jGerson
It’s another good week for album sales. As I’ve pointed out in the past, West Coast artists almost certainly sell more units physically than digitally every time around. I’m actually surprised how many units Daz moved digitally, but I have a feeling that the albums he sold as digital scales didn’t show up in scans.
Gorillaz “The Fall” – 21,634 (64% digital)
DJ Quik “The Book Of David” – 9,793 (35% digital)
Cam’ron & Vado “Gunz N’ Butta” – 7,573 (29% digital)
Del The Funky Homosapien “Golden Era” – 1,426 (17% digital)
Les Nubians “Nu Revolution” – 733 (36% digital)
Blu “Her Favorite Colo(u)r” [Re-Release] – 577 (46% digital)
Daz Dillinger “D.P.G. Presents D.A.Z.” – 387 (55% digital)
Illmind “Behind The Curtain” – 70 (100% digital)
The race to the clouds continues. Rumors are circulating that Apple will beat Google to the streaming market as they have already acquired licenses from two major labels (which have yet to be named). This will give Apple a competitive advantage against Amazon because they will be able to keep all of their music on a single server, whereas Amazon works as an external hard drive so each user must download their own copy of a song before having access to it (which doesn’t affect the consumer as much as it does each company). That’s not to mention that this opens the door to make iTunes a subscription service down the line, allowing users to stream music without downloading it to their computer, let alone a cloud.
Is Georgia the next music industry hotbed? According to a recent study, the state of Georgia’s impact on the music industry is valued at $3.7 billion. Ph.D. in Economics, B. William Riall reports that 19,955 jobs in the southern state are directly and indirectly affected by the music industry and that state’s impact on the industry is appraised at $3,777,861,628. Simon Horrocks, co-president of Georgia Music Partners, commented, “Georgia has the most diverse, world-famous renowned artists, but Los Angeles, New York City and Nashville are better known as music business hotspots. We believe Georgia has the right mix of talent, facilities and innovation needed to compete.”
The next two tidbits have less to do directly with music and more to do with social media that enables consumers to find new content. At the beginning of the week, the gaming world was in shock as Sony’s Playstation Network was inexplicably shut down. This network lapse has affected Playstation 3 and PSP users as well as members of the Qriocity Music Unlimited service. Thus far nobody has officially been deemed a culprit for this massive shutdown, but is clearly hackers considering Sony announced this morning that nearly 77 million users had their credit card numbers and other personal information jacked from its server. Chalk this up with the other slew of international companies who have their customer’s credit card info jacked in the past few weeks. You can read the full statement Sony issued here.
This isn’t a good look; Newscorp is seeking to sell Myspace for a minimum of $100 million, which means the media conglomerate is willing to take a $480 million loss if a sale goes through. Back in 2005, Newscorp purchased Myspace for $580 members. Private equity firm THL Partners, Redscout Ventures, Criterion Capital which owns social network Bebo, Chinese Internet holding company Tencent and Myspace co-founder Chris De Wolfe are all showing interest in the company. Even though Myspace usage has declined with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, the site still has value. It is currently in the top 100 most trafficked sites in the world and number 42 in the United States. While that web ranking is far from the aforementioned social networks, it’s at a competitive position with popular sites such as ESPN, and currently outranks the New York Times.
