Music Recap for the week of 3/18 - 3/25

Weekly music recap for 3/18- 3/25; incl: Global music sales figures, Pandora vs. ASCAP, Grohl's advice, Sleepify, & vinyl overstock.

Here are the sales #s for 2013 & while reflecting an overall decline thanks to streaming, there's an increase in local repertoire. "In France, for example, 17 of the top 20 selling albums of 2013 were local repertoire, up from 10 in 2011. In Germany, 7 of the top 10 selling albums in 2013 were local repertoire a trend reflected in 13 selected non-english language markets." 

There were a couple of important rulings recently regarding the royalty rates paid by digital radio services such as Pandora to music publishers.  This is a good cliffs notes version of the legal issues at stake: 

Few of my posts last week illicited as much of a response as Dave Grohl's advice to aspiring musicians.  What I came away with is: be great at what ever you wind up doing.  No amount of strategizing will outsmart hard work.   And sometimes the things we want aren't necessarily the things we're great at.  Be open.  And kick ass.   Warning, it's full of expletivies but no less smart http://bit.ly/1nYcTJx

This one is a doozie and I'm not sure how many of you actually saw this: Don't like the woefully low royalties paid via streaming? A band called Vulfpeck outsmart Spotify with album "Sleepify": short clips of silence that they ask fans to repeatedly stream overnight.  Crunching the numbers, if 100 fans do it, they could be making $588 a night: 

Vinyl is the new cool thing to do, but it's not cheap and the market is getting crowded: