As of this week, you are now able to download high quality MP3s or WAVs directly from the online music magazine.

Originally focused in Australia, Resident Advisor quickly grew to an international leader in their field. Starting with music news, event reviews, photo reports and an active forum, it soon added a podcast, DJ charts, even an event ticketing system, and has grown over the last 10 years to become one of the leading electronic music magazines. 2011 has seen it expand it’s reach further, hosting a series of 10 events across the globe (from London to Berlin to New York to Moscow and more), and now the announcement of direct in-site download sales.

Tracks are added to you RA shopping basket, which has previously been very effective in the sales of event tickets. The playable samples and track information is powered by UK retailer Juno, and the pricing structure is very similar, with mp3s priced from $1.45 to $1.89, moving up to $2.45 to $2.75 for full quality WAV files.There is also a ‘processing fee’ of $0.10 added to each transaction.

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So, what does this mean for the 2011 digital music fan? Well, each month, roughly 3000 DJs, from 80 countries chart 30,000 tracks. These are also compiled into a monthly Top 50. Alongside the aggregated and artists charts, Resident Advisor will begin adding music from top artists and labels with the aim of “giving the electronic music community a convenient channel through which to legally purchase music while browsing RA”. This equates to a lot of music out there, and some possible positive and negative affects for the RA community.

The Good

Resident Advisor is a place where people head to learn about new music. It is a logical step to involve an in-site system to purchase legal quality music downloads, and makes things easy for the music fan / consumer. Convenience is king, and being able to add a track to your cart whilst perusing the charts of your favorite DJs and live acts has an element of loyalty to the creators and taste-makers of underground music.

The Bad

Resident Advisor has always earned respect among electronic music enthusiasts for not being led by record label money or PR companies and the like. Whilst they have featured charts and podcasts, they are normally submitted and judged purely on artistic merit. Mixing in the factor of music sales means that another angle needs to be taken into account; offering a chart or podcast with 30 tracks and only one for sale can look lazy or incomplete, and so an artist could be encouraged (directly or indirectly) to submit ‘better known’ or ‘more readily available’ content.

The Result?

Seeing as the service only launched a few days ago, we’ll have to give it a bit of time to tell how it will affect consumer habits and the site itself. Will it dilute the current underground ‘premier’ content that made the site so well loved and popular? Perhaps it will persuade more DJs and music collectors to stick to the convenient legal ways to get their music fix of the next big hits.

by Lee Jarvis.

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Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music both launched within a couple of weeks of each other. They join a number of well established and loved music streaming services such as Pandora, Rdio, Rhapsody, Last.FM and many more, with the supposed king of them all, Spotify (which is VERY good, by the way), still due “any day now”. So… what do the new kids on the cloud have to offer?

Amazon offers both a Cloud Drive and a Cloud Player. Cloud Drive is your hard drive, uploaded into the cloud (therefore backing up not just your mp3s, but other documents, also). The Cloud Player offers a place to store all new Amazon mp3 purchases, as well as access to your Cloud Drive. You can stream music on the go with the app for Android mobile phones or tablets. Cloud Drive offers all users 5Gb free storage, and, for a limited time, a free upgrade to 20 GB of Cloud Drive storage with an Amazon mp3 album purchase. Also, all new Amazon mp3 purchases saved to Cloud Drive do not count against your storage quota, essentially giving regular Amazon mp3 shoppers an ever-growing storage limit.

Google Music is still invite-only at the moment, but is essentially a similar idea – uploading of your current music files, and a place to easily add new purchases, that are then accessible from any Flash-equipped web browser, along with Android phones and tablets. Very similar indeed. The one big difference? You still need to purchase new music, and this will mainly point music consumers back to digital retail stores run by Amazon and/or Apple. The supposed reason for this hitch? Everyone’s favorite villains; the major labels. Wanting to much money up front apparently hindered Google’s ability to create a one-stop-shop, and has meant that the streaming launch is more of a stutter.

Worth noting is that both of these new players are iTunes friendly. They are not aggressively attacking the third big cheese, Apple, but instead recognize that millions of music fans already have playlists and organized folder based on 10 years of iTunes usage. To ignore this fact would be a foolish move, and making it easy and convenient for them to sync, swap, and move their music around is definitely the first step in taking a slice of the Apple pie (pun intended? Possibly.)

by Lee Jarvis.

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We offer many ways to showcase and interact here at US Music Jobs, and I thought I’d cover a little about sharing your music around the website, as well as featuring recent music added by some of our most active members.

As well as from appearing on your profile, recently added mp3s are also featured on our front page and all the key US Music Jobs site pages – if you contribute regularly you are more likely to attract attention and earn new fans.

The members I have featured below are all fine examples of the value of keeping your profile up to date – adding mp3s, photos, videos, press cuttings and more will make your profile easy to search and attractive to other users and employers to read. Regularly adding info and media means that I am more likely to find you in our network – next time it could be your music shared here and across the US Music Jobs online profiles!

