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...ticket sales for the top 100 touring bands are down 12% this year, Live Nation Entertainment's major executives went on the defensive Thursday, blaming the press for "scaring" artists from touring and arguing that acts need to alter their pricing strategies. ..."The press," (CEO Michael) Rapino said, has "scared about every artist" out of touring in the fourth quarter. A number of major tours have struggled in 2010, including the refurbished Lilith Tour, and once-can't-miss artists such as the Jonas Brothers have been canceling dates... Yet the company's top brass did more than point fingers at the media, and promised...

from the going-behind-the-veil dept We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies "lose money" on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they're pretty famous for doing something quite similar. Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40. Here's the chart that the article shows, though you should read the whole article...

The struggling music industry may be aroused at the prospect of winning money from the porn industry. Warner Bros. and a number of other record labels filed a lawsuit last week alleging copyright infringement on the part of an adult entertainment company whose porn videos allegedly featured such spectacles as actors lip-synching to Justin Timberlake's "Sexyback" while engaging in sexual acts on camera. The defendant in the legal action is a Florida-based company... Damages claimed on the alleged nasty use of copyrighted music could run in the tens of millions of dollars. ...The defendant specializes in a particular brand of...

The concert business is supposed to be the music industry's one sure thing. But not this summer. The Eagles, Rihanna and Maxwell have canceled tour dates. A wobbling "American Idol" tour has flooded the market with discounted tickets, and the resurrected Lilith Fair tour has called off concerts from Dallas to Salt Lake City. Even teen idols the Jonas Brothers announced this week that they're scrapping some shows. * * * With the continued evaporation of recorded music sales, acts at all levels of the talent pool must lean heavily on their live-performance earnings. That's forcing artists to tour more,...

The pop band Men at Work has been ordered to pay a music publishing company 5 percent of the royalties it earned in Australia for its song "Down Under." A judge said Tuesday the group must pay Larrikin Publishing because it borrowed without permission a flute riff from the popular Australian nursery rhyme "Kookaburra," penned by the late Marion Sinclair in 1932, CNN said. Sinclair died in 1988. Larrikin holds the copyright to the "Kookaburra" but did not became aware of the similarities between it and 1981's "Down Under" until they were compared on a game show in 2007, the...

Prince will release his new album, "20Ten," as a free giveaway with various European newspapers and magazines. In the U.K., Prince has signed up with tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror and its associated Scottish title the Daily Record for the CD giveaway. More than 2.5 million copies will be distributed on July 10 with the newspapers. The deal will also include Prince's first British newspaper interview in more than a decade and competitions for European concert tickets. The German edition of Rolling Stone has announced that its August issue, to be published July 22, will include a new Prince album,...

...adult-contemporary singer Sarah McLachlan - will almost certainly land near the top of the Billboard album chart. Sade had a No. 1 hit in February with her first album in 10 years. ...Susan Boyle, Michael Buble and Barbra Streisand - singers who reach the older-than-40 crowd - enjoyed top-five debuts on the chart. An interesting phenomenon is occurring as fewer and fewer CDs are being purchased: Artists who appeal to older listeners are showing up surprisingly high on the list of best-sellers. Why? These days, adults buy most of the CDs. Younger people, on the other hand, tend to download...

Companies are preying on desperate musicians by selling them Twitter followers, Facebook fans and even download sales. But only a fool would think this is real success One of the most staggering statistics I took from this year's The Great Escape was that analytics company MusicMetric is currently tracking 450,000 artists. As it's not following every artist out there, we can safely say there are more than half a million competing for your attention. So how are they supposed to get heard? Unsurprisingly, new companies have emerged that are intent on profiting from the increasing desperation of artists and start-up...

The alternative music act Devo, best known for its 1980 hit "Whip It," is pioneering a new method to help win fan approval. It is asking them what they want to hear. Singer and co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh told Reuters Television that the U.S. band's first album for 20 years -- "Something for Everybody" -- was shaped through an online campaign which asked fans for their opinions. "We thought people understood us enough to make observations which could be really important," he said. The resulting disc bears a promotional sticker that reads "88 percent focus group approved." Fans helped whittle a...

...computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg recently noted that although we have strong instinctive feelings about ownership, intellectual property doesn’t always fit into that framework.... ..Optimists argue that the music industry has coped before with disruptive new technology. Until recordings came along, songs, not singers, were Big Business. So while copyright law allocated royalties for performances, it said nothing about what happened when you recorded those performances and sold thousands of copies of the recording. Only after protracted legal maneuvering did we work out an arrangement that allowed both businesses to thrive. ...collectors switching from cassette and vinyl to CD swelled the...

