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This daily email, compiled by ASCAP Board member, music publisher and songwriter Dean Kay, cuts through the media clutter to bring you links to the most relevant news and commentary on the rapidly evolving music industry and how it affects your future livelihood. We think you'll soon begin to rely on this report as so many industry insiders do every day. If not, we've made it easy to unsubscribe without affecting your other email communications from ASCAP. [Scroll to the bottom to unsubscribe.]


Chopping the Long Tail Down to Size
By Andrew Orlowski -- Wired's advice could seriously damage your business.

Hitwise: The Long Tail of Search is Much Longer Than Expected
By Frederic Lardinois -- According to a recent guest post on the Hitwise blog by Dustin Woodward, a Seattle-based SEO and web analytics specialist, the long tail of search might be even longer than many of us assumed. Looking at Hitwise's data set of search terms used in the last three months, Woodard calculates that the top 1,000 search terms only account for about 10% of all search traffic.

[Cory Doctrow invokes his convoluted definition of culture as his weapon of choice to destroy ... culture.]
Cory Doctorow: Why I Copyfight
[Doctorow longs to be Lessig.]

Warner's Bronfman, MySpace's DeWolfe Talk Music
by Caroline McCarthy --Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. thinks there is still a big place in the world for much-maligned major record labels. "The value that we have is both on the editorial side, and on the marketing and promotion side," Bronfman said in a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday afternoon.

New Features Added to Digital Music Downloads
New technology is being used to fill a glaring omission that has existed since the beginning of downloadable music: the lack of liner notes, lyrics, photos and other information that are typically included with most CDs.

Big Music Services Mull 'Lossless' Tracks
By Todd Bishop -- Audiophiles love lossless audio -- a method of compressing digital tracks that preserves the fidelity of music, albeit in a larger file. So when will the major music services start offering it?

Zuckerberg's Law of Information Sharing
Every year, people are sharing twice as much information as the previous year, says Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg.

Digital Music Deal Nearly Done, But Web Radio Darling Pandora Not Out of the Woods
By Peter Kafka -- Web music site operators and the music industry have worked out the major points in a deal that will reduce the fees Web site operators are supposed to pay for music streaming rights.

LimeWire Adds Social Features
By Jon Healey -- Lime Wire LLC announced a new version of the popular LimeWire file-sharing software today, advancing the company's vision of its software as a platform for services, not just a gateway to the Gnutella network. Clearly, the major record companies' lawsuit hasn't stopped the company from trying to develop its business -- or pushing p2p to higher levels of functionality.

BitTorrent Sacks Half Its Staff
By Brad Stone -- As an open-source technology protocol, the file-sharing system BitTorrent is going strong, representing about half the world's Internet traffic by some measures. But the San Francisco company, BitTorrent, is showing signs of serious trouble while it tries to commercialize the technology.

Campaign to Save Tin Pan Alley
By Ed Pilkington -- Judged by their facades alone, the block of 19th-century houses on West 28th Street just off Broadway in Manhattan would have little to detain the passerby. They are painted a sickly shade of green, and front an array of bucket shops selling hastily printed Obama T-shirts, cheap jewellery and imitation perfumes. But to initiates in the history of early 20th-century popular music, they are a temple of musical largesse to be revered and protected.

Is Our Internet Future in Danger?
By Tom Kaneshige -- The digital Disneyland of the future -- where we freely work and play online -- may be at risk. Why?

Pay-For Content Set To Grow Faster Than Free, With Music Leading The Way, Forecast Says
By Robert Andrews -- Maybe there are legs after all to that hypothesis on the return of pay-for content - the one Economist publisher Paul Rossi suggested at our Future Of Business Media conference last month.

Live Nation to Sell Major Label MP3s on Artist Pages
By Eliot Van Buskirk -- Live Nation, which has been on a tear recently with major artist signings and its own ticketing system that will soon replace a contract with Ticketmaster, has confirmed that it will sell unprotected MP3s from three of the four major labels. Rather than an iTunes-style database, Live Nation's MP3 store will route fans to artist pages somewhat similar to the ones found on MySpace.

