All apologies

You've probably heard by now that Adam Yauch (MCA) of the Beastie Boys is getting treatment for cancer. I guess the thing that got to me was that Yauch apologized for all of this. Hey, that's OK.

The Inquisitr has both a link to the YouTube video, and a quote from Rolling Stone.

Yauch said in a statement following the YouTube announcement; the album was originally scheduled for a September 15th release. "It’s a pain in the neck (sorry had to say it)...."

No. No.

That idea melted away

When the Iowa State Fair arrives, don't expect to see Michael Jackson's likeness in butter:

“We started hearing concerns from the public that he wasn’t an Iowan and didn’t have a connection to the fair,” said Lori Chappell, the fair’s marketing director, explaining why organizers ultimately put the question to a public vote.

Technically, the Jackson Five DID perform at the Iowa State Fair in 1971. But I guess the people of Iowa decided that Jackson was just too weird.

No comment on how odd the whole idea of butter sculpture is in the first place.

Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit Up (Nirvana vs Rick Astley courtesy DJ Morgoth)

Yes, I know this DJ Morgoth mashup was circulating some time ago (the video is dated July 2), but I'm not trendy.

Here's a Nirvana/Rick Astley mashup:



DJ Morgoth didn't assemble the video, but has commented on it.

The last.fm page for the mashup is here (free download available).

Arrrrrr! Listen, mateys! But casually, please.

I just ran across a new term - "dinner party pirates." I found it in this New York Times article:

Record company executives say there are three kinds of music fans. There are those who buy music, and those who get a kick out of never paying for it. And then there are those whom Rob Wells at Universal Music Group calls “dinner party pirates”: the vast majority of listeners, those who copy music illegally because it is more convenient than buying it.

Well, we know what the RIAA's solution is to the whole mess, but the record companies themselves, as well as some musicians, are taking a different tack. The article names several services that are trying to cater to these dinner party pirates by offering music fixes:

Legal services offering free, unlimited streaming of music, rather than downloads, are proliferating. According to a survey published last week, they are taking some of the wind out of the pirates’ sails.

“Consumers are doing exactly what we said they would do,” said Steve Purdham, chief executive of We7, a service that says it has attracted two million users in Britain in a little more than half a year by offering unlimited access to millions of songs. “They weren’t saying, ‘Give me pirated music’; they were saying, ‘Give me the music I want.”’

The music industry has high hopes that the growth of sites like We7, whose investors include the former Genesis musician Peter Gabriel, can change the reputation of Europe as a hive of digital piracy. Similar businesses include Deezer, in France, and Spotify, which was started by two Swedish entrepreneurs and has grown rapidly in Britain and elsewhere. All of them are licensed by the music industry and hope to make money from advertising....

Spotify says it has two million registered users in Britain and another two million in Sweden, Spain and France. Paul Brown, managing director of its British arm, said it wants to expand to the United States by the end of the year.

There, it would go up against a number of digital businesses that also offer free music in various ways, including MySpace Music, Imeem, Last.FM, Pandora and others.

More here.

Forget the CW moments

The key parts in this video are Timbaland's unbeatable vocal stylings.

And, of course, embedding is disabled by request. Danged YouTube.

No, not a purple people eater - although it's possible that it could resurrect the purple people eater

There are people who work in the recording industry, and their job is to serve YOU. They use advanced measurement techniques, as well as extensive industry experience, to figure out the songs that YOU like and to play them for YOU.

But what would happen if they asked you what you liked? Enter the purple people eater - whoops, I mean the Portable People Meter.

At the opening of this year's Musexpo conference in London, a heated argument broke out when manager Jazz Summers declared that "all US radio is shit". Jimmy Steal, VP of programming for LA radio station Power106fm and New York's Hot97, didn't take the accusation sitting down. Later on, Steal told me about an invention starting to be used in the US, which could change music programming profoundly: Arbitron's Portable People Meter (PPM)....

[T]he PPM is a mobile phone-sized device that consumers wear throughout the day. It works by detecting signals embedded in the audio portions of transmissions. It detects what you listen to on the radio, what you watch on broadcast, cable and satellite TV, what media you stream on the internet, and what you hear in stores and entertainment venues. At the end of the day, the survey participant places the PPM in a base station that recharges it and sends the information to a hub that transmits it to Arbitron.

