Music Industry

WASHINGTON -- Congressional crooning about reform changed keys when select big shots got a chance to score Barbra Streisand tickets.Thanks to music-industry officials, whose livelihood often depends on what Congress does, eight lawmakers and 38 staffers bought tickets to Ms. Streisand's May 12 concert in suburban Washington at face value.When tickets went on sale a few weeks ago for Ms. Streisand's first concert tour in more than 25 years, thousands of ordinary fans around the nation spent hours camping out for ducats only to leave empty-handed.

CD players are going the way of the ashtray, roll-down windows and whitewall tires. Chevrolet is the latest to join the ranks of automakers like Ford who have ditched physical media players in favor of music streamed through onboard systems and auxillary music devices like smartphones and iPods. While reasons for the change are speculative and varied, many industry experts agree that the CD player is literally dead weight. Weighing in at about five pounds, manufacturers are looking for any way they can to slim down autos' bodies in favor of maximum fuel efficiency.

Winning a credit card contest was an experience for Brian Bauer, 20, a junior at the University of Maryland. In fact, it was priceless. For the past five weeks, Bauer worked with the Universal Music and Video Department and learned from leading music and entertainment industry experts in Los Angeles. And, he helped produce two music videos for the Hoobastank song "Same Direction." "We had our hand in everything; they worked us like dogs. But, at the same time, it didn't feel like work because it was so interesting," he recalls.

After Brandy Norwood gave birth to her daughter, Sy'rai, 10 years ago, she was exhausted and ready to leave the entertainment world behind. "I was like, 'I'm good, y'all. I'm good on the music industry,' " Brandy said in a recent interview. "I didn't know who I was, but my daughter was a savior for me. " Motherhood may have eventually refocused her, but the music industry requires hit songs. Although she released two more albums after Sy'rai's birth (2004's "Afrodisiac" and 2008's "Human")

When Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO-for-life, shocked the music industry in February by calling for an end to sales of copy-protected music, the cynics smiled. And I was among them. Here was a guy who had made hundreds of millions peddling copy-protected songs and the gadgets that play them. Was this just another case of the master showman blowing smoke to keep critics and regulators at bay? Not this time. Jobs backed up his rhetoric with action this week, announcing a ground-breaking deal with London-based EMI Group, one of the four large conglomerates that dominate the recording industry.

In a landmark accord that should open the floodgates to a wave of new music-recording technologies, electronics manufacturers have agreed to pay royalties to the music industry on the sale of all digital home-recording equipment.The agreement, which will be formally announced today and requires congressional approval, will end a battle that began four years ago with the advent of digital audiotape technology.By using the ones and zeros of computer code to record music, digital audiotape provides not only compact-disc-quality sound on a tape but also allows anyone to make perfect copies from CDs or from other digital tapes.

Go ahead and sue, thousands of Internet users told the Recording Industry Association of America: We're still going to download music files. Grokster, one of the largest services where people swap songs, said last week that there had been no change in the number of people sharing files or the number of files being traded, despite RIAA's threats last month to sue people who share copyrighted music. Wayne Rosso, president of the service, was clearly pleased by the strong support from Grokster's users.

A REVOLUTION has occurred in the way music is distributed, and the big record companies are in a state of panic. With an abundance of music now available free on the Internet, the major labels have essentially lost control of their catalogs. But they are not casualties of new technology so much as victims of their own arrogance.These days, it's possible for anyone with Web access to download hours of music in an audio format known as MP3. The downloaded music is of surprisingly good sound quality and can be played out of computer speakers or on a special portable player.

Two years after music industry lawyers pounded Napster Inc. into submission, the major record companies are pointing fingers at each other over the flourishing of online music piracy. Universal Music Group, EMI Music and a cadre of publishers blame Bertelsmann AG, saying the German media giant abetted copyright infringement by supporting Napster financially in 2000 and 2001. Bertelsmann says its accusers are at least partly responsible because they missed the chance to turn Napster's song-stealing users into paying customers.

His ears are among the most important in the music industry. Often, they'll determine which, if any, of the 40 new CDs he receives each day you might one day listen to. But sometimes even Kevin Liles' ears need help. So the Warner Music Group executive resorts to a tactic he learned two decades ago as a performer on the Baltimore music circuit: He opens the doors to his New York office, plants his stereo speakers facing outward and pumps up the volume until it pulsates loud enough to unhinge the doors.

"And now you hear the music, but the words don't sound too clear …" "Inner City Blues" by Sixto Rodriguez Former Baltimorean Craig Strydom has spent more than two decades searching for Sugar Man. And even though the music journalist tracked his elusive subject to a Detroit tenement in 1997, in many ways, he's still looking. Sugar Man is the nickname for Sixto Rodriguez, a Mexican-American singer-songwriter who was living in dire poverty in the U.S. without ever knowing that his music was being used to fight apartheid halfway around the world.

