World Music

YouTube Plays Now Factored Into Billboard Ranking, Helps Make "Harlem Shake" #1 By D.L. Chandler - Feb. 21, 2013 - Hip Hop Wired Billboard has teamed with consumer information company Nielsen and will now factor YouTube video plays when ranking songs on the "Hot 100" singles chart. Baauer's smash hit, “Harlem Shake,” has already benefited, landing at No. 1 on the aforementioned chart. A new venture was announced yesterday, revolutionizing how Billboard tracks the rise of hit songs in a variety of genres. Before the deal, Nielsen tracked digital sales, physical copies, radio airplay and other traditional means of media delivery. Now, Billboard will collect streaming data on all of YouTube's official music videos using Nielsen's information measurements. Essentially, a streaming video click on YouTube will be counted as a radio spin Additionally, user-generated videos that have official use of original music will also have their streams counted and factore...

Streaming and Micropennies: The Footnotes By BEN SISARIO - January 29, 2013 - NY Times Media Decoder Blog 1. The role of record labels. When it comes to royalties, the relationship between artist and label has long been fraught, but it has become especially strained in the streaming age, for two reasons. First, digital services generally don’t do business with musicians directly, but instead go through labels or distributors, which are then responsible for paying royalties. But exactly how those royalties are calculated is often in dispute. Older artists may have no provisions in their contracts for such streaming services , or digital music at all. And despite some major lawsuits , the matter is far from settled. Second, there is wide suspicion in the industry about the deals between labels and digital services. Labels own equity in some of these services, as a condition of licensing their content. (The major labels, for example, own a minority stake in Spotify.) Critics say this cr...

South Korea leads world digital music consumption Feb. 5, 2013 - Telecompaper South Korea is leading the world in the transition from physical to digital music, with digital services accounting for 56 percent of all consumer spending on full-track music in the country in 2012, according to data from IHS iSuppli. The pace of South Korea's transition to digital music leads all other countries, including major economies such as the US, currently in second place, and the UK, ranked third. However, based on current trends, the US is expected by 2016 to ascend to the market's top spot, followed by the UK. Read More: http://www.telecompaper.com/news/south-korea-leads-world-digital-music-consumption--923085

For Many Digital Music Services, Free Is Not a Choice By BEN SISARIO - January 28, 2013 - NY Times Media Decoder Blog The competition among streaming music services is going global. It is also increasingly going free. As CD and download sales cool, the music industry is looking to subscription services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Deezer to provide an attractive alternative to pirated content. But the growth of these companies has been relatively slow, and to compete against one another, more of them are opening free tiers — a move that gets attention, but has always caused worries that it could undermine the value of music. Read More: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/for-many-digital-music-services-free-is-not-a-choice/

Amoeba Launches Digital Music Store for Rarities By Aubin - Feb. 1, 2013 - PunkNews.org Beloved California music store chain, Amoeba Music , has launched a new digital rarities store. Unlike other services, the company is focusing on older, mostly out of print vinyl. The owners explained: We've been digitizing a lot. What you see now is the lost-between-the-cracks, underappreciated, undervalued (music) from dead labels, (obscure) artists, stuff that we really stand behind. It's mostly in the rock genre, with a lot of jazz, a lot of blues, some country, some spoken word. There are some oddities for sure. In many cases the company was unable to find the original rightsholders so they're keeping sales proceeds in an escrow account and allowing songwriters to either take the profits or remove the music from the store. Along with actually digitizing the LPs, Amoeba is remastering the original records and have about 1000 recorss for sale now with more added every day. Read More:...

What Music Creators Should Know About Streaming Royalties By Etan Rosenbloom, Associate Director & Deputy Editor, Communications & Media , ASCAP - January 17, 2013 - From ASCAP.com When Spotify stopped offering European users the option of paying to download music in early January, it came as another piece of evidence of a sea change that many have predicted for a long time: music is migrating  to the cloud . Over the past two years, we've seen a four-fold increase in streaming music subscriptions in the US. The ability to stream any piece of music at any time is of course great for consumers. But as we usher in new technologies, we have to think about the way they affect the songwriters and composers that make those technologies possible. As noted entertainment attorney Don Passman recently told us , "Advertising dollars are migrating online in a big way, which means traditional media is earning less, and they're squeezing down the public performance license fe...