Spotify Plays Can Increase iTunes Sales. Here’s Proof!

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Despite fears that streaming access cannibalizes sales, classical music record label X5  tells me when it launched an app within Spotify and saw streams of one album increase 412% in a month, that album’s iTunes sales shot up 50%. The Swedish label’s “The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music” soon reached #1 on the iTunes Classical charts, and broke into the iTunes Top 200 album charts for the first time, hitting #152. The stats back up claims by some record labels and Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek that there’s no evidence of Spotify or other streaming services negatively impacting music sales.

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Rhyming & Stealing: Let’s honor late Beastie with better copyright laws

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Hip-hop icon Adam Yauch (MCA) of the Beastie Boys passed on Friday, leaving a legacy of advocacy and great music. The albums of Yauch and his band taught suburban kids about malt liquor and dust , but were also a wizardly pastiche of music and culture — from Sly & the Family Stone to Mr. Ed to Alfred E

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Jailbreaking the Degree

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Editor’s note:   David Blake  is the Founder of  Degreed , the new degree for the new world. Previously, he helped launch New Charter University and was a founding member of Zinch, since acquired by Chegg.

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What we are listening to: Bijan Sabet, Spark Capital

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I might not  like the Herman Miller’s Twitter strategy , but I do like their Lifework blog and I am religious reader of that site.

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Turn Your Underused (or Unused) Thumb Drives into Awesome, Indispensable Tools This Weekend [Weekendhacker]

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Although cloud services have made thumb drives a bit less useful for a lot of us, they're still a staple of every geek's toolkit because there are so many things you can do with them.

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Glimpse, Spotify, and More [Apps Of The Week]

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Going on a vacation soon? The best iPad apps of the week will have you outfitted in the coolest threads while keeping you organized for your next trip. Plus, you'll have all the music you want to listen to at your fingertips

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Spotify Crop Circle Appears Near Stonehenge

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Aliens are streaming our music! A crop circle bearing a striking resemblance to the Spotify logo has appeared in Wiltshire, England near Stonehenge. The Swedish startup denies having anything to do with the formation pressed into a canola seed field. Sirius XM satellite radio must feel a little jealous, as it’s been beaming music into space for years

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MTV Will Try To Break Guinness Record For Most Live Concerts With O Music Awards

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You’ve probably heard the complaint that MTV has forgotten its music video roots and spends too much time on reality television.

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Better Late Than Never: Deezer Releases APIs To Court Developers In Latest Bid To Catch Up To Spotify

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Music streaming provider Deezer is one of the bigger (and older — it’s been around since 2006) services of its kind, with some 20 million registered users in 48 territories, and 15 million tracks in its catalog — but it has failed to capture mindshare in quite the same way as rival Spotify; and some might argue that this will make it harder in the long run for Deezer to keep up and grow. Today sees the launch of the company’s latest attempt to turn that situation around: “ Open Deezer ,” a new set of APIs for iOS, Android and Java-based web apps, which it hopes will help it bring on a new raft of developers to create music services around its platform

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Science research may be freed from journals’ ‘unhealthy’ paywalls

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The UK government has told academic journal publishers it will make freely available online the publicly-funded research they currently charge for, labelling “paywalls” “deeply unhealthy”.

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