Top Digital Music Stories of 2007 - from WNYC's Soundcheck

On WNYC's  Soundcheck, WIRED magazine columnist Eliot Van Buskirk talks to John Schaefer & shares the business and technology developments that drove the music industry in 2007:

  or MP3 here

Van Buskirk's top stories of 2007, with the help from readers of his blog, Listening Post were:

• Radiohead's "In Rainbows" release
  
• Two major labels moved away from digital-rights management
  
• New royalty rates for Internet radio stir controversy
  
• The rise of ad-supported and sponsored music
  
• The dawn of the age of the connected music player
  
• The so-called "360 degree" record deal
  
• Album sales really drop off
  
• RIAA steps up campaign against file sharers, wins court victory
  
• Universal Music Group CEO reveals perplexing digital strategy [from Wired profile by Seth Mnookin]
  
• The return and re-imagining of the music video

Merry Xmas music lovers everywhere

PLAY

Courtesy of Elizabeth & Laurent at badaboo.free.fr

2007: The Year The Music Industry Broke?

It's been an interesting year for music biz: MTV just published the first installment of a  three-part series on the future of music, &  take a look back at 'what went wrong' and when in this article:  "Madonna Ditches Label, Radiohead Go Renegade: The Year The Music Industry Broke". MTV also posted this video & interviews with various industry notables:

The Future Of Music: What's Next? Experts weigh in on what the future holds, what makes a star and how the music industry changed this year. Are Things Really That Bad? Album sales might be down, but downloads, ringtones, ticket sales and other aspects of the industry are booming.

And WIRED magazine posted this  interview with Doug Morris, CEO of Universal: "Universal's CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He's Giving Songs Away" with another terrific article from David Byrne, Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars (highly recommended - after all, as he says, 'what is music, anyway?': 

• In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. 
  

Are we confusing 'recordings' with 'music'? Alternatively, what about the 'art' in 'virtual' record production themselves (eg, seminal works & 'paintings' like Sgt. Peppers,Dark Side of the Moon,etc). Jonathan Sterne's 'The Audible Past' (over at Sterneworks) is a great read - puts the very recent technological history of music into some perspective. 

Createworld 2007 keynote

This is an excerpt of the Music 2.0 keynote address on 26 November, to the Apple University Consortium (AUC) CreateWorld 2007 conference. The presentation features a recent case study in the Fullbright-supported iOrpheus: Art Among Us project (aka, the iPod Opera), held on the South Bank Parklands in August 2007. This involved the work of US Internet music pioneers William Duckworth and Nora Farrell, as well as students and staff from the Queensland Conservatorium and the Griffith Film School.  

A 10 minute documentary film made about the iOrpheus events was screened on state-of-the-art projection and 5.1 surround sound systems, followed by a live cross to New York to iChat with William and Nora. A transcript of the lecture and interviews is available at the Radio IMERSD site.