jGerson
Eminem and Royce Da 5’9″ heated up the charts this week with the release of their EP, Hell: The Sequel. This marks Royce’s first number one spot, although Em is quite accustomed to this position with seven previous chart topping albums under his belt. In indie news, Random Axe, the super-group comprised of Sean Price, Black Milk, and Guilty Simpson, broke the top 200 put up nearly 7,500 albums. For those wondering, Wiz Khalifa is nearing gold status with 459,000 albums scanned to date.
Bad Meets Evil [Eminem x Royce Da 5’9″ “Hell: The Sequel” – 166,992 [read review]
Gorilla Zoe “King Kong” – 10,000
Random Axe [Sean Price x Guilty Simpson x Black Milk] “Random Axe” – 7,300 [read review]
Citigroup officially put EMI up for sale last Thursday, beginning a bidding process that The L.A. Times believes will take months to resolve. Among the rumored bidders is Universal Music Group. UMG had previously held out during the similar auctioning of Warner Music earlier this year. It’s expected that the bidding range for EMI will be comparable to Warner, which went for $3 billion earlier this year, as EMI posted $2.6 billion in revenue in its fiscal year ending in March 2010. It’s also rumored that Warner could actually be amongst the bidders once their sale goes through this summer.
What would a week in the music industry be in 2011 without a discussion of cloud music storage? On the heels of Apple announcing its iTunes Match technology, Best Buy has quietly launched a similar service. The Best Buy Music Cloud app scans licensed music and matches it on a cloud storage network, which works to avoid file transfers. The app is currently available through Google’s Android store.
Arguably one of the best music apps, Shazam, has reportedly raised $32 million to break into the television industry. For those unfamiliar, Shazam is a mobile app that can determine the artist and title of virtually any song you are listening to. The private London based company has struck a deal with television networks and advertisers including NBC Universal to implement a technology that will allow consumers to access special offers and additional media by pointing their cell phones at their TV sets during certain broadcasts. Chief executive Andrew Fisher “said he expects revenue from the TV business to account for 50 percent of Shazam’s revenue in two years. And the company said it is on track to have 250 million users within two years.”
