Class Action law suit against the music industry

Check out this description:

The suit also alleges that the record labels sought to shut down online music pioneer Napster at the same time they were introducing their own joint ventures to sell online music. MusicNet and pressplay "were not serious commercial ventures, but rather attempts to occupy the market with frustrating and ineffectual services in order to head off viable Online Music competitors from forming and gaining popularity after Napster's demise," according to the suit.

More details in the full post on Ars Technica.

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Arctic Monkeys make it big using the internet

Unlike traditional bands, the Arctic Monkeys, an indie UK band on an indie UK label, developed a following online that helped them sell 360,000 copies of their debut album in the first week, which is a UK record for the fastest selling indie debut album.  Notably Arctic Monkeys released many of their songs on MP3 for free and encouraged fans to share the songs including sharing the songs on P2P networks.  Not surprisingly, the band also used a MySpace site to connect with fans and further encourage the spread of their music.

Is this a sign of the new way of breaking bands?  I sure hope so.

Read the full story on Monkey Bites.

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I'm trying to understand this MySpace Music thing

Ok, I get a lot of what’s going on with MySpace Music and I get a lot of what’s not going on as well. As part of my MySpace experiment on Strategize, I’m playing around a lot with MySpace Music because music is my business.

Here’s what I think about:

Stars Hide Fire has some really good music. Their profile on MySpace has 77,00 views. Their 2 songs have 29,000 combined plays. They have 6,210 MySpace friends. Does this mean that someone in the live music business on the East Coast should be paying attention to booking these guys? After all, with as many friends and views and plays as this band has on their MySpace site, which doesn’t even count their website, shouldn’t this be a good regional booking if not a good national club booking?

The problem with the logic above is that it does not seem like anyone is running any sort of correlation data for MySpace metrics against live music sales. I’m not talking about measuring the power of nationally touring acts like Green Day, I’m talking about measuring the power of MySpace for emerging, regional, and local bands in a quantifiable way. What people like me want to know is how many friends or profile views or song plays it takes to indicate a successful band.

Snaptune

Snaptune allows you to record music from FM radio to a PC.  This isn’t hard to do with other services and configurations, but Snaptune adds song metadata, does not record repeated songs, and if you use a USB FM tuner, can even change stations based on how you program it.

This is probably going to drive the RIAA crazy.

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