snapshot 11/7/07

iLike Adds Features To Streamline Social Music Marketing
Music-based social networker iLike just made marketing music via a multitude of web sites a lot easier and faster with new services that enable single source updating. iLike has:

• "pre-created" pages for 160,000+ artists, so that the artist doesn't have to go through the irritating hassle of uploading all their content again to create yet another new band profile
• opened a "Universal Artist Dashboard" so and artist can control their presence across many channels from single place - i.e post a new concert and reach fans across iLike.com, Facebook, iTunes/WMP desktops and soon thanks to Google's OpenSocial platform on Bebo, orkut, MySpace, Friendster and scores of other sites
  

Ticketmaster, iTunes expand music + ticket offerings
Ticketmaster and the iTunes Store have announced a plan to offer digital album sales directly alongside Ticketmaster.com concert tickets. The expanded offerings let users purchase tickets to an artist’s concert along with their music in a single transaction on Ticketmaster.com. Users purchasing tickets at Ticketmaster.com to live performances by participating artists will be given the option of adding a digital album to their purchase, and through the end of 2007, a special dollar-off discount will be applied to every album sold. Ticketmaster.com will provide a direct link that will take the user to the iTunes Store to download their album in full.


The Eagles Top Billboard Chart
The Eagles beat Britney Spears for the top spot on the Billboard 200 Top Albums chart this week. The band's new album "Long Road Out of Eden" debuted at No. 1 on the chart by selling 711,000 copies during its first week of release, Billboard.com reported Tuesday. Spears' album "Blackout" sold 290,000 copies.

Even though Wal-Mart gave Long Road Out Of Eden a good online push, digital downloads accounted for about 0.5% of total sales via Coolfer


Red Bull Pushes Music Initiative, Taps Label Executives
Red Bull is now pushing a serious music initiative, according to numerous sources to Digital Music News. The initiative has been underway for a considerable period of time, and already involves executive placements and the construction of a studio facility. The exact nature or charter of the group remains unclear, and may be fluid, according to one source. A stand-alone recording label appears one possibility, though a broader, 360-degree concept that integrates into larger Red Bull branding seems more plausible.


Fans shafted as Major League Baseball revokes DRM licenses
Major League Baseball has deactivated a DRM license server used to verify your worthiness to play back video of games you purchased online. Due to an earlier decision to switch DRM providers, MLB's new content and old content are managed by different license authentication servers. After making the switch, MLB has arbitrarily decided it has no intention of honoring its earlier commitments to fans who purchased downloaded games under the old system, thereby rendering many fans shut-out.


Testing Vinyl CDs: Groovy Up Top, Optical Down Below
Since CDs have a hole at their center that's too large to fit on a vinyl spindle, you'll need to use the little rubber adapter that comes with each disc to center the disc on your record player; otherwise, it'll go off-center and you'll hear the music speed up and slow down with each revolution.

As for the overall sound quality, I just finished giving the vinyl side of a Sonic Kollectiv VinylDisc compilation a spin, and it sounded decent -- not as good as 180 gram, but certainly good enough to warrant consideration from bands and labels looking to offer something new to their customers: a CD that everyone can play, with a secret bonus track in the grooves on top for those who have record players.

Apple and Starbucks iTunes WiFi integration hands-on

• Connecting iTunes through Starbucks is eminently simple: connect to the T-Mobile AP. That's it. It's all done behind the paywall, so you don't have to fork out $10 to get online to use the service. (You can also visit apple.com behind the paywall, but not .Mac services.)
• As soon as you connect to the Starbucks T-Mobile AP with your iPhone / iPod touch / desktop machine running iTunes, you'll see Starbucks music show up in your iTunes Store interface. (Hit the gallery to see how it works.)
• Downloading a track was reasonably fast, but the WiFi kept dropping with both our iPhone and MacBook Pro, leading us to believe there were some issues with the T-Mo hotspot. The download recovered fine through multiple disconnections, but it took us a little over 7 minutes to grab a single 8.5MB iTunes Plus track -- so be careful before grabbing an entire album.
• Apple is also now selling iTunes Digital Releases at Starbucks -- basically iTunes cards for select albums that let you grab the entire album on iTunes as well as a bunch of bundled extras like music videos and a digital booklet. We got two to check out: KT Tunstall's Digital Release is $15; Eddie Vedder's is $12 (but with a lot fewer music videos).
• In addition to showing users what song is being played in the store via iTunes, Starbucks is also installing TV which show current track information.
• The music piped to each Starbucks is dynamic and is not being broadcast to all other locations; the music (and data) is moved through T-Mobile's data centers to each wired Starbucks location.

Facebook’s music effort is live
It [Discography] is apparently live and available for musicians or bands that want to market themselves by using Facebook’s “Pages” feature, or pages where advertisers feature their wares.

It is significant because it comes directly from Facebook, not from outside developers. One fear is that Facebook might market it at the expense of others, though its not clear yet whether this fear is justified. It’s true that a mass of third-party efforts could be effected: There are 318 third-party applications on Facebook that are experimenting with music in some way, listed by Facebook here. The Facebook application says it helps let fans track the history of a band’s records, and see a listing of albums as well as the tracks. It can’t be used on normal profile pages.