mr. Wein.

“But we won’t make any money,” he cautioned. “If I break even I’ll be very happy. I’m just doing things to do them. I’m not finished, and I’m not tired anymore. I got a burst of energy.”

Source: NYTimes

Steve Lamacq has urged the BBC to reconsider plans to close radio station 6 Music in 2011.

The digital channel is due to cease programming next year along with Asian Network as part of an overhaul of the broadcaster.

Writing on his Going Deaf For A Living blog, Lamacq accused BBC audio and music director Tim Davie of a “sleight of hand” in his recent backing of the plans to close 6 Music.

Lamacq said: “Davie maintains that having nine standalone BBC radio stations is too many (when I think what he means is there’s ‘too many brands’ and losing a couple will make it easier to market what they have left - while also putting on a show for people who are demanding the BBC’s blood. We are a radio station up for a public flogging!)

“The inference from Davie is that they are considering moving some 6 Music shows, possibly to Radio 2, to give them ‘a bigger audience’. But given that Radio 2 has recently been told to become ‘more distinctive’ and create more programmes for the over-60s, that doesn’t look particularly practical.”

He added of the station: “Don’t scrap it now before its fully discovered its true identity. Instead, in five years’ time, take the praise for what it will have grown into and achieved: an independently-minded station on the periphery of pop.

“A station which understands and celebrates our musical history - while always looking to the future You might be surprised.”

Source: Digital Spy