UYRL

Ex-Destiny’s Child and R&B singer Kelly Rowland is no longer working with her label Columbia. Though she will no longer be with the label as a recording artist, she will still be able to put her two cents in where the Destiny’s Child catalog is concerned.

Rowland released a statement that said:

“Because Columbia Records has been my home base as an artist for more than a decade, the decision to move out on my own required a lot of soul-searching. As a solo artist, I felt the need to explore new directions, new challenges, and new freedoms outside my comfort zone and my friends and family at Columbia have been incredibly understanding about my evolution.”

Perhaps to prove that the two are parting ways on some kind of amicable note, Rob Stringer, the CEO of Columbia/Epic Label Music Group said,

“Kelly Rowland is one of our finest contemporary artists and a musical force to be reckoned with. It has been a privledge and a pleasure to work with Kelly and we will continue our working relationship with her under the Destiny’s Child moniker. The decision for Kelly to seek other opportunities for her solo career was agreed upon mutually, and any reports to the contrary are false.”

Yeah, that seems like such an honest comment. But I’m sure Kelly didn’t get dropped from her label just because people hardly know who she is compared to her former Destiny’s Child cohort Beyoncé, or because her last album only sold 219,000 copies.

No, record labels just don’t operate like that.

“Music CD sales have dropped by half from their peak a decade ago, but unlike the decline of vinyl records and 8-track tapes, the current shift is bringing with it a wholesale transformation in the delivery and distribution of music.

The format change started with MP3 files, but digital music also brings multiple distribution channels — from the free sharing of music, to iTunes and other paid download services, to more futuristic channels that could see us making micro-payments to call up songs on the refrigerator while we cook dinner.

The recording industry, which failed to adapt in the early days and instead sought to hold back the change, is now paying the price. But for artists and consumers, the shift is opening up opportunities in accessibility, and lowering barriers to entry for a music career.

“CDs are being replaced by MP3 files, and the only problem is the record labels never figured out a way to charge for MP3 files until it was too late,” says Dave Kusek.

Kusek is vice-president at Berklee College of Music, a co-developer of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI); co-inventor of the first electronic drums at Synare; founder of Passport Designs, the first music software company; and co-author of the book The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution.

“It is a format change, and the record industry had its chance when Napster first came out. They had the chance to license Napster for all their music,” he said. “If they had done that, I believe the recorded music industry would be in a much more healthy state than it is today, or ever will be again.”

Instead, the recording industry decided to sue Napster. And while it may have won that battle, it turned out to be just one skirmish in a war that would see the free exchange of music only increase.

In the U.S., the industry took consumers who were sharing music files to court, but it has since abandoned that tactic.

Most recently in B.C., a Vancouver company is taking on the recording industry in a B.C. Supreme Court case, asking the court to confirm that it is not infringing copyright with websites that allow users to search BitTorrent files on the Internet to find movies, music and other content.

Apple cashed in on the digital music craze with its iPods, picking up much of the revenue that CDs would have generated. But paid services such as Apple’s iTunes, Amazon and others still account for only a small portion of the music people listen to on their computers and other devices.

“If you look at the several billion tracks that have been sold on iTunes, that is a couple of months worth of file-sharing traffic in MP3 files,” said Kusek, who runs a consulting business, Digital Cowboys that has clients such as Nokia, Pepsi, BMG, EMI and others. Kusek also blogs at futureofmusicbook.com.

“The entire history of iTunes is [equivalent to] a couple of months of downloaded shared music,” he said.

Kusek sees a future in a type of blanket licence approach, similar to cable television’s.

“I think if it is going to happen, it is going to happen in the mobile space rather than in the computer space, although those two will merge,” he said. “The idea of selling a recording for a dollar-plus per song or $15 to $20 per disk has probably gone, or will be gone in the not-too-distant future.”

While hundreds of millions of CDs are still being purchased, sales are in steep decline. Sales of digital music in the United States grew almost 30 per cent last year, but sales of CDs dropped, with the forecast for 2009 putting them at half the level of their peak during the CD boom in the late 1990s.

