Here are some interesting news from last week.
- Shame on who?
In the wake of last week’s much discussed blog post by NPR intern Emily White (admitting to having 11.000 songs in her music library but only ever having bought 15 cds) and musician David Lowery’s response (who sees the whole as an ethical problem), Bob Lefsetz, „blogger (and digital-era pamphleteer)“ as wired.com has it, has criticized Lowery’s open letter („Why do musicians think they can shame people into doing the right thing?“) and refers to a post from Jay Frank of DigSin that challenges the notion of music piracy as the main problem.
- New Music Seminar 1
And while at Jay Frank’s blog “Future Hit DNA”, there’s his presentation from the New Music Seminar about current trends in the music industry to look at, too.
- New Music Seminar 2
Regarding the NMS one of the most interesting sessions certainly was: “Crystal Ball Movement: Music Business Visionaries Predict the Future“, where not the least Warner’s Lyor Cohen was part of an expert panel on the (future) state of things in the music industry.
- Hearing and believing
The congressional hearing on the Universal/EMI merger was high profile news on the weekend. You can check the complete footage from the respective five minute testimonials of UMG chairman Lucian Grainge, EMI Music CEO Roger Faxon and Live Nation executive chairman Irving Azoff (all in favor of the merger) and Warner Music Group director Edgar Bronfman Jr., Beggars Group founder/chairman Martin Mills and Gigi Sohn of consumer group Public Knowledge opposing it. Or you can check the articles pusblished respectively at Billboard, in the New York Times or in the Wall Street Journal.
- Honorific
While in the USA, Martin Mills could also pick up his lifetime achievement award at the A2IM Libera Award ceremony in New York, where former RFC participant Seymour Stein made a speech in his honour. (via Billboard)
Hypebot has the full list of the 2012 A2Im Libera Award winners.
- Low frequency, high investment
With sound (as in sound quality) being set as one of the topics of this year’s RFC, we took notice of course, that high-end wireless home audio system developers Sonos have not only presented a new wireless subbass speaker (surprisingly called „Sub“) but also raised 135 million US-$ in funding for further audiophile hardware developing. (via Engadget and Techcrunch)