Monday, March 24, 2008

snapshot 3/24/08

Music fans prefer Wikipedia to MySpace
Search for an artist on any of the popular search engines, and the top three results are practically guaranteed: the artist's official Web site, Wikipedia entry and MySpace page -- often in that order. According to data provided to Billboard from Yahoo -- the second-most popular search engine on the Web after Google -- those searching for artist information are selecting the Wikipedia entry link over artists' MySpace pages by a factor of more than 2-to-1. The Wikipedia entries are also more popular than artists' Web sites.


HDtracks Lauches
The founders of Chesky Records have soft-launched HDtracks, a download store that offers full-resolution FLAC files and 320kbps MP3 files; uncompressed AIFF files are on their way ("We're going to be the first company other than iTunes to offer AIFF with the metadata intact," David Chesky said). Tracks cost $1.49 apiece and albums cost $11.98. Participating labels include Tzadik, Blind Pig, Koch Records, Taang!, Vanguard Classics, Sundazed, Luakabop and Cryptogramophone.


SONY BMG, WARNER NEAR DEAL WITH MYSPACE
MySpace's plan to launch a digital-music joint venture with the major record companies is picking up steam, as the social networking giant nears deals with Sony BMG and Warner Music Group, multiple sources familiar with the situation told The Post. The agreements could be signed as soon as this week. The service is expected to launch later this year.

Unlike most music licensing agreements, which require upfront advances, no money is expected to change hands. Instead, the labels are trading content rights in exchange for minority equity stakes in MySpace Music and the chance to participate in the advertising revenues that News Corp. hopes to generate from the service. The new MySpace Music is expected to be a mix of pay-per-download and ad-supported video and audio.


Rock Band meets iTunes, opens built-in music store
The new software update allows gamers to buy new musical tracks, released weekly, without having to use the Xbox Live front end. The store is no more and no less than a full-fledged music service for Rock Band; you can browse available songs by artist, by song title, and, later, by album. Many of the tracks are shown with album art, the name of the CD they've been taken from, as well as detailed information about how difficult each song is to play on each of the game's four instruments. A preview function is also available, allowing gamers to hear each song before they pay the dollar or two to download the tracks for use in the game.

Ars Technica has downloaded the update and tested it; the interface is slick and easy to use. It really does feel like you're shopping for music, and gamers are hungry for the constant content updates to the rhythm game. This presents a unique ability to push new artists. Last week, one of the tracks was by a relatively little-known band called Paramore, and suddenly their name was being talked about on all the major video game blogs and sites, along with links to their songs and videos. Gamers were downloading the song for $1, and not only were they listening to it, but they were interacting with it via the game, talking about the bass line, the vocals, how fun it is to play on the drums.


SpiralFrog Launches Free Concert Ticket Sweepstakes
SpiralFrog (www.spiralfrog.com), the free and legal ad-supported music site, gives music fans the chance to win $5,000 in concert tickets with a new sweepstakes launching today. Whether fans want to see Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige, Rascal Flatts, The Hives, Sugarland, Maroon 5 or The New York Philharmonic or even all of them, they can! The winner picks the concerts and SpiralFrog pays for the tickets – up to $5,000. Once fans enter the sweepstakes by becoming a registered member, they get more chances to win by referring a friend.


The Royalty Scam via Hypbot
The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.


Rhapsody Rallies Madonna Pre-Release; Big Spending Ahead
Rhapsody has now secured a juicy Madonna exclusive in the United States, according to details shared with Digital Music News on Thursday. The track, "4 Minutes," is the lead single ahead of the April release, Hard Candy. The album will be the last for Madonna under Warner Music Group before the superstar exits for Live Nation.

The song, which features Justin Timberlake and production by Timbaland, can be streamed gratis from rhapsody.com or through the Rhapsody subscription application. Die-hard Madonna fans are already swapping pre-release leaks, though the unauthorized downloads are of grainy quality. An authorized download is also available to Vodafone subscribers in Europe, and ringtones are coming next week.


Celestial Jukebox Arrives, But Is It Any Good?
MusicStation currently offers 1.5 million tracks -- far fewer than Napster or Rhapsody. Still, all four major labels are on board, and we were able to find a fair amount of what we were looking for, including 33 albums by The Fall and live versions of certain songs.

Each song contains full album art, and is encoded at 48 kbps in the enhanced aacPlus codec -- a descendant of the format used by XM Satellite Radio. Through nice Shure in-ear earbuds, audio quality was good enough, if a little fuzzy and harsh at high volumes. We detected none of the high-frequency artifacts associated with poor MP3 encoding. Unless you're wearing a pair of high-end cans or top-shelf buds, these sonic imperfections will be hard to detect.


Analyst: 50 percent of phones will play music by 2011
Music players are losing out in popularity to phones that pull double-duty, according to a market research report released Monday. More than 500 million music phones were shipped worldwide in 2007, which puts that category of device 300 million units ahead of regular old portable music players, according to the report released Monday by MultiMedia Intelligence. The company is forecasting that by 2011, of the 941 million handsets that will ship worldwide, more than half will be music phones. (The report defines a music phone as a handset that plays music files, and has a memory card slot.)

"Music has been the first 'killer app' for the operators to drive the consumption of premium content on the handset," said Frank Dickson, chief research officer for MultiMedia Intelligence. To that end, MMI predicts the mobile music market will be worth $6 billion by the end of this year. "With such significant revenue and customer demand at stake, the operators' and handset providers' concerted efforts (will) use music as a central part of their handset strategies," the report says.


Fuzzy Logic on Potential iPod Music "Subscriptions"
According to Jupiter surveys, somewhere between 5% and 15% of the songs on anyone's iPod are purchased from a downloads store, the average user has 1500 songs on his iPod (though that's skewed by big collections: only 20% have more than 1,000), and the average iPod user spends $20 to $35 per year -- not over the lifetime of a device -- on downloads. (The average paying downloader actually spends at least $10 more, but a lot of iPod users don't buy any downloads.)


MySpace Scores Gold Record (In Ad-Supported Terms)
MySpace has scored 500,000 downloads for the upcoming Pennywise album, part of a larger, ad-supported concept. The tally would normally constitute a gold album in the United States, at least by traditional sales certifications. The total, confirmed by MySpace Records executive J. Scavo to Digital Music News this weekend, comes ahead of a Tuesday album delivery.

At that point, MySpace will send emails to the pre-release takers with redemption instructions. The tie-in, which first surfaced in November, requires users to become a friend with sponsor Textango prior to receiving the free download. The album, Reason to Believe, comes roughly twenty years after the group first formed in Hermosa Beach, California. Pennywise peaked in the 90s, though the latest download tally - and a friend total of 150,000 - reflect a sizable group of loyal fans.

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