via the Times UK:

This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see.

It shows the fate of the three main pillars of music industry revenue – recorded music, live music, and PRS revenues (royalties collected on behalf of artists when their music is played in public) over the last 5 years.

We’ve broken each category into two sub-categories so that, for any chunk of revenue – recorded music sales, for instance – you can see the percentage that goes to the artist, and the percentage that goes elsewhere. (In the case of recorded music, the lion’s share of revenue goes to the record label; in the case of live, the promoter takes a cut etc.)

Hopefully, this analysis – and there’s more on the nuts and bolts of our method below – sheds some factual light on the claims and counter-claims that are paranoically sweeping across the music industry establishment, not least that put forward by the singer Lily Allen in this paper recently – and the BPI – that artists are losing out as a result of the fall in sales of recorded of music.

The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.

Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of this article, but our data – compiled from a PRS for Music report and the BPI – make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.

The long and short of it – the music industry’s “decline” isn’t as simple as record labels would like us to believe, and that musicians are getting a bigger slice of the music industry pie than they have in the past.

My main problem with digital music applications is the silence that is there to start with.

If you record nothing at all onto analogue tape and play it back there’s still something there. I always needed some noise to begin the working process with, a tone or some hiss seeping through the faders of a beat up old Alan and Heath and then take it from there.

However now digital music applications are becoming more of a tool for creating noise, sometimes at the most micro of levels. What we’re hearing now in music is that the sounds have become more and more complex. You can tell by listening to underground electronic music these days which is incorporating a higher bandwidth of hi frequencies and sub bass as well as contemporary notated music which had been leaning further to incorporating prepared instruments, electronic sounds and extended techniques. Both genres overall just incorporating a wider spectrum of noise, harmonics, overtones, beating tones etc.

What is happening is people are yearning for more noise and it’s becoming more and more acceptable to hear it, so we are actually improving our ears by being able to hear sound in a different way.

There are all sorts of reasons that analog, at its best, sounds so good, ranging from the sense of reality that a little background noise establishes, to nostalgia, to the ear-pleasing nature of analog distortion.

When you listen to a digital recording with headphones, something that’s extremely common today, you’re hearing a new type of silence in the music.

Do you think that pristine digital recordings are making musicians yearn for new types of noise and new types of sounds?

Image: cameralucida

According to Billboard, the late 1960s were the peak of musical diversity in popular music, with 743 different songs appearing on the 1966 Billboard Top 100 chart. It’s fallen consistently since, hitting an all-time low in 2002 with only 295 songs.

Since 2002, it’s improved only slightly, with 351 unique songs appearing on last year’s Top 100.

Is it any wonder that people are listening to less radio, buying less music and, instead, turning to blogs and podcasts to find new music?

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, shipments of vinyl LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007, growing to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period, to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats

Nearly 450 million CDs were sold last year, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on the first three months of this year, Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million in 2008.

“I don’t think vinyl is for everyone; it’s for the die-hard music consumer,” said Jay Millar, director of marketing at United Record Pressing, a Nashville based company that is the nation’s largest record pressing plant.

An avid music fan himself, Millar says he has moved to vinyl in recent years.

“Once I got my first iPod … I’m looking at my wall of CDs and trying to justify it,” Millar said. “The things I like — the artwork, the liner notes, the sound quality — it dawns on me, those are things I like better on vinyl.” He welcomed back the pops and clicks, even some of the scratches.

“I like that fact that it’s imperfect in a lot of ways, live music is imperfect too,” Millar said.

Image: Tilton Lane

Based on what I’ve seen, it looks seriously droolworthy.

This is what cell phones are going to look like in five years, intelligently combining mobile features with music and Internet services. It’s too bad we’ll have to wait five years for something like this to be affordable, though.

The iPhone combines three products — a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a cutting-edge Internet communications device. Based on what we’ve seen so far, it looks like it will redefine the state of the art of both mobile phones and MP3 players.

