Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips appeared on The Colbert Report Wednesday night to talk not only about the new Lips album, but also “Do You Realize?,” Oklahoma’s recently dubbed “state rock song.”
Oklahoma: “The Life is Short” State
Archive for the 'music' Category
Imagine that: Someone in the record industry wants more money. Shocking, I know. According to cnet news, music publishers are the latest victims of the digital age. Apparently, they make pennies on the dollar for tracks sold on iTunes and in other digital music stores.
To be fair, I don’t know the complete business model for digital music well enough to say whether music publishers are or are not getting screwed. I do know if these folks are going to get paid more, it’s coming out of our pockets, and as the article points out, the outcry is just now starting to settle from Apple’s move a few months ago to implement the first iTunes Music Store price increase.
The kicker to me is that they want to come after other music “sources” in iTunes as well. These include music in movies and TV shows, streaming radio, and even the 30-second previews for songs in the the store. This just seems a bit greedy to me.
“In the U.S. while we do get paid a mechanical (licensing fee) from ITunes [sic], we are not getting any performance income from Apple yet,” David Renzer, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Publishing Group, said in interview late last month with entertainment-industry publication, Encore. “(On iTunes) you can stream radio, and you can preview (tracks), things that we should be getting paid performance income for.
“Also, if you download a film or TV show,” Renzer continued, “there’s no performance (payment) and typically there’s no mechanical (payment) either.” (from cnet)
It might be true that they don’t get paid for these things, but I really don’t think they should come digging around the digital consumer for money. Talk to the studios about the movie and TV show issue. Talk to the radio stations about streaming radio. As for the 30-second previews, just give it up. We are already paying up to $1.29 per track. Keep pushing this agenda and a lot of people will fall back on much cheaper ways to acquire music, TV shows, and movies, which result in zero royalties.
Oh, and they are so upset that they are going to ask congress to intercede. Good thing congress doesn’t have anything on its plate right now.
Via ZeroPaid.
I hate to see this because I’ve always enjoyed indie record stores (despite the fact that I haven’t lived around one in a long time). Is this the death knell for indie record stores, or more likely, the first major sign of the death of the compact disc as a music medium?
“The Social Media Guide” points to a new Last.fm blog post that discusses their new charge for “International” users to access their streaming radio service.
In order to keep providing the best radio service on the web, we need to ask our listeners from countries other than USA, UK and Germany to subscribe for €3.00 per month. In return you’ll get unlimited access to Last.fm Radio, and a promise that we’ll be hard at work improving the service for years to come.
This isn’t a huge surprise considering the ridiculous royalties charged to Internet radio providers. As Mashable points out, Last.fm competitor Pandora simply cutoff International users. While I think that people generally overreact to a company charging for something it once gave away, I fear this is the nature of the beast when it comes to dealing with music copyright holders. The thing with Last.fm is that they offer so many other ways to discover music that are beyond simple streaming.
CNET announced last week that today it will begin redirecting requests for its music.download.com site to Last.fm. It’s a logical step since they are both CBS Interactive properties and music is what Last.fm is all about. Still, I imagine that there are a lot of music.download.com users will find it a hard transition given the different concepts behind the two sites.
I really like Last.fm and think that they bring a really interesting approach to music discovery. Since more users means more data means better discovery, I hope that this added exposure increases their userbase.
