Topic: Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation Industries

Update: imeem's Final Label Match

I posted a few weeks back at length about imeem's success in securing the rights to stream from three of the four major labels' catalogs. (You can read the post here.) Earlier Monday, imeem announced that it had made a deal with the ...READ»

The Birth of the Goog-Tube

The rumors are true! Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. According to a Google press release "YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community." The transaction has ...READ»

Is the Music Industry Blackmailing Microsoft?

Microsoft plans to pay Universal Music a percentage of its revenue from sales of its new portable media player, the Zune, the New York Times reported yesterday. Microsoft is trying to position the Zune as an iPod killer and plans to ...READ»

SpiralFrog: Is it Over Before it Begins?

SpiralFrog, set to launch in Q1 2007, was supposed to be a new model of digital music distribution. The plan is an advertiser supported model, where users get to download music for free -- as long as they watch advertising. It ...READ»

Why the Music Industry Needs A Makeover

A recent article in Crain's New York Business (subscription required), titled "Music Labels' New Leaders," explores the music industry's shift to hiring the hippest hitmakers to man the helm of many top -level positions in the ...READ»

Ticketmaster Joins the Club

The fan club business, that is. As Reuters reported this week, Ticketmaster bought a majority stake in echomusic, a music marketing outfit in Nashville. It sounds like echomusic will soon be doing for Ticketmaster what Musictoday ...READ»

Attack of the Baby Pixars

Digital animation isn't the cozy little world it used to be. Now lots of people are trying it--and trying to shoot the big studios' lights out.READ»

RIAA Still Suing Individuals, While E.U. Lightens Three Strikes Rule

Piracy and copyright issues are still troubling the world, and recent news about the RIAA, and the European Union's copyright laws highlight this fact. The RIAA is reportedly still suing people when it said it wouldn't, and in ...READ»

Saving the Music Industry -- Environmentally, At Least

As the music biz starts tossing out jewel cases by the busload as they try to jump on the green bandwagon, a Canadian enterprise is also looking to clean up the music industry. Yangaroo, a Toronto-based venture, is innovating the ...READ»

Can Sony's Lia Vollack Save the Music Industry?

Lia Vollack, Sony's soundtrack guru, is the shrewdest music executive in Hollywood. In the past five years, in the face of a little glitch called the Failure of the Music Industry -- the 40% drop in CD sales since 2000 -- Vollack's power has grown immensely. Why? Because soundtracks -- often purchased as a keepsake of a movie -- reliably sell CDs. Can the record labels keep her happy long enough to hold onto their last cash cow?READ»

• Music Goes Green
• Six Soundtracks that Topped the Charts
• Music's Invisible Money Machine

Attack of the Sequel King!

He's a movie-studio boss, but in his lean operation, the boss delivers food, hauls lights around, and drives the truck.READ»

The Music Industry: No Longer a One Trick Pony

There was a time when all a record label had to worry about was making hits. Good hits paved the road to successful albums, and then the label got paid--really paid. As holder of the majority of the publishing rights of music ...READ»

Maverick Mogul

As he builds his own digital version of the vertically integrated movie studio, Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban is questioning everything about the business--and naturally ticking a lot of people off.READ»

WALL E, Steve Jobs, Pixar and Optimism

WALL E.  Have you seen it?  What did you think?  I loved it. I want to discuss WALL E, the latest release from Pixar, not because of the quality of the movie, but because of the Pixar story, and what it has to say about self ...READ»

Media: Can Google, Limewire Outplay iTunes?

The digital music market continues to be an exemplary battleground for the implications new media has on pre-established business practices. Startup gBox and infamous Limewire are venturing into the digital music market to try to ...READ»

Music Lover, Can You Spare a Dime?

According to indie rocker Jill Sobule, there's only one thing record labels are still good for and that’s financing albums. Everyone is preoccupied over which music-distribution model will win out, but the fallout of the Internet's ...READ»

The Lost Picture Show

It's all in the presentation. With crying babies, bad screens and rude chatter at the theater, maybe Hollywood alone cannot be blamed for the box office slump.READ»

Entertainment: Madonna's Moves Herald the Future of Music Distribution

Material Girl Madonna appears to be thinking not just like an artist, but also like a businesswoman. The 49-year-old singer has signed a groundbreaking record deal with concert promoter LiveNation, citing her decision to adopt a more ...READ»

Survey Shows MP3 Pirates Also Buy the Most MP3s, So Why All the Fuss?

A survey conducted in Norway found that music consumers who regularly download illegally pirated music tracks are also the largest purchasers of legitimate digital music files, by a factor of 10 over non-pirates. So, you have to ...READ»

The Sound of Freedom?

Today’s deal by Bertelsmann to sell its big BMG music publishing unit to Vivendi seems, at first glance, like a victory for the little guys. After all, music giants such as Sony, Warner, and EMI all wanted to buy BMG -- and the ...READ»

Animation Skeptic

Job Titles of the FutureREAD»

Google Books Deal Faces Challenge by Tech Giants

Google Books' deal to scan an archive of published books has been controversial right from the start, and now faces its biggest challenge yet: From a powerful coalition that includes Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon. Is it all about search ...READ»

Out of Juice? Recharge!

Feeling burned out? Meet the men and women of Pixar Animation Studios. They're under the kind of pressure that would drain anybody's battery. Here are their screen-tested strategies for staying animated.READ»

iTunes' Share of Music Market Grows to 25%

It's safe to say the music industry is in a transition period, but one thing that's not going anywhere? iTunes. iTunes has quickly taken hold of a good portion of the entire music industry: it accounts for 25% of all music units sold ...READ»

AMF Is on a Roll

AMF has moved bowling out of its old alleys and into technotainment.READ»