I was looking at music sales for the week of 1/3/10. Susan Boyle’s “I Dreamed a Dream” was on its sixth week and sold 3, 103, 828 copies. Mega-selling records like this are becoming an anomaly, but I think there’ll continue to be a place for them in our culture because people still like a [...]
Continue reading...Monday, January 11, 2010
I was involved with a group of guys several years ago trying to start up a record label. There were four of us. We had world-class production talent and managed to recruit two very talented hip hop and pop artists. All we wanted was to sign a distribution deal with a major label. The quality [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, January 7, 2010
The other day a reader asked how one goes about dominating a niche market in order to make the money that would make it worthwhile to make music. It’s an honest question, but it’s based on the faulty assumption that you have to dominate a market to make money. The reason that the whole market domination [...]
Continue reading...Monday, January 4, 2010
Revolutions on the level of the one brought about by the Internet happen rarely. At most, once or twice a century. This one’s a big one. Few industries have been untouched. And it’s just getting started. Perhaps no industry has seen the degree of upheaval that the music industry has. We’re going to see a [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, December 30, 2009
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 [...]
Continue reading...Sunday, December 13, 2009
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 [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, December 8, 2009
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 [...]
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Monday, January 18, 2010
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