response 32 of 165:

Apr 5 22:41 UTC 2002

The dead tree edition of USA Today has an overview story about 
home copying in their business section today.  Little new, but 
a few interesting snippets:
 
"The public is almost evenly divided on whether Internet users have
the right to swap music from CDs online, according to a CNN/USA TODAY/
Gallup poll: 43% say it should be legal, 46% say illegal, with 
11% undecided."

"((CD)) Sales this year are worse.  Total units are down another 12%
vs. the first three months of 2001."   (KRJ adds: Total units were 
down 10% in 2001, but a big chunk of that represented the industry's
decision to wind down CD single production, which is why the 
dollar value only went down 6% or so.  If that 12% decline for 
2002 to date is mostly album sales, then the companies are getting 
walloped much worse than last year.)

Band manager Miles Copeland says banks are turning down 
music companies for loans.

Pam Horowitz, president of NARM (music retailing trade group)
says: "Do we still have a competitively priced product?...
DVD sales have exploded, and it's a product where the price has
come down while the price of CDs has gone up.  If our only response
as an industry is to stop copying of CDs, we may be missing a 
consumer message."   

A few other people in the article mention the usual argument that 
consumers are buying less music because most of what the companies are
flogging right now is crap.   (A big point of support for that position
came from a similar article in the Miami Herald about a week ago, 
which reported again that rock concert attendance is also down.
A falloff in the business of live music indicates that the public's
attention is shifting away from music.)

response 34 of 165:

Apr 14 02:30 UTC 2002

April 6 Billboard, browsed at Borders, has a big lead story:
   "Losses Mount for Music Industry Digital Services":
which seems to be mostly about Pressplay and Musicnet.  
Apparently the losses are mounting to a point where the parent
corporations are getting concerned.  

I wasn't willing to spend $7 to take it home with me, and Billboard
does not put the juicy business news on the web site.   I forgot to 
note if there was any clue as to the number of paying customers for 
the official services.

response 36 of 165:

Apr 15 12:56 UTC 2002

"Music-for-rent" would be a more accurate description.  :)
 
-----
 
A Washington Post writer gets a beta-test version of actual 
DataPlay hardware and pre-recorded music disc.  The reviewer
thinks the technology might have some potential for replacing flash
memory in digital cameras, "but I can't figure out why anybody would
want to buy music this way.  The CD works just fine as is."
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42176-2002Apr13.html

response 38 of 165:

Apr 21 17:22 UTC 2002

Very nice overview article from the Chicago Tribune on the
consolidation in the radio business, and spillover effects into
the record industry and Internet radio.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0204140469apr14.story?coll=
chi-n
ews-hed
"Rocking radio's world"

Quotes:
> Since 1996, Arbitron surveys show that the
> average time spent listening to radio by consumers 
> 12 and older has dropped 9 percent. In the
> last two years, listenership has dropped more than 
> 7 percent, Arbitron says. The young
> especially are tuning out: Teen-age listeners are 
> down 11 percent, and people between the ages
> of 18 and 24 have declined 10 percent.
...
> Playlists at stations across the country 
> continue to shrink, with only about 20 songs a week
> played with any regularity, most from the best-funded 
> major labels. Many commercial stations say
> they play only records approved by their audience
> through extensive market-testing, but this
> practice has led to a numbing sameness of programming, 
> with many of the same records played
> in the same formats from Miami to Seattle. In one week 
> recently, the 40 biggest modern-rock
> stations in the country opened a total of 16 
> slots for new records, and the 45 biggest top-40
> stations added a total of 20. That means that 
> even though more than 30,000 CDs are released
> annually, the vast majority of the songs played 
> at these stations is the same week after week, a
> pool of a few dozen artists who are also seen 
> extensively on video networks such as MTV and
> VH1.

The quotes from the Clear Channel execs, about how they are only there
to serve the public, are particularly nauseating.

