Warner Music is Tracking You!

A piece in Hypebot alerts us to a lawsuit filed in federal court contended that Warner Bros Records website, among other  well-known media properties, including Disney and their music site Playlist.com, have been secretly tracking online users, as well as children, by installing ‘Flash cookies’ on their computers, which quicky respawn after their deletion.

Didn't anyone learn anything from the Sony/DRM debacle?  Would be curious to know how many people actually visit the Warner Bros Records site. 

Hypebot plays the game of casting the upcoming HBO movie based on Rolling Stone journalist Steve Knopper's "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age".

The most amusing of the suggestions is Danny Boneduce to play Edgar Bronfman Jr.

A Social Media Strategy Outline For Bands

Hypebot posted a graphic that sums up why bands must use social networking tools. It's not telling artists anything new, but it does lay it out and makes it all very logical. This will help bands to focus their marketing. At the center of the hub is the website from which all roads (whether Reverb Nation or Twitter) lead to.





Biggest Selling Vinyl Record of 2008

Hypebot posted this graph which has Radiohead bookending the top 10 selling vinyl records of the past year. If anyone is thinking about waxing poetically on the comeback of vinyl, just look at the numbers and think twice about the impact. As I've written before, vinyl does not make a dent in sales number. In Rainbows sold 25,800 copies. Rolling Stone's article proclaims that vinyl sales almost doubled in 2008 and that "vinyl is still experiencing a renaissance". I would hardly call this news. With more layoffs at labels and more artists releasing records on their own (Radiohead), vinyl sales will not help music's bottom line rebound. When it does and it enables artists to make a living making music, then it's news.

Rights Restricted Music Is Back

Have the labels and studios learned anything over the past few years? An article in today's Hypebot says there is a consortium of the labels and studios who want to, once again, control how you can use what you buy.

It's been said, wants gone is gone. But apparently some in the entertainment industry failed to get the memo. A group of major film studios and record labels have joined together once again in an initiative called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem to find a way to control what happens after you purchase a digital album or movie.
"The goal is to create for downloads the same kind of interoperability that's been true for physical products, such as CDs and DVDs...Once you've acquired a file, you could play it on any of your devices -- if it couldn't be passed directly from one DECE-ready device to another, you'd be allowed to download additional copies. And when you're away from home, you could stream the file to any device with a DECE-compatible Web browser." - LA Times
Its called domain based digital rights management. Apple already uses a version of it. Total freedom until you want to share what you bought with a friend...or use it on a non-compatible device.This DRM has a new name and may even be a bit less intrusive. But it's still DRM, and as such faces certain consumer rejection. When will we learn?

This is the reason I don't buy from iTunes-I don't want to be told what to do with the music I buy. Once again, those who are willing to pay for content, will be the ones to get screwed. History repeats itself, yet no one seems to learn from the lessons of the past and they continue to make those mistakes again and again. Dante's Inferno comes to mind.