Last week, I went on Ticketmaster to purchase a ticket to see one of my favorite artists, The Weeknd, in concert. Tickets went on sale on Thursday at 10 am. There I was on my iPad at 10am, trying unsuccessfully to process my order.  I tried for thirty minutes – on my iPad, my Blackberry, and [...]

  We’ve been able to pay to digitally download sound recordings through legitimate services for over a decade now, and these services have grown pretty rapidly in terms of both scale and profitability. So much so, that iTunes (so far the most successful of the digital distribution platforms) has sold more than 10 billion songs [...]

The “world’s largest funding platform,” Kickstarter raised $20 million for musicians in 2011. The Kickstarter-crowdfunding model demonstrates that musicians can successfully (and directly) obtain funding for their creative projects from their fans, without record label backing- either major or independent. This all begs the question, what does Kickstarter’s $20 million mean for the future of [...]

The 2011 end of the year numbers are in! Was 2011 the year when the music industry went back to black? Well that depends on what numbers you compare and who you ask. The Nielson-Billboard 2011 Music Industry Report indicates that music sales for 2011 are up for the first time in seven years (thanks [...]

By now everyone has heard of Spotify, the Swedish-founded, UK-headquartered music streaming service launched in 2008. This past summer, Spotify joined a long (and growing list) of music subscription services available in the United States, including Rhapsody, Mog, and Rdio.  Already established in Europe (including Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and [...]

Unless you have been living in a cave the past six years, you have at least a passing understanding of the existence of social media. Social media allows its users to reach out to friends, acquaintances, or followers with what is happening. This could be in the form of a picture, event posting, or a [...]