The music-video site
PluggedIn launched today with about 10,000 videos from Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI. Branded with the tagline "Filter the noise. Hear the music," PluggedIn is being seen by the major labels as an opportunity to once again dictate how their content should be experienced and used by the masses, bringing things back to the way they were before those pesky indie labels and
YouTube remixers ruined their expense accounts and fat-cat lifestyles. Its picture quality is really quite nice, but it doesn't allow embedding of its videos, and as mentioned, it only has about 10,000 clips in its label-generated database right now—although it's licensed the All Music Guide's content in an effort to make its content well look
a lot deeper than it actually is. And not only that, it kicks those pesky people who have opinions about music that may be different than yours—and the ability to spell—to the curb, too!
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.jpg "This Year, \"American Idol\" Will Be Won By A Dude Named David (But You Knew That Already)")
Idolator
Overly excitable music-business types are looking at Apple's recent deal with HBO, where top-tier shows like The Sopranos are priced at $2.99 per episode on the iTunes Store (as opposed to The Wire's $1.99-a-pop price), as a sign that the company may someday embrace variable pricing, which would allow the music business to revitalize itself by charging the $2.99-a-song price that "4 Minutes" and "Touch My Body" so rightfully command. Thankfully, Anthony Bruno at Billboard splashes a bit of water on this notion by pointing out that the shows that HBO has placed on iTunes last quite a bit longer than three minutes and thirty seconds—which, one would think, might attract just a bit more money—and that most of the variants in price can be explained away by the shows' relative lengths. Prediction: Some poor major-label act is going to be corralled into releasing a 10-minute debut single for the purposes of "testing the $2.99-a-song waters" within the next six months. [
Self-publishing outfits have been around for awhile now, giving deluded artists the opportunity to flood the marketplace with the products of their genius one on-demand copy at a time. However, Amazon is using the print-on-demand CD publishing service CreateSpace to get music back in print that you probably didn't realize you wanted in the first place—unless you're looking for six specific titles.
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