A profitless Web site started by three 20-somethings after a late-night dinner party is sold for more than a billion, instantly turning dozens of its employees into paper millionaires. It sounds like a tale from the late 1990s dot-com bubble, but it happened Monday.
Everything Louder Than Everything Else
"There’s something . . . sinister in audio that is causing our listeners fatigue and even pain while trying to enjoy their favorite music. It has been propagated by A&R departments for the last eight years: The complete abuse of compression in mastering (forced on the mastering engineers against their will and better judgment)."
So, Google buys YouTube for a reported $1.65 billion in stock, seizing control of what Defamer calls "the world’s largest online repository of Brokeback Mountain parodies, fake teenager video journals, and promotional clips for NBC’s exciting new slate of Fall programming."
Digital Rights Managements hurts paying customers, destroys Fair Use rights, renders customers’ investments worthless, and can always be defeated. Why are consumers and publishers being forced to use DRM?
Entertainment Industry Exec Acknowledges That Piracy Is Competition
For a while we’ve been saying that whatever media companies think about piracy, from a moral or legal point of view, it doesn’t change the fact that they must learn to compete against it
Tower Records to be liquidated
After a lengthy auction stretching over two days, a federal bankruptcy judge on Friday approved the sale of Sacramento-based Tower Records to Great American Group, which plans to liquidate the music retailer.
iTunes Inspires Changes in Music Industry
Imagine a world where musicians keep the copyright to their music and make $5 or $6 per album sold instead the current $1 or $2. This is a model being proposed by Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music Group. With sales of CDs continuing a downward spiral, he realizes that the music industry needs to make some changes.
When Are We Going To Let The Hippies Back Into The Record Store?
So let me go ahead and say out loud what everybody has known for at least a couple of years now: The music industry is officially dead. What blows my mind is not only the way nobody will come right out and acknowledge the obvious, but the way those who do sort of see the writing on the proverbial wall try to rationalize just what the hell happened.
Nearly Unknown Music Store Beats iTunes for UK Music Award
Bleep.com is a UK-based online music store in the tradition of Emusic.com. Like Emusic.com, it offers a variety of music as DRM-free MP3 files from a large selection of independent labels. But Bleep.com has improved on Emusic.com and is offering full-length previews of tracks before purchase. Files downloaded from Bleep.com are encoded as 320kbps MP3s instead of 192kbps files offered by Emusic.com for better sound quality. Blogs can even embed track previews in posts, like this:
MySpace is greyspace — mostly over 35
According to comScore, More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older, as the Site’s Demographic Composition Continues to Shift. It’s 51.6%, in fact. ComScore says:
Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock
"Google Inc announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community," says the Google Blog.