A good review of the new Tom McRae album here – Link to Modern Music: Tom Mcrae – King Of Cards »

 The Daily Mail has an interesting little article talking to Richard Branson (of Virgin Records fame) about how the record label was launched with Mike Oldfield as its first artist. 

Article here: Link to ‘£20 for tubular bells? They’d better be worth it’ | the Daily Mail

 I’ve been reading the Digital Music News today – with another report of sales declining. I presume that the article is built around press releases of the likes of the IFPI and the BPI. The problem I have with these stats is when I look at the IFPI’s figures (for the UK at least) unit volumes are increasing.  Taking figures from 2000-2005 (2006 figures you have to pay for) as you can see here.

Unless I’m mistaken that is definitely an upward trend. Now the relative value of individual CDs could be argued as download on the basis that prices are probably rising at lower rate than your preferred measure of inflation, but so are a large number of things (including simple production costs) – this is simply a reflection of market pressures and the evolving global market.

The other thing is that the music industry is highly seasonal – in part this is the record industries own making.  How many high profile artists release a new album in the first three months of the year?  Very few – your U2’s REM’s, Coldplay’s either hit the Easter period or are released in the August – November period. So you’ll see seasonal drops and rises – so 6% drop between first and last quarters is to be expected.

But releasing major artists and promoting them all in a shortish period, aren’t they creating a tougher competition between themselves for people’s dollar and pound? I know now we have a little one too take care of, I have notably more limited budget – so more albums get pushed onto my amazon wishlist if I spend my month’s music money before I’ve got all the releases I’d like. Those albums on my wishlist that aren’t purchased soon after will probably get deleted from the list – and that’s lost sales. So spreading releases means I can spread my spending better – means more sales. And I’m damn sure this is a common situation.

So as Disraeli said – There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, and the music industry may have problems but it can do a lot to help itself without resorting to suing the hell out their customers and people trying to sell their product.

Well its official that Apple will offer a DRM free solution; BUT at a fairly hefty premium of 20p (~$0.39) per track.  You could argue you’re being asked to pay more for less!

Ok, so the quality is meant to be higher – although it does leave question begging – does that mean that normal DRM’d tracks are substandard, and that buying CDs and ripping them is still the better option?  Oh, and the interoperability issue – well, the files are Apple’s AAC – so to be seriously portable, you’ll need to know how to transcode to MP3 (or Ogg Vorbis or FLAC to avoid quality loss), and how many high street punters know how to do that?

Given the finger pointing and sabre rattling coming from the European Commission and governments, are Apple likely to be out of the woods?  According to the Financial Times today (Brussels to target Apple’s iTunes site) probably not as it would appear that Apple are the subject  of an investigation for violating EU regulations on cross border purchasing with regards to country restrictions on purchases. Something I find kind of ironic given the successful BPI attack against CD-Wow (see recent posts) for its sourcing of CDs.