I’m sorry I didn’t post a link to this sooner. This is a nice perspective on the whole digital music landscape from the boss over at Yahoo Music. We’ve heard from the major labels and we’ve heard from the retailers, but Y! has a different view which is interesting. I’ve followed this since the beginning. I started Unit Circle Rekkids right near the start of the Internet’s explosive growth period. I saw different digital solutions emerge and fall by the wayside. After getting burned on Liquid Audio (if you can imagine, back then you paid them (A LOT) for the software to encode your music so that they could sell it and take a cut).

Over the years, digital distribution has changed from an interesting idea to I think the best solution for indie music. If we can get the majors to get over themselves, I think the days of manufacturing CDs are at an end.

Bloomberg.com: U.S.
NBC Universal, General Electric Co.s entertainment division, began selling television shows for download at Amazon.com Inc., days after ending a similar agreement with Apple Inc.

Is it about the content or is it about the technology? Is it about the content creator or the content consumer? Amazon is really good at on-line retail, but their download strategy is as stupid as Apple’s strategy is smart.

Will Heroes be strong enough to drive people from iTunes to Amazon, right after the Google TV debacle? Not me, ’cause Amazon’s DRM is extremely lame. But maybe most people don’t care?

I guess we’ll see?

The Television Revolution is at the Gates

This article is over a year old and still seems precient. We’re starting to see Indy filmmakers try to raise money this way, but they don’t have the dedicated audience that someone like Joss Whedon or Aaron Sorkin does. If someone at that level decided to go audience funded, they could kick start a whole new industry…

this is a great article. It definitely jibes with my experience. After having some bad scares with DVD-R and CD-R media going sour years later, I’ve switched to archiving on both Hard drives and DVD (hard drives are actually cheaper per MB these days), but it is always important to know the differences between brands and types of media. I have to second his recommendation for Verbatim DVD+R DL, it is the only one I’ve found to work consistently.

I’m calling these numbers into question until I get some more details. It seems pretty counter-intuitive that with Apple selling a million iPods a month (or whatever) and with them introducing movies and such recently that their sales could possibly be falling. I could understand that songs-sold-per-user as an average could be dropping. That might even make a sort of sense, but overall sales? I don’t know about this. It also seems to be counter to my own direct experience where my label revenues from digital downloads (mostly driven by iTunes) are increasing month-to-month, not decreasing.

Griffin Technology: iTalk Pro – Stereo Mic for iPod

As I wrote earlier, the new iPods can finally record in CD Quality audio without having to put Linux on them. Finally, there is something that lets you take advantage of it! With an external mic-in to boot. I’ve been waiting for the widescreen iPods to update my 4G, but this might push me over the edge…