Music Execs Stressed Over Free Streaming

itwbennett writes "At the Digital Music Forum East conference, held Thursday in New York, music industry watchers gathered to puzzle anew over the continuing decline in music sales. 'We have lost 20 million buyers in just five years,' said Russ Crupnick, a president at the analyst firm NPD Group who spoke at the conference. Moreover, only about 14 percent of buyers account for 56 percent of revenue for the recording industry. In years past, the blame was put on digital music piracy. At this year's conference, however, the focus was on free streaming Internet services, such as Pandora, MySpace, Spotify and even YouTube."

Alternatives

[Lorien_the_first_one]

Here are some interesting alternatives not mentioned so far:

Jamendo (CC music)
SomaFM (streaming)
BlueMars (streaming music for the space traveler)


I use the bottom two every day and go to Jamendo when my eMusic account runs dry for the month.

Re:people are broke..

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

I will drink to that. I've found some pretty amazing talent on Jamendo, and honestly I get more enjoyment out of music when I know the artists are in it for the love of music. I'd also add in OCRemix [ocremix.org] if you're into remixed classic video game music. I'm not a huge fan of techno, but some of the artists have turned the video game music I grew up with into truly haunting and beautiful instrumental music.