2008

Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
globenewswire

Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc. (”Ticketmaster Entertainment” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq:TKTM), the world’s leading live entertainment ticketing and artist services company, today announced financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2008. Revenues for the quarter were $384.0 million, 9.4% higher than the prior year due to strategic acquisitions. Full year [...]

Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends” was the best-selling album in the world in 2008, according to a report issued on Monday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group. “Viva la Vida” (right, Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin) sold 6.8 million copies around the world and also [...]

If anyone had any doubt that touring is where the money is in the music business, a quick look at the top Moneymakers for 2008 should hammer the point home. Regardless of genre, retail sales or radio play, each of the 20 acts on Billboard’s Moneymakers list toured in 2008. (Taylor Swift mostly opened [...]

As album sales plummeted in 2008 for the seventh time in eight years, there was one bright spot for a music industry still in love with physical products: Sales of vinyl records increased by nearly 90 percent.
That’s right, they still make vinyl. Consumers bought almost 1.9 million new LPs last year, the most since Nielsen [...]

I’ve read this post from CD Baby touting their revenues and figures from 2008.
Here’s some key figures listed in that post:
* 277,000 albums for sale and 150,000 artists with active albums as of January 1st, 2009
* Of the 277,000 albums, 194,000 of them are available for digital distribution.
* 993,175 CDs sold in 2007; 1,013,478 CDs [...]

Creative Commons provides easy and effective ways to offer up your content without abandoning all rights to its use—free distribution might be allowed, for instance, but only as long as the author is attributed and the distribution is noncommercial. Sounds great for hippies and Web 2.0 types, but what big-name artist would actually commit this [...]

An “unprecedented” number of homegrown Australian acts have made an impression in an annual national airplay report. But it was American artists who ultimately were the biggest winners.
U.S. artists dominated the top five spots of the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia’s 2008 “most played” lists for artists and records, released today (Jan. 5).
For the second [...]

A music-buying public enamored of digital downloads may be abandoning the compact disc in droves, but one physical medium is staging a tiny comeback.
Amid otherwise gloomy music sales numbers released by Nielsen Co. this week, vinyl record sales doubled compared with the year before. The number of long-play vinyl records sold in the United States [...]

Sales of recorded music fell sharply in 2008, as consumers continued to migrate away from the CD format, large retailers reduced floor space for music and the recession dampened consumer spending during the critical year-end holiday shopping period.
Total album sales in the United States, including CDs and full-album downloads, were 428 million, a 14 percent [...]

If you’ve read anything about the music business during the last eight years, you won’t be surprised to read the following summation for 2008, via The Wall Street Journal:
Increases in digitally downloaded albums and songs were not enough to offset a nearly 20% plunge in CD sales in the U.S., according to year-end figures published [...]

Survived 2008 okay? The year proved difficult for an already-disrupted industry, though “accelerated transition” could be the best description of current forces at work. As in previous years, consumers continued their shift towards digital formats, and free continued to beat paid. But a widespread economic downturn appears to be intensifying a long-running [...]

Right from the start of radio consolidation, the smart money said these emerging monopolies could never pay back the huge debt they were running up to buy large concentrations of radio stations.
Back then, $100 million sale prices for individual radio properties were not uncommon. Multiples way in excess of ten times were expected. There was [...]

The never-ending slough both the people who deal with music directly (making it, releasing it, booking it) and those of us who cover it for a living have been dealing with is made even worse by the simple fact no one likes admitting: we’ve seen this coming. For years. And those of us who are [...]

Super-producer Timbaland will ring in the New Year with a newly processed $11,450 lien against his mansion, courtesy of an ongoing florist bill dispute.
The White Tulip Florist, a company based in Miami Beach, filed legal papers against Timbaland claiming the star purchased $25,850.00 in trees, flowers, and lights from their organization. According to the company, [...]

As the economy dwindles, the recording industry has seen their share of losses in the last decade citing mergers between the four major labels and taking actions to pull copyrighted videos of their artists off Youtube and other file sharing sites, now takes on Myspace Music- the somewhat launched new service to rival the Itunes-types.
As [...]

Despite all the possibilities the digital age brings forth, music is still slumping. While its helped usher in things like the viral music video, sales of actually music hasn’t become the money maker that CDs once were for major record labels.
According to a recent study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, (via [...]

Momentum from this last full week before the holiday swelled Country album sales to 2.375 million units pushing total YTD country album sales over the 45 million mark. Although the numbers pale when compared with 2007 performance (last year’s Top 75 Country sales were almost double this year), it was still a welcome surge [...]

It’s kind of hard to flip on the tube or open a publication right now and not see a list that sums up the best (and sometimes the worst) of 2008. For this special edition of Names & Faces, we scoured different media outlets to give you a sampling of other publication’s picks for the [...]

Throughout 2008, as America was transfixed by a historical and climactic presidential election and a scary economic meltdown, pop music became blurry.
Styles morphed more than they did the year before as mainstream acts dissolved sonic barriers. Easy signifiers of certain genres all but disappeared. So-called indie rock, which generally prided itself on a ragged, warts-and-all [...]

The concert business grossed just under $4 billion worldwide in 2008, the most ever for a year and up almost 13% over last year, according to Billboard magazine.
“Overall, it’s been a pretty good year for touring,” said Ray Waddell, who covers the industry for Billboard. “I’d never say it’s recession-proof, but it’s resilient.” In North [...]

“Death to the CD! Long live digital music!” might just be the new mantra for the record industry if it listens closely to one technology analyst group. Gartner on Monday advised record companies to drop retail CDs as their primary revenue generator before next year’s holiday shopping season and adopt a “digital first” strategy that [...]

