Group items tagged

1. The best approach is slow and cautious. Right now, we are in the jungle. In the jungle, you don't rush blindly ahead. You dip a toe in the sand, and see if you sink. We have no hope of predicting which of these services might catch on. We need to move slowly, with very short-term agreements and see what works and what fails. And we need to be sure not to undermine our other business partners while we do that. Which leads to… 2. We should support our allies and punish our enemies. Rob McDaniels for InGrooves estimates that it takes 150-200 streams of one song to equal the royalty income on a single download. Right now, our industry still relies on the sale of physical product (believe it or not, it's still the primary source of revenue) and on digital downloads. Perhaps streaming is the future. Perhaps not. But we would be very unwise to cut ridiculously low-cost rates to a business model that obviously threatens both physical retailers and iTunes. Let's take care of the people paying our bills. At the same time, we should continue to press ahead with legal efforts against things like Pirate Bay- efforts that are finally starting to show some results. 3. We need to recognize that "bundling" and ad-revenue sharing is a marriage, and it works both ways. If we bundle the cost of music access into the cost of a mobile phone or the sale of a computer, we're now not only in the music business, we're in the electronics business. Any economic factors that hurt the sales of phones and computers will now hurt us as well. 4. Most of all, we need transparency in the negotiations and setting of rates, so that everyone in the music community understands what they're being paid and how it's being calculated.

Street Music How indie are you? Thats a good question to ask, because i believe that there are certain level of indie. I actually really enjoy the street performer, simply because sometimes walking down hollywood blvd. needs a soundtrack. What about the street merchant? At the same time you do have those artists that feel that they can sell you or even worse trick you into buying their product with a few nifty words, i think we're all in agreement on this, but there's nothing that inspires me to reach into my pocket and slip a few dollars like hearing them working for it. When trying to market your music on the street words just don't cut it.

Labels - 0, Songwriters - 1 In a historic deal between labels and songwriters the national music publishers association has come away with a major win in an agreement that will see labels forking out the monies from "pending and unmatched accounts" that are set up in cases where a publisher has not been located by a record label, or an ownership dispute over a song. This is good news for the industry because publishers and labels are finally beginning to see eye to eye.