Blisstunes

What the World Will Look Like After UMG+EMI... This is why the Senate is holding hearings, and why the FTC is holding this up. It's the latest marketshare breakdowns in the US, as counted by Soundscan for last week and shared with Digital Music News by a top label executive. If the deal closed right [...]

Think DRM Is Dead? Then You're Dead Wrong... DRM died when Apple switched to unprotected downloads, right? Utterly wrong: music has never been more inflexible, protected, and non-transferrable. And for proof, here's a rundown of the padlocks installed by the largest music services in the world. Tweet Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/digitalmusicnews/~3/5_6XdYZwmL8/120516drm

Abolish Music Copyright? The Idea Keeps Gaining Steam... If music rights are a mess, why not get rid of the mess? This isn't a fringe idea harbored by the Pirate Bay anymore -- then again, the Pirate Party is starting to win more representation than ever in places like Germany.  And just this week, the [...]

42 Percent of the Time, 'Discovery Moments' Involve a New Artist... Recommendation, recommendation, recommendation, recommendation... it's worse than 'monetization'!  But ten years later, why hasn't anyone figured this puzzle out?  Why is old-school FM radio still dictating the favorite songs of a majority of music fans?    At NARM, power-attorney Ken Hertz said there's a [...]

Good Morning! Spotify, Grooveshark, DMN, UMG, WMG, Sony... More Spotify truthiness?  Facebook now shows nearly 20 million Spotify users, roughly double the advertised active user estimate from Spotify itself.  The running conspiracy theory is that Spotify is actively lowering its active userbase to plump its paid conversion percentages (or something like that.)  In Grooveshark's push [...]

Disrespect, or Disruption? Beastie Boys File-Sharing Volumes Are Surging... So how do you justify file-swapping Adam Yauch? After all, you can't say you're going to the show anymore! Maybe the flip side is that many of these swappers are discovering earlier Beastie Boys stuff for the first time, and merely going to the platform they [...]

Counting Crows: 'BitTorrent Is the New Radio...' But is it, really? We keep seeing evidence that radio - as in, FM radio - remains the strongest promotional platform, by a longshot. That is, despite its tendency towards endless repitition, homogenization, commercial breaks, and deejay spasms. Or maybe, because of those tendencies. In fact, radio is [...]

The Latest! NPR, Thinglink, Thrillcall, Thefuture.fm, DEV, Coachella, Sigur Rós, CBGB's, Pledge Music, Ben Folds... These are the stories we're tracking late in the day. Check back for late-evening and early-morning developments. NPR is now beefing its 'All Tech Considered' series, a '2.0 upgrade' that means broader dive-ins and expanded analysis. The same thing goes [...]

The Latest! Angry Birds, Pandora, WiMP, Pirate Pay, Live Nation, NARM, UMG+EMI... First, let's rattle through some stunning stats. Angry Birds has now reached 1 billion downloads, according to Rovio. That's up from 'just' 500 million in November. Previously, we reported that Pandora hit 150 million registered users. But perhaps more eye-raising is that 70 [...]

May 27th at the Rusty Nail Ardmore, PA. Get Tix and info here.