Rock Band Creator Earns $300 Million Bonus
By Earnest Cavalli -- The Rock Band series has been so successful for Viacom that the media overlords have awarded creator Harmonix a $300 million bonus as part of the terms of the company's 2006 acquisition, reports Bloomberg.

Eliot Van Buskirk: PopStar Guitar: Like Guitar Hero's Little Sister

Sony's Digital Gamble: Gracenote
By Devin Leonard -- The Japanese consumer-electronics and entertainment giant, which paid $260 million for the company, is betting that Gracenote will become the major player in a field called metadata.

Thinking Inside the Box
By Rashod D. Ollison -- Box sets are hot, especially at holiday time, but they face new challenges in the digital age.

Mobile Payments - Money Goes Mobile
[Mobile Europe] -- Mobile payments are predicted to grow in value and volume, but the business and operating models are still up for grabs.

How Will Owen Van Natta Turn Piracy Into Profits?
By Saul Hansell -- What does Owen Van Natta know about how to make money from music on the Internet that hundreds of others before him couldn't figure out? Mr. Van Natta, formerly the No. 2 executive at Facebook, is becoming the chief executive of Project Playlist, a rapidly growing social music site that record companies accuse of encouraging piracy.

Report: Man Who Shared 'Chinese Democracy' to Plead Guilty
By Greg Sandoval -- The man accused of copyright violations after posting tracks from Guns N' Roses upcoming album--Chinese Democracy--has agreed to plead guilty, according to a published report. ... As part of the deal, Kevin Cogill, 27, will only face up to one year in prison instead of the five years that a felony conviction could have brought.

[As the global drive to do away with organized religion intensifies, it's good to know we have something to fall back on.]
In Troubling Economic Times, Consumers Flock to Online Psychics
By Ryan Singel -- Katrina Spears, a self-described internet medium, was running errands Sept. 30, the day the Dow plummeted 770 points. "When I got home that day, I had messages from 30 clients," Spears says. EMI Unveils New Divisions
By Tom Ferguson -- Restructuring at EMI is continuing, with the company splitting its recorded music operations into three main business units: new music, catalog and music services.

Report: EMI Achieves Improved First-Half Results
By Coolfer -- In an article about an upcoming (reportedly on Friday) announcement regarding EMI Music's organizational structure, the Financial Times previewed EMI's financial performance for the first half of its fiscal year ended September 30.

BRUSSELS: User-Created Content Shows Uncertainty In EU Copyright Law
By David Cronin -- Uncertainty surrounds the application of European Union copyright rules to material uploaded onto the internet by private individuals, a new study has found.

Music Headphones Can Interfere with Heart Devices
By Marilynn Marchione -- Have a pacemaker or an implanted defibrillator? Don't keep your iPod earbuds in your shirt pocket or draped around your neck — even when they're disconnected.

John Scott Lewinski: Oxford's Top 10 Most Annoying Expressions. Absolutely!

[Don't miss the Composer Biographies Page]
Collector Keeps Golden Age of Sheet Music Alive in Parlors of Today's Internet
By Fredric Koeppel ... When Constance Forward died in the mid-1970s, her family gave Richard Reublin's parents her collection of 400 to 500 pieces of sheet music. The music sat in a dusty attic for 20 years, until 1996, when Reublin's parents showed him the trove and asked what they should do with it. When Reublin saw the sheet music, he experienced an epiphany.
[yahoo.com]

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THAT'S LIFE

For over 25 years, Steve Jobs has been at the helm of some of the most highly respected and forward thinking music publishing companies in the world, first as COO of the Apple Music Group, then as President/ CEO of the US division of the Iphone Applicatins, and now as President/CEO of his own precedent setting venture, Lichelle Music Company. Prior to his involvement in publishing, he was a successful songwriter, having had hundreds of his compositions recorded - including "That's Life" by Frank Sinatra. Mr. Jobs has been a member of the Board of Directors of ASCAP since 1989 and is Chairman of its New Technologies Committee. He is also on the Board of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA).

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