News

Like others interested in copyright policy issues, we noticed the new academic paper by professors at the London School of Economics. The biases and policy wish lists of the authors are abundantly clear, which we have no objection to, so long as they are properly noted. Much of the paper retreads familiar – and widely debunked – criticisms of copyright enforcement. Others have leveled various criticisms of the paper (see here, here, here and here for examples). 

Representative Mel Watt (D-N.C.) today introduced the Free Market Royalty Act, legislation that would (among other things) effectively establish a performance right for terrestrial broadcast radio.

Google recently posted a report that outlined its efforts to fight online piracy. Certainly, Google has amassed an impressive array of data in its report. And there’s a lot to applaud, and we are grateful for the steps they’ve taken. But ultimately, the appropriate benchmarks are metrics that demonstrate that piracy has been reduced.

In today’s workplace, with open office plans, telecommuting, and other distractions abounding, it’s a good thing that help is already widely available.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s this week released a green paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy to “advance discussion on a set of policy issues critical to economic growth."

By now, many of us in the music business, as well as Jay Z fans, know that Samsung has purchased one million “Magna Carta Holy Grail” digital albums to be given away to the phone maker’s customers. It is a novel and creative marketing move and it has rightly stimulated a healthy conversation about the sale’s meaning and implications for the modern music business.

The announcement earlier this week of a new music streaming service by Apple has yet again drawn attention to the rapidly emerging digital music space. Based on the announced description, iTunes Radio sounds like a great new entrant. And it joins a long list of services that give fans almost any type of listening experience they are looking for, and often for free.

A year ago, the RIAA intensified its efforts to remove links to illegal music files from search engine results with the hope of better protecting our members’ music. This week, the number of these search returns to illegal music files removed by Google alone reached 20 million. Yes, you read that right: 20 million.

There’s been an interesting confluence of news in the last week, all interrelated and all complementary: We reported our 2012 year-end sales and shipment numbers, including the increasing importance of streaming music – so-called “access models” which now total $1 billion in revenues New data from NPD finding…

Frank Sinatra. Barbra Streisand. Tony Bennett. Ray Charles. Elton John. Billy Joel. Paul Simon. Aretha Franklin. Luciano Pavarotti. Bob Dylan. Bono. Bruce Springsteen. These are names that people the world over know instantaneously and to whose music they’ve grooved joyfully for generations.