MADE

A reader commented on this blog several days ago that he was finding it difficult to sell his mp3s on iTunes and Amazon. He asked me if I could give him advice. I replied that no musician in the new media economy can rely on digital music sales to make a living.
One of the [...]

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Abraham Lincoln didn’t know it at the time, but his words captured the genesis of the record industry’s collapse.
50 Cent’s newest album [...]

It’s scary how much influence the RIAA still has on the music world. Ten years after Napster, high music licensing fees are stifling innovation in the online music startup world. Imeem lost tens of millions to licensing fees; a situation that chased off big name venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital. That led to MySpace [...]

Competition is the 800 lb gorilla that dissuades thousands of people from following their dreams. Tech startups are notorious for worrying about it. In the music world, competition used to be a very real threat for aspiring music artists. Now, it’s largely a bogeyman.
What’s changed that is the Internet and its creative destruction of the [...]

I check the Google Analytics stats for this site often. One of the things I’ve noticed is that the top keyword phrase people use to come in through the search engines is “free a&r contacts.” The next five most popular keyword phrases are some variation of a&r contacts.
What this tells me is that there are [...]

Is there a limit to the amount of music that the public will consume? I think the answer to that is no. Take comfort in that because it also means that, theoretically, there is no limit to the number of musical acts that the public will accept. Don’t worry too much about competition.
We used [...]

If I were a record label exec, I’d be worried by the graph below.

It’s based on research conducted by the Times Online Labs. It shows the state of live and recorded music in the UK from 2004-2008. The most striking thing about it is the drastic decline in recorded revenue to record labels; and the [...]