Topic Browser

In a major setback for the RIAA and the major record labels, a federal judge today cut the $675,000 damages award against Joel Tenenbaum for downloading and sharing 30 songs by 90% to just $67,500. Calling the fines "unconstitutionally excessive",...

Holy crap. Graphic designers, want to win a copy of CS5 design software in our contest? Click here to enter…

Background & Creative Allies Design Contest As you may know, the parent company of Hypebot and Music Think Tank is the boutique national booking agency Skyline Music. This summer Skyline is getting a makeover. A management consultant might call it...

In response to an article in the Guardian on Clay Shirky and his opinion on news paywalls, Glenn Peoples over at Billboard has written a great summary of how the music industy's digital dilemma relates to that of the newspaper...

GigsWiz has released a Facebook Application. Through it fans can make concert requests in Facebook for the bands and artists who are registered users of the GigsWiz platform. The application lets fans share their requests within their own friend network,...

This month, YouPhonics will help you jam with anyone, anywhere, at any time; from your old bandmates to your favorite artists. No longer will you need to live near their bandmates. Heck, you don't need to know them either. In...

Over at our sister blog Music Think Tank, there are two new posts up. One is from Chris Bracco, editor of Tight Mix, on how to track the results of your attempts to get your music on blogs. The other,...

The End of the Road?: The concert business, a lone bright spot in the struggling music industry, is in trouble this summer. A tale of bad backs, canceled acts and angry fans. (WSJ) In response, Live Nation and Ticketmaster promise...

The oil spill t-shirt design contest had me thinking about the rich history of propaganda art in Western civilization. For decades, governments, business and revolutionary groups have relied on graphic depictions to convey an overt political agenda. There is a lot to be learned from the artwork of past political movements, and designers can look to [...]

Before the end of the year, MySpace Music, having "underachieved" with regard to revenue goals, is considering launching paid subscription service. Sources say they are in need of moving to a paid model because the venture is burning through piles...

TIME ran a story this morning on album leaks; the topic is interesting to me because it highlights a shift that happened within my lifetime. Prior to the web and the social epidemic of file-sharing, Tuesday was the holy grail...

Communication scholar Nancy Baym, who has been interviewed on here before, recently gave a great talk at Harvard's Berkman Center. In it, she talks about how the music industries, in advent of the Internet and social web, have been forced...

Due to a technicality, Lady Gaga was ineligible for the nomination of best new artist at this year's Grammys -even though she was the most popular artist of 2009. Since she was a nominee the previous year, it meant that...

New Music Seminar has announced an updated schedule and speaker line up for its New York City summer conference from July 19th to 21st at Webster Hall. The conference will include five focused discussions on topics like the future of...

Several services including Twitter1K and Followers For Sale have begun selling new Twitter fans by the thousands an at least one experienced internet marketer Jonathan Volk claims to have increased his Twitter following after buying just 1000 followers. "Before ordering...

Loudbytes has been experimenting with selling t-shirts, buttons, mugs and other music merchandise with download codes attached. Now Loudbytes downloads will be counted by SoundScan alongside sales at iTunes, Amazon and other outlets. “Loudbytes is not about originating sales online,...

The Pirate Bay Hacked, Users Exposed - A group of Argentinian hackers have managed to gain access to The Pirate Bay’s admin panel through a security breach. Via the backend of The Pirate Bay website they were able to delete...

Sirius XM Radio has now broken the 19.5 million subscribers mark. This makes sense. Well, sort of; it would make sense to my father. He and I recently got back from a 3,000 mile road trip, spending near entire days...

The Internet and Mobile TV platform Babelgum has created a viral video parody of the group OK GO called "Giant Pie." Blogger Brenna Ehrlich over at Mashable suspects that the parody is meant to send two messages: OK Go’s videos...

Marketer Seth Godin published this interesting insight today on his blog: "For 20 years, the Billboard charts were easy to manipulate. By paying radio stations and some retailers, record labels could push an act to the top 40, which would...

Both Google and Bing are searching for ways to position themselves as the best entertainment discovery tool. While Bing's offering is slightly more robust than Google's; it may not take them long - as recent rumors suggest - to catch...

At the end of June, Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora, held a talk at Digg, where he outlines the difficulties and windfalls that the company experienced during their transition onto mobile devices. As Blogger Kent Rahman writes, the talk...

Over at our sister blog Music Think Tank, there are two new posts up. One is from Chris Taylor, a co-founder of MicControl, a music blogging network, on the 11 must-have iPhone apps for the musician on-the-go. The other, from...

Garage-pop rockers Killola, joining forces with Aderra, a digital distributor of live concert recordings, have created USB Dogtags - that not only serve as a unique merch item to sell to their fans, but also provide the group with a...

SuperGlued, the community for live music lovers, is kicking off the New York Summer Music Junkie Contest on July 11; they will aggregate and reward concertgoers for all the things they do before, during and after shows. Fans will earn...

(Updated) News Corp. is in discussions with Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. about replacing MySpace's crucial search-advertising partnership with Google... (Wall Street Journal) How Canadian rockers Arcade Fire maintain DIY mystique. (Yahoo) Glenn Peoples: 5 Hot Digital Music...

But Beatles Fans Still Have To Wait EMI Music has remastered 15 albums at Abbey Road Studios from The Beatles' Apple Records catalog and will release them as CD's and digital downloads on October 26, 2010. This will mark the...

From the Eighth Dimension Promotions newsletter, an update on the winning album cover design for Hawke from Bai-ee, who is not only a Creative Allies graphic designer but a house music producer… *** Hawke, the song-crafting nom-de-plume of producer/DJ Gavin Hardkiss, presents this steadfastly exuberant single filled with re-works of “Monday Comes And Goes,” the signature track [...]

Report: Even Dirty Tricks Can't Keep Stats Up The number of visitors to MySpace UK is reportedly down 50% from 10 million to 5 million in the last six months. The drop has lead to a fresh round of layoffs...

According to the artist commonly known as Prince, in an interview with the UK's Daily Mirror - the publication that will be giving away his new album 20TEN in a cover mounted promotion this week: "The internet's completely over. I...