In a front page Wall Street Journal story, a pair of reporters uncover the corporate-fueled rise of YouTube star Marie Digby. It turns out that she was signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records for two years. There was a bit of an uproar from both sides. Some cynics felt cheated, believing that the homemade video clips of the very talented Digby were not genuine. That’s rubbish, of course. Even if Disney paid for her Mac and helped her map out a strategy of playing covers of popular tunes, it was still Digby — belting away tunes as she strummed an acoustic guitar or tickled the ivory on her home piano — that drew in music fans. So you can put me in the other camp, of fans defending her work as the real deal. I wrote about it in Birth of a YouTube Star.  

Nielsen SoundScan is reporting that CD sales are off a whopping 20% so far this year. You didn’t think it was that bad, did you? CD sales have fallen every single year, save one, since the millennium started.

In this article I go over the problems with the music industry, why the death of the CD isn’t that bad, and how the movie and video game retailers better take note because they’re on the cusp of being marginalized too.