Of course, they could get some of this information for me by checking my last.fm scrobbles - but I digress. And actually, it can detect something that last.fm can't:

The information it collects is so specific that it can report if a listener switches stations in the middle of a song. This is the part that is of utmost importance to music programmers.

Well, you can measure all of this stuff, but how do you interpret the measurements?

Steal says he's concerned that it could be detrimental to new music, since it can sometimes take people a while to warm to a new artist or song. When radio stations use the PPM to determine what songs should remain on their playlists, new artists could be taken off the air before they even have a chance to make an impression.

Of course, it could work the other way around. When the purple people eater detects that someone switches off The Big Hit That's Been Around For Three Months Already, perhaps that will send valuable data to the surveyers.

I'll tell you something I think you'll understand

Time passes, and if there's anyone who knows this, it's Paul McCartney.

Paul McCartney had never been to the United States before 1964 (for the record, George Harrison had). When he initially arrived in this country, one of his first tasks was to perform with his bandmates on a television show called the Ed Sullivan Show, which was broadcast from New York City. A little over a year later, he and his bandmates were again in New York, but this time they played in a slightly larger venue - a baseball stadium.

It's been over forty years since the Beatles played Shea, and a lot has happened since then, to Paul McCartney and to many of us. McCartney broke up with his then-girlfriend and married...a New Yorker. Paul was the fourth of the four Beatles to quit the band (although Starr's and Harrison's departures were temporary). He formed another band, took a trip to Japan, and went solo. His New York wife died, and he married and divorced an Englishwoman.

Then, four decades after his last date, Paul McCartney returned to the theater from which his Ed Sullivan appearance was broadcast. Ed Sullivan had long since died, and he was instead welcomed by a gray-haired man named David Letterman. Oddly enough, his setlist did not include any of the songs that he had played back in 1964.

[T]he ex-Beatle performed "Get Back" and (the Fireman's) "Sing The Changes" for broadcast, and "Coming Up," "Band On The Run," "Let Me Roll It"/"Purple Haze," "Helter Skelter," and "Back In The USSR" for the gathering crowd.

Not sure how Ed Sullivan would have reacted to some of those songs, but presumably Letterman liked them.

But then it really began to get strange. Because then Paul relived another professional triumph - sort of.

Nowadays it's not unusual for bands to play outdoor stadiums - in fact, several musical artists (including McCartney himself) have played football stadiums. But it's still something for a 64-plus year old musician to play a large sports stadium when the NFL is not involved.

But even Paul McCartney can't play Shea Stadium any more, so he did the next best thing. No, he didn't play Yankee Stadium. He played Citi Field.

As a 23-year-old Beatle, Mr. McCartney introduced rock to a stadium audience on Aug. 15, 1965, when the Beatles played a 34-minute set at Shea Stadium, which Citi Field replaced. The Beatles returned to Shea in 1966 on what would be their last tour.

Mr. McCartney was also at the final concert at Shea Stadium, joining the headliner, Billy Joel, on stage last year....

On Friday night, in the first of three shows at the stadium, Mr. McCartney reminisced about 1965, imitating the muffled and distorted sound the Beatles got through the old stadium’s P.A. system, which by all accounts was drowned out by screaming girls. (Nearly 44 years later, somewhat older women seized their cue to scream.)

McCartney then recalled many people who had passed away, including John Lennon, George Harrison, and Linda McCartney.

Sadly, after that show was completed, another former McCartney associate passed away. The Music's Over chronicled the hit years of Gordon Waller:

Since [Peter] Asher’s sister, June Asher dated Paul McCartney at the time, Peter and Gordon were lucky enough secure unrecorded Lennon-McCartney songs for their own use. One of those songs, “A World Without Love” became their biggest hit.

In an odd coincidence, Waller was sixty-four when he died - an age with which McCartney fans are familiar. And the Englishman died not too far away from Citi Field and the Ed Sullivan Theater (and, for that matter, the Dakota) - Waller lived in Ledyard, Connecticut, and died in Norwich.

Now I am not as old as McCartney, and there has only been one time (last summer) where I have had the opportunity to visit a place that I was familiar with over forty years ago. For McCartney the issue is especially odd, because while very few people care about what I was doing in the 1960s, there are some people who don't care what Paul McCartney did AFTER the 1960s.

