A list that I view every few months is the upcoming CD releases to see what’s coming down the album pipe.
Personally, I’m most looking forward for Dr. Dre’s Detox, which is set to release sometime this year. Detox should be Dr. Dre’s final album and one that will step aside from the norm. In a 2002 interview with MTV, Dre stated:
“I’m not talking about lowriders and blunts and all that anymore, I mean, that’s played. As a matter of fact, I’m tired of hearing other people talk about it, to tell you the truth. I had to come up with something different but still keep it hardcore, so what I decided to do was make my album one story about one person and just do the record through a character’s eyes, And everybody that appears on my album is going to be a character, so it’s basically going to be a hip-hop musical.”
Don’t know if this is officially from Dr. Dre, but here’s a teaser video promoting the album:
This is a great interview with emusic.com’s CEO David Pakman. Emusic.com is my favorite music download store. This article gives us a great insight on Mr. Pakman’s opinions regarding DRM. Some notable quotes from David Pakman:
The average iTunes customer buys one song per month, spends about $10 a year on iTunes. The average eMusic customer buys 20 songs per month and spends $168.
EMI totally understands [music that plays everywhere] now. I think they made a courageous move. Obviously, the indies have done this since the beginning, and the indie market share has grown considerably in the last five or six years, while the majors have declined. They must be doing something right. I think another major will take the same approach this year, and then the other two will do it next year. DRM in downloaded music will be gone. Its days are numbered. There will still be DRM for subscription rental services.
PureTracks: This site really looks promising ($1 a drm-less tune) – can’t wait to give it a try.
gBox: (coming soon) Universal and Google get together to sell DRM-free music.
Walmart: jumping into the DRM-less music sales business – great, the consumer ultimately wins. Except if that consumer happens to be using firefox ;( in that case he is out of luck.
7digitial: a UK-based site for DRM-less music – haven’t tried this one out, yet.
Hip Hop is not dead, it just sucks: A great article with analysis of today’s Hip Hop. This Time.com article, gives us some figures to prove that the hip-hop, the once king of all genres, is now in a slipping slope downward.
While music-industry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap. According to the music trade publication Billboard, rap sales have dropped 44% since 2000 and declined from 13% of all music sales to 10%. Artists who were once the tent poles at rap labels are posting disappointing numbers. Jay-Z’s return album, Kingdom Come, for instance, sold a gaudy 680,000 units in its first week, according to Billboard. But by the second week, its sales had declined some 80%. This year rap sales are down 33% so far.
Denny Somach, the world’s leading expert of classic rock, was one of Howard Stern’s guests today. He explained how Led Zeppelin took other artists’ songs, remade them, and put themselves as the authors of some of their songs. He goes in further detail on his website: www.classicrockcentral.com. I heard the whole show. They would play Led Zeppelin’s songs next to the other songs and both songs would sound the same. Hopefully, one day, this issue would get settled and the original artists be compensated, appropriately.
