Nielsen and Billboard released their sales numbers for 2013 this week. Some might be surprised to hear that sales of digital songs in iTunes, Amazon, and other download stores dropped from 2012 to 2013. Isn’t the music industry supposed to be going digital? Yes, but downloads are not the future. On-demand streaming music are replacing…
As record labels continue to grapple with how to make money from music when there’s an internet, one label called Care Of Editions has devised a weird solution we couldn’t help being curious about. Its idea: to pay people for downloading music, using money generated from physical sales of that music. You can get anything it…
Crowdsourcing. Vinyl. Gamification. Subscription. Sustainable. Artisanal. These are quite the trendy words, and all of them apply to Feedbands, a crowdsourced record label that lets its users vote on which music should be pressed into vinyl records and delivered to subscribers. It’s an old-meets-new concept that just might be crazy enough to work — especially…
Record labels used to do almost anything to get their releases noticed. When I was a college radio DJ, our station once received a CD in a bag of dirt, so it would stand out next to the stack of padded manilla envelopes. Today, labels and other music owners face a similar challenge in getting…
As many of us do, I recently ended up in a Facebook conversation about parenting or music. In this case, it was about both conversational mainstays: Namely, how do you allow a child in 2013 to decide to listen to something of their choosing? “I’ve been thinking lately about the downside of having a digital-only…
On Record Store Day (4/20), the Boards of Canada appear to have released some ridiculously scarce vinyl: six 12-inch vinyl singles, each of which there is only one copy. In these days of omnipresent everything, this level of scarcity feels like the lottery. Many people already love BoC, and have been anxiously awaiting another release…
Amazon has done for records what it did for CDs: added an AutoRip feature, so that whenever you buy records from Amazon, you’ll get the MP3s too, neatly deposited into your Amazon cloud account, from whence you can download it onto your thingy of choice. As if your local record dealer didn’t already have enough…
The best and worst things about digital media, depending on your perspective, are the same: Files can be copied endlessly, without degradation. This is why Napster worked, and, in a less direct sense, why you’ll find more or less the same music on Deezer, MOG, Muze, Rdio, Rhapsody, and Spotify. How does a service stand…
Most of us get our dose of new music on the interwebs, whether via streaming radio, blogs, blog aggregators, friends, feeds, label newsletters, or hybrids like Shuffler.fm, the online music blog curator that’s also recently joined the lineup of Spotify apps. This one’s different. The popular site The Turntable Kitchen, part personal blog, music blog, tech blog,…
The ever-evolving music industry is pushing artists to use unconventional methods of promotion such as apps and functional merchandise, and now, music that is only available as an app. Enter Delaware, a company that founded Re<ords, a virtual record store, of sorts, that releases two-track album apps mimicking the look and feel of vinyl. A free app called Re<ords Mag serves…
Nobody has to remind us how fun it can be to mess around with music apps designed to mimic the formats of days gone by. However, the same instinct that compels us to try them also encourages app developers to build lots of random iPad apps for pretending to play vinyl. It’s an odd concept,…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — We already know the vinyl revival is not going away. Now, there’s a handy new app looking to help record shoppers (not to mention CD holdouts) listen to albums before buying them, as well as sharing their prospective purchases with friends a la Instagram. Enter: InstaSound. This iOS app (with a companion…
Much has been made of our supposedly decreasing attention spans when it comes to music. The proliferation of MP3s, peer-to-peer file sharing, and streaming services like Spotify and Rdio have put ridiculous amounts of content at our fingertips and in our pockets. Some argue that all this music weakens our ability to appreciate it. Why focus…
As someone who spends lots of time thinking about the future of music as an app phenomenon, it might surprise you that I do a lot of my listening on vinyl records. I’m not alone – reports abound of vinyl’s surging sales numbers over the past five or so years. Though they make up a tiny percentage of…
The iPhone, iPad, and Android smartphones may not be the best-sounding portable device we’ve ever heard – that would be this – but they can pull crazy stunts like pretending to be a cassette player, vinyl turntable, or boombox, one of the reasons they rule so hard as music players. And to be fair, they sound pretty good…
