With most other businesses, if a supplier makes unreasonable demands, a retailer can turn to other providers. Since copyright law gives record labels and publishers a government-granted monopoly, no such option is possible with music. Digital vendors have only two options: Accept the terms or not include those songs in their offering.

It’s a ridiculous situation that innovative companies like Spotify are beholden to such lazy companies as the major record labels. The terms of their deals are so laughably one-sided that it’s almost unbelievable. Could you imagine going into a “normal” business negotiation with these?

Hopefully, as time goes on, and the majors’ artist rosters dwindle from relevant new acts eschewing them, the tables will turn. Yes, the majors’ will always have their catalog, but if things continue on their current path, they may be forced to license out the catalog at a discounted rate in order to stay relevant.

via GigaOM.

Because of a proposed class action settlement, Ticketmaster is being forced to credit $1.50 per ticket order (up to 17 orders) to customers due to the fact that they profited off of “processing fees” without declaring as much.
And despite the reparations, Ticketmaster can continue to profit off transactions — they just have to say they’re doing so on their website.
According to court documents, the original claim, filed October 21, 2003, also implicates UPS’ delivery price for expedited delivery of tickets as deceptive. Those part of the UPS subclass of the suit are entitled to an additional $5.00 credit per ticket. Both credits are in the form of vouchers, which can be redeemed a maximum of two at a time.

Sooooo you’re telling us that we can only redeem $3 of vouchers at a time? (Assuming we never bought expedited shipping) Great, now I only have to go to 8.5 overpriced events in order to fully utilize the $22.50 windfall I’m getting for being overcharged at every event I’ve been to in the past decade!

via Yahoo! Finance.

I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked. If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it. And so now we all get to know that about people and stuff. I’m really glad I put this out here this way and I’ll certainly do it again.

Really glad to see that Louis CK’s “experiment” of making it as easy and affordable as possible for fans to buy his product was successful. Who would have thought that treating your fans well and not overcharging them for DRM-saddled content was a good idea? Sure, he would have made more for himself if he let a large corporation handle the sales, but the goodwill he’s getting here will more than make up for it down the road.

via Louis CK.net.

We’ve been waiting for years for someone to seamlessly wed editorial content like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork’s lists and reviews to a deep music backend, and this is a great step in that direction. These beta apps, though, are merely a first step, and don’t fully reflect the deep archives, sorting features, and knowledge of these sites yet, and we’re hoping to see that in future versions.

If I’m in a pinch for time to get some new music, oftentimes I’ll just troll Pitchfork’s best new music section for stuff to listen to on Spotify. With the Pitchfork App, I can listen to the album right there on the same page of the review. It’s awesome and time-saving. Houston is right in that many of the apps are bare-bones as of now, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction and we’re truly seeing a killer music app that combines content curation with instant gratification start to take shape.

From a business standpoint, it was brilliant for Spotify to bring the app makers to the Spotify client, rather than the other way around. It ensures that people will be Spotify users first and foremost.

You can try out Spotify apps out for yourself by downloading a preview client here. (Shame on Spotify for not linking to this on their Apps product page!)

via The Verge.

Yeah, me neither. That’s a breathtakingly high number, especially for someone who is “just a DJ.” To put it in perspective, that would make his annual salary higher than anyone in the NBA, save Kobe Bryant (who makes $24.8 million a year).

But you know what? Good for him. The dude has worked his ass off since the mid-eighties to get to here he’s at today. He tours constantly and loves what he does. He’s clearly good at what he does, including marketing himself, his music, and establishing relationships with his fans.

Witness Tiësto, the stage name of the Dutch disc jockey, producer and composer Tijs Michiel Verwest, the headliner on Friday, Ultra’s opening night. Though he’s never had a crossover radio hit and his solo albums sell modestly, Tiësto is a major international star, as confirmed by one familiar evaluation: His annual income apparently exceeds $20 million.

“Yeah. Could be that,” he said without a trace of affect recently by phone. “Before taxes and costs.”

via WSJ.com.

Let’s just hope that the only reason Apple and Google are taking this long to put out their streaming music services is that they’re really making it something compelling to users.

