A Mega Upload man, Kim Dotcom (not his family name), has been detained in New Zealand following fears he might ‘escape’ to Germany, where he’d be safe from extradition. He’s aprt of the group which are currently being sued in the US for $500million worth of piracy damage.
As you might of noticed, a few websites went down on Wednesday, in protest of the new SOPA legislation being brought into the US Congress. Google, Wikipedia joined in, while Wired had the most inspired take on the argument.
It will be 6x bigger than Google’s. It will be as big as Visa’s was. It will make it more valuable than McDonald’s. It is Facebook’s IPO, which is set to raise an extra $10Billion for the company.
Not only did 2011 see vinyl sales hit a two decade peak in the US, but that peak also came courtesy of independent stores, with 67% of sales from from them.
Kodak is in the mists of reorganization. While struggling to re-brand as a digital development company they’ve had to borrow $950million from Citigroup to help them along the process.
Pirate Bay has released a press release claiming that ‘SOPA can’t stop us’. Seeing as piracy is illegal anyway, additional laws don’t do much than just add extra bureaucracy.
LL Cool J has launched a new social networking site orientated around music to battle against MySpace’s upcoming transformation. It’s called Boomdizzle and advertises the fact that it uses “patented collaborative technology with innovative digital marketing to change how music is recorded, distributed, and shared all over the world.” Whatever that means.
Live Nation have allowed Big Champagne founders (who they own) Eric Garland and Joe Fleischer to put together a team to work out how to push the live music industry into the future (i.e. how to keep people paying purchase fees for tickets which most bands could sell directly). We’ll see how that turns out…
Investment raising site Kickstarter helped musicians raise over $19million dollars last year, proving that people do want to help musicians. Just not the big ones who also appear on zShare.
Fiction Records boss Jim Chancellor has said labels are ‘scared’ of guitar bands because they take time to develop. His label is responsible for the likes of White Lies, Maccabees (who are set to be the #1 Album this week) and Snow Patrol.