Even a trip to iTunes for a new song or movie might soon be within the grasp of Illinois’ tax collectors. Imposing the state’s sales tax on downloaded songs and movies surfaced as a new money-making idea Tuesday from Gov. Quinn’s administration to help bail out the state, which has a $13 billion deficit. Quinn also proposed selling off a portion of tobacco settlement proceeds to raise $1 billion; requiring banks to divulge the accounts of tax scofflaws to arm the state with a potent new tool to collect unpaid taxes, and extending for four months deeper into the next...

Three years ago, Paul McCartney was one of the most outspoken of the disgruntled acts at EMI, the record label that had been his home since the earliest days of the Beatles. He complained in an interview with The Times of London that he and other artists at the label, which had recently been bought by the British private equity firm Terra Firma, were treated as “part of the furniture.” He signed a deal with the Concord Music Group, an independent label in California, for his new releases. Now, in another blow to EMI, Mr. McCartney has pulled his full...

Leaked documents reveal draft text of secret global copyright deal ) OTTAWA — As negotiators from 37 countries prepare to meet in New Zealand on Monday to discuss a top-secret trade agreement, a draft text of the document has found its way onto the Internet. While bits and pieces of the agreement, called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), have been leaked in the past, this is the first time a full draft is available to the public. The agreement, negotiated privately for the better part of two years, aims to create a global organization to oversee worldwide copyright and intellectual...

Pop group Squeeze have said hits like Cool for Cats and Up the Junction would not have happened if the band were starting out in today's music industry. Singer Glenn Tilbrook... "If we'd been placed under the same commercial criteria, I think we'd have been gone after our first album." Their second album, which came out in 1979, contained their biggest hits. He was speaking as the group were honoured with a plaque at the site of one of their first gigs in south-east London. Tilbrook and Chris Difford returned to the Greenwich Borough Hall - where they played in...

Another year, another reason to raise bloody hell over who didn't get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and who did. Tonight, a fresh class of five historic names will march into the coveted main hall: ABBA, Jimmy Cliff, Genesis, the Hollies and the Stooges.

ABBA, Jimmy Cliff, Genesis, The Hollies and the Stooges will become the latest inductees in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Monday, officials said. Other inductees this year include individual recipients of the Ahmet Ertegun Award -- record executive David Geffen and songwriters Jeff Barry, Otis Blackwell, Ellie Greenwich, Barry Mann, Mort Shuman, Jesse Stone and Cynthia Weil. An induction ceremony is set for Monday night at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.

Global music industry body the IFPI said it wanted to counter the "myth" that artists can make it on their own. In a report, it said virtually no new artists had broken through without the backing of a record label. Major labels invest $1m (£670,000) in each new act, who could not afford to make records and videos and go on tour without that backing, the IFPI said. Record labels around the world spend a total of $5bn (£3.3bn) a year on developing and promoting new and established artists. IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) chief executive John Kennedy...

The US music blogosphere seems to have been turfed of late. The general terrain has returned to nature: gone are the tacky, post-Justice mirrored surfaces of two years ago and in their place are lo-fidelity hillocks and dream-pop pastures. Just take a look at the names of the buzzy bands of the past few months: from the mountains (Mountain Man, Mount McKinley, Speck Mountain), through to the woods (Tall Firs, Woods), and then down to the sea (Beach House, Wavves, Surfer Blood, Best Coast, Beach Fossils, Coasting). There's a Rainbow Bridge to a Summer Camp, and Silk Flowers and Blue...

...The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) says that global government legislation is essential to the sector's survival. It cited Spain as an example of a country which does not have laws in place to prevent illegal downloads. The sales of albums by local artists there have fallen by 65% in five years. Federation chairman John Kennedy said the situation in Spain is now "almost irreversible". "Spain runs the risk of turning into a cultural desert," commented Rob Wells, Senior Vice President, Digital, at Universal Music Group.... "Drastic action needs to be taken in order to save the Spanish...

...in its first year of operation the museum hosted approximately 85,000 guests... The word "museum" may not even be the most apt descriptor for the complex. The Grammy Museum uses the annual awards as a jumping-off point, allowing visitors to digitally explore genres, regions and the recording studio. It takes a hands-on approach to education, giving the guests the opportunity to record vocals, mix a track and learn the basics of traditional rock 'n' roll instrumentation. ...on Jan. 8 the museum will open "Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer," pairing the intimate looks at the star with rare footage...