That subject line should also mention that’s average number of CDs per head of population. Is this something to feel proud about? Given recent news that digital downloads aren’t necessarily more ecologically sound than CD buying (I still find that hard to believe), perhaps I should be. I’ll also admit to an enduring love of physical formats. It’s an interesting article: apparently the average price of a CD fell below £9 for the first time last year; also UK music revenues fell 5% between 2001 and 2005, which doesn’t seem that bad, given the diversity of other media increasingly available and may as much reflect a tightening of margins rather than a death rattle for the industry as a whole. Anyway here’s the full list:

CD sales per person in 2006

Britain 2.7
US 2.1
Norway 2.1
Ireland 1.9
Australia 1.9
Denmark 1.8
Belgium 1.7
Sweden 1.7
Switzerland 1.7
Japan 1.5
New Zealand 1.5
Canada 1.5

It would be interesting to know the average number of MP3s purchased for those countries as well, I’d guess Japan and the US would top that list.

Link: Guardian article

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Sheesh, you turn your back for a few days well-deserved r’n'r and suddenly a giant American corporation goes and snaffles your preferred music service. When I read the news on my return, I’ll confess my heart sank a little. Last.fm’s my little secret (that I happen to share with only 20 million other subscribers). Why would they want to go and sell out to CBS? The answer’s obvious and detailed on Last.fm’s recently initiated blog. I hope they’re treated with as much of a hands off approach as Yahoo! have done with del.icio.us. I wish them a hearty best of luck and will now return to daydreaming that I’d had such a brilliant idea. Sigh.

Link: Last.fm blog post

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A new service launching 14 May will supply purchasers of vinyl with 320Kbps non-DRM MP3s of their music at no extra cost. Digiwax is a new enterprise from UK-based First Word Records, suppliers to the DJ market. Every purchase of double-weight vinyl comes with access to a password-protected area to download the same music from the Digiwax’s website. It’s not clear whether this is limited to artists signed to the company or not. However, it sets a welcome example to other vendors and neatly sidesteps the irritating process of having to digitise vinyl. I’d very happily purchase more records if this service were offered more widely.

Links: Wired Gadget Lab blog, Digiwax
Via: Mediaor

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It’s time to stand and salute Carrie Underwood, for it is she who’s responsible for the first ever (iTunes) digital download to enter the US top 10. The song which I’ve not had the fortune to hear yet is apparently a cover of a Pretenders song. It guess it was never going to be the much more appropriately titled Sign ‘o’ the Times by Prince…

Link: Carrie Underwood website
Via: Gizmodo

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Is there no stopping Last.fm? Following on from recent news of partnerships with some of the top four major record labels comes news of a global chart show. All power to their elbow, though I’m not sure Channel 4 is currently a big player in radio:

The Worldwide Chart will showcase the top tracks from Last.fm’s European, Asian and US charts. The station currently has 20m active users from over 232 countries and is available in 11 languages. Channel 4 Radio DJs will also begin ‘scrobbling’ their playlists, allowing Last.fm users to track and share their selected music.

Link: New Media Exchange article, via Digg

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The web has been positively buzzing with speculation since the announcement of an imminent EMI/Apple “exciting new digital offering”. Would it be the Beatles back-catalogue made available on the iTunes Music Store or something else? Turns out it’s the latter - EMI will be making it’s entire catalogue available via iTMS without DRM restrictions. It’s the first of the mega-corporates to take the leap and it’s difficult to imagine that Steve Jobs wasn’t aware of this when he made his own call for the abolition of DRM.

Everything isn’t quite glory and light: it appears that the deal is $0.99 for tracks locked with DRM and AAC encrypted at 128kbps or $1.29 without DRM at 256kbps. Given Apple’s emphasis upon simplicity, this is a rather surprising move.

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Noting that today is April Fool’s Day, I’m nervous that everything I read will be some form of prank. This story, however, was printed in the UK’s The Independent newspaper a few days ago, so I’m trusting that it’s true. Despite that, there’s a somewhat comic edge to the article’s headline, whatever time of year it is: ‘Rough Trade opens massive record shop to fight internet‘. It conjures images of Don Quixote tilting at windmills or King Canute ordering the waves to stop.

Rough Trade was established in 1976 as a shop and two years later as a record label (for further details read their own succinct history). The new store will occupy 5,000 square feet of floorspace London’s East End, which will make it Britain’s biggest music shop. Brick Lane is currently one of London’s most fashionable areas, second only to neighbouring Hoxton/Shoreditch. Given current developments, it’s a brave move, but I’ll be cheering them on.

(Rough Trade also offer an interesting recommendation service in the form of The Album Club and an online MP3 store, Rough Trade Digital, both of which I intend to cover in the not too distant future.)