While the iPhone’s price ($499 plus a 2-year contract) may put it out of the reach of many musicians, it’s clear that the technology is something that musicians will have to face. Digital music is becoming more important than ever, as is mobile technology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the technology in the iPhone is copied by other manufacturers within a few years.

The iPhone has been one of the most hyped new product introductions in recent years, but, in this case, it looks like the technology really is revolutionary.

Here’s Apple’s ad introducing the iPhone:

Their debut single gate-crashed into Apple’s iTunes Top 30 on word-of-mouth. The group used Propellerhead’s Reason extensively on the project as it lent itself perfectly to the group’s collaborative writing process—thanks in part to its extensive onboard sound library and usability.

“Not many people know this, but Reason is actually integral to the whole existence of Urban Myth Club,” says Dezz. “Whereas most bands start writing material in the studio together, the first few tracks from our album ‘Helium’ were written entirely online using Reason as the core tool for collaboration – writing musical concepts and most importantly sharing files over the Internet easily. During the two years making the recording, we did a lot of time writing together in the studio, but we had the best of both worlds, being able to also work remotely. Reason enables us to completely indulge creatively by ourselves and not have to spend time debating whether something works or not.”

Reason helped the band find a completely new way of working and they found it extremely liberating and inspiring. “Reason plays an important part in most of our compositions. To give you an idea, we must have written over 250 tracks from concepts to full-blown, eight-minute epics for our album Helium, and most started life in Reason. Whittling them down to just 13 tracks for the final album cut was the hardest thing!”

“The first track we wrote and still is a favorite was “Bird’s Eye View”. It started with me writing the melodic hook in Reason. I then e-mailed the .rns file to Ian who got totally inspired and came up with this fantastic new section. Reason’s great for exchanging or emailing .rns files because they are not huge beasties. When I got the track back the next day I thought, ‘Amazing! I would never have taken it in that direction, but it works!’ I then continued to build on the track and we would fire the Reason file back and forth whenever we felt ready to pass it on. As a result, the track developed in a very different way then had we have written it in together in the same studio.

Dezz found that it was easier to switch between working between multiple songs using Reason. “When we had loads of outboard it got to a point where it would take half the morning to wire everything up the way we had it last time and load up all the samplers with the relevant stuff. It was a nightmare if you’d wired something in line through an effect because you’d have to keep exhaustive notes on exactly how everything was configured. Now you just open a song… fantastic!”

He raves about Reason’s extensive library and flexibility. “The Rex player is unique! Nothing on the market touches it. The string library is also very lush. The ability to ReWire with other software is a major feature for us. We have quite a lot of refills but keep coming back to the factory-supplied refills because they are so good. We really like the Strings Refill as it’s very accessible software when you first start with it, but there’s also unlimited depth to it. We keep discovering new things the deeper we get. It’s also the only music software on the market we know of that lets you wire a feedback loop for creating special effects.”

Reason’s ease-of-use impressed Dezz as well. “Reason is really great for getting concepts down really quickly when inspiration hits. There is nothing worse than firing up software and messing around with loads of settings before you can get going. It’s also useful for exporting a track and taking it outside the studio. We always find it is good to listen to tracks away from the studio during all stages of its development to get a different perspective on it.”

But Urban Myth’s use of Reason goes beyond merely studio writing and tracking, they’re also using it live. “It’s so dependable and quick to load. Doing our music live, as any electronic artists will know, is not a simple task. It’s good to have something solid and reliable as part of our live kit. We’ve play huge festivals like Glastonbury, The Big Chill, and The Glade, so we need something we can rely on.”

Dezz fully expects to see more collaborations similar to Urban Myth Club, with people around the world hooking up together online, writing tracks and releasing them as full-blown commercial projects.

Note: This article has been updated to correct quote attributions.

