“The CD as it is right now is dead,” Levy said, adding that 60% of consumers put CDs into home computers in order to transfer material to digital music players.

But there remains a place for physical media, Levy said.

“You’re not going to offer your mother-in-law iTunes downloads for Christmas,” he said. “But we have to be much more innovative in the way we sell physical content.”

Record companies will need to make CDs more attractive to the consumer, he said.

“By the beginning of next year, none of our content will come without any additional material,” Levy said.

CD sales accounted for more than 70% of total music sales in the first half of 2006, while digital music sales were around 11% of the total, according to music industry trade body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

CD sales were worth $6.45 billion and digital sales $945 million, the IFPI said.

Bottom line: That’s right CD’s are dead. People just decided one day to wake up and not decide to buy CD’s anymore. This happened in one day and was not a gradual process. It has nothing to do with the ‘actual’ music. Nope, not that. Instead, one must invest more time hiring better art designers so the consumer will buy more physical CD’s. The record business is based on science rather than science and art.

YouTube have now established the new model in the Google Nation:

Step 1: You create the art;

Step 2: Google steals it from you;

Step 3: Google makes you chase them to take it down;

Step 4: If you can afford to chase Google to try to make Google take it down and Google does take it down, the work Google stole will suddenly reappear;

Step 5: See Step 3;

Step 6: See Step 4;

Step 7: See Step 3;

Step 8: See Step 4;

Step 9: See Step 3;

Step 10: See Step 4;

Step 11: See Step 3;

Step 12: See Step 4;

Step 13: Tired of this yet?

Step 14: See Step 3;

Step 15: See Step 4;

Step 16: Tired of this yet? Got any money left?

Step 17: See Step 3;

Step 18: See Step 4;

Step 19: Now if you’re tired of this, or you don’t have any money left (and since we are billionaires) what we could do little artist is give you a share of the advertising revenue we are/could be selling on the pages with your artistic works. Approval over advertisers? Oh, no, we don’t do that. And of course we will do whatever we want to try to commercialize your name, likeness, song titles, genres, and the clothes that you wear. And that revenue share? We’ll decide what’s fair because we are Google and we do no evil. CONTINUE READING

Press Play
Diddy
TW 170,463
*the lowest first-week total of his career

Extreme Behavior
Hinder
TW 75,726
Total 1,047,986
*What other rock single is clocking 75k a week?

Sam’s Town
Killers
TW 61,715
Total 479,246
Â

Eyes Open
Snow Patrol
TW 25,125
Total 837,790
*Nice gradual build on this one.

• Talent Agency is Hoping to Find Next Web Video Stars.
  The United Talent Agency best known as the home of comedians like Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan are placing bets that Web video is on a growth curve similar to that of cable television a generation ago.Hence, they created an online unit devoted to scouting out up-and-coming creators of Internet content — particularly video — and finding work for them in Web-based advertising and entertainment. The goal is to recruit the next generation of television and film writers and directors from the relative obscurity of sites like YouTube and Revver and to help the major Web portals that are hungry for original content to find the creative people they need — just as movie studios have long turned to talent agencies when looking for new directors, screenwriters and actors.

“In the old days, i.e., two months ago, it was about signing up those clients and immediately figuring out how to flip them into traditional media,� Mr. Weinstein said. “Now we can look at an artist and say, that might be a goal, but in the interim, or while we’re doing that, or instead of that, how can we monetize their interests online?�

• Spitzer and Payola: Old Habits Die Hard.
  Last week, Blackground Records/Universal, purchased ads that enabled the song, “Too Little, Too Late� by the teenage singer JoJo to climb to the No. 2 position on the nation’s mainstream pop radio chart.

“Radio promotion executives are still under enormous pressure to use tools that maximize radio airplay because airplay still sells recordings,� said Rachel Stilwell, a Los Angeles lawyer who has written about payola and who worked several years ago as the national director of promotion for the Verve Music Group, a Universal subsidiary label. “Old habits die hard.�

A spokeswoman for Mr. Spitzer, Juanita Scarlett, said yesterday that the attorney general’s office was “aware of the possible violation of the terms of our agreement with Universal and we are looking into the matter.�

• SRC/Universal Motown Records has entered into an exclusive distribution deal with Miami based Coalition Music Group
• Roxette signs new U.S. deal with Capitol Records

• Weird Al Yankovic Credits Internet and YouTube For the Success of New Record.
  Weird Al” Yankovic’s new album, “Straight Outta Lynwood,” has scored his biggest chart successes in a career that spans nearly three decades. Lynwood,” Yankovic’s 12th album, debuted this month at No. 10 on the Billboard 200, his first top 10 album ever

Once “Nerdy” hit outlets like YouTube, there was no stopping it. “We knew with ‘Nerdy’ that he’d hit on something incredibly relevant to different generations,” Dan Mackta, senior director of marketing for Zomba Label Group, says. “Kids were discovering him like a new artist.”

“I’d kind of written off the chance of ever having another hit single, since record labels weren’t really releasing commercial ones,” Yankovic says. “As much as people are griping about the Internet taking sales away from artists, it’s been a huge promotional tool for me.”

• Sesac/CMJ Showcase Thursday, November 2nd @ The Delancey (NYC)
• More options for music lovers: Satellite radio may be coming to IPods.
  Apple has filed a patent which allows the user to tune “into a wireless signal (e.g., AM FM radio, digital radio, or WiFi)”
• Check out new music including the track Over It  from Los Angeles female pop rock act Dragstrip Kitty. Demos produced by Gina Schock from
  the Go Go’s and Jimmy Harry. For more information email legal Pam Klein.
• The Killers ‘offended’ by Green Day
  The Killers’ Brandon Flowers has criticised Green Day for what he sees as their calculated anti-Americanism, according to NME.com
  “You have Green Day and ‘American Idiot’. Where do they film their DVD? In England,” the frontman told The Word. “A bunch of kids screaming ‘I don’t want to be an American idiot’ I saw it as a very negative thing towards Americans. It really lit a fire in me.” Â

The singer added he felt the DVD was a bit of a a stunt. “I just thought it was really cheap,” he explained. “To go to a place like England or Germany and sing that song – those kids aren’t taking it the same way that he meant it. And he [Billie Joe Armstrong] knew it.”

Bottom Line: This is great press for both the Killers and Green Day. Brandon Flowers understands show business and knows how to utlilize the press. Nevertheless, it is odd performing American Idiot to foreign kids. Brandon built a sound argument as Green Day are preparing for a ‘spin’.