UK Festivals Suffer Slow Ticket Sales: Glastonbury, the biggest festival, still have plenty tickets available. Some blame the less in demand, Jay-Z, as the headline act. Others believe that people are choosing attend smaller festivals. ‘Most of the largest festivals are controlled by the American promoter Live Nation, which signed up acts including Madonna for $120 million (£60 million) and Jay-Z for $150 million.’
Poor ticket sales forced organizers to pull the plug on Norway’s Quart Festival which featured Death Cab For Cutie. Organizers blamed poor ticket sales and budgetary prblems. (Full read here)
Warner Music Pulls Songs From Last.fm: The website Last.fm, that claims it has 21 million users lost Led Zeppelin songs and hundreds of thousands of other tracks. Warner Brothers wanted more money and Last.FM’s parent company, CBS – was unwilling to pay. Warner was expecting to make more money from the deal but the fees related to the existing free service have been far less than it had hoped. Warner wants a cut of advertising, not just on the music player itself.
AC/DC and Walmart: AC/DC will be the next major band to sell a new album only through Wal-Mart Stores. AC/DC has not released its catalog to iTunes. The Eagles struck a deal with Wal-Mart last year with plenty of success.
A lot of people say that if the labels would have found someway to cooperate with Napster in their heyday, that the landscape today would be better for them. I disagree.
The file sharing that came afterwards would have been inevitable because of greedy labels trying to make up for lost sales by charging ridiculous amounts of money for the “right” to legally serve their catalogs.
This is a tactic that they’re either using or threatening to use as a way to hold these new services hostage. They don’t care about trying to work within a new digital system, all they care about is lining their damn pockets…
…and because of it… I hope the die a slow and painful death….
Universal –
Last.fm has been bought by US media giant CBS Corporation for $280million dollars. Did you grasp that yet? 280 million dollars. How much did artists get from that 280 million dollars? zip, zero, zilch!
Last.fm is USING tracks written by artists to build the business without paying out. How can you call the labels greedy and not CBS? Your comments are discriminatory, favoring one corporation over another.
Ok but by the same token.. how much of that buyout money did the artists receive? How much did the artists receive from the upfront payments from Myspace, iMeem, Q-Trax, and Spiral Frog to name a few. Probably that same zip, zero, zilch.
Yes I did actually forget that Last.fm was purchased by CBS but what about the other cases in which the majority of the money that is invested in these companies are used to strictly for the right to use their catalog?