From Playstation Blog:

In addition to PlayStation 3, you may also enjoy Music Unlimited on your network-enabled BRAVIA TV, Blu-Ray Disc player, Sony VAIO or other PC and coming soon to Sony’s other mobile devices, including PSP. Music Unlimited will be available later this afternoon Pacific Standard Time (PST) for 30-day free trial of the Premium service, with monthly subscriptions of Premium at $9.99 or Basic at $3.99. For more information about Music Unlimited, check out the press release.

via Access Millions of Music Tracks on PlayStation Network with Music Unlimited – Available Today – PlayStation Blog.

Imagine if the RIAA went digital in the late 90′s, early 00′s. To borrow an Arcade Fire lyric, they’d have mountains beyond mountains.

via Business Insider CHART OF THE DAY: The Death Of The Music Industry.

“We felt the album was the best we’d done, but there wasn’t a single,” the drummer says. “Everyone, including Brian (Burton, aka Danger Mouse), told us that there is nothing that will change your career more than getting a record played on radio. You can make all the great records you want, but your audience will stay basically the same. There is a limit to how far you can go without a radio hit. So we spent 14 hours total over two days working on one song; we’ve made whole records in that amount of time.”

How much did they want to change their career, though? Many mainstream pop radio artists have a very short shelf life and even fewer have successful touring careers. It just seems kind of odd that a band that has slowly grown a genuine following over 8 years of touring would suddenly want to manufacture a “radio hit.”

They do have a point about live hip-hop, though. I can count on one hand the number of hip-hop acts I’ve seen that actually are worth the price of admission. Other than the acts with lots of familiar catalog material to draw from, the genre just doesn’t have a compelling live experience for the average fan.

Carney says he and Auerbach are hip-hop fans, but he fears for the genre’s survival. “It is an art form that is totally at risk of dying,” he says. “With the decline of record sales, that genre is exposed. There never really was a live hip-hop scene. When you think about rock ‘n’ roll, you think concerts. With hip-hop, you think albums. Other than Jay-Z, hip-hip shows aren’t big business. I feel bad for a lot of rappers we work with because they have a hard time making a living. Promoters don’t want to put on hip-hop shows because a few (unreliable) rappers have screwed things up for a lot of other rap artists.”

Read: Turn It Up: Black Keys’ breakthrough year: Here’s how they did it.

Over the weekend, Apple released an update for iTunes (10.0.1). In addition to various bug fixes, Apple made a couple of changes to Ping that make the service a bit more usable.

Users can now “Like” or “Post” about any song in their iTunes music library that’s available for sale in the iTunes music store. There’s also a Ping sidebar on the right hand side of your music library that displays recent activity from your friends.

Apparently, tech pundits and bloggers are rejoicing that Ping is finally a viable music social network. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler declared Ping as “A Thousand Times Better.” CNN’s article headline read, “Let Us Now Praise Ping 10.0.1.”

I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of the rule that making your product marginally usable by its intended audience deserves effluent praise. It’d be like heaping hallelujahs onto your new bank for finally allowing you to deposit money. Next thing you know, these guys are going to be sending gift baskets to Toyota for putting functional brakes in their cars now.

Dave Winer was a little more reserved in his praise, but still decreed that “Ping now is beginning to actually be a social network for music.”

Really? Well I guess that’s kinda true. Maybe like how Antoine Dodson is beginning to actually be a musician with his Gregory Brothers produced song.

Sure, these are improvements to the experience, but they should have been there at launch. Apple’s made some other improvements since launch, such as improving the spam filtering and adding back and forward navigation buttons for Ping – but again, these “upgrades” should have been in place from day one.

Apple’s made no improvements to Ping that warrant another look at the service as an useful music discovery tool. You still can’t listen to full songs that other people are talking about. You still can’t access Ping from a web browser. Hell, you still can’t even import your friends from Facebook or any other source yet.

I’d say call me when Apple starts remedying the ten issues I called to attention at launch, but you know what? Don’t even do that. Don’t mention anything about Ping to me again unless it demonstrably shows value equal to or greater than last.fm or Pandora as a tool for discovering and sharing music.

It’s been almost two years since Spotify launched in Europe – why in the hell isn’t it out in the US yet?

Yeah, yeah, the question is rhetorical because what other reason is there for blocking the domestic release of what Lifehacker calls “the best desktop music player we’ve ever used?”

Raise your hand if you guessed right – The reason why Spotify isn’t out yet is because of our old bumbling nemesis, the major record labels!