Um...there ARE headphones

The Guardian recently wrote an essay about music in the office.

Do you ever, while in the middle of compiling a particularly puzzling Excel spreadsheet, think you'd get things done a bit quicker with Dizzee Rascal bonkering on in the background? Have you found your typing speed increases in direct proportion to the donks per minute in the latest Blackout Crew single? Would you make fewer spelling mistakes if you could listen to James Yorkston all day?

Here on the music site, we think the answer to all these questions is "yes". Admittedly, this is because we want a reason to be allowed to play music on an office stereo all day (at the moment the Powers That Be at the Guardian say it's not allowed, probably because it distracts other people from working – yeah, whatevs).

Perhaps I'm missing something here, or perhaps it's a weird Yank thing, but I listen to music in the ofice and don't get into trouble from the Powers That Be (Prince Charles?).

Perhaps I should describe my work environment. I work in a room that has seven cubicles around the edges of the room...and a conference table in the middle. The conference table is used to hold conferences, and at such times the room can get a bit noisy. It could have been worse - some people who don't work in the room thought that we should put a ping pong table in our room. Instead, the ping pong table is next door, and we just hear the sound through the wall.

In a cubicle environment, headphones are a necessity. While one can quibble about productivity with or without headphones, I submit that you are more productive with headphones than you would be if you were forced to listen to someone else's meeting.

Accordions and the King of Pop

Once upon a time there was an accordion player who happened into a recording career, part of which included parodies. He ended up doing a few parodies of songs from a really really popular artist...an artist who liked him. While the accordion player branched into other areas, his relationship with this artist was obviously significant. This is what Al Yankovic said:

The first time I met him in person was long after I had gotten permission to do "Eat It" back in 1984....The first time I actually ran into him was backstage at one of his concerts, this was maybe four years later, when Even Worse came out with my second parody, "Fat." I went backstage, and he was seeing a lot of people, but I brought along a gold record of Even Worse to present to him, and he was very gracious and thanked me for it and said some nice things. After the fact, I thought, "That's probably the last thing Michael Jackson needs, another gold record for his storage locker." Seeing him in person was amazing, it was otherworldly. He was and continues to be so iconic, it's hard to even conceive of him as a human being. He always was bigger than life.

Yankovic also discussed the Michael Jackson song that he didn't parody:

I considered parodying "Black or White" around that time. Michael wasn't quite so into it, because he thought "Black or White" was more of a message song, and he didn't feel as comfortable with a parody of that one, which I completely understood, and in a way, he did me a huge favor, because I was already getting pegged as the guy who did Michael Jackson parodies, and because he wasn't so into it, I decided to go with Nirvana, which wound up revitalizing my career.

More here.

I want you to REALLY want me

While I never actually owned an 8-track tape during my younger years, I theoretically could have done so. And if you want to own one, you can do so today. Outside the Beltway noted that Cheap Trick, a band which saw major success when 8-track tapes were still in style, is releasing its latest album - with the creative title "The Latest" - in an 8-track version. Of course, retro has its price - in this case, $30.

Now certain people, possibly including myself, will get all amused over this thing and laugh at people who seek out 8-tracks when CDs are plentiful.

Or maybe not. Guardian Unlimited reported that "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)" was able to chart with only 64 CD sales. The caption for the accompanying photo:

Florence Welch hopes nobody realises she bought all 64 singles herself.

Oh, if only Brian Epstein were alive today. He'd be buying 8-tracks like tomorrow never knows.

Empoprise-MU News - 19 July 2009

Empoprise-MU News

The news letter for Empoprise-MU - An Empoprises vertical information service for music news.

Welcome to Empoprise-MU News

Music soothes the savage beast. Ron Perlman recited poetry on a "Beauty and the Beast" TV show soundtrack. But that's beside the point, sort of.

Behind the Scenes

I've referred to my long-tail reduction and fattening-up project, but I haven't really explained what I'm doing to my last.fm library.

First, I took a look at all of the artists that I had only played once. Some of the artists were eliminated from my library altogether. For all of the rest, I made sure to play the artist a second time. Therefore, when my library is the way I want it to be, I have a bunch of artists with two plays, and exactly zero artists with just one play. Of course this goes out of balance from time to time, and then I have to revisit my one-play artists again.

