industry

Metalhit is now offering MP3 albums for less than $5 each. According to owner Mike Riddick, “Because of your article on Metalhit, and suggestions, I changed our album price point to $4.99 (instead of $5.25). Thanks to Invisible Oranges!” He’s referring to this post on pricing for MP3 albums. (See, particularly, the comments). $4.99 is […]

by Cosmo Lee Someone read this blog and signed a band as a result. That someone was Digby Pearson of Earache, and the band is Wormrot. According to this post on Earache’s blog, Digby downloaded our grindcore mixtape, loved the Wormrot track, got hip to the Grind and Punishment blog (whose Andrew Childers compiled the […]

Price in Indecent Proposal: $1mby Cosmo Lee They say that every person has a price. That is, every person has some monetary threshold at which one can be induced to do things one normally wouldn’t do. Let’s tweak that to apply to downloading. First, let’s assume that the default behavior by a metal fan in […]

by Cosmo Lee MySpace band pages have become practically unusable. Now bands are sticking huge images at the top and Twitter feeds, videos, widgets, flashing banners, instrument endorsement logos (seriously, who cares about those?), and other nonsense everywhere else. I’ll never like a band for its MySpace design, but I’ll dislike a band for it. […]

by Cosmo Lee Amie Street is a legal MP3 store with a unique business model. Albums start out free, and rise in price as more people buy them. The incentive is to find undervalued albums. It’s easy to set up an account, and each album has listening samples. I’ve found lots of great music here […]

by Cosmo Lee Have you switched from MySpace to Facebook for music? Recently I spoke with a touring band who said that “MySpace is dying.” They said that their rate of new friend adds was plummeting, and that their fan action had moved to Facebook. This doesn’t necessarily mean that MySpace is dying. Although this […]

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8069463&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1 I wish I could have observed the Scion meeting where they decided not just to be a car company, but also a lifestyle brand. Auto marketing is tied to lifestyle (“sport,” “green,” “luxury,” etc.), but Scion have taken this concept to new heights. They’re sponsoring free metal shows (see, e.g., commentary on Wolves in […]