Before we dig in, I want to reiterate why Spotify is so compelling a product. The excitement of what Spotify offers isn’t so much the actual product it peddles. There are already a handful of music services that offer unlimited music playback for a monthly fee. Its main draw is that it employs a ad-supported freemium model where anyone can listen to music without charge initially. If you like the service you can pay for other compelling perks such as mobile device playback or higher quality playback.

I think the music monetization problem is twofold. The first is finding a means in delivering music to people that isn’t cumbersome and cost-prohibitive to the consumer. This is a problem that is more or less solved by Spotify. It’s easy to use, delivers accurate results, is the right price, and even incorporates innovative features like playlist collaboration/browser based sharing. The service itself appears to be a great product, worthy of people’s time. It’s not a trivial accomplishment, as most other “legitimate” music services have failed miserably at this throughout the years, including the vaunted iTunes.

What about the cost-prohibitive part? Well, according to Billboard, the main hang up for Spotify in the US isn’t due to technical reasons, rather, it’s because some labels have “expressed displeasure” with the business model Spotify employs. Are you fucking kidding me? You’re displeased at a business model which offers a compelling product to consumers with the potential to monetize the population of people who like music and are connected to the internet? (Fun fact: That is a metric FUCKTON of people.) Sure, it may not be as tempura batter tasty as selling 10 million Backstreet Boys CDs in 1999 at $15 a pop, but when your current business model is pinned on selling 1/100 that number of CDs, Spotify should look like a shiny new money printer.

To clarify, the labels have no problem with the product that these streaming services put out. Their major hang up is in how it’s sold to the customer. Really? You’ve got a wonderful product that people would die to pay for, yet you can’t keep it in your pants long enough to convince people that it’s worth it? It’s the equivalent of the most socially awkward kid at your high school landing a date with the prom queen and is inexplicably about to get to third base, but stops her because he wants her to pay for her half of dinner first.

For an example of their idea of a solution, look at rdio. rdio has some great social features and the same all you can listen promise that Spotify does, except with one major pitfall – there’s only a 3 day free trial.

Three days.

What a joke. Think about how likely you would have stayed with Netflix or Facebook or Twitter if they only gave you 3 days to try out the service before they started charging you. I’m guessing “not very.” With the way many peoples’ schedules are, you’re lucky if you get them to fill out a profile within 3 days.

How is allowing ad-supported “free” streaming on a service any different from sticking an ad on youtube before any VEVO video? It isn’t. Yet VEVO is a service ostensibly supported by the major labels because they’re the ones who thought of it. In an era where people consider music free, you have to start there and demonstrate added value in order to get them to pay.

The second problem of selling digital music is educating people that such a service exists and getting them to experience it so they can see how invaluable it is to their daily lives. Unlimited music is a wondrous product. It’s also something that a lot of people don’t wholly comprehend until they get a chance to experience it for themselves. Even for a generation that has been weaned on “free” unlimited file sharing, the value of providing a legitimate, good user experience can’t be underestimated. It’s a pain in the ass to “steal” music, but most people would rather wade through the sewage it would take to pick a song from the poop that is p2p than pay an onerous $1.29 for each track. However, give them a service that makes it simple to find whatever they’re looking for, whenever they want, and you’ve got a new convert. Once you’ve established how indispensable it is, it should be an easy sell to get people to pay for mobile/offline/high quality options. If there were a service that offered me the selection and sound quality of a high end bittorent site with the legitimacy and ease of a legit service, I guarantee I would right there with my $10, $15, even $20 each and every month.

Now, this music service Valhalla doesn’t necessarily have to be Spotify, but as of now they’d have the best chance of pulling it off in the US. It’s already proved itself in Europe with establishing a userbase and business model. People are clamoring for it in the US, even coming up with convoluted schemes to get the iPhone app working out of Europe.

So, major record labels, just license your music at reasonable rates to let Spotify come to the US already. You’re already a decade behind, stop delaying the inevitable and look towards the goddamn future already. Worst case scenario you let a service have discounted licensing rates for a little bit. You won’t have lost any more money out of pocket than you would have by sitting around trying to peddle CDs with your thumb in your ass.

But best case? Imagine selling one $10 CD a month to everyone who likes music. Think about how many people that is. Imagine how much money that would bring in to your coffers.

I’ll wait while your business development team does the cost-benefit analysis on that one.