Music Industry

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")

Eats Szechuan Best on Liberty Road offers an extensive menu, especially on the weekends, when dim sum is served. Scene We polled some of the folks involved in the music industry in the area about their favorite shows of the year. Results ranged from comedian Robert Townsend to Slick Rick to John Fogerty. Trips Johnstown, Pa., is home to the Inclined Plane, an uncommonly steep railroad used to transport people and cargo up and down a mountain. It closes for a couple of months after December, so check it out while you still can. CDs If you see Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in the music racks, it's not a misplaced copy of the video game.

SUPPOSE A company asked you to buy a computer based on how much you like its portable music player. Would you bite? For Apple, the tactic might work, and that says a lot about the state of the computer and music industries these days. When Apple announced the third version of its iMac desktop computer this week, it boasted that the machine comes "From the creators of iPod." On the surface, that's like GM pitching a Cadillac Escalade by bragging that it's "From the creators of the turn signal."

A year after Apple Computer Inc. launched its iTunes Music Service, the online music industry is selling songs by the millions - and that may not bode well for the major record labels. Online services account for a fraction of overall music sales, but they're growing rapidly. And the new choices they give consumers threaten to remix the recording industry's traditional revenue streams, pumping up the volume of singles and subscriptions and turning down album sales. Customers at three of the leading online services - iTunes, Musicmatch Inc.'s Musicmatch Downloads and RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody - buy about 10 times as many singles as they do albums.

The non-profit Maryland Lawyers for the Arts will hold its second annual seminar on "Legal and Business Issues in the Music Industry" Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the University of Baltimore Law Center, Mount Royal and Maryland avenues.The keynote speaker will be M. William Krasilovsky, a New York-based entertainment lawyer and author of two highly regarded books on the music industry. In addition to his writing, Mr. Krasilovsky is former counsel to the Songwriters Guild of America and Warner Brothers Music Cos."

If you want to get into the music biz these days, it turns out there's a ground floor available.Children's music.Sure, Raffi is everywhere. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made records. Barney's first album is due next month -- on his own Barney label, and no, the Barney label will not be presenting the "Jurassic Park" soundtrack, thank you.Peter, Paul and Mary recently cut their second children's album, "Peter, Paul and Mommy Too." Bobby Goldsboro cut a children's record. Waylon Jennings, of all people, just cut a children's record.

The record industry opened a broad new front yesterday in its legal war on Internet music swapping, a practice it believes has caused compact disc sales to plummet by billions of dollars in recent years. The Recording Industry Association of America filed copyright infringement lawsuits against 261 individuals it claims have uploaded more than 1,000 music files on networks such as Kazaa, Grokster, Imesh, Gnutella and Blubster. The industry said the lawsuits, filed in federal courts across the country, were among the first of what could be thousands of legal actions against individuals alleged to be holding illegal music files.

Digital jukeboxes are set to have a big impact on the music industry.Yet it was only about a year ago that Rob Lord and Jeff Patterson, a couple of Californian computer-science students, launched their digital jukebox, IUMA, the Internet Underground Music Archive.IUMA has since used the Internet to send samples of alternative rock music from Arizona to Australia.It charges each band $20 to $75. Listeners tune in for free. All they need is access to the Internet to download the music on to their computer sound cards before transferring it to an ordinary cassette.

I suspect the phenomenon of American Idol has seduced millions into thinking that a booming career in the music business can be established in no time, that just about anybody who can halfway carry a tune can be a superstar. Although over the years there have been many exceptions (indeed too many to name), it's not that easy, folks. Not everybody can be the next Beyonce. Besides, one is more than enough. But don't give up all hope. So you can neither sing nor dance, but maybe you have a talent for writing catchy songs.

The music industry moguls howling about the onslaught of free downloads of songs via Internet file-sharing programs might do well to remember the stance of John Philip Sousa. The renowned composer of military marches was the leader of a highly popular band as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Then along came this newfangled thing invented by Thomas Edison called recording. "This was the first time that the sounds of music were stored at will," says Emily Thompson, a visiting scholar in the program for science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.