Trans World has posted another loss. CD sales have dropped another 15.1% in the U.S. according to Nielsen Soundscan. This has forced many stores including Trans World, Hastings, and Virgin Megastores to think of new business opportunities. “Trans World has 950 stores and we would expect them to continue to deemphasize music over the next 12-24 months,” said Richard Greenfield of Pali Research during a recent investor note.

The new Mya record apparently was delayed again. On March 5, 2007 the album’s first single “Lock U Down,” a collaboration with Lil Wayne, was sent to U.S. radio but failed to chart or sell noticeably, and thus the album was delayed once again, with a current schedule for a September 18, 2007 .

in2une Music is a new company that offers music promotion and marketing services, artist development, and digital music marketing.

Kyambo “Hip-Hop” Joshua has been named president of Columbia’s urban department.

Mark Cuban the 2.3 billion dollar internet entrepreneur has now claimed the internet is “dead and boring”. “We have reached the point of diminishing returns with today’s internet. The speed of broadband to your home won’t increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth.”

KOAR recommended artist Cene will be signing to Asylum Records/Atlantic.

American Idol runner-up Blake Lewis signs a record deal with Clive Davis’s Arista.

Major record labels and SoundExchange have reached a deal with webcasting services over covering royalty rates that webcasters must pay to stream sound recordings through 2010.

Commercial webcasters including AOL, Live365, MTV, RealNetworks, Pandora and Yahoo! will not have to pay more than $50,000 per service as a per-station or per-channel minimum royalty to webcast sound recordings.

Large webcasters will not be required to implement any kind of technology to prevent the streamed music from being ripped, i.e. copied, by users, — but, the services have agreed to cooperate and discuss implementation of anti-stream ripping technology on their services with labels and artists. (Billboard)

Total U.S. Market:

Online radio (Yahoo!, AOL, Clear Channel, and Live 356) – 29 million people listen each week.

Terrestrial radio – 230 million weekly listeners

Satellite radio – 14 million weekly listeners

Charm Offensive by The States

Car Crash by Matt Nathanson

Angels on the Moon by Thriving Ivory

Sunlight by Matt Pond PA

A source tells KOAR that BurnLounge just laid off a substantial number of their employees. This puts BurnLounge future in question.

BurnLounge is a controversial digital upstart that allows users to open their own digital download store.

Developing……..

 

Walt Disney’s High School Musical 2  soundtrack opened with 618k in sales making it the second biggest opening following Linkin Parks Minutes to Midnight with 625k.

Alternative act Paramore jumped from 14k to 33k with the help from radio and MTV. AFI side project Blaqk Audio debuted this week with 29k. Nickelback is closing on the 6 million mark.

According to sources the rumors of closing Virgin Megastores are false.

YouTube will Advertise on Video Clips: The good ol’ days of watching your favorite videos without advertising are finished. YouTube hopes to reinvent video advertising on the web. YouTube is charging about $20 per 1,000 views, with the revenue split between the website and the provider of the content. (Timesonline) – (Coolfer)