In a perfect world, I would then move on to the two-play artists and bump them up to the three-play level, or can them altogether, in an attempt to shorten and fatten the tail still further.

The one advantage of this exercise is that I get to listen to a wide variety of music as I check out each of these minimal-play artists. I mean, you can't listen to "The Girl and the Robot" ALL of the time.

Special Features

Just a reminder that if you're on Facebook, be sure to fan the Facebook page for the Empoprise-MU blog. The fan page is at the http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empoprise-MU/213885425013 URL.

Upcoming

Old artists, old technologies - I'll try to throw something new into the mix.

O.P.E. - you don't have a clue about my love for Synthia

As you know, I've been listening to my new CD acquisition, Röyksopp's "Junior," fairly extensively over the last few days despite my computer problems. Much of this time has been spent listening to "The Girl and the Robot," but I have actually listened to other songs on the album - more than once.

Lately, I've been placing the song "You Don't Have a Clue" on constant repeat. This song, one of several collaborations between Röyksopp and Anneli Drecker, occurs toward the end of the CD. I guess the best way to describe the song would be otherworldly polar electrofolk. "Polar" because the song sounds like it was written back in Tromsø (x, x, and Drecker are all from this northern Norwegian town), and "electrofolk" because it sounds like the song (especially the chorus) was conceived during a power failure and fleshed out when the power came back on.

As for the "otherworldly," you just need to wait for the first chorus to kick in, and listen to the very high vocal stylings in the background - about a half octave higher than Anneli Drecker is singing. While the backing vocals are credited to Röyksopp, I think that a little bit of artificial help was involved (even the late Michael Jackson didn't sing that high - in fact, most women don't sing that high). So, I personally credit the backing vocals to someone that I call "Synthia."

With all due respect to all of the other females on the album, Synthia clearly holds her own on this song. OK, she may be...um...a robot, but I guess I'm in love anyway.

Last.fm users can hear the song here, or you can listen to this live performance (including audience participation from a not-so-talented audience).



As for the lyrics, they deal with a continuing or non-continuing relationship:

It's late in the night,
The dancing is done,
The music has died,
We're ready to run.

But you don't have a clue,
This party hasn't ended yet,
Not for me and you,
And now you're just pretending, yeah.

But even they turn otherworldly:

You're hiding from yourself,
Guess you are, yes you are,
Like golden rays of sun,
in the cloud,
He-He-Yeah

We're meant to be one,
I know we are,
If I am the sky,
Then you are my star...

Or perhaps the people of Tromsø just have deeper thoughts about the sun and the lack thereof, which is understandable. As I write this, the sun is not scheduled to set in the town until 12:45 AM...on July 26. Of course, by November 26 it will be a different story.

Svein Berge spoke about his hometown in a 2005 interview:

I grew up in Tromso, really far north up in Norway. To us it was perfect, great scenery, great space. This was obviously prior to the Internet and so on, so one was quite secluded in many ways, particularly culturally. Impressions from what was going on in the UK had to be chased and sought after, which for people like us – interested in club culture and club music - made it very hard....

[O]bviously when you’re 14 you cannot really just piss off to London and go raving. In Tromso they were scarce – but we knew some guys who arranged rave parties every 3 months or so that probably had 50-100 people attending at most. And up in Tromso it would really be quite drug-free, and more about the joy of playing live music, the atmosphere and the strobes, which meant the scene was very healthy.

As for Drecker, I couldn't find her views on her hometown, but she does appreciate the sunflower, according to www.annelidrecker.com:

Anneli accepted to be the protector of the sunflower. In a role play Anneli was handed over a flower pot with a small sunflower, and she had to promise to take good care of it, give it light and water to make it grow.

The sunflower protectors are ambasadors for SOS Children's Villages, and Anneli was excited to participate as she is already supporting a child through their program.

More information here (in Norwegian).

Wanna check the beta of the Empoprise-MU Facebook page?

If you read my Empoprise-BI business blog, you may have seen my July 7 post which announced the creation of a Facebook fan page for the Empoprise-BI blog.

Well, I've now created a Facebook fan page for the Empoprise-MU music blog. It can be found at

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empoprise-MU/213885425013

And I must again give props to the makeuseof post which guided me through the whole fan page creation process. (I had to hunt a bit for the Notes settings, but eventually found them along with the general settings.)

