You should not be surprised to learn that a federal judge yesterday ordered BlueBeat.com to immediately stop selling Beatles songs and other music from its site, rejecting a goofy assertion that the company had copyrights on the songs via the use of something called “psycho-acoustic simulation.”
After having $10 billion wiped off their collective worldwide revenues this decade, the four major music labels haven’t had much to crow about. Indie labels, which have banded together to negotiate as Merlin, together are as large as EMI, the smallest of the majors.
EMI, one of the global music majors, is shutting down some of its offices in Asia. Offices in Thailand and Singapore have already been shuttered, while regional headquarters in Hong Kong are ready for the grim reaper. All of this is part of the right-sizing moves EMI has been making; it had earlier announced plans to cut thousands of jobs worldwide.
I keep reading how the music industry killed the CD and now nobody on the Web can sell anything longer than a three-minute download. How odd. I sell music–on some days, I believe, more of a given CD than any single store in the country, including Amazon.com–and I do it from a Web site that never has more than 7,000 visitors a day.
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