US Music Jobs member: Silvia Pratesi

Recommended Listening: You can do the impossible (Musical Theatre)
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US Music Jobs member: John Runowicz

Recommended Listening: Running From The Blues (Blues)
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US Music Jobs member: Lucy Blanco

Recommended Listening: Bye Bye Blackbird (Jazz)
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US Music Jobs member: Gene Townsel

Recommended Listening: Chrissy/From Album (Pop)
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US Music Jobs member: Paul Mills

Recommended Listening: The Painter (Contemporary)
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US Music Jobs member: Daniel Tortoledo

Recommended Listening: Throughout These Years (Pop)
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US Music Jobs member: Ulysses Salett

Recommended Listening: Come on Home (Contemporary)
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US Music Jobs member: Kremena Lyutskanova

Recommended Listening: Beauty Girl (Classical)
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If you would like to be featured in future US Music Jobs blog posts, then update your profile regularly and leave a message on my profile wall (another feature that you should use for networking – look out for a future blog post!)

Lee Jarvis.

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To bring everyone up to speed, there has been an ongoing case in Swedish court that the four owners and heads of Peer2Peer (file sharing) site The Pirate Bay were in mass breach of copyright laws, not just within the music industry but also regarding movies and video games. The case has received a lot of attention and also incredible support from torrent and P2P websites and their users. Roger Wallis, who spoke in favour of The Pirate Bay at the trial, received a colossal amount of floral tributes, sent to his wife at their home.

The verdict was announced today, and all four men (Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Carl Lundström) received 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000. The prosecutors were aiming for much higher compensation, although their calculations are often very misguided; 10,000 free transfers of your song does not mean you lost 10,000 times the sale price of that record. Do they take into account the people who downloaded a few free tracks and then bought the actual album? I thought not.

Having said that, I am not in favour of people setting up software allowing the public to trade music and other files for free without artists’ consent. Let alone the people who shoot their mouth off, claiming “all music is free” and the like. Yes, all music is probably available for free if you wanted to find it online, but I am in favour of letting the artists (and the copyright owners) make that decision, controlling and profiting from the distribution of their work in some way, be that financially or by building their contact list. As content creators, that is their choice, and one of the reasons I am a huge fan of Creative Commons licenses.

People are using over-stretched analogies such as ‘if you hold the P2P site accountable then you must also prosecute ISPs’. There are also many, many comments across the web from people claiming it is a sad day and that there is no way this should have happened. I’d like to hear them come up with a solution, as to how artists can retain control of their work, be compensated where appropriate, and how they will be able to fund and market future creations and music projects.

You can’t really go and prosecute the millions of end users who take the music and other files. The RIAA have tried and failed more than 35,000 times, receiving nothing but bad press, fueling angst and probably instigating further file sharing. If there was a system in place by the websites to charge the users a subscription fee, then maybe that could work, and they could then reimburse the labels and artists. But they have not chose this route. So, do you hold the P2P sites and owners viable? Maybe. If their business model does not compensate the artist in any way, then I think they should be charged somehow. Governing bodies should aim to control this cause though, rather than react to the aftermath. The P2P sites could avoid legal wranglings themselves by striking up deals with labels, but as they are sworn enemies, how about independent artists? If the artists can register their music with a site and give permission to distribute and share globally then the P2P sites can still aid the discovery and sharing of new music and building of artists careers, which they are so fond of using as their mission statement.

What will the devastating effect be on the music industry? Not much. For a start there will be months of appeals, more uneducated blabberings in the press, and probably more flowers. ‘Pirates’ will continue to vent and despise the major labels and government prosecutors. P2P file sharing is rampant, and as much a part of a schoolkid’s daily life today as dolls, toy cars and baseballs were decades ago – it’s not going to disappear. Major labels will continue to push in this wrong direction instead of focusing their efforts on restructuring their business models, and to get to the route of the problem, that is that they have mistreated musicians and music fans for many years now. Creating value, authenticity and transparency within their brands should be at the top of their agenda, not ‘hire more lawyers’.

Who wins? Neither side. Certainly not the Pirate Bay owners (lend me $905,000 will you, mate?), and not the labels who struggle to recoup a few million bucks when they have just spent the same amount on forcing untalented acts into their hit-machine mould, only to be forgotten by this time next year. There are some people out there who have a collection of thousands of unpurchased songs that they will hardly listen to who think they are on the winning side. Congratulations, you’re very clever.

Who loses? Artists. Artists may move to gigging like crazy in order to subsidise the record sales gap in their revenue compared to previous years. Which is fine if they are able to do so and the people who listen to their music online genuinely like them and willingly support them when they come to town.

So do me (or more accurately, the music industry) a favour. Find a new, upcoming artist / band / rapper / DJ-producer from your iPod collection who is performing in your town this weekend, and go out to see their show / gig / concert. Use the $15 you just saved from purchasing their album… you will then be giving something back to the industry that you ‘care about’ so much. Heck, you may even have a good time. Yo-ho-ho.

Lee Jarvis.

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