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On the Beat (Music Talk)

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  • Host: Celia Hirschman
  • KCRW presents a new weekly commentary about the music industry with analysis by Celia Hirschman, President of Downtown Marketing, a music consulting firm in New York City.
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Music Excursions

Wed, Nov 18 Listen

How to Finance Your Career

Wed, Nov 11 Listen
To those who think talent is the hallmark of success in the music business, think again. While talent is essential, marketing wisdom and good business sense are fundamental skills needed as well. That's especially true for independent artists, who often self-finance their careers. With so many musical acts out there vying for attention, a keen and innovative approach is needed...

Performance Royalty Debate Rages On

Wed, Nov 4 Listen
The debate over whether broadcasters should pay a performance royalty is one of the music industry's hottest topics. Just two weeks ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee, approved a bill that would require broadcast radio stations to compensate artists and labels whenever music is aired...

Kevin Montgomery and Amanda Palmer

Wed, Oct 21 Listen
It takes tenacity and vision for an independent artist to build and maintain a career in today's music market. Anyone with a computer can record and distribute a record on their own, but building a self-supporting career is a different matter. Finally, there's some hope. A few musicians have embraced new models, sculpting out their own futures...

Data Rocks!

Wed, Oct 14 Listen
For the last fifty years, the traditional record label business was built on an ecosystem of radio stations, press outlets, retail stores and live venues, all of whom lived behind velvet ropes. The system closed to the public. Only the trade could participate. Today, that business is a shell of its former self...

The FTC and Bloggers

Wed, Oct 7 Listen
They went after funeral homes, they went after identity theft, and now the Federal Trade Commission is going after the most pressing need for consumer protectionism ? bloggers...

Gaming and YouTube

Wed, Sep 30 Listen
While the record industry struggles with the difficult transition of selling expensive physical goods to selling low-cost digital files, the gaming industry appears to be heading towards the same fate...

Spotify

Wed, Sep 23 Listen
It's been less than a decade since Apple launched iTunes, and they remain the dominant digital retailer of choice. Currently, iTunes enjoys 70% of all digital music sales in the US market.

File Sharing, Next Generation

Wed, Sep 16 Listen
Every country handles peer-to-peer downloading differently. Here in the US, in federal court this week, four high level members of the website, "Rabid Neurosis" were indicted on music piracy charges. Rabid Neurosis is a website that operated from 1996 to 2007. It was infamous for uploading illegal music files months before their official CD release date. According to federal prosecutors, the early supply of music often came from music industry insiders at radio, press and retail, who gave...

The Beatles

Wed, Sep 9 Listen
Today, on the ninth day, of the ninth month, in 2009, The Beatleshave once again invaded. This time, the landing pad is the world stage, with multiple massive Beatles releases...

Music Scenes

Wed, Aug 26 Listen

Summits and Conferences

Wed, Aug 19 Listen
This week, I attended an invitation-only record industry summit in LA. About 50 mid- and high-level players from all sectors sat in the backyard of an attorney's home in Mandeville Canyon to discuss the plight of the business. The discussion was moderated by Eric Garland of Big Champagne. Big Champagne monitors music downloads, streams and bit torrents on the web. They are in the best position to identify Internet users' behavior in music...

Tenenbaum, the Pirates and the BC Dash

Wed, Aug 5 Listen

Sonicbids

Wed, Jul 29 Listen

Rock in Museums

Wed, Jul 22 Listen
When you think of an art museum, you probably think of a venue more in line with pondering than with partying. And if there's a music program, it's probably classical, chamber or folk music. But in the past few years, museums all over the country have been hosting great live indie-rock performances...

Financing Records

Wed, Jul 15 Listen

The People Meter

Wed, Jul 8 Listen
This story involves a billion-dollar device, a secret society of business executives, the Federal Communications Commission, and a little radio station housed in a basement...

Michael Jackson

Wed, Jul 1 Listen
Michael Jackson was an artist who transcended fame and stardom and sat firmly in the realm of an icon. Its possible we may never see a star of his proportions again. After an announcement of Jacksons death, the Internet exploded. Twitter feeds doubled, Facebook status updates tripled, and the LA Times website, one of the first to break the story, nearly caved from the activity...

