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Articles on Digital music

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A billboard in Nairobi for Safaricom, Kenya’s largest mobile service provider, featuring veteran rapper and producer Jua Cali. Andrew J Eisenberg

How African countries are doing in ballooning digital music revenues

The political economy of music distribution goes unchecked. Despite increased digital revenues, also across Africa, music markets remain characterised by bottlenecks between musicians and audiences.
Digital documents are not nearly as easy to retrieve. Africa Studio/Shutterstock.com

Estate planning for your digital assets

What happens to your Facebook account, your iTunes purchases and your email messages when you die?
Everyone’s listening, but few are buying. karljonsson

Streaming may suffocate the music industry – or save it

Taylor Swift’s announcement that she was removing her music from the Spotify music service started a debate about the future of music. Swift argued that artists were not receiving appropriate compensation…
Electronica musician Chet Faker, on Future Classic distributed by Warner, is nominated for the ARIA’s album of the year. EPA/ Anthony Anex

Independent artists call the shots, ARIAs or not

Since the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) award nominations were released last week much of the talk has been about how 80% of the nominations for album of the year were released “independently…
Looks like the future – sounds like status quo. EPA/Daniel Hambury

Thom Yorke’s ‘new’ music model ticks few of tomorrow’s boxes

Late last week, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke released his new solo album – Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes – via BitTorrent, Inc’s “bundle” platform. Visitors to the service pay a US$6 fee, receiving the usual torrent…
The advent of digital music caused a few headaches, but digital copyright issues go back further than that. ~lauren/Flickr

Digital copyright protection – some success, but mostly failure

There’s been a bit of talk recently about getting internet service providers (ISPs) involved in the enforcement of copyright law. The federal Attorney-General and Minister for Communications recently released…
Pirates aren’t all that hard to please. Philippe Put

Who are the music pirates and what do they want?

Music piracy is a huge problem, if the music industry is to believed. But so far, very little has been done to stop it. We are, however, starting to get an idea of what motivates people to do it. If record…
Mute Synth, a collaboration between Dr John Richards and Mute Records. MuteSynth creditphoto GeorgeBenson Stereographic

DIY music comes of age with new ways to collaborate

Following the explosion of do-it-yourself music in the 1990s, aspiring DJs and producers have been spoiled rotten. Home studios are increasingly commonplace now that there is such a wealth of affordable…
A budding romance? Ed Yourdon

The iPod zombies are more switched on than you think

Teenagers get a bad rap for zoning out on their iPods at every given opportunity, but they may not be the unsociable narcissists they are often portrayed as. In fact, they are often skilled users who manage…
Thom Yorke: not a fan of streaming services. angela n

Spotify is no desperate fart, just ask the music fat cats

Spotify is currently the world’s largest music streaming service with 24 million active users. Founder and CEO Daniel Ek has stated that the company will pay out roughly $500 million to rights owners in…
Music sales have been falling for some time, but this should not attributed to piracy alone. Tracey Nearmy/AAP Image

Music sales are waning but don’t blame the pirates

Fact: worldwide sales of recorded music have declined significantly over the last decade. Fact: there has also been an increase in the use of P2P file-sharing technologies over the last decade. While there…

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