These big record labels really know how to crash a party. Rolling Stone put it into perspective by saying it’s probably just a coincidence that EMI’s lawsuit against Vimeo comes just a few weeks after the major label agreed to terms to license its music and videos to Vevo, YouTube’s new video streaming site made in collaboration with the record industry.

So what does a lip dubbing clip look like anyway?

Well let’s take a look at one created by some Vimeo staffers and friends.

For more lip dub videos check the Vimeo channel Lip Dub Stars.

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No one has came up with a legitimate solution for this issue but rest assured it will eventually be solved. Telling people how much they can download is not it, especially with the inevitable rise of streaming television & movies to your TV via the internet. A year or two from now it will be impossible to tell the torrent downloaders from the soccer moms on the web based on download consumption. A world with bandwidth limits will result in your precious internet looking more like the image below and you do not want that.

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In the day I learned how to play the guitar there was no internet. You would take private lessons to get your knowledge and chops up to speed. The problem with that, it was only 30 minutes to an hour a week. You we’re left hanging for up to 7 days if you hit a speed bump. That’s when frustration builds and some people give up.

So how did I solve this problem? V.H.S tapes! Remember those? In the back of a guitar magazine there was an ad for a guitar training course (The Metal Method) and my dad bought it. It was a game changer to say the least. I had a guitar teacher 24 hrs a day and could rewind, fast forward and pause if I needed. Brilliant idea and it worked amazingly!

With the internet things have only gotten faster and better so we’re going to take a look at four products that will help you get to your goals of becoming an accomplished guitarist!

1. Jam Play – Online Guitar Lessons

Jam Play is a site dedicated to teaching you absolutely everything you need to know to learn and master the guitar. Provided is over 19,302 minutes of lessons from 24 instructors.

• Access to Phase 1 Beginner Lessons, Phase 2 Advanced Lessons, & Phase 3 Song Lessons
• High-definition lesson quality with scene selection & supplementals
• Full Chord Library to Print, Memorize and Access Any Chord
• Supplemental tools & Printable guitar Lesson Documentation
• Ask Jam Play guitar instructors your questions, get video responses

Price: $19.95 / Monthly
Visit The Site For More Info

2. Guitar Tricks – Learn To Play Guitar

Learn guitar from a hand-selected group of instructors, technicians, and professional guitarists. You have access to a large library of video and audio lessons, tutorials, sheet music, reference, exercises, personalization tools, and more.

• Thousands of streaming videos and tutorials
• Connect directly with instructors in the exclusive Full Access Subscribers Forum
• Jam Station software offers 150 tracks of backing music for you to practice over
• Proprietary Metronome and Tuner tools

Price: $12.95 / Monthly
Visit The Site For More Info

3. Guitar Superstars – Guitar Training

Guitar Superstars is the guitarist’s choice in either advancing their stellar performance career or that beginner who would like to learn how to take their guitar playing to the next level.

• Hundreds of lessons in video format
• Personal lesson plans
• Award-winning Jam machine technology & prerecorded jam tracks
• Supplemental tools & Printable guitar Lesson Documentation

Price: $37.00 / One Time Fee
Visit The Site For More Info

4. Metal Method – Electric Guitar Lessons

DVD guitar lessons that specialize in classic rock, hard rock, metal, and neoclassical shred electric guitar lessons. Includes beginner, intermediate, and advanced lessons.

• Instructor Michael Angelo Batio was 2009 Guitar World Magazine’s Reader’s Poll
• Lessons are shipped on DVD format
• Metal Mike Chlasciak (Halford) and shred master Rusty Cooley (Outworld) are former students
• Instant access to evaluate the quality of the products including instructional programs, product demos, and live concerts.

Price: N/A
Visit The Site For More Info

* Metal Method is mostly a DVD course although they do offer some free online material. Due to the fact that I’ve gone through his previous training as a kid I felt it should be mentioned.

Overview

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Here is how Nimbit is describing the new service:

Nimbit MyStore for Facebook takes full advantage of all the social networking capabilities of Facebook, giving artists powerful fan marketing and promotion capabilities. With Nimbit MyStore for Facebook artists can:

• Conduct pre-sale promotions
• Post and promote new releases
• Promote shows and tours
• Track promotions and giveaways
• Build fan loyalty through ongoing promotions
• Drive fan-to-fan marketing
• Create and track viral spread

With Nimbit MyStore for Facebook, artists can sell both digital and physical products, including digital music, physical merchandise, eTickets and more right from the artist’s Facebook page. Fans never leave your Facebook page to purchase an item, enabling artists to own the buying relationship, maintain knowledge of what each fan buys, and retaining more of the profits.Digital music

• Physical CDs, DVDs
• Merchandise (T-shirts, posters, autopgraphs items, etc.)
• Download cards
• eTickets
• Create custom packages based on fan buying behaviors

Nimbit MyStore accepts all major credit cards and Paypal and provides a single, secure checkout cart right from the artist’s Facebook page for all purchases.

This looks really promising and can’t be good news for Myspace.  Artist/Bands have stuck with myspace because Facebook has always lacked with its music services but this looks like it could be the game changer and overall great news for musicians abroad!

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Earlier today I read that Korn would be releasing 4 digital EP’s throughout the year and would be available to users who pay a monthly subscription on their site. My first reaction is amazement. I really didn’t expect to see a band like Korn try and come up with it’s own model. I start doing some research and find out that the material on these EP’s are unreleased tracks and a demo version of a new song which appear on their “real” release.

