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Technology

An End and Beginning for the Media

Source: All About Jazz
January 4, 2009

When the economy sneezes, the media business catches pneumonia. The problem for the media business in 2008 was that the economy caught pneumonia. When the economy gets pneumonia, the media business gets it too--then someone knocks it across the back of the head with a shovel. Or several shovels. Advertising is cratering. (GM is essentially a media-funding company with a carmaker attached.) The audience is fragmenting. And the old means of business--grinding up trees and delivering them, shooting radiation to ...

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Technology

The Apocalypse is Coming: Musicians Guide What You Need to Pack

Source: All About Jazz
January 4, 2009

Saxaphone, check. Extra reeds, check. Crisis schmisis. Its nothing more than a crisis of consumer confidence, and Wired.com Editor Dylan Tweneys list of 12 Good Gadgets for Hard Times is a great way to spend some money to survive it.

But what happens in a real crisis, the kind where the world stops working, the electricity stops working and (gasp) the internet stops working? Every New Years Eve, some wacko predicts the End of Days. What might you ...

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Technology

Google Tries Converting Every Book Ever Written to Digital

Source: All About Jazz
January 4, 2009

CONTROVERSY: GOOGLE tries converting every book ever written to digital... Developing...

Project Gutenberg offers thousands of titles (mostly fiction) in txt format, while manybooks.net provides an impressive array of books in Sony format (as well as several other formats). The motherload of free ebooks, however, is books.google.com. The Google folks are busy digitizing every book they can get their hands on. As of this writing, they have reportedly digitized over 10,000 public domain books, which anyone can download ...

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Technology

Sanyo R277 Delivers Internet Radio Without a Computer

Source: Michael Ricci
January 4, 2009

The table-top box provides access to thousands of stations and will wake you up in the morning. Online radio, which can pick up thousands of stations from around the world, is one of the wonders of the Internet.

Except that it isn't very convenient, mostly because it's generally tied to a computer. That means listening in the same room as the computer, unless you have some kind of audio network in the house. The dream of an online radio that ...

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Technology

2008 CD and Ringtone Sales Fall, Digital Growth Slows

Source: HypeBot
January 3, 2009

For the 52-week period ending December 28th, according to retail data collected by Nielsen SoundScan:

Physical album sales were down 20% Overall album sales dropped 14% after digital was added This follows a 15% drop in '07 and represents a 45% decline since a high in 2000 Digital track sales were up 27% Down from a 45% rise in '07 Digital album sales grew 32% to 65.8 million unitsDown from a 53% rise in '07 ...

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Technology

$800 Million Invested in Music Tech in 2008

Source: HypeBot
January 3, 2009

On his Indie Music Tech blog, Duncan Freeman lists more than $260 million in investments by angels and  and venture capitalists in music tech companies during 2008.

After including deals where the exact terms weren't disclosed, as well as, more than $520 million in mergers and acquisitions, he totaled a whopping $800 million in music tech related transactions in 2008. There is a list of each of the deals including links to related news stories here.

Duncan's own Band Metrics ...

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Technology

JazzWax FAQ: Questions Answered

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
January 1, 2009

Now that we've reached the end of one year and the start of a new one, I figure now is as good a time as any to tie up a few loose ends. In the past couple of months, I've received quite a few emails from new readers asking about JazzWax and how things work.

Here, in a nutshell, are the questions I'm most frequently asked along with the answers:

What is JazzWax? It's a blog where I write ...

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Technology

Billboards Free Send a Tune to a Soldier

Source: All About Jazz
December 31, 2008

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