So what does this mean? It means that there is a specific place for people on Facebook to read the contents of this blog. This saves me having to feed all of the posts through my regular Facebook stream, since many of my Facebook friends don't really care about my musical preferences.

So if you're on Facebook, and interested in my musical theories, go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empoprise-MU/213885425013.

Oh, and by the way, if you're on Facebook and want to read my business ruminations, go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empoprise-BI/98783891478.

This means that two of my four blogs have Facebook fan pages at present. Inland Empire and NTN Buzztime readers, stay tuned.

Do you know the Thriller man?

I confess that I would have failed this test. How would you do?

But, fatefully in 1979, [he] was recruited by Quincy Jones to write for Jackson, and he never looked back. He wrote three songs for Off the Wall and the title track of Thriller, the biggest selling album of all time. As if this wasn't enough, he penned hits for everyone from Donna Summer to Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin to Anita Baker, Herbie Hancock to good ol' Quincy Jones, George Benson to LL Cool J. Remember Stomp! by Brothers Johnson or Masterjam by Rufus? That was [him] as well.

And the guy sounds...a little odd:

Not bad for a self-taught muso whose first job was in a fish factory in Grimsby.

However, the reclusive, Grammy-winning genius has always shunned the spotlight, is rarely sighted in public and almost never speaks to the media. The few photographs that exist of him depict his appearance changing with an array of hairstyles and moustaches. He is rumoured to own properties around the world – France, Fiji, Kent and an address on LA's exclusive Mulholland Drive – although not, perhaps, in Cleethorpes. North Lincolnshire Council have barely heard of the richest man ever to come from that town.

So, do you know his name? If you don't go here.

If Alexa's Wish ever goes electronica, I'll be there

Several years ago, I would go to the occasional Alexa's Wish show in southern California. One interesting thing about the band is that because the band members were not high school kids, some of the fans of the band such as myself also skewed older. (I was probably in my late 30s when I was going to Alexa's Wish concerts.) Because many of us had jobs to go to in the morning, our ability to see the band was somewhat affected on weeknights.

It looks like I'm not the only one who has issues with this. For example, although I listen to the electro techno music at times, I've never been to a 3:00 am club date ("It's 3am, and DJ Whoever is spinning"). Turns out I don't have to:

Aficionados of dance music are used to waiting until the wee hours to catch top-of-the-line talent. But especially in summer an array of early parties, some outdoors, offer a respite from late nights and expensive clubs, allowing people with day jobs the opportunity to hear the latest in experimental beats and still be at the office on time in the morning.

“I go to the clubs, but not very often; it’s hard to fit it in for a working person like myself,” said Matthijs Koopmans, 52, an educational consultant from the Bronx and a fan of D.J.’s like Sasha and Digweed and Danny Tenaglia.

Now if only Major League Baseball would learn that you can only attract the younger generation with day games, the world would be a better place.

On Casey Kasem as THE source of information

Why was Casey Kasem's American Top 40 important to people like me who grew up in the 1970s? Mike Hale reminded us in his retrospective look at Kasem:

[B]ack in the day — before the Internet, even before “Entertainment Tonight” — there were better reasons to listen to Casey Kasem. For one thing: as bizarre as it now seems, millions of people didn’t know what the No. 1 song was each week until they heard that drumroll on “American Top 40.” It was appointment listening, as much of a weekly communal experience as “All in the Family” or “M*A*S*H.”

That's something that even those of us who lived through the 1970s often forget. In addition to not having "Entertainment Tonight" and Mary Hart's legs, we didn't have anything called billboard.com where we could look stuff up. In fact, if you took a time machine back to 1976 and mentioned "billboard dot com" to me, I'd probably think that you were talking about a Soviet music publication that said what May Day parade tune was at the top that week. (Yeah, Russian music has changed also.)

Hale makes another point:

As square as it was, by playing the entire Top 40 it gave many people a greater variety of music than they could get from listening to their local radio stations for a week.

Now I grew up in the Washington DC area, so I could probably flip my radio station around from WPGC to several other radio stations and get a good approximation of a variety of music. But in the 1970s, that was all that I could do. I couldn't go to Digitally Imported or last.fm or Pandora, and I couldn't listen to Australian radio stations on my telephone.

