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“A federal jury handed Apple a win in a long-running antitrust case on Tuesday, rejecting plaintiffs’ claims that the company had sidelined competitors and hiked up prices during the iPod’s heyday,” Julia Love reports for The Mercury News. “After just a few hours of deliberations, the eight-member jury sided with Apple that iTunes 7.0 was a meaningful improvement over previous versions of the software, rather than a plot to hobble rivals,” Love reports. “The verdict defuses a case that could have cost Apple as much as $1 billion.” “The trial was full of legal drama, including an eleventh-hour search for...

They may not have a crystal ball, but the folks at Spotify do have the next best thing: heaps and heaps of hot, fresh listener data. ...Here’s who’s next up, according to Spotify. Pell Børns Raury The Bohicas Mikky Ekko Seinabo Sey Houndmouth Ezra Vine Kim Cesarion MisterWives James Bay Ryn Weaver George Ezra Young Fathers Catfish and the Bottlemen MLKMN Francesco Yates AURORA

<p>OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — In an unusual legal twist, a federal judge decided Monday that a billion-dollar, class-action lawsuit over Apple's iPods should continue, even though she also disqualified the last remaining plaintiff named in a case that has been on trial since last week.</p>

In what the music biz sees as a long overdue move, Nielsen SoundScan and its client Billboard will soon implement radical changes in the way album sales are calculated for the weekly chart that remains a key metric of an artist’s popularity. Beginning with the album chart that will be published Dec. 3 (covering sales for the week ending Nov. 30, which climaxes with retail’s Black Friday), music streams from services like Spotify and Beats Music will be tabulated as part of the data employed to rank the nation’s most popular albums. SoundScan will equate 1,500 song streams as the...

...These labels come out of an old impulse and a newer set of circumstances. Jazz musicians have been making albums in clubs for as long as it’s been feasible... For historical and acoustical reasons... Vanguard leads in this field — a page on its website shows thumbnail images for 123 albums created in the club — but there have also been fine recent dispatches from Jazz Standard, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola and elsewhere. Still, those are albums released on separate record labels. The perpetual challenge of running a successful jazz club, and the equally daunting proposition of starting a record label,...

Universal Music Group artists have a new way to make money from their music videos following a three-way pact between the label, in-video advertising company Mirriad and global ad agency Havas. With the deal, Mirriad will use its digital product placement technology to offer Havas clients, which include LVMH, Dish Network and Coca-Cola, opportunities to advertise inside UMG-family music videos. The companies announced the partnership, a first in the fledgling in-video advertising market, on Monday morning. Mirriad scans existing videos for surfaces, like bare brick walls, empty billboards and plain drinking mugs, and is able integrate branded assets such as...

U.S. album sales hit 3.97-million last week, the smallest weekly total for album sales since Nielsen SoundScan first began tracking data in 1991, Billboard's Ed Christman and Glenn Peoples report. It's also the first time during that period that weekly sales have fallen below 4 million, they write.Sales for the week ending August 25 fell 18.6%. The best seller was rapper Whiz Khalifa's "Blacc Hollywood" which debuted with 90,000 units, Billboard says. For the first time in more than a year,  sales for the soundtrack to Disney's "Frozen" fell below 100,000 units.CD sales have practically vanished, down 19.2% year-over-year, with sales at...

The Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Fla., where the Dave Matthews Band is playing Tuesday night, can hold up to 15,000 people. But as Yahoo and Live Nation see it, the potential audience is limitless. Tuesday’s show is the first in an ambitious partnership to supply free live video streams of a different concert each day for an entire year; more shows are planned by Kiss, Justin Timberlake, Usher and the Neighbourhood. If successful, the program will help establish Screen, Yahoo’s video site and competitor to YouTube. And for Live Nation, the world’s biggest concert promoter, and the rest...

Tony Bennett doesn’t have much patience for most modern music. The legendary singer, 87, told the BBC Radio 4’s Today program that most modern songs lack a “lasting quality.” “The songs that are written today, most of them are terrible,” he said. “It’s a very bad period, musically, throughout the world for popular music.” He added that today’s music industry leaders are more concerned with making money than making quality music. “The corporations took it over and they want to make so much money and they don’t care whether the public likes it or not,” he said. “They think the...

