It has been a month of major announcements, changes and acquisitions for the new music industry and in this guest post, Scott Perry of the always informative NewMusicTipSheet.com does a great job of chronicling them:
I
haven't seen a land-grab like this since 1999. Call it a land-grab, call it an
explosion of innovation, but the steady trickle of new developments in online
music consumption and communication has turned into a flood as of late.
Let's pull out our dance card, folks: in the past month alone, Pitchfork and Stereogum have both launched video destinations, and PluggedIn went public
with their music-based HD video
community site. Universal has made strategic investments i
n PluggedIn (which is
also partially funded by Welk Music Group founder Kevin Welk), online
distributor InGrooves, and music-based social net 
Buzznet. Buzznet has purchased the music blogs Stereogum
and Idolator, which raised question by other blogs about their
future
unbiased-ness. Tommy Hilfiger has launched a
video destination via
SonyBMG, SonyBMG's myplay is growing as an ad-monetized social net, all the
labels continue to monetize their sites' traffic with ads, and Music.com has quietly transformed...
itself into a music video
destination site. SonyBMG, Warner Music Group, and Universal all have ownership
stakes in the upcoming MySpace Music (to the howls of questions pertaining to
equity for the likes of Ioda (congrats, Ted!) and The Orchard), which will go head-to-head with Imeem (which has also granted ownership stakes to the big
dist co's). And TuneCore has paid out over $1 million to the artists that
use their service to sell music.
Yahoo-owned photo site Flickr just added video-posting capabilities, throwing down
the gauntlet against the Google-owned YouTube about two years too late.
Facebook Music has emerged from beta, Last.fm continues to seamlessly integrate community into
their celestial jukebox, ilike helps fans find other fans (and buy tickets and
music) via their iTunes history, Twitter is helping people communicate via broad-blasting
text messages, and Ning is helping artists make and grow their own social
nets. And still in its infancy, ConcertAttack is helping fans find each other by posting
pictures & videos from recent concerts.
Muxtape came out of nowhere and has totally won the online
mixtape space before it was even a category (with a fellow fan developing a
badass plug-in that lets you view Muxtapes like you would use Coverflow for your iTunes). Although for the record, Mixwit has won my heart with easy loading via SeeqPod & Skreemr, customizable mixtape covers, rolling spools, and
instant syndication to a couple dozen communities. Now whether or not either of
these two services are legal remains to be seen, but I do hope that something
can be worked out.
WMG has hired Jim Griffin to turn his ten-year-old ISP-based music
consumption fee speech into a reality, which has been greeted by skepticism to
those new to this idea in the blog community.
Indie retail just threw a helluva party with Record Store Day, which started amongst a handful of
retailers less than six months ago and blossomed into a worldwide event this
past Saturday.
And if you missed the news on this last week, check out MiShare, this $99 device which can be used to transfer
tracks between iPods (ruh roh). And AT&T just launched a Mother's Day
commercial featuring "Daydream" by iMonster & Jill Scott from Lupe Fiasco's debut -- a mighty fine reason to stop your
Tivo and let the ad play.
Take a breath and let this dizzying deluge of data soak in for a moment -- ALL
of the above has happened in the past MONTH, and that's just the tip of the
iceberg.
Who wins? We all win. As music evolves from an object-based acquisition to an
experiential event that is either monetized by advertising or licensing, the
opportunities to discover and share new music has never been bigger. It's just
a matter of attaching a fraction of a penny to each transaction in order to
make sure the rights holders get paid.
