I thought I would reprint this article because of its significance to all types of music production in our modern world!

By Darren Divine

(Darren Divine is a local DJ in Atlanta & writer for Urban News International )

Now album sales in the music industry as a whole have declined

since the beginning of 2005. Downloading off the internet is

becoming the standard choice of buying music, making the CD

format obsolete as the cassette or 8 track tape. Even with

download sales combined with all other formats of music

(cd,vinyl,etc.), it still doesn’t amount to how much the

market has been on a downward fall.

Now one theory about the lack of sales go back to the download

format, file-sharing in particular. It has been reported the

on-line giant I-Tunes, goes through an estimate 600 million

illegal traded songs. For instance, with the click of the

mouse I can purchase an artist full length album, rip it to a

file, then forward it to everybody in my address book. Now if

I got 500 friends, they all get the album for free, leaving

the revenue that supposed to generated if those 500 people

went & got the album themselves null & void.

So gone are the days of the 90’s, where most of the top ten

artists in any market, exceeded platinum, double, triple, on

up to multi-mega sales. In rap music for example, which has

suffered the biggest blow out of all other art forms. the

average artist now sells an estimate of one to two hundred

thousand.

So what’s keeping them from being dropped from their record

deals, RINGTONES.

That’s right , take party like a rockstar, done by the Shop

Boyz, The song was no. 1 on the pop chart, sold a million

ringtones, but the album hit bottom at 174,000 copies. Another

song was “This is why I’m hot” done by the artist Mims,

2.7million ringtones, album sales 276,000. Even worse was

Huey’s “Pop, Lock, & Drop it. One million ringtones, album

sales, a dismal 71,000.

So what’s the future hold for this market who artists are

becoming as good as how many ringtones can they generate? Will

their even be a need to record a full length album? Get a

decent budget from record companies? Or what about longevity?

It would be hard to build a fan base if your an artist who is

one hit then out. Time will tell if people will remember the

hottest ringtone now, “Crank Dat” by Soulja Boy 5 to 10 years

from now.

We can only hope the ringtone era doesn’t kill what seems to

be a dying effect, which is the quality of today’s hip-hop

artist. It just makes me want to put my phone on vibrate.

www.nberg.net

www.nberg.net

photo by Hamid Sedghinejad

I came across a wonderful blog about Discovering Iran. We often hear about the negative aspects of this interesting country and I thought I would repost some of her extremely positive qualities! Thanks to Dark Roasted Blend for the original blog post!

Darkroasted Blend - Discovering Iran click here!

This is what I would consider to be an inorganic mandala. Beach rocks carry an amazing earth energy that has inspired this photo art

I came across an interesting article in the St. Petersburg Times this week. Apparently 49 years ago 9 young skiers died in the Ural mountains under unusual circumstances. When they failed to show up on time searchers discovered their camp had been vacated quickly. Apparently they had cut open the tent and ran down slope from the camp wearing only their nightclothes and without any footware on! Five the bodies were located immediately and had succumbed to exposure from the very cold temperatures. Here’s an excerpt from the original article about the remaining skiers :
“It took two months to locate the remaining skiers. Their bodies were found buried under four meters of snow in a forest ravine, 75 meters away from the pine tree. The four — Nicolas Thibeaux-Brignollel, 24, Ludmila Dubinina, 21, Alexander Zolotaryov, 37, and Alexander Kolevatov, 25 — appeared to have suffered traumatic deaths. Thibeaux-Brignollel’s skull had been crushed, and Dubunina and Zolotarev had numerous broken ribs. Dubinina also had no tongue. ”

Please click below to read the original article and get the whole mysterious story:

The St. Petersburg Times