Despite my relatively positive opinion on eMusic, I have cancelled my membership. It’s not that the service wasn’t good, but rather, it is unnecessary. The biggest problem is that it is not a strong enough store on its own to replace iTunes or Amazon, and at the same time, it does not really complement either of them very well, either.
Earlier today when deleting old domains and such on my server, I accidentally deleted this blog in its entirety. I also did not figure this out until about an hour ago. Nevertheless, it is back up and running now. But since I had no backups, it was completely rebuilt, i.e. some links may have changed. I’m setting up automatic backups on the server as we speak, and nothing like this should ever happen again. My apologies for the downtime and the inconvenience.
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?
Everyone’s favorite1 burger joint is getting some interesting publicity today. First it was the guy who lost 80 pounds eating nothing but McDonald’s, but now it’s something a little more related to new media. McDonald’s is holding a public contest to write the jingle for their next television commercial. According to the website, there’s really no rules other than the inclusion of the following Grammy-winning lyrics: Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.
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?
I have renamed this blog New Media Economist. It just makes sense to talk about the entertainment industry as a whole, rather than keeping a whole other blog about the film industry. So enjoy, as this will also likely mean more content, more often.
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.
If you know me at all, you probably know that back in high school, I co-founded and taught Video Productions, an award-winning filmmaking program. To this day, I still help out, and still work on the site and keep the YouTube page relatively up to date.
Not too long ago, Video Productions got its first copyright claim, this one coming from UMG. However, instead of the video being taken offline, given a cease and desist, or being sued, we received the following:
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.