From legislation to artist activism to mobile music, 2008 was a year of firsts in Latin American music.
Uruguay drops VAT: Uruguay became the first country in Latin America — and perhaps the world — to grant an exemption of value-added taxes from the sale of music CDs and DVDs. The law, which went into effect [...]

If there was any one definitive tone of pop music in 2008, it was not a genre, instrument or voice. It was a $400 pitch-correction plug-in from the software company Antares. You know it when your hear it — that little flutter between vocal phrases that lends a certain robotic tang to vocalists.
Auto-Tune burst [...]

Inevitably there are those of us who seem perpetually busy and end up finding gifts at the last minute, regardless of any plan to start early. The holiday just creeps up, and time flies when least wanted. So, what do you get your friend(s) for that last minute gift, or perhaps a stocking stuffer for [...]

If someone asked you to name the #1 album of the year in Billboard’s just-published year-end issue, you might say Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III. That is, indeed, the best-selling album so far in 2008 (with two weeks to go). Or you might remember back to last year’s surprise blockbuster, Josh Groban’s Noel, and, figuring [...]

At the end of each year, Turn It Up focuses on the best of the best from Chicago’s independent music scene. Several of these artists will be playing in the next few weeks (consult individual entries for details). Here are my 10 favorite local indie releases for 2008:
1. Shot Baker, “Take Control” (Riot Fest/Underground): In [...]

The finalists of the 7th annual Independent Music Awards have been announced and are moving on to the final round to be judged by a distinguished group of influential artists and industry insiders.
Though music fans have been provided the opportunity to listen to the finalists’ music and cast votes for who they believe should win [...]

‘Blue Christmas’ may turn out to be the music business’s theme song for this holiday season. U.S. album sales were down 21.7 percent during the first week of December compared with the same period last year, accelerating from the 17.4 percent decline recorded during the last two weeks of November, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
For the [...]

Who knew back in January that when Vampire Weekend tinkered with the guitar-driven dance rhythms of soukous on its self-titled debut, the band would set the tone for the next 12 months? In many ways, 2008 was the year Afropop fully cracked the American music landscape. This sort of appropriation is anything but novel: Western [...]

2008 has been a startling year for innovation in digital music. We’ve been covering startups all year in our daily bulletin, not to mention our work with the Popkomm-IMEA and MidemNet New Business Showcase awards. So we thought we’d round up some of the most interesting startups from this year.
We ended up with 200 everything [...]

The employment picture remains dismal, and layoff reports are now a daily part of life. Among those reducing the rolls is Last.fm, acquired by CBS for $280 million last year. The London-based Last is reducing roughly 20 employees, according to information confirmed by the company. That translates into approximately 20 percent of the broader 95, [...]

Wall Street may have tanked in October, but YouTube was busy reaching new heights. According to a recent study released by comScore, the video giant attracted 100 million users in the United States alone during the period. The swelling crowd viewed roughly 5.4 billion videos, nearly 40 percent of the broader 13.5 billion [...]

The time when musicians considered it a sell-out to appear in a TV ad or license their music for commercial purposes is long gone — perhaps ending definitively when folkie legend Bob Dylan appeared strumming his guitar in a 2004 Victoria’s Secret lingerie commercial.
(True to his word, Mr. Dylan had told reporters in 1965 that [...]

IODA, the global leader in digital distribution, marketing, and technology solutions for the independent music and film industry, today announced that among the 2009 Grammy nominations, 63 are from the IODA family. An increase over IODA-nominated clients in 2008, the 63 nominations reflect the success of more than 45 artists from more than 35 independent [...]

Metallica, My Morning Jacket and Pearl Jam are among the artist featured on “Live From Bonnaroo 2008,” due in January on DVD from Superfly Presents and A.C. Entertainment.
The DVD was originally offered only to 2008 festival ticket-buyers, but is now being made available to the general public for a limited time. Sam Erickson, best known [...]

This time last year I predicted that 2008 would be ‘The Year of Free’. (Targeted legal free that is, not the ‘let’s give it all away and hope for the best’ flavour of free I’ve been posting about here recently.) Though all music can’t ‘just be free’, free services are a crucial element of [...]

Digital music sales account for 18 percent of the U.S. music market and that figure will grow to 41 percent in five years, Forrester Research said in a report released on Monday.
The report titled “U.S. Music Forecast, 2008 to 2013″ also forecast that 55 percent of U.S. online consumers will pay to download digital music [...]

In an all-new top three on the U.K. album chart, the Killers’ “Day & Age” (Vertigo/Universal) took the No. 1 spot ahead of Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” (Black Frog/Geffen), while Take That scored its 11th U.K. career No. 1 single with “Greatest Day” (Polydor/Universal).
The Killers thus complete a perfect trio of studio albums: “Hot [...]

In 2008, a few schools of feminine pop ruled the roost. On the right were the retro-revivalists, lavished with plaudits for their youth, remarkable vocals and their keenness to fill the gap left by their 21st-century predecessor Amy Winehouse; you might know them better as Adele [...]

The fiscal fourth-quarter report that came out of Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) on Tuesday isn’t pretty. Revenue dropped, despite a 28% increase in digital music sales and a healthy advance on the publishing side.
However, even digital salvation is a beast of burden these days, as growth is decelerating. High-margin downloads were supposed to beef [...]

Reporting on the state of the music business, this column has had occasion to note over the last year or two that the arse was pretty much out of ’er. The end was nigh. The music business was in freefall. Looking at trends and events from 2008, we now gingerly report that the crashing music [...]

Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company, insists the music business isn’t dying. Yesterday, it released numbers to help bolster its case.
UMG saw sales drop 6.2 percent in the last quarter, parent company Vivendi disclosed yesterday. But that’s not as bad as it looks: Strip out the effect of currency fluctuations (chiefly, the rise [...]