meta-roj

with the announcement yesterday of a sony-bmg hookup, and the pending warner-emi deal, we may soon have just three major labels.

of course, there are other issues. with sony-bmg rushing to the altar, there might be a strategy to leave the warner-emi deal in regulatory trouble – last merger to the party.

how many big labels is enough? cartel? oligopoly? monopoly?

(not yet available at the moment)

the news is out, but the official word from penn state isn’t quite on the web yet.

check here and here.

i’ll wait for these links to go live before i dig too far into this one.

update: these links work now, the material from penn state is open for your review.

a few penn state researchers have published a little research on music and mood…

so, put on something you like and go spend a couple minutes reading it…

some time ago, both kevin laws (here) and i (here) commented on walmart and the music business. tonight i came across this quote:

Wal-Mart also is Hollywood’s biggest outlet, accounting for 15% to 20% of all sales of CDs, videos, and DVDs.

(source)

just another little datapoint in the mix….

this article seems to have most of the interesting bits of data.

universal, the largest of the few record labels, will cut 1350 jobs by year end. naturally, they’re blaming the job cuts on net piracy. in the big picture, this is 11% of their 12,200 body workforce, in an attempt to cut expenses by $200 million.

wait a second. $200 million for 1350 jobs? that’s pushing $150k per body. hmm. there’s more to this than a small pile of pink slips, of course. hmm.

ot strictly business, but some things worth linking, i think….

a review of every uk #1 hit since the 1950’s, in blog form.

and, in true internet fashion, the american version is in the works.

an important event today, that i can’t properly address fully at the moment:

there are several reports floating around, here’s one from npr (with a link to the audio), on the universal music cd price cutting theory and how well it went over with the retail outlets.

this is a version of the story from from the washington post