Dear Friends,

It is that time again. The semester is underway, most of us are looking forward to a fall break (I spent mine in my office – but at least I can spot the desk now) and it is time for another installment of “Wisdom from the Web”.

The first link I would point you to is for a presentation delivered by Universal Music to their investors in June. This link, takes you to a Powerpoint with some interesting statistics about the company and the state of the industry. I used some of these slides (giving proper notice, of course) for my class discussion on the major record labels.

It was interesting to see their emphasis on a shift to 360 degree contracts and their explanation of that to their constituencies. The pie charts are good to show market share, etc. – but they were also valuable in warning students to be careful where their information comes from – and to expect a certain bias when extracting information from a source of this nature.

I was looking for other such presentations from the other majors, and didn’t find anything particularly interesting, except to remind you that playing a “conference call” from a publicly traded company can be a good learning experience for students. You can link into Warner’s latest calls here. Just as a warning, though, they do take these down after a certain time frame and without notification, so if you plan to present one in class, check it the day of your class to make sure they haven’t pulled it down.

Next, I wanted to share one of my favorite “non-music” sites with you that has a lot of information about the music industry. Wired Magazine (a very interesting read in physical form) is a good source for technology related issues. They cover many of the important changes and challenges from the tech side of our industry – so much so that they have a separate section on music issues that is easy to find and can net some good information without a whole lot of searching. You can go directly to the music articles at http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music. Current articles include, “Who Will Facebook Partner With for Its Music Service?” and “Does The Long Tail Apply to Mobile Music?”

Finally I would like to draw your attention to the Copyright Royalty Board (at least I think that is their name this week – but maybe that is unfair – it has only changed three times since I started teaching this topic after all). I went looking for a direct link to find out more about what they are doing, and sure enough, you can get to their latest thoughts here .

Once I got there, I followed the link for information on the rate settings “Mechanical and Digital Phonorecord Delivery Rate Determination Proceeding (Docket No. 2006-3 CRB DPRA)”. You have to be pretty up on your legalese, but if you have the time to digest it, you may find it pretty interesting. This is the “public version”. Something that I hope will be easier on the palate is their electronic newsletter. I signed up for it at http://www.loc.gov/crb/news/subchange.html just this morning. I can’t tell you if it will pan out, but the link makes it easy to unsubscribe, so here’s hoping that this will be informative and in plain English.

That’s it for this month. Good luck to all as we near the midpoint in the semester. I wish for you that all your papers are graded and up to date and that it is clear sailing for you through the holidays!