Apple has announced that the iTunes Store has surpassed five billion legal song downloads. This is pretty cool, but hardly a surprise, since iTunes has been the top music retailer in the country since April, even amongst brick and mortar retailers. Regardless, this is still extremely awesome. I pretty much use iTunes exclusively for music purchases unless what I am looking for is not available. How about you?
So apparently EMI announced that they’re going to be releasing several albums on vinyl on August 19th of this year, including stuff by Radiohead, Coldplay, the Beach Boys and John Lennon. Indie kids everywhere are rejoicing (or are complaining that EMI is simply trying to earn a few bucks for the shareholders) whereas some analysts wonder if this is a good decision financially. There’s talk of vinyl being “brought back” in a time where physical media seems to be going away… but the truth is a lot more simple than this. Ready for it?
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Most people don’t give Starbucks enough credit for their entry into the music business. Well, most people don’t really give Starbucks enough credit for anything, but that’s another story. The truth is that when it comes to marketing music, Starbucks has the right idea… and others need to follow.
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I am in no way a fan of The Hills. I have many legitimate reasons for disliking that show. However, I do have to commend MTV for integrating a brilliant method of music marketing intoThe Hills, and possibly other shows as well.
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I’m a big fan of RSS and of giving people the ability to build web services around your data. One of the things I’ve been hoping for was for the record labels to start offering RSS feeds of their tour data.
EMI has gotten all their labels to do it (see Capitol’s artists page), and it appears that Suretone has as done it, too. Suretone is a subsidiary of UMG, and as far as I can tell, unlike EMI, Universal has not implemented this across any of their other labels. If there are others out there that I’m missing, let me know.
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So eMusic has been around for quite some time, but has it changed over the years? How does it fare against iTunes and Amazon? I hadn’t used it for some time, so I went over and grabbed myself a subscription.
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So, we all know that Coldplay released their single Violet Hill as a free MP3 download. What I did not know was that when you gave them your email address, they automatically subscribed you to their newsletter without a disclaimer and without giving you the option to not do this.
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I can’t really think about The Offspring without being reminded of my seventh-grade self blasting Americana at inopportune moments, but let’s put that aside for a second.
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