Link: Independent news story
Link: Rough Trade
Via: Dissensus

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In an amusingly farcical turn of events, the viral marketing campaign initiated by Nine Inch Nails‘ record company has resulted in a fan being sent cease and desist letters and a demand for legal fees by solicitors and RIAA threats to an entertainment zine. The hugely popular American industrial group headed up by Trent Reznor is due to release a new album soon. To boost interest, they’ve produced an alternative reality game involving “obscure web sites, answering machines and clues on NIN tour t-shirts all being part of a giant, mysterious puzzle.” Part of the action involves legally distributed Nine Inch Nails taster MP3s, but when one German fan posted up a streamed version of a song, he received a letter from solicitors demanding he pay costs and remove the track immediately. Soon after, online zine Idolator were ordered to remove a similar MP3 by the RIAA.

Just the sort of situation to be satirised by the one and only Chris Morris.

Link: full story at P2P blog
Link: details of the game

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However awful the message for some readers, isn’t that a beautifully-worded headline from The Wall Street Journal. The venerable newspaper notes that there’s been a 20% fall in CD sales for the first quarter of this year when compared to that of 2006. The rise in digital download sales apparently doesn’t mitigate this decline significantly. Combined physical and digital music sales are down 10%. The article notes a number of contributing factors, not least of which:

• losure of high street vendors (600 closed in US last year)
• Poor quality of contemporary music
• Online piracy
• Downward price pressure exerted by retail chains like WalMart and Best Buy, and
• The poor old MP3 blog.

Here’s my alternative list of reasons for the decline in music sales:

• Ongoing atomisation of music scenes resulting in increasing irrelevance of popular music charts.
• The cumulative weight of popular musical history - five decades and counting - resulting in a more or less conscious sense of cultural exhaustion; witness the popularity of strikingly derivative neo-New Wave groups in recent years.
• The RIAA’s aggressive pursuit of copyright infringers has been terrible PR for the music industry as a whole - they’re now very much the bad guys. This attitude has become a widespread feeling of contempt for the industry as a whole and lazy justification for piracy. (However, there’s always been widespread piracy, ever since the cassette tape became a cheap and easy method of duplication.)
• The tremendous popularity of the iPod has encouraged a consolidation and rediscovery of existing music collections much more than discovery of new music.
• Huge increase in alternative forms of entertainment e.g. DVDs, video games (X-Box, Playstation, Nintendo, etc) and the internet.
• Piracy - okay that’s shared with most other commentators. However it’s my experience that when people take copies of new music they like, they’re also more likely to go to concerts or buy future albums.

TechCrunch has posted about this article and it’s accrued a lengthy debate in the comments. My favourite contribution is this one from someone called Ramon (who unfortunately hasn’t provided a personal URL):This is what is going to happen:

1) Internet becomes ubiquitous in wireless form, especially on mobile devices.
2) Streaming, on-demand music popularity goes up.
3) Providers of streaming, on-demand music begins signing exclusive contracts with artists (”Shakira, only on Yahoo Music; Dashboard Confessional, only on iTunes”)
4) Artists get a cut of the profit (from the subscription costs) based on how many individual listeners are playing their music.
5) Providers of streaming, on-demand music will provide the service that record labels provide now, at a cheaper cost to the consumer, with greater profits to the artist (who is not getting raped on the miniscule % they get off cd sales), and with easier accessibility.
* puts away crystal ball *

Link: Wall Street Journal
Link: TechCrunch

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The American Copyright Royalty Board has just agreed new royalty rates that could jeopardise the business of websites that derive revenue from streamed music. Although a seemingly small increase in microcosm, in aggregate the impact could be enormous. Wired states:

In the old, percentage-based fee system, webcasters paid SoundExchange — the Recording Industry Association of America-associated organization that pushed the Copyright Royalty Board to adopt the new rates — between 6 percent and 12 percent of their revenue, depending on audience reach. The new system charges all webcasters a flat fee per song per listener; for instance, in 2007, streaming companies would owe $0.0011 per song per listener (rates change based on year).

Commentary on GigaOm quotes Pandora’s co-founder sounding very worried:

“Left unchanged, it’s over for us and every other internet radio service, period. Makes it un-viable,” Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren wrote in an email. “We’re staying online because we’re hopeful that sanity will eventually win out. This is a ludicrous ruling.”

It’s worth reading the comments on the GigaOm post for informed opinion. It appears this change will only apply to US-based companies leaving the likes of Last.fm unaffected, although there’s talk of an imminent deal between the UK company and Warner which may spell trouble, revenue-wise. Wired concludes:

If the new rates stick, online music fans may come to expect far less innovation, variety and quality when it comes to internet radio. Some industry experts fear that even more users could be driven to illicit services that pay no royalties or those that operate from other countries.

Or perhaps new services will establish themselves outside the US alongside a migration of existing companies.

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