According to this (Link to Virgin Megastores Post US-Based Quarterly Increases — Digital Music News) Digital Music News article Virgin have posted an improvement of 9% for music sales. Given that they can’t have pushed up prices by 9% (if anything the likes of CD-Wow are forcing retail prices down), I can only read that CD sales aren’t all doom and gloom like the RIAA would like to paint.

Many  will be going, who, what to the subject of an article on David & David that has been written for Crawdaddy (here).  However, you may be more interested if I was to say that one of the David’s (David Baewald) did a lot of work with Sheryl Crow’s debut album and was a member of the Tuesday Night Music Club.

Apart from David & David I’d highly recommend David Baewald’s solo work – particularly Triage.

The spoof blog – The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs  has a rather scarily accurate picture of the where the record industry is today.  It would very funny if it wasn’t for the fact that in the process of messing around as Universal are they’re likely to trash the livelihoods of some of the more niche artists, and because of their ‘loan sharking’ business model it will be the artists that will pick up the tab for it as well in lost sales.

It is interesting that Apple don’t seem to have tried to deal with artists directly yet, for example Paul McCartney who signed to Starbucks earlier in the year, and licensed the physical media sales back to the ‘box shifters’. Is it only a matter of time before Apple take the last step and setup a record label, like Starbucks and other media delivery operations such as Yahoo.

 Crawdaddy have got another good article on their site looking how in some ways the music industry has come full circle since the days of punk. But in other ways – so far away such as the rapidly fragmenting music scene and the technological impact upon music tribalism.

See the full article here – Crawdaddy! – Feature Story – Jesse Malin Comes Full Circle.

 With the push massively hiked broadcasting fees for web radio stations, a lot of stations are pushing back as hard as they can, with now a ‘Day of Silence’ where normal broadcasting is being suspended completely or a looped programme (in the case of KCRW) explaining what the issue is and the impact on them. The only players who seem not to be getting involved are the biggest, who are probably both the least innovative and can weather the increased costs – namely Clear Channel and AOL (more details –Additional Details Emerge Ahead of Webcaster Day of Silence).

 To add to the pain, live sessions that some stations are noted for and attract a lot of good publicity for the artists involved – such as Morning Becomes Eclectic (on KCRW) and the famous Peel Sessions for the late great John Peel on Radio 1, are under pressure. A number of artists are now pushing for performance or royalty payments (more detail here Musicians To Radio Broadcasters: “Clearly, We’re Not Wealthy Enough” and Variety article). The irony is that the artists that I’ve seen involved probably are smallest beneficiaries from such sessions, and I’m sure that the likes of Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey can manage without the extra few thousand that such a change would introduce. But those need and benefit from the exposure of live sessions – the smaller and indie artists like Wilco will lose out on the publicity as stations are likely to cut back or stop doing such sessions.