Our Digital Music

This Week’s Music News You Can Use

by bhoughton on January 19th, 2008

• The world’s 4th largest record label group EMI announced it would cut 1500-2000 jobs or one third of its workforce in the next 90 days.  Details emerged of a new plan to spend more on artists development and less on marketing. (Good for new music and bad for  the established acts we love.) Several major acts including Coldplay, Robbie Williams and The Verve said they would delay delivering new releases until EMI proved they would support them and The Rolling Stones departed the label for Universal as Radiohead had earlier.
• Fewer indies on imeem and Lala: Hypebot broke the story that digital music distributor IODA was telling its labels that it was unable to make deal with imeem, Lala and some other Music 2.0 companies because of low royalty payments.
• Borders Books & Music is leaving Amazon for online fulfillment starting in April and is considering its own mp3 only store.
• Steve Jobs of Apple’s big new product announcement this week had no news for music fans (see all 90 minutes of the speech summarized in a fun 60 second video) causing Hypebot to ask “Has Apple Gone As Far As It Can Go With Music?“
• Ever wish you could start your own record label or invest in a great unknown band.? Well you can. The UK’s SliceThePie.com claims its users will launch more new bands in 2008 than three of the four major label groups.
• Check out this video overview of Creative Commons which some believe is the future of all music.
• Do you use Usenet to share songs? A Usenet provider won a case against EMI in German courts saying it was not responsible for file sharing on the network.

POSTED IN: Music News You Can Use