(Updated) Dear Bowery Ballroom, Could you please ditch Ticketmaster? For $15 tickets they charge over 20% for a “convenience charge” ($3.10 per ticket), then charge between $14.50 and $19.50 to print and send you your tickets, then charge a $4.10 processing fee. If you want real tickets, the price jumps from $30 (original) to $59.80. So for a company that handles massive quantities of printing and shipping, mostly electronically, they make over 2/3 (after UPS charge) of the what the venue, crew, equipment, label, and traveling band take in—combined. Robbery. Old news, but still.
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(Updated)

Dear Bowery Ballroom,

Could you please ditch Ticketmaster? For $15 tickets they charge over 20% for a “convenience charge” ($3.10 per ticket), then charge between $14.50 and $19.50 to print and send you your tickets, then charge a $4.10 processing fee.

If you want real tickets, the price jumps from $30 (original) to $59.80. So for a company that handles massive quantities of printing and shipping, mostly electronically, they make over 2/3 (after UPS charge) of the what the venue, crew, equipment, label, and traveling band take in—combined. Robbery.

Old news, but still.

Mattel Now Using Aqua's "Barbie Girl" in Commercial... Which It Once Sued Over Copyright Infringement

In 2002, everyone’s favorite appeals court judge (seriously, the guy never fails to entertain) Alex Kozinski told Mattel too bad, parody songs are a part of what you get for being a cultural icon—and included the classic line: “The parties are advised to chill.”

From suing the band for infringement to actually licensing and using the song in just a few years.

[via @wayneandwax]

This is a story of triumph. I realize this is obscure, but:  if you ever find yourself doing batch file renaming, A Better Finder Rename is an incredible time saver.  (I wrote about it previously here.) I’m in the middle of a comically tedious effort to change the embedded players on the RRR website from imeem to SoundCloud.  As a result of a process involving iTunes, Audio Hijack, and Logic, I had the following:  153 30-second preview tracks that followed a peculiar scheme. First 39 tracks:  original version of each song, grouped by album. Next 114 tracks:  alternate versions of those same songs, listed in the same order but in groups of three. For instance, if track 1 was “Characters, Setting, Plot”, tracks 40, 41, and 42 were alternate versions of “Verb Tenses”.  Track 2 was “Dots and Dashes (Punctuation)”, so tracks 43-45 were alternate versions of it.  The alternate versions were in the same order, thankfully (Downtempo, Recall, Instrumental). I needed a way to rename all those files without doing it manually; I refuse to do something so ghastly.  So: I pasted a list of the original file names into Excel and used some text functions (mostly vlookup, left, right, and concatenate) to create a pretty list. Then I copied/pasted that final list into a text document that simply listed all the new names, in order. Made a backup of my ugly-named tracks (which I later needed) Brought those ugly-named tracks into A Better Finder Rename, told it rename everything using my text file, and voila:  new names. Bam!
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This is a story of triumph.

I realize this is obscure, but:  if you ever find yourself doing batch file renaming, A Better Finder Rename is an incredible time saver.  (I wrote about it previously here.)

I’m in the middle of a comically tedious effort to change the embedded players on the RRR website from imeem to SoundCloud.  As a result of a process involving iTunes, Audio Hijack, and Logic, I had the following:  153 30-second preview tracks that followed a peculiar scheme.

  • First 39 tracks:  original version of each song, grouped by album.
  • Next 114 tracks:  alternate versions of those same songs, listed in the same order but in groups of three.

For instance, if track 1 was “Characters, Setting, Plot”, tracks 40, 41, and 42 were alternate versions of “Verb Tenses”.  Track 2 was “Dots and Dashes (Punctuation)”, so tracks 43-45 were alternate versions of it.  The alternate versions were in the same order, thankfully (Downtempo, Recall, Instrumental).

I needed a way to rename all those files without doing it manually; I refuse to do something so ghastly.  So:

  • I pasted a list of the original file names into Excel and used some text functions (mostly vlookup, left, right, and concatenate) to create a pretty list.
  • Then I copied/pasted that final list into a text document that simply listed all the new names, in order.
  • Made a backup of my ugly-named tracks (which I later needed)
  • Brought those ugly-named tracks into A Better Finder Rename, told it rename everything using my text file, and voila:  new names.

Bam!