It's weird to just think about the changes in the entertainment industry in the last 30+ years, and how important any one news source could be. Just like we'll never have an equivalent of Walter Cronkite again, we'll probably never have an equivalent of Casey Kasem again.

Keep reaching for the stars, Casey.

More here.

Empoprise-MU News - 12 July 2009

Empoprise-MU News

The news letter for Empoprise-MU - An Empoprises vertical information service for music news.

Welcome to Empoprise-MU News

I'm going to try to write an entire newsletter for the Empoprise-MU music blog without mentioning a recently-deceased chimp-owning, moonwalking, controversial musical king. We'll see how far I get.

Behind the Scenes

Actually this should be fairly easy, because I've been concentraing on the Royksopp CD "Junior" for most of the week, as this blog and my last.fm feed will attest.

But by the time you read this, I should just be getting over a period of semi-withdrawal - a period during which I will have gone almost two day without having the "Junior" CD, or MP3 versions of the songs, with me. I'm writing this in advance of a planned weekend trip out-of-state, a trip in which the CD will be left at home, and any computer containing the CD tracks will also be left at home.

Never fear, however - I've loaded "The Girl and the Robot" on to my ancient Motorola Q phone, where it is not only available for listening whenever I like, but where it is also serving as both a ringtone and a wake-up alarm. So I'll get at least a partial fix during the weekend, when I wake up (not that I will have fallen asleep watching MTV) or when someone calls me (not that I'm so alone).

Special Features

OK, I'm not the only person who has scrobbled "The Girl and the Robot" in the last few days. If you search the lastfmfeeds group on FriendFeed, you'll find at least a couple of others.

And if you check the last.fm page, I'm not even one of the top listeners.

Yet.

Upcoming

I compare Casey Kasem to Walter Cronkite. Really. Think about it.

I go through these phases. This will pass.

http://www.last.fm/music/R%C3%B6yksopp/_/The+Girl+and+the+Robot

I quoted the chorus, but let's quote the dudes.

So you want to understand me
You just see what you want to see
There's no way I can help you out
You don't know what it's all about

Indeed.

Pandora's 40-Hour Box

Companies that used licensed music need to figure out how they're going to pay for the use of it, and different companies have worked out different ways of doing it.

MediaMemo reported that Pandora has hit upon a new strategy:

Web radio darling Pandora has good news for its users: We’re saved! And a slightly different message for its heaviest users: Pay up.

Both messages are a result of long and tortured negotiations with record labels that have finally come to a close with a deal Pandora says it can live with, though it’s different than the one founder Tim Westergren said the site had nailed down in November. The flip side is that the service will now require users who listen to the service for 40 hours a month to pay 99 cents if they want to hear any more tunes that month.

The New York Times reported on the specifics of the deal with Pandora, and other services:

Webcasters with significant advertising revenue, like Pandora or Slacker, will pay the greater of 25 percent of revenue or a fee each time a listener hears a song, starting at .08 cent for songs streamed in 2006 and increasing to .14 cent in 2015. Pandora had $19 million in revenue last year and expects that to rise to $40 million this year.

Small sites with less than $1.25 million in revenue, like AccuRadio, Digitally Imported and RadioIO, will pay 12 to 14 percent of it in royalties. All stations will be required to pay an annual minimum fee of $25,000, which they can apply to their royalty payments.

That $25,000 minimum bugs Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr, who believes that this will establish a non-innovative online radio industry:

$25,000 may not sound a lot for bigger online radio stations, or similar services such as Pandora, but for the small indie online radio market, it will be a killer because many would be fortunate enough to make $25,000 a year to begin with, but even if they did make more, $25,000 out of a profit of $30,000 or even $50,000 (profit before the royalty payment) is a massive burden.

Existing players aside, the imposition is even greater on new internet radio stations. Innovation often comes from below, and new stations (not unlike blogs) take time to establish an audience, and even longer to earn money.

Riley went on to argue that online radio stations still get a raw deal, something that BusinessWeek also noted:

In its heyday, broadcast radio was the only game in town to connect an artist with listeners. As a result, radio stations didn't compensate artists, since it was believed that radio exposure lead to increased album sales for the performers.

That premise has been basically true over the course of radio's history, but now that new forms of radio are developing, traditional radio is on the decline. But still the old business model persists. Now, a movement called musicFIRST is trying to change that model, but their success is still in doubt.