That’s all I needed to see to know that this is more of a fan club then anything else. Yes they are giving away 4 digital EP’s but it’s not your main release. You still have a major label to push your main album. I can’t say that I’ve ever thought about it before, but unless you are willing to put your best stuff on the line with none of the traditional hand rails to guide you through the process, then it’s not breaking any new ground. I will say in Korn’s defense that they aren’t pushing it like they are the next NIN’s or anything like that but when you read the headline it certainly looks like they are trying something different.

So what if this was their main release? What if they really did separate the main record into 4 EP’s spread out a 12 month span. Well at $6.95 a month, the fans would be paying a much higher price if they stayed in the entire year but if the band could offer more value then it does become a bit more interesting. I love the idea of continuity but I really think you would have to offer a version that could be purchased or given away in combination. However if you did that then it becomes a fan club again. Would users be willing to pay more (like a subscription) but also receive more stuff like tickets, merchandise, etc but without any other alternative to get the album? Legal alternative that is! Yeah that could be a problem.

Obviously the plan needs work but someone will eventually figure it out. Until then, I consider myself very lucky to be living in a time of such uncharted territory and with the opportunity to see it unfold and even contribute myself as a musician.

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With the launch of MySpace music and now the addition of iLike, it’s obvious they are claiming the music market and making it much harder for bands to leave the site. Trust me, as a musician myself, I’m sick of MySpace and would love to abandon my page but if your goal is to share your music with as many people as possible then leaving it (for the time being) is not an option.

During a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta said that the company might use iLike’s recommendation platform for other media, including video, entertainment and games. For the time being MySpace does not plan to integrate iLike with MySpace Music, and the brand and core product will continue to be managed separately. The entire iLike team, including co-founders and brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi, will remain with the company. “We don’t want to disrupt any of the great things iLike is doing,” said Van Natta. AllThingsD reported that the unit of News Corp. paid $13.5 million in cash upfront, and promised an additional $6 million to retain founders Ali and Hadi Partovi and other iLike talent.

With iLike being an incredibly popular app on Facebook, this gives Myspace some real estate on it’s competitors site. Business Week added that Facebook could decide to pull the plug on the application, though it would face a barrage of criticism from its vocal users and would be hard-pressed to offer up an alternative with as much appeal. Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker says that’s unlikely to happen as long as the iLike application stays the same. “We expect that users will continue to discover and share music through the iLike application on Facebook,” says Barker. “We look forward to working with the iLike team to make music a great social experience on Facebook and across the Web.”

For now we have to keep our music profiles but that doesn’t mean you have to send your traffic to them. I’ve noticed a lot of bands starting to promote various things like music or pics on MySpace but linking to other sites and even their own. Can you imagine bands having to get domain names again? I think it’s a good thing and I think what MySpace offers as a central hub for music is great but the file compression, horrible layout, etc just don’t work for me anymore. We need something new that all musicians can get behind.

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From Google’s blog:

“Last week the world watched in wonder as Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding partytransformed a familiar and predictable tradition into something spontaneous and just flat-out fun. The video, set to R&B star Chris Brown’s hypnotic dance jam “Forever,” became an overnight sensation, accumulating more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than one week. But as with all great YouTube videos, there’s more to this story than simple view counts.

At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for “Forever” used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” — in the last week, searches for “Chris Brown Forever” on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site:

This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official “Forever” music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.

So, what does all of this mean? Despite compelling data and studies around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown’s “Forever” has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chartand #3 on Amazon’s best selling MP3 list. We’ve seen similar successes in the past with partners like Monty Python.”

When you think about it… this makes perfect sense and thankfully some record exec saw the potentional to make some money off of a youtube video that was going viral. Cheers to that person! I would expect to see this happening more and more with this recent success.

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The Nielsen Sound Scan report for Country Music found album sales dropped 24% from the previous year’s numbers. To put that in context, there were more “Metal” albums sold last year than Country. Maybe pirating music was never really the issue with lackluster album sells over the last few years.  Bad music and a poor economy could very well be the  main reason the music industry is in such a slump. I knew it!

Or ………. is the sample size to small?

From the Washingtonpost.com :

“A 2008 survey by Nielsen Media Research found that 80 percent of all U.S. homes have a computer, and almost 92 percent of those homes have Internet access.

The 50 percent figure “was a bit of an eye-opener,” admits Tammy Genovese, CMA’s chief executive. “We know that most of our fans have access to a computer. We just didn’t realize they didn’t have it in their homes.”

“It’s dial-up, and it’s just too expensive,” says Chuck Taulbee, 39, from Stockton, Mo., who was in town for the festival, which concluded Sunday and featured performances by such superstar acts as Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts and Taylor Swift. Like many of the people polled in the CMA survey, Taulbee lives in an area without broadband, making accessing the Internet so tedious that he’d rather do without.

In addition to lack of broadband, those surveyed cited cost and concerns over content as reasons they stayed offline. Perhaps more disturbing to the country music industry is the news that 42 percent of those ardent fans who do not have home Internet access have no desire to remedy the situation.”

So besides the fact 42 percent of the people polled have no interest in embracing technology what so ever…., I have to say this poll reaffirms my decision that the R.I.A.A. has and continues to overstep its bounds in every way, without even knowing if piracy is the real problem. Greed by label executives IS the real problem from my vantage point. Dubbing cassette tapes and burning CD’s never brought the music industry to it’s knees, so why would file sharing?

Maybe we should all be thanking those die hard country music fans, whos refusal to “get with the times”, provides some interesting data to a debate thats going to keep going for a really long time.

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