Music Publishers Want Apple to Pay for iTunes Store’s 30-Second Previews

(On iTunes), you can stream radio, and you can preview tracks, things that we should be getting paid performance income for.

- David Renzer, CEO Universal Music Publishing Group

We have no choice but to assume Renzer does not use iTunes and has no idea how others use it. No idea.

  1. Streaming radio stations are not provided by iTunes; iTunes aggregates the list of available stations.  Those stations are responsible for paying their internet royalties.
  2. So, Renzer wants iTunes to start forking over money every time someone previews a song. And what does he think happens next?  Surely he doesn’t believe iTunes would start handing over money without changing anything.  No, iTunes would stop offering previews, sales would plummet, and we would be back to square one.

Please tell me he doesn’t believe 30-second previews are preventing purchases.  He’s not that ignorant, right?

[via DF:  “This is about one step away from demanding money for when you have a song stuck in your head.”]

Unpaid Internships: common but illegal

marco:

(via soupsoup)

The scenario is fairly typical: a company offers an opportunity to ‘break into the business’ in exchange for the intern working for free. You see many examples of this in the entertainment industry. […]

In order to qualify as an unpaid internship, the requirement is simple: no work can be performed that is of any benefit at all to the company. That is, you can not deliver mail, sort files, file papers, organize a person’s calendar, conduct market research, write reports, watch television shows and report on them, read scripts, schedule interviews, or any other job that assists the employer in any way in running their business.

New York’s entertainment industry runs on unpaid (or severely underpaid) interns. It’s embarrassing, and it disgusts me — it effectively limits jobs in the business to people who already have enough money (or, more commonly, whose parents do) to afford to live in New York at a loss for a long time.

I’ve never seen the disconnect between starting salaries and cost of living be as grossly and unnecessarily out of proportion as the entry-level jobs in the New York entertainment industry.

Go, Internet, Go

This just happened.  A song-based commercial, aired during a break from a tennis event happening in Flushing Meadows, was

  • broadcast on TV in Boston
  • watched in Brazil via satellite
  • rebroadcast to the internet
  • watched online in Brooklyn and listened to on headphones
  • played into an iPhone
  • analyzed by Shazam
  • looked up on YouTube
  • listened to in full
  • and shared to a friend via chat [the URL]
stop suing yr street-team, stoopid
@wayneandwax

Major labels are introducing their own file format

It’s called “CMX” and it’s in the form of a single file that contains the music, artwork, and more.

[via @wayneandwax]

For years you’ve been using the well-supported, ubiquitous file format called MP3. It’s an international standard, it works just fine in every media player, and other universally-accepted formats are in place for the album artwork, lyrics, and what have you. Sounds like you’re ready for a new, unified format that no one has ever heard of and, if introduced five or six years ago, might have been revolutionary!

This isn’t new. In 1998, the RIAA formed a consortium, called SDMI, to develop a unified DRM scheme for digital audio files. A year later, Rio introduced the first portable MP3 player ($200), and the RIAA’s response was to seek a court order blocking shipments of the player!

And whatever happened to SDMI? RIP 10/15/1999.

Sean’s right about cultivating a merch market. At one of the venues I do press for, The Highline Ballroom in N.Y.C., we regularly see artists coming in who make more money at the merch table than they do on ticket sales. Getting a good logo design and printing up a bunch of pins and shirts and hoodies and signed CDs is a necessity.
John Seroff, “Music Bloggers Roundtable Redux”, pointing out the tragic habit bands have of spending thousands on music production and pennies on design and promotions.

iTunes brings back b-sides with Digital 45s

iTunes recently revived an old marketing tactic:

The vinyl 45 rpm record once ruled jukeboxes and helped bring artists into the hands of true music fans … iTunes is bringing this concept into a new age with D45s—two great tracks at an equally great price.

In other words, top tracks used to cost $.99 each, but now they’re so $1.29, so buy two and save 30-50 cents.

This is a potential way to make a few cents on those viral remixes, mashups, and alternate versions floating around by pairing them with hit singles.  Example:  Use Somebody by Kings of Leon is $1.29 on its own, but pay 20 cents more and get the Use Somebody Digital 45, which also contains “Knocked Up (Lykke Li vs. Rodeo Mix)”.

Interesting throwback to the old A-side/B-side convention.  It’s all about working at the margins.  Does it blend?