Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve heard a lot of chatter about “breaking” new musical acts. The current bone of contention: can a truly DIY artist sell more than 10,000 albums?

The debate kicked off in mid January when Tom Silverman — founder and president of the legendary hip hop label Tommy Boy Records — was featured in a series of articles on musiccoaching.com. During the first interview, Tom referenced 2009 data from SoundScan, the company that tracks retail purchases of music, which indicated that only 112 records reached platinum status in 2009 (that’s 1 million albums). He then focused on the other end of the sales spectrum, pointing to the dearth of artists that have broken the 10,000 sales barrier without label help. Tom said:

In 2008 there were 1,500 releases that sold over 10,000 album units. Out of that there were only 227 of them that were artists that had broken 10,000 for the first time. So in the whole year only 227 of the artists were artists that had broken what we call the “obscurity line.” When you sell 10,000 albums, you’re no longer an obscure artist; people know about you. […] We looked at the 227 and identified that only 14 of them were artists doing it on their own and all the rest were on majors and indies; a little more than half were on indies.

If you’ve been paying any attention to music biz news this week, you’ve no doubt stumbled across an item (or ten) about Google OneBox — the web search company’s bold foray into the world of on-demand music. While many of the reports focus on what this new service means for fans hungry to hear tunes with one-click, they don’t often drill down into what this might mean for artists and songwriters.

OneBox has already launched, so you could just go try it out right now. Or, you could read what our vigorous research revealed about the new venture. OK, it wasn’t really that vigorous — we simply entered a band into the Google search bar to see what happened next.

Being that it’s so close to Halloween, we figured we’d search for Slayer’s classic thrash album, Reign in Blood. Lo and behold, a handful of track titles popped up, with a little “play” icon next to each. We clicked on the title track and were instantly slammed by axe aggression. Neat! read more

On September 23, 2008, songwriters, publishers, record labels and digital music services announced they had reached an agreement on mechanical royalties for songs played on online music services. According to the agreement, limited download and interactive streaming services will pay a mechanical royalty of 10.5 percent of revenue, less any amounts owed for performance royalties. Called a “breakthrough that will facilitate new ways to offer music to consumers online,” the voluntary agreement crafted by the Digital Media Association (DiMA), the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), the RIAA, the Nashville Songwriters Association International(NSAI) and the Songwriters Guild of America (SGA) ended a longstanding dispute about mechanical royalties for interactive streaming and limited downloads. This blog post explains what digital mechanical royalties are, and how this agreement affects musicians, music services and webcasters. read more

Yahoo! to stop supporting Yahoo! Music after September 30
Starting Oct. 1, customers won’t be able to revive frozen tracks or move working ones onto new hard drives or computers, because Yahoo! won’t be providing any more keys to the songs’ DRM wrappers. Without the keys, the music is stuck. If a user’s computer goes on the fritz, say good-bye to Yahoo’s music. This situation epitomizes the problem we laid out in our last post about the Library of Congress.
Chris Gaither, LA Times read more

FCC Chairman plans to recommend censure against Comcast
Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin plans to recommend that the FCC issue a warning against the ISP for imposing "arbitrarily limits" on its subscribers. The recommendation, now circulating internally, would require various disclosure and procedural shifts without applying penalties.
Margaret Kane, News.com read more

Coldplay Smashes Records on iTunes, In More Ways Than One…
Apple declined to offer hard figures, though digital album totals of Viva La Vida across various retailers topped 288,000, according to figures supplied by major label executives. Of that, iTunes carries a commanding percentage, one that may have pushed past 275,000, according to a separate estimate.
Paul Resnikoff, Digital Music News read more