Music Industry News

Jazz News: Huge Music Donation to the Library of Congress

Source: Riffs on Jazz by John Anderson
January 11, 2011

Universal Music Group has made a huge donation of treasured recordings from its vault to the Library of Congress. The material, dating from 1926 to 1948, includes music from Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, and Billie Holiday. Here's the story from the New York Times: Library of Congress Gets a Mile of Music By Larry Rohter The Library of Congress has begun taking possession of a huge donation of recordings, some 200,000 metal, glass and lacquer master discs from ...

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Skyline Music Launches Book a Band / Plant a Tree

Source: HypeBot
January 11, 2011

Hypebot and Music Think Tank's parent company, booking agency Skyline Music, is kicking off the new year on a green note with the launch of Book A Band / Plant A Tree and a challenge to other music companies to join in. Every time a promoter or venue books one of Skyline Music's exclusive clients, who range from jazz legend Arturo Sandoval to social media darling Zoe Keating (3 million+ Twitter followers), and accepts contracts and promo email, a tree is planted ...

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Filling Catalog Holes - Rdio Makes Nice with Merlin

Source: HypeBot
January 11, 2011

Rdio filled a few catalog holes today by partnering with Merlin. This deal will give the streaming music service access to titles by top indie artists including Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, Spoon, The xx, The National, Vampire Weekend, The Pixies, Belle and Sebastian, Tim McGraw and Boards of Canada. The Rdio—Merlin relationship will initially focus on the U.S market and later expand globally. Last year, Rdio launched without Merlin's content—likely in an attempt to ease licensing terms. Now it's just ...

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Merlin "Concerned" Indies May Not Get Fair Deal from Google Music, Signs Deal with Rdio

Source: HypeBot
January 11, 2011

Indie trade group Merlin has signed a deal with Rdio to stream the music of its members which include such key indie labels as Rough Trade, Epitaph, Naxos, Beggars, Merge and Domino. The deal fills a major hole in the Rdio offering.  At the same time, a leaked email to Merlin members states that while talks have finally begun with the proposed Google Music service, Merlin execs remain concerned that indie artists and labels may not get a fair deal. ...

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Supreme Court Says Major Label Price Fixing Lawsuit Can Move Forward

Source: HypeBot
January 11, 2011

The U.S. Supreme Court has made the decision to allow a lawsuit accusing the four major labels of conspiring to fix music prices to move forward. The labels appealed to prevent this from happening, but the Supreme Court has chosen not to stop the lawsuit. "The case is Sony Music Entertainment v. Kevin Starr, though it involves all of the Big Four labels: Sony, Warner Music, EMI, and a unit of Vivendi SA (the company behind Universal Music Group)," Jacqui Cheng ...

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January is Filled with Jazz

Source: Seattle Jazz Scene
January 8, 2011

From Jim Wilke:

There's an amazing amount of activity in the jazz world this week.... the JEN conference (successor to IAJE) is this week in New Orleans, the APAP presenters conference is happening in New York City and both are chock full of artists' showcases and presentations and concerts, stirring up more interest and involvement in Jazz.

Add to this the NEA Jazz Masters Awards Tuesday night in New York (already sold out) and you have a lot of positive ...

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Buy One, Give One Free: What Artists Can Learn from Social Entrepreneurship

Source: HypeBot
January 8, 2011

Over at Music Think Tank, George Howard makes the case that the record industry has yet to find a way to reward fans for sharing music. In many instances, our human nature is to share the music we love with others. We've yet to incentivize this exchange in any way. Instead, the record industry has condemned it. “So, we as content creators desperately need to encourage our constituents to share," Howard writes. “That is, when someone buys a CD at ...

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As Google, Apple Hesitate, RealNetworks Demos Unifi Cloud Music and Media Service at CES

Source: HypeBot
January 8, 2011

Yesterday at CES, RealNetworks demoed Unifi, a new music and media cloud service which its says can serve as a complete library of all the media a users owns, accessible from any internet-connected device.  Real says Unifi will be available early this year. But how did Real beat Google and Apple cloud music services to market?  Apparently by ignoring the record labels. More & A Video Demo: For months, Google and Apple have been negotiating with labels and other rightsholders to ...

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