Kings of A&R

Trans World has posted another loss. CD sales have dropped another 15.1% in the U.S. according to Nielsen Soundscan. This has forced many stores including Trans World, Hastings, and Virgin Megastores to think of new business opportunities. “Trans World has 950 stores and we would expect them to continue to deemphasize music over the next 12-24 months,” said Richard Greenfield of Pali Research during a recent investor note.

The new Mya record apparently was delayed again. On March 5, 2007 the album’s first single “Lock U Down,” a collaboration with Lil Wayne, was sent to U.S. radio but failed to chart or sell noticeably, and thus the album was delayed once again, with a current schedule for a September 18, 2007 .

in2une Music is a new company that offers music promotion and marketing services, artist development, and digital music marketing.

Kyambo “Hip-Hop” Joshua has been named president of Columbia’s urban department.

Mark Cuban the 2.3 billion dollar internet entrepreneur has now claimed the internet is “dead and boring”. “We have reached the point of diminishing returns with today’s internet. The speed of broadband to your home won’t increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth.”

KOAR recommended artist Cene will be signing to Asylum Records/Atlantic.

American Idol runner-up Blake Lewis signs a record deal with Clive Davis’s Arista.

Major record labels and SoundExchange have reached a deal with webcasting services over covering royalty rates that webcasters must pay to stream sound recordings through 2010.

Commercial webcasters including AOL, Live365, MTV, RealNetworks, Pandora and Yahoo! will not have to pay more than $50,000 per service as a per-station or per-channel minimum royalty to webcast sound recordings.

Large webcasters will not be required to implement any kind of technology to prevent the streamed music from being ripped, i.e. copied, by users, — but, the services have agreed to cooperate and discuss implementation of anti-stream ripping technology on their services with labels and artists. (Billboard)

Total U.S. Market:

Online radio (Yahoo!, AOL, Clear Channel, and Live 356) - 29 million people listen each week.

Terrestrial radio - 230 million weekly listeners

Satellite radio - 14 million weekly listeners

Charm Offensive by The States

Car Crash by Matt Nathanson

Angels on the Moon by Thriving Ivory

Sunlight by Matt Pond PA

A source tells KOAR that BurnLounge just laid off a substantial number of their employees. This puts BurnLounge future in question.

BurnLounge is a controversial digital upstart that allows users to open their own digital download store.

Developing……..

Walt Disney’s High School Musical 2  soundtrack opened with 618k in sales making it the second biggest opening following Linkin Parks Minutes to Midnight with 625k.

Alternative act Paramore jumped from 14k to 33k with the help from radio and MTV. AFI side project Blaqk Audio debuted this week with 29k. Nickelback is closing on the 6 million mark.

According to sources the rumors of closing Virgin Megastores are false.

YouTube will Advertise on Video Clips: The good ol’ days of watching your favorite videos without advertising are finished. YouTube hopes to reinvent video advertising on the web. YouTube is charging about $20 per 1,000 views, with the revenue split between the website and the provider of the content. (Timesonline) - (Coolfer)

Mommy and Daddy were right when they told you “Nothing is for Free” — “Free” always comes with a price tag. In this case, its about 12.5 Billion…..

According to a report released by IPI, rampant global piracy of recorded music has cost the U.S. $12.5 billion in economic output and 71,060 jobs annually.

The damaging result of music piracy:

– The U.S. economy loses $12.5 billion

– U.S. workers lose 71,060 jobs

– U.S. workers lose $2.7 billion in earnings, including $1.1 billion in earnings from workers in the sound recording industry or “downstream” retail industries, and $1.6 billion in earnings by workers in other U.S. industries; and

– The U.S. government loses at least $422 million in tax revenues, including $291 million in personal income tax and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes.

“Piracy harms not only the owners of intellectual property but also U.S. consumers and taxpayers,” says Stephen E. Siwek, author of the report and principal with Economists, Inc. “Moreover, the impact of music piracy appears to be intensifying.” (YAHOO)

Except for the music business, no other business in history has been seriously inflicted by criminal behavior…

KOAR recently talked about and blasted underground illegal site myspacemp3.org asking authorities and individuals in appropriate positions to sue the creator of the site and remove the site from the web.

Good news here. The illegal hack site myspacemp3.org which allowed users to rip streaming audio off of Myspace sites into MP3’s has been suspended.

The author and creator of the illegal site and code is based in Madrid and his name is Octavio Chango. Madrid-based author Octavio Chango blamed MySpace for shuttering the site and freezing his ISP account, and even offered email documentation to back his claims. “You are no longer welcome on our site, and if you make another site like myspacemp3 we will sue,” a cut-n-pasted email thread from MySpace reads. (DMN)

Separately, a source within Myspace confirmed the shutdown effort, and a representative strongly alluded to the enforcement move.

MTV Networks is merging its online digital-music offerings into a joint venture with RealNetworks in order to create a stronger competitor to Apples market-dominating iTunes Store.

This new move also appears to spell the end of MTV’s Urge digital service, launched in partnership with Microsoft. MTV’s Urge fell apart quickly with the lack of focus and few subscribers.

MTV has been investing in digital technology. They plan to invest at least $500 million in games, on top of acquisitions like that of Harmonix Music Systems the developer of the Guitar Hero game series. (WSJ)

Consumers need approximately three dominating digital retailers allowing them a couple of options.