When young, aspiring artists ask Mark Foster, the 27-year-old leader of Los Angeles trio Foster the People, for tips on making it big in the music industry, he offers practical advice. "Kids hit me up on Twitter and I tell them to learn how to bartend," Foster said. "There are career waiters in Los Angeles and they're making over $100,000 a year. " Foster knows first-hand how difficult breakthroughs can be. After moving to Los Angeles from Cleveland at 18, Foster threw himself into the city's party scene, hoping to make any connections he could.

The B-52s were performing another one of their New Year's Eve shows when, right after "Roam," they were asked to stop for the countdown, champagne toasts and balloons. It might have been 2011, but the band finished the night in typical garb — singer Fred Schneider in a gold jacket, the gals in sparkly minidresses — and with a couple of classics, "Rock Lobster" and "Love Shack," just like they might have 30 years ago. That they're still playing them is further proof that the Athens, Ga., veterans have yet to overstay their welcome.

The multiracial five-piece band Black Kids, which has an affinity for '80s British rock, is something of a sensation in Europe. There, the band has ascended the charts, packed venues and secured prime TV spots. And in the United States, the critical praise is deafening. Of course, the musicians didn't expect all the buzz. Music bloggers and hipster circles gush over the group's tongue-in-cheek multicultural image and the irreverent neon pop-rock of its debut CD, Partie Traumatic. The album has been out for about a month, and the scruffy band from Jacksonville, Fla., is already tired of hearing about itself.

The thousands of fans who filed into Morgan State University's auditorium for Khia Edgerton's funeral yesterday could recite her accomplishments: recording artist, radio personality, leader of an underground music movement. But during the two-hour music-filled ceremony, those fans learned how Edgerton rose from spinning records in her family's Randallstown basement to become "K-Swift," leader of Baltimore's club music scene. The story is a by-the-book lesson on the value of hard work. "She's didn't talk about building an entertainment empire - she just did it," said Marc Clarke, of radio station 92Q, where Edgerton was the first female DJ. "She didn't talk about losing 170 pounds.

As he cruised down Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive, Good Charlotte singer Joel Madden battled spotty cell-phone reception to talk about band life, family life (he and girlfriend Nicole Richie are parents of a baby girl, Harlow) and the state of the music industry. His group, Good Charlotte, which got its start in Waldorf in 1996, is headlining the AST Dew Tour's Panasonic Open tomorrow night at Camden Yards before it embarks on a summer tour with Boys Like Girls. The band's latest album, Good Morning Revival, was released last year.

A recent top story on the music-piracy wars featured another humiliating setback for the music industry - a new antipiracy technology that doesn't work. That's how the headlines read. We journalists have a knack for missing the point. That's what happened in the recent flurry of stories about SunnComm Technologies Inc. SunnComm's MediaMax CD-3 system is designed for use on music CDs, to set limits on the number of times a user can copy the music. But a Princeton University graduate student, John Alexander Halderman, found that anybody could beat the system by turning off the "CD autorun" feature in Microsoft's Windows operating system, or by just holding down the shift key when loading a music CD. SunnComm became an Internet laughingstock, and the enraged chief executive officer, Peter Jacobs, threatened to sue Halderman for spreading false information about MediaMax.

The ailing music industry is poised to make a new push to copy-proof its music CDs, in hopes of slowing the raging epidemic of Internet piracy. Microsoft and Macrovision each announced new copy-protection initiatives at Midem, the record industry's biggest international conference, which ends today in Cannes, France. The new versions of locked-down discs are intended to strike a better balance between the labels' desire to keep their songs off unauthorized file-swapping services like Kazaa and consumers' expectations of flexibility and portability.

In the past few years, shrinking album sales and illegal downloads have shaken up the music industry. But after a downturn in the late '90s, live music festivals are once again flourishing - offering some hope for a struggling industry. After the horrendous 1999 Woodstock and the subsequent sputtering of Lollapalooza, American music festivals looked all but done for. But now, festivals such as Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, a revitalized Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits Music Festival are grossing in the tens of millions, making them formidable revenue sources.

Daniel Bernard Roumain, known in the music world as DBR, says the violin has saved his life. Rather fittingly, he uses his life saver to reach out to others and dive into the deepest of topics in his new piece, "One Loss Plus." "For anyone, it's nice to have an antidote, not only in a time of war, but when you are sad and feel alone," Roumain said. "Music can serve as a wonderful antidote to a very harsh and cruel world." Roumain, 36, of Margate, Fla., started playing the violin when he was 5 years old. By age 10, he was composing and playing in rock and jazz bands; by 15 he had "plugged in," or attached his violin to amps; and now he has released an album (etudes4violin&electronix)