Musical notes

Great interview on the state of the music industry with Tom Silverman in Wired Magazine.  Also some really interesting factoids in Fast Company.  A few extracts:

* Sweden is probably one of the few places in the world where music sales were up last year – and this is the land of the Pirate Bay

* Despite the promise of myspace and self-publishing, its actually become quite difficult for an artiste to make it on his/her own.  In 2008, only 10 artistes broke the 10,000 album sales number by themselves.  215 had a label behind them.  And the number of people breaking 10K is falling

* 80% of the records released in the US have sales of under 100 copies.  Almost 20% sold just 1 copy

* Music labels apparently buy their own songs on itunes to drive up the hype (Maybe we’re overly harsh on Indian companies).  Sidenote: You can also buy twitter / facebook followers to boost your popularity (more on that here)

And in case anyone was still wondering about the future of music albums, heres a graph: