Biggest Selling iTunes Artists within last 24 hours
With a fortune estimated at £45 million, Adele has topped the Sunday Times under-30s music rich list for the second year running. Despite releasing no new material last year, the singer’s wealth increased by £15 million in 2013.
Adele, 26, has released two studio albums – 19 (2008) and 21 (2011) – and wrote the theme tune to the 2012 James Bond film, Skyfall. She was also awarded an MBE last year for services to music.
DJ Calvin Harris is second on the list, with an estimated £30 million to his name. The DJ, whose real name is Adam Richard Wiles, released his third studio album, 18 Months, in 2012 and has enjoyed nine UK Top 10 hits from the record. First week sales of over 50,000 also propelled 18 Months to the top of the UK album chart.
Cheryl Cole, who has not released new music for two years, has dropped a position from last year and is now third in the list with £16 million.
The top 10 list is dominated by the five members of One Direction – Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson – who each have a fortune estimated at £14 million. Read more
via 9to5Mac
This won’t be the first time someone suggested Apple could start its own record label. But with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, two music industry heavyweights that have built some of the world’s biggest record labels rumored to be getting creative roles at Apple, it’s interesting to imagine what influence Iovine and friends could have on Apple’s approach to content.
If Apple is ever going to move on from simply being a music distribution hub taking its 30 percent cut to a record label of sorts fostering, promoting, and investing more in artists, Iovine is as good as it gets. Having built Interscope Records, the label behind some of the biggest artists of the last 20 years from Dr. Dre to Lady Gaga, Iovine’s real expertise is building labels, growing artists and selling music. Iovine himself admits the streaming service and even the headphone business were always a way to get control back to the labels and empower the artists, and that seems to be his main focus. Jimmy on building the Beats streaming service from a February 2013 interview:
“The artists aren’t going to get back there one song at a time. iTunes was great but it needs a step forward now. I really believe that. I believe that as a record producer, I believe it as a record company guy…”
On television at least, it looks as if the beat doesn’t go on.
The phenomenon of music-based television shows, which have dominated the ratings for more than a decade, seems by nearly every measure to be over or in steep decline.
“They flooded the market,” said Simon Cowell, perhaps the individual most responsible for turning amateur singers into superstars, with his roles on “American Idol,” “The X Factor” and “America’s Got Talent.” “There have just been a ton of shows, and something has simply gone awry.”
As broadcast network executives descend upon Manhattan this week to hawk their new programming wares to advertisers in the springtime ritual known as the upfronts, shows filled with music have gone achingly flat.
It is hardly the first time television has burned out a genre through mass imitation and overexposure. Networks rode westerns into the ground. They exhausted the audience with singers trying variety shows. At one point, almost every night had a newsmagazine. And, most famously, ABC ran the sprockets off its game show hit “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” with four episodes a week at its height, leading to a plunge in ratings and its relegation into syndication.
The music genre has been both longer lasting and more potent than most of these examples — until now. CONTINUE READING
Newsletter