snapshot 6/3/08

Tori Amos splits with label, goes indie
Tori Amos has ended her six-year tenure with Epic Records, calling on her fellow artists to "stop being dependent ... on any system that has become undependable." "Artists need not fear structure, we just have to design and partner with expansive ideas," she said. "It is time for us as artists to stop being dependent, dependent on any system that has become undependable. Only then can we help to create a new system that propagates and secures independence for each creator."


Musicians push for better sound online and on disc
As more listeners turn to music downloads and the compact disc seems headed for history's scrap heap, a growing number of artists are making a renewed effort for better-sounding tracks, online and on disc. It's generally accepted that regular MP3 music files compromise CD sound quality for convenience and portability. (Some listeners argue that even CDs are less than optimal.) Last year, Amazon and iTunes made concessions to upgrade the quality of their download tracks.

Some artists want the bar raised even higher. Metallica announced last week that its upcoming untitled album, in addition to being released on CD, will be available as a higher-quality digital download ($12) and on audiophile vinyl in a limited-edition $125 boxed set. It's due this fall.


Spiralfrog.com to offer downloads from EMI artists
SpiralFrog Inc., which operates an ad-supported, free music and video download Web site, said Monday it will soon begin offering content from Coldplay, Keith Urban and other recording artists as part of a new licensing deal with EMI Music. Terms of the deal between the New York-based company and Britain-based EMI Music, a unit of EMI Group PLC, were not disclosed.

The EMI deal gives SpiralFrog users access to content from two of the four major recording companies. SpiralFrog inked a licensing deal with Universal Music Group prior to launching last September.


Firefox on track to crack 20% share in July
Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox browser is on pace to hit the 20% market-share mark next month, a Web metrics company said today. Firefox boosted its share by 0.6% in May, accounting for 18.4% of the browsers used during the month and putting it within shouting distance of a major milestone, according to Net Applications Inc. "Firefox is trending to hit 20% market share sometime in July," said Vince Vizzaccaro, the company's executive vice president of marketing, in an e-mail.


Radiohead catalog comes to iTunes Stor
Radiohead's back catalog is now at the iTunes Store (link), Apple has announced. Although the British band was previously selling material from its latest album, In Rainbows, its earlier albums had been left off, possibly due to licensing issues. In Rainbows was initially launched as an independent download, for which customers could pay as much or as little as they felt it was worth. A traditional CD release and digital distribution on Amazon followed.


TuneCore: Get yourself on iTunes for $30
Suddenly, without the need for massive infrastructure and with the presence of unlimited "shelf space" for music, artists could get themselves into the new stores without needing a label, but they still needed someone to help with the mundane details that surrounded loading music into a store like iTunes, stuff like contracts, signatures, renewals, payment processing, properly-formatted music files, and album art produced to each store's specifications. In other words, artists needed an administrator but not necessarily a full-blown label.

And the digital stores want a middleman, too; none of them really want to deal with a million artists directly, artists who can't properly submit XML-formatted album data and AAC files at the right bitrate.


Short Ads
Those of you who use immem have surely noticed that they have started inserting audio ads between playlist tracks. Bravo immem! Audio ads are the only format that works with audio content. This morning I heard two ads on imeem; one for the Zune and one for T-Mobile. The Zune ad was about three seconds and the T-Mobile ad about 10 seconds.


My Morning Jacket Premieres Album on Internet Jukeboxes
My Morning Jacket and its label ATO Records have struck upon a new way to introduce an album to existing fans and help the band find new ones: Zapping the record across the internet onto thousands of jukeboxes in bars and nightclubs around the world. The band's upcoming album, Evil Urges, doesn't go on sale until June 10, but barflies and club kids can catch it as of Tuesday on any one of these music machines.