The article also reports that (KRJ paraphrasing) the RIAA is starting
to wake up to the idea that destroying the fledgling Web radio business
would be a bad move, in terms of choking off promotional opportunities
for record companies.

response 40 of 165:

Apr 22 04:06 UTC 2002

In fact, there was a cute line in the article -- unfortunately, I don't have
it with me -- about how all the music company mergers allowed them to play
one branch of Time-Warner against another.  It sounds like they were basically
going and asking dad when mom had already said no.  Funny that those mergers
might actually have made it possible for this album to come out.

response 42 of 165:

Apr 22 15:50 UTC 2002

Well, right.  That's why I thought it was so ... ironic?  Am I allowed to call
this irony?  

response 44 of 165:

Apr 23 19:57 UTC 2002

  Also interesting, Salon has a piece today centered around the struggle of
  Joshua (?) Byrd, a music professor at a small college, to get Sony to pay
  royalties on two obscure albums he released in the 1960s (and on their much
  more recent CD reissues.)  He claims that despite the fact that his works
  remain in print (suggesting that they must be selling to someone, though I
  can't imagine who..) Sony pays him no royalties and won't even acknowledge
  his requests for sales figures.

  The story makes it seem that this is common practice in the music industry
  but unless you've got as much money on the line as the Dixie Chicks did
  when they sued Sony that it's rarely economically feasible to collect from
  a stonewalling record company.

  I apologize for not digging up the URL but I've got nine or ten different
  batch MP3 encodes going right now (part of the Great Leap Backwards) and 
  my CPU is thrashing so badly that using Mozilla to find the article would
  probably take 10 minutes of staring at half-rendered screens..

response 46 of 165:

Apr 24 01:13 UTC 2002

Large-scale outlets have always been cheaper than Tower, Virgin, and company.
Back when Tower existed in the downtown Ann Arbor area (which continues to
disintegrate, I might add, and I'm a lot younger than you folk who know what
it was like when it was *really* good), I'd usually browse, perhaps purchase
an item or two that was harder to find, and do my actual CD buying at a place
like Best Buy.  Best Buy's cd selection actually used to be better and more
appealing, in my opinion.  Anyway, I saw little point in actually spending
money there when the same stuff was considerably more affordable elsewhere.

I'm surprised this is even newsworthy. :)

response 48 of 165:

Apr 24 03:20 UTC 2002

Indeed.  Tower and Virgin are not niche stores, though.

response 50 of 165:

Apr 24 18:39 UTC 2002

Mike in resp:41 on Wilco's move from the Reprise imprint to the 
Nonesuch imprint, both within the AOL Time Warner empire:

>  ...but in this case it does
>  sound like the band benefitted from the fact that the acquired labels
>  still retain some degree of independence/individuality

... except that neither Reprise nor Nonesuch were ever independent
labels; both were Warner Bros. divisions since their creation. 

Reprise was originally started so Frank Sinatra could have his own 
label, IIRC, and for many years it was where Warner stuck many of 
its prestige/quirky artists, most notably Neil Young, who I think saved
the label from being killed off when it was floundering some years 
back.  Nonesuch was founded as Warner's classical division in the 
early 1960s and it had a glorious history; in the last ten years or 
so the brand has been repositioned as a world music/serious art label, 
with a lot of licensing of European issues (artists such as Radio 
Tarifa, Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure, Youssou N'Dour).
More recently Nonesuch has picked up Emmylou Harris after the 
main Warners label discarded her following the WRECKING BALL album.

Label "branding" is a fascinating concept... but it's really drifting
here, isn't it?

response 52 of 165:

Apr 24 20:43 UTC 2002

Nonesuch did a lot of folk music of other cultures under their 
"Explorer" series -- what would be called World Music today, though
that term was many years in the future -- but classical music
was why they were founded.  See the many obituaries for 
Teresa Sterne, the record executive who built the label, which
turn up on Google under "nonesuch records teresa sterne".

response 54 of 165:

Apr 25 04:12 UTC 2002

I can't help with (b); I kinda liked Uncle Tupelo but have never warmed
to Wilco, and after their first collaboration with Billy Bragg I 
gave up completely.   I sort of liked Son Volt better (the other 
descendant band from Uncle Tupelo) but I eventually lost track
of them too.

response 56 of 165:

Apr 25 16:02 UTC 2002

Too many "Uncle" bands: Uncle Banzai, Uncle Gizmo, Uncle Tupelo ... 
I no longer remember which is which.