Music Industry

In an odd yet understandable marketing strategy, the folks behind E!'s new reality show "Mrs. Eastwood & Company" have spent a lot of pre-premiere publicity time explaining what the show isn't. Which is to say, Clint Eastwood. The legendary actor and director will appear in but a few episodes and then only briefly. He will not, for instance, be slamming doors or engaging in filmed therapy sessions with his wife, Dina, around whom the show revolves (see title.) That doesn't mean the show is not about Clint Eastwood; it is. If the principal characters -- Dina, her 15-year-old daughter Morgan and 19-year old stepdaughter Francesca -- were not related to him, there would be Absolutely No Reason to watch this, which, by reality show standards, promises to be tame to the point of sedation.

The European Union's antitrust regulators have approved Sony Corp.'s $2.2-billion acquisition of EMI's publishing business, clearing a major hurdle in Sony's ambition to create the world's largest music publishing group with rights to about 2 million songs, including some by David Bowie, Stevie Wonder and Pink. The deal announced Thursday still needs to clear U.S. regulators, who have historically been more lenient than their European counterparts. Nevertheless, antitrust experts cautioned against celebrating too soon.

The invention of the phonograph was going to discourage people from going out to see live music. The introduction of music radio was a surefire way of killing record sales. "Home taping is killing music" screamed the magazine ads when the cassette tape was introduced to the marketplace. Of course, each of those sky-is-falling alerts from the music industry over the last century was a false alarm. With each technological innovation, music became more accessible and more lucrative than ever.

Whitney Houston's death last month on the eve of the Grammy awards still has fans and the music industry reeling, but it holds an extra measure of resonance to those whose primary mission is helping struggling musicians put their lives back on track. The singer's death at age 48 came just a few hours after the closing notes of the Recording Academy's MusiCares Person of the Year tribute in Los Angeles, the major fundraiser for the organization's foundation created more than two decades ago to help musicians in need — many of them like Houston wrestling with substance or alcohol abuse issues.

Roughly a quarter-century ago, Whitney Houston's peers crowned her pop's new princess when they awarded her the Grammy for best female pop vocal performance. At Sunday night's Grammy Awards, many of the same people came together to mourn her untimely death. Barely 24 hours after Houston died in her room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, as the music world's glitterati massed at the Staples Center, it was evident that Houston's spectral presence would hover fitfully over the evening.

The collapse of the old music industry — the happy business of spotting talent, pressing millions of LPs or CDs and wondering how to spend the profits — is so well documented that it is almost a surprise to find a new book on the subject. If you were starting now, you might tell the story by dissecting Guy Hands' disastrous buyout of EMI, studying the Lady Gaga-to-Amy Winehouse hit factory at Universal Music or even revisiting the Japanese-German culture clash that followed the Sony-BMG merger.

Re "Top Label Cuts CD Prices to Fight Net Downloads," Sept. 4: Some years ago I stopped buying classical CDs because of the high cost for a product that actually costs about $3 to put on the shelf. Also, some $17 to $18 issues were 20-year-old recordings in analog. So, consumers pay high prices for digital CDs that offer only analog sound. Ridiculous! No wonder sales have slipped. I don't download classical music from the Internet. I just stopped downloading too much cash from my pockets to the greedy record companies.

I am a frequent user of Napster, which I see as a valuable service. Others, however, see it as a way to steal music. They think of it as circulating music without giving proper compensation to the musicians, producers and record companies. What people who are opposed to this service fail to understand is that Napster really isn't about songs that you hear on the radio all the time or the videos you see on MTV.

A rock-music industry investigation will be the storyline of a seven-episode arc on CBS' "Wiseguy" beginning March 1. The stories will feature guest stars Tim Curry ("Amadeus," "Rocky Horror Picture Show"), Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac) and Deidre Hall ("Our House," "Days of Our Lives").

The battle-weary music industry surveyed the wreckage of another dismal six months Wednesday as global data showed music sales tumbled almost 11%. Despite big hits from pop queen Christina Aguilera and rapper 50 Cent, Internet downloading and CD burning continued to ravage the industry, dragging music sales down to $12.7 billion in the first half of this year, a leading industry body said.

