eMusic recently announced that they’ve reached a milestone, having sold 100 million songs as unencrypted (DRM-free) MP3s.

Tech bloggers are freaking out about the news:

• Digital Music News asks “So, uh, Mr. Major Label executive guy; How many million DRM free tracks does eMusic have to sell before you join the party? No, really.. how many?”
• Techdirt says that DRM-free music is the way to go, and that the major music labels are pretending that the jury is still out.
• MacWorld says that the labels are mulling life without DRM.
• WebProNews warns that they are going to keep slamming on Apple’s “rotten to the core” DRM in response to the “ever-growing consumer backlash revolving around Digital Rights Management.”

These guys need a reality check. Like it or not, sales of non-DRM’d music are trivial in the context of music industry sales, they are insignificant compared to the sales of DRM’d tracks at iTunes, and they don’t offer artists a serious new option for making money.

Continue reading ‘Why Bloggers Don’t Run Record Companies’

Qloud (pronounced “cloud”) today launched a public beta of its search service and iTunes plug-in.

Qloud uses media player plug-ins to provide the listener data that powers Qloud’s search. In the Qloud service, users can then search through this information, and can do so in multiple ways:

• music preference (how much it is played, how highly it is rated):
• demographics (what the age, gender, location of the listeners is); and
• category (how the music is tagged).

For example, one could search for the most played tracks with the tag “workout.” But users can also go further by seeking, for example, tracks most tagged ‘workout’ and ‘hiphop’ by women in New York aged 20-30.

“Qloud will do for music discovery what Google has done for web discovery,” claims Toby Murdock, co-founder of Qloud. “Users prefer the control and immediate gratification that the search experience provides. Qloud now offers that for music, and our unique approach makes the search results accurate and satisfying to music lovers around the world.”

Continue reading ‘Qloud Launches Music Search Engine; Integrates With iTunes’

Great American Group, a leading retail liquidation firm, announced today that it will be liquidating Tower Records and all of the company’s assets. The sale, which also includes various leases and properties, was given final approval today by a Federal bankruptcy judge.Liquidated will be all of the merchandise and equipment at Tower Records’ 89 stores across the United States. Included will be hundreds of thousands of music CDs, music and film DVDs, and various audio equipment.

Tower Records, which has 89 stores in 20 states and owes creditors about $200 million, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in August. The industry-wide decline in music sales, downloading of online music and competition from big-box stores such as Wal-Mart was cited by the company as the reasons for its financial problems.

The filing came two years after a reorganization that resulted in bondholders forgiving millions of dollars in debt but taking an 85 percent stake in the company, leaving founder Russ Solomon and his family with 15 percent.