shouting loudly

This Harvard Crimson interview with Girl Talk is quite good. Here’s a relevant gem: 13. FM: A significant aspect of the narrative out there about you deals with the legality of your music, which uses samples from other artists without permission. Have you ever even been sued? GT: We’ve had no problems. I feel that [...]

The Wired blog Underwire appears ready to declare music-protecting DRM dead in light of Sony BMG’s decision to begin selling some tracks in the unprotected MP3 format. Since Sony was the last holdout among the big four record labels, this is indeed big news; that said, I remain skeptical that the music industry will completely [...]

In two different news stories summarizing the latest Nielsen Soundscan music sales report, the music industry is cast as growing at a remarkable clip or continuing its long, slow decline. Variety takes the latter tack, moaning, “Album sales take a tumble in 2007.” In contrast, the Centre Daily Times celebrates the growth in total sales [...]

From the same Wired commentator who recently celebrated the slow death of music DRM, Eliot Van Buskirk now considers the impact of the vinyl resurgence on CDs. The argument is almost certainly overstated, and he makes no good causal connection between the still-sparse (albeit growing) amount of vinyl and turntable sales, but I enjoyed reading [...]

In a speech to the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, Warner Music chief Edgar Bronfman warned the mobile industry not to make the music industry’s mistakes in failing to satisfy consumer wishes: “We used to fool ourselves,’ he said. “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected [...]

On Thursday, a federal jury in Minnesota found a woman liable for uploading 24 songs via the peer-to-peer network Kazaa, ordering her to pay $220,000. The volume of online discussion of this case is unsurprisingly large, but I thought it would be worth highlighting some of the coverage, especially from CNet and Ars Technica. CNet [...]

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, an excellent profile of music mogul Rick Rubin suggests Sony’s recent hiring of Rubin as Columbia Records co-head just might save both the company and the music industry. Rubin certainly seems bent on changing the music industry. He sounds like a Free Culture activist, scolding the industry for [...]

Here’s a minilink to a NYT story about Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s new South Park deal (worth roughly $75m over 4 years), in which they get a share of ad revenue and seek to take the show online–in other words, to move on from Viacom’s 20th-Century business model. Let me spoil the best part [...]

In a move the Times describes “as a boiling over of the long-simmering tensions between Mr. Jobs and the major record labels,” Universal Music Group (UMG) has declined to renew its annual iTunes contract. The reasons are simple enough: the music industry wants some tracks to cost more than $.99, while Apple likes the one-price-fits-all [...]

Interesting article at the Independent about giving away free music downloads: The record industry has reached a strange pass when it makes more economic sense to give away an entire album than to spend the money needed to persuade people to buy it. But, when it comes to the process of downloading, it seems that [...]