digital distribution

Newsflash: Beatles Still Not for Sale Online

Peter Kafka in Media on April 7, 2009 at 8:19 am PT

Hot off the presses from EMI and Apple Corps, the Beatles’ holding company: a press release that goes on for 461 words about plans for yet another repackaging of the Fab Four’s albums–on CDs. And then these two sentences: “Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalogue will continue. There is no further information available at this time.” Because why rush into anything?

1982 Called. It Wants Its Digital Music Distribution Model Back

John Paczkowski in News on September 22, 2008 at 8:29 am PT

Overall CD sales are plummeting after eight years of unflagging erosion. Digital music sales now account for 15 percent of recording industry’s revenues worldwide and 30 percent in the United States, according to recent data from The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And those numbers are climbing faster than ever. Consider: This past June, Apple said it has sold some five billion songs on its iTunes Store. Clearly, physical media are giving way to the Internet as a means of music distribution. What better time, then, to reinvent the music industry’s business model for physical media, as SanDisk hopes to do with its new microSD memory card album format?