Tuesday Business Links
There's money in them hills: The just-completed Bonnaroo music festival, put on by Superfly Productions, sold out its 80,000 tickets and raised about $17 million in ticket sales -- up from $14.7 million last year. (Billboard.biz)
Contrary to popular opinion, digital music has been no better for the environment than CDs, wrote Billboard's Anthony Bruno. Discarded MP3 players leak heavy metals and chemicals into landfills, and consumers are buying more blank CDRs to burn the music they have acquired digitally. The Consumer Electronics Association has launched www.MyGreenElectronics.com to help consumers responsibly use their electronic devices. (Billboard)
Verizon now offers full track, over-the-air downloads from Wind-Up Records artists such as Creed, Scott Stapp, Evanescence and Finger Eleven. An over-the-air track costs $1.99 and comes with one copy for the PC and one for the mobile handset. (Press release, via Digital Music News)
The Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) announced it has distributed more than $100 million from private copying levies in just four years. In Canada, the CPCC collects levies on blank media, such as CDRs and cassettes, and gives the money to rightsholders. (Press release)
Inside the guts of a Zune Marketplace desktop software file are hints that Microsot's Zune may be preparing a content partnership with MTV, VH1 and CMT. (Engadget)
You know there's a premium on news for anything relating to both digital music and the Beatles when news of a Ringo Starr digital reissue makes waves across the Internet. (Billboard.com)
Music attorney Chris Castle dissects a Washington Post op-ed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohman. (Digital Music News)
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