by Mike McGuire | February 26, 2009 | 1 Comment
This is perhaps one of the coolest and potentially disruptive apps in the Apple iTunes AppStore – at least in terms of the music industry. I’m speaking of the Presidents of the United States of America iPhone app (mentioned in the story) which is actually a compendium of four albums worth of the band’s songs, [...]
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by Mike McGuire | February 12, 2009 | Comments Off
Muzak, provider of that eerie, sometimes annoyingly cloying music piped through elevators, hotel lobbies, malls and lots of other public spaces is filing for Chapter 11. Some might mourn, some will rejoice. Tough economic conditions – our new favorite explanation for everything –are blamed for making it impossible for Muzak to dig itself out from [...]
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by Mike McGuire | February 12, 2009 | 1 Comment
Kindle 2 lets users “hear” a computerized voice read the content of the book, magazine or newspaper article. Authors Guild denounces said feature, arguing that the text-to-speech read back is a derivative work. The obvious point was made in the CNET story: text-to-speech is not a replacement for an audiobook (and an audiobook is a [...]
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by Mike McGuire | February 11, 2009 | Comments Off
I suppose that one of the benefits of the sour economy is that it will put the match to half-baked business ideas – like labels trying to run their own online music services. I’m not saying that the Total Music store hatched by Universal Music and Sony BMG was a half-baked idea, I’m just sayin’ [...]
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by Mike McGuire | February 10, 2009 | Comments Off
A down economy prompts all sorts of companies to consider partnerships, mergers and acquisitions that in better times might have seemed unnecessary. Today’s announcement that Live Nation and Ticketmaster want to merge – a deal which could create a combined entity worth around $2.5 billion — is one of those deals. It might that initially [...]
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by Mike McGuire | February 5, 2009 | 1 Comment
Far be it from me to be insensitive to the travails of the movie industry when it comes to the transition to an online world, or to cast aspersions on the fine reporting over at the New York Times, but this story is just … what’s the phrase the kids use, oh yeah, weak. In [...]
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