Apple

The iTunes Music Store features music from all five major record labels and over 600 leading independent labels from around the world. With more than 100 million songs downloaded and more than 70 percent market share of legal downloads for singles and albums, the iTunes Music Store is the world’s number one online music service.

“The iTunes Music Store offers the world’s most extensive collection of downloadable music with over one million tracks available,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Applications. “With more than one million songs, over 600 independent labels and dozens of innovative features, iTunes is the ultimate destination for discovering and downloading music.”

The iTunes Music Store is available in the US, UK, France and Germany, has Apple’s legendary ease-of-use, pioneering features, personal use rights and breakthrough pricing, and lets PC and Mac users legally discover, purchase and download music online. The iTunes Music Store gives users the ability to play songs on up to five personal computers, burn a song onto CDs an unlimited number of times, burn the same playlist up to seven times and listen to their music on an unlimited number of iPods.

Apple offers a complete solution for discovering, buying, managing and listening to digital music anywhere with the unbeatable combination of iTunes, iPod and AirPort Express with AirTunes which lets music lovers wirelessly stream music from their PC or Mac to a stereo located in any room in their home.

The iPod mini offers an appealing combination of ultra-portable design, style, song capacity, ease-of-use and audio performance. “The iPod mini has been a smash hit in the US, and we’re thrilled to finally be able to offer it to music lovers the world over,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPod has changed the way people listen to music and is now the number one digital music player in the world.”

Features

• iPod mini comes in a choice of a silver, gold, pink, blue or green 4GB model and includes a belt clip.
• All iPod minis include earbud headphones, an Apple iPod mini power adapter, a 1.2m 30-pin to FireWire(R) cable, a 1.2m 30-pin to USB 2.0 cable and a CD with iTunes 4.6 for Mac and Windows computers.
• iPod mini can be charged with either the FireWire or USB 2.0 cable and gets up to eight hours of battery life
• iPod mini is the world’s smallest portable music player to hold up to 1,000 CD-quality songs, weighs just 3.6 ounces and is encased in an ultra- portable, lightweight anodized aluminum body, available in five colors — silver, gold, pink, blue and green
• iPod mini features Apple’s Click Wheel for one-handed operation, along with the same award-winning user interface as the rest of the iPod family, and works seamlessly with Apple’s iTunes, the number one online music store.

Optional accessories with the following suggested retail prices include the iPod mini Dock for $39 (US), in-ear headphones for $39 (US) and arm band for $29 (US).

Pricing & Availability

iPod mini for Mac and Windows is currently available in the US and is expected to be available worldwide through the Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers on July 24 for $249 (US).

iPod mini requires a Mac with a FireWire port and Mac OS(R) X version 10.1.5 or later (Mac OS X v10.2 or later recommended); or a Windows PC with a FireWire or USB 2.0 port, or a Windows- certified FireWire or USB 2.0 card and Windows 2000, XP Home or Professional.

The problems of creation, recording, mastering, production and distribution that come with the traditional music industry are disappearing. Musicians can now record and master music on their computers and post it directly to the Internet. Programs like Apple’s GarageBand simplify the process so that just about anyone can get involved in computer music. Many musicians are using blogging tools to create their own sites. This gives them control of everthing, from recording to distribution.

The rise of “Instant Music” has never been as obvious as the last few days. Within hours of Howard Dean’s speech at the end of the Iowa Caucauses, remixes were appearing on the Internet . Dozens of musicians saw the humor in Dean’s concession speech, and have made remixes ranging from techno, to rock and funk. A Howard Dean fan has posted links to dozens of these remixes on his site. Amazingly enough, while you’re listening to your favorite Dean remix, you can check out the Howard Dean store for clothing that commemorates the speech. Would you believe that there’s even a thong printed with the speech. All we can say is….”Yeeeeeaaaaaah!”

Expect to see Instant Music become common as the tools become widely available. The Dean remixes may be funny, but they also are a sign of how desktop music publishing is going to revolutionize music just as desktop publishing revolutionized the print world.