HTC's $300-million investment in Beats Electronics has, so far, resulted in Beats earbuds being packed with Android smartphones. But the partnership may soon take a major step forward as HTC and Beats are reportedly looking to develop a music service that may end up challenging the likes of Apple's iTunes and Spotify. According to a report from the news site  GigaOm , HTC and Beats will roll out a new line of smartphones and tablets with Beats audio features and possibly even a music streaming service that could be unveiled as early as the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, later this month.  Om Malik, GigaOm founder and reporter, wrote in the report that HTC is leaning on the connections of Beats co-founder and Chairman Jimmy Iovine's connections in the music industry to build a streaming service that "will be offered as a default music client on HTC phones and tablets.

Roughly a quarter-century ago, Whitney Houston's peers crowned her pop's new princess when they awarded her the Grammy for best female pop vocal performance. At Sunday night's Grammy Awards, many of the same people came together to mourn her untimely death. Barely 24 hours after Houston died in her room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, as the music world's glitterati massed at the Staples Center, it was evident that Houston's spectral presence would hover fitfully over the evening.

Four months after Swedish digital music sensation Spotify launched its music service in the U.S., the company has amassed more than 4 million users who can play any song they want from Spotify's catalog of more than 15 million songs — absolutely free. For Spotify, however, those songs don't come cheap. Every time a user plays a song, Spotify must pay an undisclosed royalty to music labels and publishers. Like a high roller who keeps doubling down, Spotify is optimistic it can eventually make money, even if it means giving away music at the outset.

Gene McDaniels, who emerged as a pop singing star in the early 1960s with hits such as "A Hundred Pounds of Clay" and "Tower of Strength" and a decade later wrote Roberta Flack's No. 1 hit "Feel Like Makin' Love," has died. He was 76. McDaniels, whose career included many years as both a songwriter and a record producer, died Friday at his home in Kittery Point, Maine, after a short illness, said his wife, Karen. "I put him as the second-greatest thing I ever heard," jazz musician and vocalist Les McCann told The Times on Monday.

UNDERRATED 'Gattaca' (1997 ): Now part of the premium cable background as cheap filler between prestige documentaries and high-concept series, this patiently drawn film starring Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke holds up despite its age. Elegantly imagining a future of electric vintage automobiles and genetic modification taken to an icy extreme, this is thoughtfully noirish sci-fi reliant on nuance and real social issues to tell a story, no murderous...

Raphael Saadiq calls it "8 o'clock," even when it happens at 10 or 11: that moment every night when he steps onstage and savors the electricity of a room full of people gathered to hear him play. "It's a real high for me," says the Oakland native, who's been an important figure on the R&B scene since forming Tony! Toni! Toné! with an older brother in 1987. "The first time my dad saw us he asked my brother if I was on drugs. I was like, 'Why would you say that?' And he said, 'You're this completely different person up there — then you come off stage and you're just chill,'" Saadiq said, laughing.

PolyGram installed former EMI Records executive Davitt Sigerson on Thursday as chairman and Johnny Barbis, a PolyGram executive, as president of its Island Records USA division. The moves follow the departure last year of Island founder Chris Blackwell, who was ousted after publicly criticizing PolyGram Chairman Alain Levy. Music industry veteran Richard Griffiths has been named chairman of Bertelsmann Music Group's newly restructured European sector.

What is euphemistically called trading music online is theft, most of it petty. Songs downloaded free deny artists and record companies their due. Even so, the recording industry has abetted the robbery with its own greed and ineptitude. Though the industry is showing a glimmer that it understands there are better ways to deal with the problem, it also is employing a legal blunderbuss to pursue small-time downloaders as big-time criminals.

With Warner Music Group being bought for $3.3 billion in cash and Pandora Media Inc. on the verge of an initial public offering of its stock, could the music business be attracting investors once again? Roger McNamee, managing director of the Silicon Valley private equity firm Elevation Partners, said there's at least promise. While Elevation does not have an investment in any music start-ups, McNamee does know a thing or two about the music business and how it intersects with technology.

As CD sales plummeted, music executives looked in hope toward a new business model: Instead of trying to sell albums for $15 to $20 apiece, offer unlimited access to songs online for a flat monthly fee. The idea, however, has yet to catch on with the masses of music fans. The main impediment for many years was that subscribers couldn't use the services on the MP3 players that most of them owned, Apple's iPods. Now, with iPods giving way to iPhones and other mobile devices that support subscription services, Apple is putting a new hurdle in their path: It's trying to grab a huge chunk of the subscription revenue.