I grew up in the 1970s and was on the record production track. Did a few indie productions that are still well thought of today... on a limited scale! ;-) Jumped the hoops, ticked the boxes: AES member, NARAS member, blahdy blah. I was blessed to have some truly fantastic mentors, including/especially the late Bob Moog and the incredible, amazing, underrated Jimmy Miller (Stones, Traffic). But for every kind, generous, enthusiastic, supportive mentor there were 50 sexist @$$holes. Record execs who, when introduced to me as a female producer, looked me up and down and with rolling eyes sighed "They USED to be publicists." With all due respect to Massy, it wasn't the physical environment that drove me out of the industry. I LOOOOVED the studio. LOVED it. It was like entering a cocoon where you checked life's problems at the door to be at your most effective. What really drove me out of the industry was being at some function with a bunch of "they USED to be publicists" type guys and deciding that I simply DID NOT WISH TO SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE DEALING WITH WALL TO WALL @$$HOLES when there were countless other options available. I saw my future: to quote John Cale, "what endlessness ahead". And I did not like it. I didn't care to spend the rest of my life in a toxic working environment being put down for being competent, whereas in other industries one's competence is appreciated, expected, valued and credited. So I bailed. This may seem like cowardice to you, and if it does, that's fine, you do you. But on a day to day basis it ground me down to the point where a production career, while achievable, simply didn't seem to ME to be the best use of my time & talents. The misery was simply never going to let up, not ever. Life's too short for that. I'm way better off psychologically and emotionally being OUT of the industry. Decades later I still feel I made the right decision. I think there are some wonderful, talented women out there who are on the rise. I think of Casey Desmond, who, as the daughter of an engineer/studio owner, literally spent her childhood crawling on the floor among the consoles, wires and speakers. To her, it's home ground. And with the support network she has of family & friends ALL in the industry, she'll get there eventually if she wants it. But she has other strings to her bow as well, and it will be interesting to see if she elects to move on to another of her core competence areas like videography or fashion design. I wouldn't blame her if she did, and I will totally understand. Why spend the rest of your life getting the metaphorical cr*p kicked out of you on a daily basis if YOU DON'T HAVE TO. Either choice will be equally life affirming.

Factoring in the 2 alternate "flavors" of former FM powerhouse WBCN which now stream online - playlisted WBCN and Free Form WBCN - looks to me like the radio scene in Boston will remain largely the same as it ever was. Except, of course, that former Bostonians like me can listen to our old friends any time, anywhere! :D If I had to vote which ones will survive, I'd vote on Henry Santoro's version of WFNX and Sam Kopper's version of (FreeForm) WBCN to end up the big draws as the others fall by the wayside, sooner or later.

Well... It's the same old problem. Distribution. Make your app available in a timely fashion in an app store EVERYONE CAN ACCESS, and we'll be more than happy to buy it. A lot of Android consumers out there are using devices which, for a variety of reasons, cannot access Google Market. If we can't access Google Market, and your app is not on Amazon Market, guess what? We CAN'T buy it, much though we would like to. I've said it before: Distribution is not an end user problem.

WORD!!!!!!!! Thank you, Clyde, for finally saying this. If the record companies are serious about combatting pirating, they are going to have to seriously rewrite all these territorial contracts. I've had to wait as much as a YEAR for music released in the UK to be legally available in the USA; sometimes it never gets released here at all. Newsflash, label mooks: if you don't find a way to make your product available LEGALLY in a TIMELY fashion, people are going to find a way to acquire it. (And I'm not even sure the courts would uphold that as an "illegal" download. If the label doesn't make the product AVAILABLE for purchase, nobody can be accused of STEALING it, now can they?) Consumers want to be able to discuss new releases with their friends, just as they have always done since the beginning of recorded music. The difference nowadays is, those friends are very likely to be in another country. It's not the consumers' problem to figure out how to solve this; it's the labels' and the artists' problem to figure out how to solve it. Consumers can't write your contracts FOR you, but if we could, we would demand simultaneous release in all territories.

I think it did, and I think it's only going to get infinitely worse after the new layout rolls out. I mean, look: When a friend of mine posts a song in their ticker from Spotify, I *should* be able to click on that link to hear the same song at the same time. But I can't; it doesn't work. In fact, it crashes Spotify completely and hangs up Facebook. (And no, I'm not some kind of computer illiterate middle-aged person. I have 4 gig RAM and 3 different web browsers, thank you, and this VERY BASIC FUNCTIONALITY does not work in any of them.) Farcebook has jumped the shark, bigtime.

You are entirely correct. This user is not at all happy. Even worse - for those who have existing Spotify accounts, links to the music your FB friends are playing WILL NOT OPEN in Spotify when you click them from within FB. This whole thing is an epic fail. I've pretty much migrated to G+ for right now, where all links to all available music services do still work. For now.

Yeah, it's a damn shame. I don't really give a crap what the in-dus-treeee says, Grooveshark for me is still the best business model, and Spotify's lack of content didn't convert me. But I do BUY what I HEAR on Grooveshark, and that isn't likely to be changed by either of these add-ons.

Apple seems to be really, REALLY good at keeping the major tech media's collective mouths shut about this one. My account was hacked via iTunes in August 2010 (someone set up an automatic debit every month), and PayPal told me that ****OVER 50,000**** accounts had been hacked. If this happened to any other company it would be all OVER the tech media. So you may be shocked that it happened; I'm shocked that it wasn't EVER REPORTED BY ANYONE.

