Buzz Track: Hopeless Romance

Goodnight Fellows is an indie pop band from Pueblo, Colorado. Their songs could find themselves on top 40 radio next to Bruno Mars and Fun. Check out the track Hopeless Romance , could be a smash hit.
Contact: danielrfriedman@aol.com

Subblime, a new online hub for YouTube stars to shared products they love (and generate revenue in the process), launched publicly on Tuesday. The site has been in a private beta stage for months. It has already drawn YouTube creators like Elle Walker and Kristina Horner to publish lists of their favorite items.

Fans who join Subblime immediately subscribe to their favorite YouTubers’ lists and can choose to favorite it or buy it.

“My number one customer is the content creator on YouTube and my goal for them is to help them grow their business,” said co-founder and CEO Adam Winnick, noting that everyone on YouTube is looking for additional revenue streams to buttress the influx of ad dollars.

Winnick made frequent analogies to examples in traditional media such as “The Biggest Loser,” which made a lot of its money from integrating fitness apparel and dietary supplements into the fabric of the show.

Samsung has purchased 1 million copies of Jay-Z’s coming album, entitled “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” slated for release July 4, and plans to give them to Samsung Galaxy smartphone users for free – 72 hours ahead of the release. The users are to receive the music through an app they’ll receive later this month. (Recipients won’t be able to share it until the official release date.)

Samsung paid $5 apiece for the albums, according to a person familiar with the matter. It wasn’t immediately clear if Nielsen SoundScan will count Samsung’s purchases in its sales tallies.

For Jay-Z, the deal is a precious advertising opportunity and gives him $5 million in sales before the album is even released. The agreement signals the increasing importance of corporate sponsors to the music industry, which has seen sales tank over the past decade.

BMI wants Pandora to pay the piper. Or at least pay the piper a little more.

Music licensing company BMI filed suit against internet music streaming service Pandora on Thursday, demanding higher licensing fees and accusing Pandora of trying to do an end-run around BMI’s licensing rate structure.

In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in southern New York, BMI contends that, despite Pandora and other streaming services’ growing share of the music-listening marketplace — and accompanying increase in advertising revenues — Pandora has been paying an unreasonably low licensing rate, and in fact has been lobbying Congress to lower its fees even further. Read more

Steven Spielberg on Wednesday predicted an “implosion” in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever. What comes next — or even before then — will be price variances at movie theaters, where “you’re gonna have to pay $25 for the next Iron Man, you’re probably only going to have to pay $7 to see Lincoln.” He also said that Lincoln came “this close” to being an HBO movie instead of a theatrical release.

George Lucas agreed that massive changes are afoot, including film exhibition morphing somewhat into a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher. His prediction prompted Spielberg to recall that his 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial stayed in theaters for a year and four months. Read more