Stopping the pop-swappers

According to the RIAA, CD sales dropped by 10% in 2001 and a further 6.8% last year, largely because of file sharing.

But the figures tell a different story.

In America and the rest of the world the biggest culprit in falling music sales is large-scale CD piracy by organised crime.

In just three years, sales of pirate CDs have more than doubled, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Every third CD sold is a pirate copy, says the federation.

The IFPI’s Commercial Music Piracy 2003 report, produced in early July, reveals pirate CD sales rose 14% in 2002 and exceeded one billion units for the first time.

Last Thursday was listening to an interesting BT interview on KCRW (ooh here’s a Mark Farina interview) where he talks about some general career/new album stuff, but also nerd-talk (starts around 17m in). One thing that surprised me was his shout out to Richard Boulanger (hmm, well BT did attend Berklee for a little while). Apparently he’s been working with Luigi Castelli on CSound stuff (hey there’s a csound max/msp object) Music software is really it’s own world (dmoz, random listing); not too much OSS stuff I can spot, however jMax is GPL’d.

There’s a Remix article entitled The Mad Professor that has some more interesting tidbits.

Not mentioned, but I came across it while searching, kyma looks pretty neat