It seems somewhat obvious to me that there will ALWAYS be a "next big thing" in social networking sites, in much the same way that no "biggest band in the world" ever held that spot forever. IMO the mistake is expecting any SN site to last forever. We've seen the rise/fall of MySpace, now it's the rise/fall of Facebook, Twitter will come after that, and probably Tumblr after that. And so on.

Ahh come on Ian, it's way more fun than betting on the Kentucky Derby! :-) I *wish* that Jim Selby would get it b/c even though Naxos is a classical label, that guy has a genuine vision for the future. But it won't happen. My picks: Ruthig, Mills, Iglauer, Parker. More or less in that order.

So, what, it's going to have a playlist of like 10 songs? :-)

I wouldn't mind paying more for d/l's with improved sound quality PROVIDED that the upgraded format came with the credits embedded as metadata. Not being able to find out who engineered, produced, wrote, and played on a track is one of the most frustrating things about purchasing downloads. The UK-based Music Producers Guild has a good campaign on this called "Credit Where Credit Is Due". Read about it here: http://www.creditisdue-mpg.co.uk/

I can't help feeling these statistics are *somewhat* misleading when it comes to people's actual listening habits. The reality is that in the USA and Canada, streaming music on a smartphone is much too expensive for anyone except yuppies to do very often. It's a data muncher par excellence - hence my own decision NOT to move to mobile when Sirius/XM released its streaming app. It's cheaper for me to pray that my old Sirius Stiletto hangs in there for a few more years. My own usage pattern tends more toward streaming satrad and music ***from my PC*** when at work (where my portable satrad doesn't work and where my mp3 collection isn't). That's 8 solid hours a day of music streaming which are not being reported using the methodology contained in the article.

These guys are so far ahead of the rest of the industry in terms of sussing out the ONE approach that will work in the new milennium that it is almost PHYSICALLY painful. You almost can't even read this without bursting out laughing, it's so ingenious. Now if only the rest of the industry would get ON BOARD with new approaches like this, instead of slagging them off so relentlessly for the outdated business models they DON'T follow. We now return you to blah blah rights holders blah blah Spotify blah blah Vimeo blah blah. Carry on...

I agree. The door is WIDE open for something similar but without the privacy issues. As an aside, I still kind of miss the pre-Murdoch MySpace. Wonder if there's any chance someone would buy it at a bargain-basement price and REALLY remodel it...

I hope he's wrong too. The problem with not having any LEGAL streaming is that it opens the door for plenty of ILLEGAL streaming. That won't benefit anybody. At the same time though, doesn't take much to perceive that the Spotify business model is kinda set up to fail. Just for the record, though, I would neither support nor subscribe to an Apple/iTunes streaming system. Not after my account got hacked and I couldn't even get a live person on the phone. I doubt I'm the only consumer who feels this way.

Oh come on. I use Megaupload to transfer large files of scanned documents to and from WORK. Nothing to do with piracy at all. Another useless and thoroughly inaccurate statistic that the industry is going to try to beat its own customers over the head with.

That, and you'd think Apple CS would at least ANSWER phone calls and inquiries about this. I can use the words "class" and "action" in the same sentence. Can you?

See, I'm a loyal GS user and I vehemently dispute that GS users don't buy stuff. I do, ALL. THE. TIME. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I *didn't* use Grooveshark to buy a track. Grooveshark provides direct links to Amazon and iTunes that are effortless to use, they take you right to the track you want (at least they do on Amazon; I boycott iTunes so I couldn't testify as to that!), so if you're set up w/ the Amazon downloader already and use 1-click, you're done. The 2 reasons people use Grooveshark, in my opinion, over other streaming services are (1) it's INTERNATIONAL, so that hot new release from the UK that everyone is Tweeting about will show up there MONTHS before it does on any other US-based service; and (2) It's so damn EASY to BUY stuff off of Grooveshark. Give us the PRODUCT we want, WHEN we want it, and make it EASY to buy. Whichever streaming service figures this out the fastest will be the one that ultimately wins.

All these streaming services would be 100% justified in cranking their ad rates SKY high, and frankly I think they should do it. Increased revenue for them; better deals (hopefully) for musicians whose content is being streamed.

The US figure is explained by the vast number of "enterprise" corporate drones who are given Blackberries via work - supposedly b/c BB syncs much better with MS Exchange than anything else does. Quite intrigued by the UK dominance of Symbian though. Wonder why that is?

Yeah, this'll be great - it was difficult to "Share" the stuff you were posting via Typepad!

Nice work on this piece, Corey! If I might be permitted to add just one little smidge of historical context - you have to remember that back in the day, the biggest (and sometimes only) advertisers in music zines were... the major labels. I'm not going to claim that this ALWAYS colored what a music writer was permitted to say, though it certainly sometimes did (the extent varied from mag to mag); but it also was a key element in dictating who got to write about what. There was a real art to being an assignments editor, since if Major Label A took out 6 full-page color ads promoting its September releases, Major Label A was pretty much PAYING for your print run. So the editor kind of had to pick which staff writer would be willing to give each release the fairest shot. The independence of the ad revenue stream nowadays gives music writers WAY more latitude than they had in the past. Use it wisely, my children! :-)

I like #5 as well. Very clever design!!

Different spins on the same statement. Bronfman always said existing deals would remain in place - just that he won't be making any NEW deals.