Well, it used to be quite simple: the ones with the big bucks could easily plan out who will have a hit during the summer, put together a well-crafted media plan showing to all involved how much the Mega Company believes in the artist and the specific song and, after many, many remixes to be sure the song is no turkey, that the video was appealing and radio programmers reacted well to the song, there were little doubts the artist could indeed have a hit. That, of course, depending on how the other bands and labels would do (better songs, better media plans and partners, better videos, higher ranking radio programmers, etc...).

Now ? Damn, the internet has again change all the rules :)

Take three of the latest big hits: Fun's We Are Young, Gotye's Somebody To Know and Carla Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe didn't started that way at all: it was more like a gigantic rumble, growing and growing that went viral on Twitter and Youtube and everybody got to send that link over and over again. There, no carefully media plan, just a good song, a good video and that magical ingredient no one knows which makes a hit or a miss...But basically, it's all about expanding from your...

The US Congress passed a Copyright law, back in 1978, stating that after 35 years, songwriters will be able to reclaim publishing rights from record labels and publishers if they introduced termination notices at least two years before the recoup date. This means that, on january 1st 2013, many artists will have back the publishing rights on songs they wrote, or co-wrote. And we're talking artists as important as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Pink Floyd (for recordings done in 1978) but the list will go on and on as years go by.

That sounds good, no ? But not so fast: some major labels, EMI USA at the forefront, are arguing that the artists were by contract their employees and therefore all works performed as employee belongs to the company (corporate authorship). Which means that EMI USA, along with other labels and publishing companies who did have artists as employees, are fighting to retain copyrights on songs written by the artists who were signed with them...Without getting into the nitty-gritty of things, one-sided unbalanced contracts are already the norm for most contracts, the artists being all too eager to quickly sign a deal, so 35 years seem...

These days, we hear more and more about crowd-funding for music related "products": records (but also movies) are being made possible by the injection of funds from the public, charmed and interested in a specific project.
The idea of crowd-funding isn't new but it attracks more and more people and groups who relay on this social based dynamic to get running on a documentary, an album, an art project.

Vinylmania is one of these great project: an italian vinyl lover wants to make a 75 minutes documentary about how he got entangled in music and he visits 11 different cities in the world, meets many different people, all as bitten as him by the love of music and it's paramount object: the vinyl. His film embodies so well the love for music and its physical presence, something we're losing when buying an mp3: lines of codes lost among other lines of codes can't compete with a 30cm Long Playing with a cover, an artwork sometimes as important as its musical half.

see here for more infos about Paolo Campana and his documentary project: http://www....

We all know the industry has to face crumbling physical sales and digital ones don't quite make up to it, if only because people now buy more on a song-per-song basis than full albums. Some like to lament, some prefer to act. As Mister Valaire, a band from Quebec, is doing and their exemple is worth the attention.

Lost in the gigantic noise zone that is the internet, there's something like 5 million bands on the now as-good-as-dead Myspace, these fierce canadian musicians had an album out 2005 in (Mister Brian) which flopped with elegance but already proposed to the buyers an extra to the physical album with access to some digital content.
In 2007, weeks before Radiohead "pioneereed" the pay-as-you-want In Rainbow, Mister Valaire digitally released the "Friterday Night" album for free, under Creative Common licence, and the album soon reached 27.000 downloads about one year later. From the 27000th download onwards, the email adress was asked from the people downloading the album, providing a very valuable marketing angle. In 2009, the album reached 40.000 downloads, and Mister Valaire awarded itself a well-deserved Golden Hard Disk Trophy.

In 2009, their...

In an interesting article from industrial online mag Side-Line, the editor points out that it seems major labels will soon abandon CDs as the end consumer primary source for music and that format will only be used as limited editions package filled with goodies and extras.

It makes sense: we're seeing the last moments of a format as digital downloads are slowly but surely taking more importance but that's not the main reason: CD costs money to be manufactured, and money to be stored in shops that are already reducing the space allowed for music and record companies need to squeeze as much as they can in these very hard times for the music industry. Already the end consumer has slowly killed the album as he's keener to buy song on a one-per-one basis, deprieving the industry from revenues on albums...Furthermore, the way the public listens to music is more and more dematerialized: people buy music from Itunes or digital portals, or listen to streaming sources, but the music main source isn't CD no more. Plus add to that equation piracy downloads and you have there the recipe for the end of a music format: CD's will slowly get put aside and will remain as an extra-...