According to a report by Forrester Research, U.S. digital music sales — downloads and subscriptions — will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17 per cent over the next five years, putting digital music on track to make up 41 per cent of the music market in 2013.

The growth in these purhcases won’t compensate for the decline in CD sales, leaving the overall music market shrinking by a compound annual growth rate of 0.8 per cent, to $9.8 billion US in 2013.

“I think it will become more of a utility, a service that you subscribe to that is bundled into your bill, and you get your music that way,” Kusek said.

While CDs can be played in a variety of devices, from a car to a living room stereo to a boom box on the beach, there are far more variations for digital music.

“I have a pair of sunglasses I can play music in,” Kusek points out with a laugh.”

BBC News is reporting that internet traffic in Sweden fell by a third on Wednesday following the introduction of the Local IPRED law, which allows rights-owners to go to court and force ISPs to give them the details of suspected file-sharers.

Swedish internet measurement firm Netnod says that traffic fell from 120Gbps to 80Gbps on the day, although Swedish Pirate Party vice chairman Christian Engstrom claims it’ll rise again in the coming weeks. “It takes people a few weeks to figure out how to change their security settings so that they can share files anonymously,” he said.

The Pirate Bay has already launched its IPREDator service which lets people pay €5 a month to access its torrent site through a virtual private network, to evade the new law.

Google is in negotiations to acquire Twitter, according to a report on TechCrunch - although its sources disagree on whether the negotiations are in their early or late stages. The story suggests that the deal would value Twitter at “well, well north” of its existing $250 million valuation.

Why buy? The value of Twitter is increasingly as a live search engine - as millions more people use it, the value of digging into what they’re tweeting about in real-time is potentially huge to someone like Google. It’s no surprise that Twitter has been working hard on making its search more closely integrated into the site, as co-founder Biz Stone explains in a blog post.

Twitter rebuffed an acquisition offer by Facebook earlier this year - if a deal with Google goes through, we’ll know why.

I know I never would have guessed that Malawi would deny Madonna the opportunity to adopt one of their young nationals, but it appears that is exactly what happened. Madonna was denied the opportunity to bring four-year-old Mercy James into her family by the country’s High Court on Friday.

This news will definitely reassure all those who picketed against this adoption. Many said that Madonna was wielding her riches as a way to bypass the country’s adoption laws (there was much to-do about the singer’s first adoption from the country as well).

According to the court register Ken Manda (and Reuters), Madonna was rejected as a potential parent for the child because she is not a resident of Malawi. In the ruling Judge Esimie Chombo looked down on celebrity adoptions, telling the court they could result in child trafficking.

Madonna’s lawyer reported that the singer will be filing an appeal on Friday.

Just why Madonna is so set on adopting another child from Malawi, that has at least one parent somewhere, is beyond me.

It would seem that there are probably many children in the world who do not have family members to take them to court to sign adoption papers – and that those children are more in need of actually being adopted.

Santana has a bright idea about how to help educators out of the recession – legalize marijuana!

Though Obama brushed a question off about the legalization of marijuana in an online town hall last month, the legendary guitarist thinks the government should legalize the drug and return profits to teachers and education in general, according to the Associated Press. “You will see a transformation in America,” he said.

On March 26 Obama replied jokingly to a question on marijuana legalization, “I don’t know what this says about the online audience.”

The question asked whether the legalization of the drug could give a helping hand toward towing the economy out of recession.

But Santana apparently doesn’t care what his opinion “says” about him. He thinks that the drug’s legalization is “really way overdue, like the prohibition with the alcohol and stuff like that.”

These comments came from the musician as he was promoting his upcoming residency at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. In reference to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger Santana said,

“I really believe that as soon as we legalize and decriminalize marijuana we can actually afford a really good governor who won’t keep taking money away from education and from teachers and send him back to Hollywood where he can do ‘D’ movies and we can get an ‘A’ governor.”

Ouch.

I can’t see what’s wrong with a little bit of pot myself, but I tend to doubt that the government would use its profits for good. Most likely they’d just follow the current trend and give the money to bail out huge corporations or to just make the government BIGGER.

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