Jazz Odyssey

“with sites like Digg, it’s the wisdom of the crowds or the tyranny of the mob. You never know what you’re going to get.“
Slashdot’s founder questions the wisdom of crowds in this article:
Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog

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Real Time – WSJ.com: “…the key point isn’t the idea of releasing a steady stream of music instead of an album a year at most — that’s an interesting discussion, but not a new one. Rather, it’s asking what music fans will most readily pay for. Debates about serializing music tend to revolve around the [...]

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hypebot: UPDATE: Qtrax Launch Delayed As All 4 Majors Deny Deals

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hypebot: WMG, Universal Deny Qtrax Deals plus Commentary: “Qtrax’s announcement on Sunday that it was launching its ad supported download service at midnight with music from all four major labels may have been premature or at the very least misleading.  Both Warners and Universal are denying deals with Qtrax.”

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“Qtrax launches today making available 20-30 million tracks floating around on P2P’s available for free and legal download via its new ad supported service.  All four major labels have signed on.
Users download and launch a player that runs ads while they search for and download tracks.  DRM prevents the tracks from being burned and counts [...]

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The Album is Dead… – Blog Maverick: “So the question arises, why don’t artists serialize the release of songs ? Why not create a ’season’ of release of songs, much like the fall TV season and promise fans that Flo Rida is going to release a new single every week or 2 weeks for the [...]

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Bloomberg.com:
Opinion: “The only future for recorded music — as bands such as Radiohead have already discovered — is to give it away free on the Internet. But whether a private-equity firm like Terra Firma can be that bold is open to question.“

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Highly regarded neo-marketer Seth Godin has posted a must-read pearl of wisdom over at his blog…here is a particularly inspiring excerpt:
“It’s important to charge something, because the act of paying fundamentally changes the dynamics of the relationship. The question is this: at the start, is your goal to maximize profit or to build a [...]

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Simon Napier-Bell on the music industry: “Pop music has never sounded better or more vibrant, never been more easily available to the listener. The only people who are suffering are the people who brought it on themselves. The major record companies.“
(Via Guardian Unlimited.)

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“This teenager hacked into the outfit charged with protecting companies like Sony, Universal, and Activision from online piracy—the most daring exploit yet in the escalating war between fans and corporate giants. Guess which side is winning.“
Media Defenders Profile – Portfolio.com

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In his first interview since releasing the sales data, Reznor on Wednesday talked about his rethinking of music in the digital age.
Trent Reznor: Why won’t people pay $5? | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

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From Economist.com: “Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors. The next few years are likely to be even worse…Three vicious circles have now set in for the recorded-music firms. First, because sales of CDs are tumbling, big retailers such as Wal-Mart are cutting the amount of shelf-space they give to music, which in turn [...]

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“Though it appears that Data Portability has a long road ahead of it and that major vendors are unlikely to open up access to their users’ data, in fact openness has some important competitive advantages. The open and integrated vendor has far greater network effect and scale of access to data for their own purposes [...]

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“In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned.“
Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM

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“In the dying days of the music business as we once knew it, record labels are waging war on leaks—only to discover that many of the saboteurs come from within the industry itself.”
The Music Industry’s War on Insider Leaks — New York Magazine

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CrunchGear » Archive » Dubious Rumor Alert: Apple is not starting a record label with Jay-Z: “The idea is that Jay-Z, whom recently left Def Jam, will launch a label partnered with Apple. The problem is, Steve Jobs can’t do that; the other labels would call shenanigans (rightly so, too) and jump [...]

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Stranger things have happened, but I’ll believe it when I see it. That said, The Boy Genius seems to be a pretty connected individual, and where there’s smoke….
Jay-Z launching record label with Apple | The Boy Genius Report

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Billboard Magazine’s Antony Bruno reports: “According to label sources and pirate network tracking firms, fans downloading full albums from BitTorrent sites almost universally choose files that include scans of the CD booklet over those that don’t.
Of course, there is little that can be done with those scans other than view them on a computer. Imagine [...]

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“Sixtyone is different from most read-submit-vote-comment sites because it has an elaborate point system…When you sign up, you get points; each time you vote up a song, you spend 5 points, but if others vote for the song and it gets popular, you earn your points back. Furthermore, you can earn free points by listening [...]

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“If you’re looking for a two-word motto for hip-hop in 2007, you could do worse than that: ‘Keep grinding.’ This was the year when the gleaming hip-hop machine — the one that minted a long string of big-name stars, from Snoop Dogg to OutKast — finally broke down, leaving rappers no alternative but to work [...]

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