...radio is still the number one place where music consumers discover new music... It may be old technology, but it’s one that we still gladly live with. With a vehicle that’s constantly tethered to the Internet, that balance of power changes. More people can leave radio in favor of their personalized playlists and channels on Pandora, Spotify and other online services, which means that the total dynamic of “drive-time” can and will transform. Sure, many will still listen to local talk or sports radio, but others will choose to listen to stations that they can’t get through terrestrial radio via...

he music business is about to get its own alternative currency, called Songcoin. The alternative currency phenomenon is real, as weird as that might feel to those of us who would never consider shelling out cash for points to buy special pixels for that Farmville game we never really got around to playing. Bitcoin, despite the issues mentioned below, shows that alternative currencies can become quite real to certain people, which can then make them real enough in general, causing them to take on a value of their own outside the traditional financial system.As Forbes reports, we still donÂ’t know...

What is wrong with this picture? What kind of people are we when we celebrate sleaze and ignore honor and valor ?

It’s often said that art appreciation is wholly subjective. Aesthetic tastes naturally differ, de gustibus non est disputandem, etc… And if art is a matter of taste, and not subject to critical scrutiny, then so it is with music, which is simply a subset of art. In one sense, the people who posit this argument are correct. There’s no objective, non-arbitrary measure by which you can judge the quality of a musical composition, artist, or genre. In another sense, these people are completely wrong. I hew to the Adam Carolla theory of musical appreciation. That is, there is a distinct,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has refused to take up a Boston University student's constitutional challenge to a $675,000 penalty for illegally downloading 30 songs and sharing them on the Internet. The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., who was successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegally sharing music on peer-to-peer networks. In 2009, a jury ordered Tenenbaum to pay $675,000, or $22,500 for each song he illegally downloaded and shared.

I've enjoyed Deezer for two or three years now. It was a site where, for a simple free registration, one could listen to unlimited music. It was a gold mind of old classic country blues. Now, having settled down in a new place (and having used it not long ago) I go back to it and find that now all you can listen to for a subscription is thirty seconds. To get what we used to have now requires the "premium" service which isn't even available in the USA yet! Any other Deezer users out there? Anyone know what happened?

Since their release in 1978, hit albums like Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute,” Kenny Rogers’s “Gambler” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” have generated tens of millions of dollars for record companies. But thanks to a little-noted provision in United States copyright law, those artists — and thousands more — now have the right to reclaim ownership of their recordings, potentially leaving the labels out in the cold. When copyright law was revised in the mid-1970s, musicians, like creators of other works of art, were granted...

Police have arrested two men in connection with a plot to rob and murder British soul singer Joss Stone. BBC confirms the men, ages 30 and 33, were arrested after police received a report of a suspicious vehicle in the area near the singer’s home in Cullompton, England. The two were found with swords, maps of the singer’s home, ropes. forensic-style overalls and a body bag in their possession. “Police attended an address in Cullompton after alert residents notified officers about a suspicious-looking vehicle. Officers attended the area at around 1000 BST and subsequently arrested the occupants of a red...

ASPEN, Colo.--The Recording Industry Association of America said on Monday that current U.S. copyright law is so broken that it "isn't working" for content creators any longer. RIAA President Cary Sherman said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act contains loopholes that allow broadband providers and Web companies to turn a blind eye to customers' unlawful activities without suffering any legal consequences. "The DMCA isn't working for content people at all," he said at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum here. "You cannot monitor all the infringements on the Internet. It's simply not possible. We don't have the ability to search...

...a framework of a deal in which stations would pay a total of about $100 million a year in performance fees. ...The association’s outline suggests that the largest stations pay a performance fee of 1 percent of net revenue, and smaller stations a lower rate or none at all. While labels and musicians have long sought performance fees, broadcasters have argued that the stations provide important promotion for artists, and that a fee might put small stations out of business. ...it would still need Congressional approval. ...Last year, after the both the House and Senate judiciary committees approved bills that...

There may be an FM radio in your next cell phone whether you want it or not. The National Association of Broadcasters is lobbying Congress to stipulate that FM radio technology be included in future cell phones. In exchange, the NAB has agreed that member stations would pay about $100 million in so-called performance fees to music labels and artists. Radio stations would be required to pay performance royalties on a tiered schedule with larger commercial stations paying more than smaller and non-profit stations. The agreement is part of a compromise between the NAB and the Recording Industry Association of...