One of the wonderful paradoxes of the digital era of media is its retrograde quality. We tend to think of inventions like the internet and peer-to-peer digital networks as apotheoses of modern communication, but their economic impact on many media industries has been to unravel their modern industrial structures and to resurrect many of their pre-industrial, folk foundations.
Nowhere has that been more true than in the case of music. MP3 files, P2P networks, and now streaming have blown up the multi-song bundle we called the album — and the profit margins that came with it — and restored the single to prominence, as it was in the days before the invention of the long-playing record (LP).
The much-derided phenomenon of unlicensed “sharing” of music over P2P networks also carries echoes of music’s past. Until the Gramophone and the Phonograph made private performances of music practical, music was almost always shared, in the sense that it was usually experienced as part of a public performance. While the industrial technologies of recording and playback made private performances lucrative the instinct to share music never really went away. Read More »
That represents an increase of 12 percent and 6 percent, respectively, over 2013.
PledgeMusic CEO and founder of the DotBlockchainMusic project Benji Rogers was interviewed by Robert Levine, author of “Free Ride” and a former executive editor at Billboard, during a keynote conversation at the inaugural 
if the superior skills of a LeBron James or Kobe Bryant added a mere 2 points per game on average to his team’s total, in a league where the average point differential per game is 0.06, over the course of a season they could easily add a half a dozen or more wins to the team’s record, making the difference between first place and missing the playoffs. Given the financial payoff for the team’s owners of reaching the playoffs, James and Bryant are worth almost any price, as in fact their salaries reflect.