Here are some news from last week.
- From The Top
If you had been planning to get yourself the exclusive rights to the coming new generic top level domains (gTLDs) .music or .tickets (or .audible, .audio, .film, .guitars, .media, .movie, .play, .radio, .show, .studio and .video for example), you are a) too late now and b) would have faced tough competition by the likes of Google and Amazon. As Billboard reports, entertainment was one of the fields, in which the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) could score a total of over 350 millions in admission fees for new gTLDs, as was revealed last week. Who wil finally get to market the new gTLDs will be decided by January 2012.
- A New MySpace Age
Will MySpace return to the main stage of the music business? A major relaunch for late 2012 / early 2013 is in the makings and some believe, a renewed MySpace focusing on artist pages and their connection to fans will help to make it a player again. Justin Timberlake, one of the MySpace owners certainly hopes so. (via Billboard)
- Amazoning
If you look at the various instances of market concentration in the music business (something the RFC 2012 will do!) Amazon can be seen as a prime example of market dominance in the online retail field. The “Institue For Local Self-Reliance” has produced an interesting infographic on Jeff Bezos’ online megashop.
- Everything’s Gone Gaga
And while we’re looking at Infographics, check out The Music Void’s illustration of some aspects of the digital music industry. Including depressing comparisons between Kate Perry, Keysha, Michael Jackson and The Beatles…
- Dirty Hairy
And finally on the eve of the premiere of hair metal musical “Rock Of Ages” (featuring Tom Cruise as a stadium rockstar with “the boozy silverback swagger of Jim Morrison and Glenn Danzig’s armored-car physical presence”…) we would like to share some of the, erm, warm words about the film’s music by the Village Voice’s film critic Nick Pinkerton from his overall , erm, warm review of the film:
“There are two basic ways of thinking about this music; which one you’re inclined toward will probably influence your enjoyment of Rock of Ages. One is fond nostalgia—this was innocently hedonistic good-time party music, with hooks big enough to land Moby Dick. “Goddamn, they don’t make ‘em like they used to,” said Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” in The Wrestler, when Def Leppard comes on in a bar. “Then that Cobain pussy had to come around and ruin it all.” The other—which I happen to believe—is that that Cobain pussy did everyone a great favor, because hair metal was bone stupid, creatively bankrupt, morally debased pop trash that marked an all-time low in record-label-chart manipulation and synthetic hit-making hackery. And if rock, as is herein insisted, will never die, the “rock” paradigm perpetuated by Rock of Ages—the same as in Rockstar energy drink and Nickelback’s “Rockstar”—deserves a deep, dank unmarked grave.”