Music industry

I'm not convinced Google TV will be any different from the many other failed attempts to bridge the Internet and television--WebTV and its various Microsoft offshoots, AOLTV, and the first iteration of Apple TV all come to mind. (Although the new Apple TV might be at the right price point to make a go of it.)

Google's emphasis on apps might sway some skeptics, but for the masses, it really comes down to entertainment content. Before I'll pay for some mysterious box that attaches to my TV--much less buy a brand new Internet TV--it needs to … Read more

One of my favorite online streaming services, Grooveshark, has begun notifying registered users that it's going to raise the price of its VIP subscription service beginning December 1. But if you sign up for VIP service before then, you'll never pay more than $3 a month or $30 a year.

Grooveshark's online music streaming service is and will remain free. The main benefit of the VIP service is support for streaming to mobile phones, including Android, BlackBerry, some Nokia phones, and Palm; you also get access to a desktop app and other benefits. The company briefly offered … Read more

Three years after launching the first DRM-free music download store, Amazon.com is once again stepping up its music game.

On Wednesday morning, subscribers to the indie-music download service Amie Street received an e-mail announcing that the company had been bought by Amazon. Existing customers get a $5 gift certificate to Amazon's MP3 store and must download all the music they've paid for by September 22.

Amie Street started by offering music from independent labels and digital distributors like The Orchard, and it was a pioneer of demand-based pricing--all downloads on the site started off being available for … Read more

Music Hack Day is a recurring event in which developers take 24 hours to write music applications based on various open APIs. This weekend, Music Hack Day took place London, and a few of the results have been made available online for the general public. Most offer a minute or two of interesting musical distraction, like 7x7, a Web page that lets you create chords from notes in a matrix, and Soundwheel (warning: audio will begin playing as soon as the page loads), which warbles bass tones as you drag points around a color wheel.

But one hack seemed truly … Read more

This summer's concert season has been brutal for the music industry, with cancellations and discounting galore. Blame the economy, blame the lack of marketable big-name artists on tour, but whatever the reason, concert ticketing giant Ticketmaster (which is owned by concert promoter and venue owner Live Nation) is responding.

In the inaugural post of Ticketology, the new Ticketmaster blog, the company has announced the end of a longstanding annoyance: service charges that get tacked on to the ticket price late in the buying process. Now, when you select a ticket on Ticketmaster's Web site, service fees are included … Read more

This month's U.K. edition of GQ Magazine contains a fairly substantial article from U2 manager Paul McGuinness in which he blames Internet service providers and technology companies directly for the falling sales of recorded music. As he notes in the article, he made a speech on this subject about two years ago and was roundly criticized by various "anonymous bloggers." I've never been anonymous, but I did point out some of the factual inaccuracies and weird assumptions in his speech at the time.

I can't speak for anonymous bloggers everywhere, but I've never … Read more

When Vevo launched in December, I wasn't very impressed. I wondered why the site needed to exist when it was mainly serving as a distribution point for the ever-popular YouTube.

Despite my skepticism, it has quickly become one of the most popular video properties in the United States, thanks to its large store of exclusive content. And artists and copyright owners, at least, are getting some money when their videos are distributed through Vevo, which often wasn't the case before.

Vevo on Wednesday launched its free iPhone app, which gives iPhone and iPod Touch users access to 20,… Read more

It was fun while it lasted. I had wondered how Grooveshark could charge just $3 a month for unlimited on-demand music streams to your iPhone while other companies charge more than three times as much.

Turns out, it can't.

Earlier this month, the Grooveshark iPhone app appeared in Apple's App Store. On Monday, Apple pulled the app. According to Grooveshark's blog, Apple received a complaint from Universal Music Group UK.

This isn't exactly a surprise, given that Universal Music filed a lawsuit against the upstart subscription music service earlier this year. In a statement, Apple confirmed … Read more

Are you fed up with the antics of the big-time concert industry? The continually rising prices? The huge service charges? (Not that this is entirely the fault of the ticket sellers--a percentage is usually kicked back to the artist.) The quick "sell-outs" of all decent seats, followed by the mysterious appearance of marked-up tickets on scalper sites?

Then here's some good news. In June, The Pixies teamed up with digital-music marketing agency Topspin Media to perform an interesting experiment in London. The Pixies--who didn't have an e-mail list before they started working with Topspin--sent an e-mail … Read more