Calling all readers, there are 5 days of voting left for the Online Hip Hop Awards and currently Vicariousmusic.com is in 5th place!!! So we need your help!
For the next 5 days (Wed, Thurs, Fri, Sat and Sun) we’re picking 1 winner (per day) who emails us and tells us you voted, here are the prizes.
Wed: Koch Records prize pack (DJ Khaled “We Global”, In Flames “A Sense of Purpose”, Hatebreed “Live Dominance DVD”, Ray J “All I Feel”, Dwele “Sketches of a Man”)
Thur: Atlantic Records prize pack (T.I. “Paper Trail”, Big Kuntry King “My Turn To Eat”)
Fri: RCA Music Group prize pack (Jazmine Sullivan, Jennifer Hudson, Ray Lamontagne new cd)
Wall Street suffered another downpour on Tuesday, the latest gash in a worsening contraction. The broader DJIA dropped more than 500 points to 9,447, while the S&P 500 dropped to its lowest levels in five years. The tech-heavy Nasdaq also slipped 108 points, or 5.8 percent, to land at 1,755.
In total, the Dow has lost more than 1,400 points over the past five trading days alone. That is affecting music-related stocks like Apple (AAPL), which slipped below $90 to $89.16 on Tuesday, down 9.15 percent. That is the lowest level for the stock since March of 2007. Meanwhile, Warner Music Group (WMG) languished below $6 to $5.94, down 10 percent, and Sirius XM Radio slipped to 48-cents, down 3.92 percent, its lowest levels since March of 2003.
Those attempting to buy at the bottom are playing a tricky game, and earlier gambles have been punished. Meanwhile, the bears are growling loudly, and dampening investor confidence in the process. That includes Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, who pointed to worsening conditions and opened the door to rate cuts. “In light of developments, the Fed will need to consider whether the current stance of policy remains appropriate,” Bernanke said.
Elsewhere, hard-charging market analyst Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” urged investors to run for the exits. “Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market right now, this week,” a visibly-shaken Cramer told Ann Curry on the Today Show. The comments, delivered by the oft-bullish and rowdy analyst, undoubtedly spooked market confidence further.
Popular internet music sites like Pandora and Last.FM have been granted a stay of execution by our elders in Congress. Yesterday, Congress passed the Webcaster Settlement Act, which, according to Consumerist:
Gives Internet radio stations like Pandora until February 2009 to reach a new royalty agreement with copyright holders; if they meet the deadline, the government will not interfere, which is great news since it was the gov’s Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) that set the current market-killing fees in the first place.
Now, President Bush has to sign it, and then the websites and the nightmarish RIAA have to play nice to eek out a deal. So for now, take a deep breath, kick back, and enjoy some free streaming music through your internet’s tubes. If you’re new to this, try these, for starters: Pandora, Last FM & WOXY.com.
Best Buy is set to be the exclusive retailer forGuns N’ Roses decade-plus-in-the-making new album “Chinese Democracy” before year’s end, sources close to the situation tell Billboard. Some details of the deal are still being worked out, including the release date.
The news brings a semblance of closure to the bizarre history of “Democracy,” which Guns N’ Roses has been working on since the mid-1990s. Since then, every original member of the once mighty group has left besides vocalist Axl Rose, and millions of dollars have been spent working on the new material.
T-Mobile’s new G1 phone (made by HTC with Google’s Android OS) will have access to purchase songs from the entire Amazon MP3 catalog of 6 million tunes.
Music magazine Blender’s website launched a new weekly video podcast named Blender Burner, hosted by editor Joe Levy. Yahoo Music will get exclusive rights to each new episode over the weekend, after which an embeddable version will pop up on the Blender homepage and video site.
The weekly Blender Burner videocast brings you breaking news, must-have downloads plus footage and interviews from our photo shoots. It’s Blender, fresh from the digital oven!
Big Tech Covering the digital giants, by Jon Fortt
It took me a while to get around to it, but I’ve finally downloaded the iTunes 8 update, and played around a bit with the Genius song recommendation feature. After a test drive, I’ve decided it’s the best thing Apple has (AAPL) added to its music management suite in quite a while.
Genius solves my “iTunes laziness” problem. I’ve got 4,000 items in my library, I listen to genres as diverse as gospel, alternative and hip-hop, to and I’m too lazy to make good playlists out of it all. I used to count on the Party Shuffle feature to save me, but got tired of how it would end up throwing in random Christmas carols at the wrong times of year.
It works by tapping into the wisdom of crowds. After I click on a favorite song from when I was dating my wife – “Ordinary” by Train, from the “Spider-Man 2? soundtrack – and click the Genius button, Apple suggests a playlist based on the scanned libraries and listening habits of other iTunes users. (Among the good picks: “Dare You To Move” by Switchfoot, “I Alone” by Live, “The Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe, and “Send Me On My Way” by Rusted Root. Mostly angsty alternative songs from the ’90s. Cool.)
A couple of reasons Genius is a good move for Apple, business-wise:
One, it encourages people with decent-sized iTunes libraries to listen more. I suspect that these folks are the most likely candidates to upgrade to newer iPods, and if they’re rediscovering their music collections they’re more likely to do that.
Two, it increases the “stickiness” of iTunes, and decreases the likelihood that I’ll switch to some other service. It’s like a moat around iTunes and the iPod, keeping would-be invaders out.
That said, the Genius isn’t perfect. Some of its picks are a little weird – like the Billy Joel song it squeezed between Augustana and The Verve Pipe. And while I’m glad Apple allows you to save Genius playlists, I think it’s annoying that it saves them as a new type of list that doesn’t sync to older iPods. (I can easily copy and paste the songs by hand into an old-school sync-able playlist, but I shouldn’t have to.)
But overall, Apple is making great use of the computing power in its data centers to unobtrusively provide a feature that any music lover will understand. If Steve Jobs and the rest of the crew can figure out how to tap their 65 million iTunes account holders and provide more features like this, they’ll probably have my business for a long time..FT