Jammie Thomas and Bruce Springsteen

Wed, Jun 24 Listen
The case brought against Jammie Thomas for illegally downloading 24 songs came to a close last Thursday. Thomas was found guilty for willfully violating the copyrights of the songs she downloaded and ordered to pay the RIAA a whopping $1.9 million in damages...

Bopaboo, Jammie Thomas and the Persian Bay

Wed, Jun 17 Listen
Great ideas are built on thinking differently. There's a new website called Bopaboo that hopes to solve the record business' current woes. The site allows users to take their unwanted electronic music files, and sell them as used MP3's for a cheaper-than-retail price. Sellers can upload their unwanted songs in a closed community, set the price, and wait for buyers to come knocking like eBay. Bopaboo would offer record labels a percentage of the transaction, small as it may be. The idea has...

Pirates and Pirates

Wed, Jun 10 Listen
This week, the Pirate Party won 7.1 percent of the Swedish vote. The Pirate Party is a young, technically savvy political group who now occupy one of the eighteen seats Sweden holds in the European Parliament. One of their main platforms is the revision to copyright law and the decriminalization of Internet file sharing, or illegal downloading..

EMusic and Live Nation

Wed, Jun 3 Listen
The record business has long been criticized for its lack of adaptation to the changing music market. At first the excuse was somewhat understandable. We had a model that was working for decades before the Internet pulled the rug out from under. We fought hard, stupidly hard to maintain the old way of doing business. This week, Sony Music has finally given us a good example of how the business is starting to change...

Napster, Choruss and Leaky Pipes

Wed, May 27 Listen
If you were to re-tell the history of the music industry, you would have to divide it into two parts: Everything that happened before Napster, and everything that's happened since. Napster introduced the idea of free content on the web, and blurred the lines between sharing and stealing. The shift delivered a massive blow to the tried-and-true methods of the record industry....

Auto-Tune and Melodyne

Wed, May 20 Listen
American Idol has already run eight seasons. Since its debut in 2002, watching non-singers belting out of tune has become an amusing addiction. When Karaoke was introduced in the 80's from Japan, it revealed an inner fascination with the amateur, flaws and all. But since that time, something has been happening in professional recording studios that is a curious counterpart to our obsession with amateurism: that is perfection, specifically, pitch perfection...

Censorship

Wed, May 6 Listen
It's been a busy week for Trent Reznor, the mastermind of rock band Nine Inch Nails. In the midst of touring North American amphitheaters, word came back that Apple Computer had censored the bands' most recent free IPhone application update for their album called The Downward Spiral...

Frank Zappa: Man of the Year

Wed, Apr 29 Listen
Most record executives attribute the demise of the record business to 1999, when digital maverick Shawn Fanning opened his peer-to-peer music site, Napster. From that moment on, the record labels thought they were at war with the consumer...

Righting the 'Copywrongs'

Wed, Apr 22 Listen
Courtroom decisions dominate the news this week underscoring the potential legal opportunities copyright attorneys are facing. To those graduating college this May, think about taking your LSAT's...

It's a Privilege

Thu, Apr 16 Listen

Arts and the Stimulus Package

Wed, Apr 15 Listen
As the financial recession deepens, government and non-profit organizations alike have been forced to weed out the expendable from the essential. Sadly, music and the arts usually take the biggest hit. But to help boost investment, President Obama has allocated $50 million in his recent stimulus package to the creative community...

The Music Business Trial of the Year

Wed, Apr 1 Listen
I can imagine that when Joel Tenenbaum downloaded seven songs from a file sharing service, he didn't think it would be a big deal. He probably didn't think allowing that service to share his seven songs with others was a big deal either. And I'm certain he didn't think he'd end up in the middle of a high-profile copyright lawsuit. He was wrong. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is suing Tenenbaum for punitive damages. If the court finds willful infringement of copyright,...

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