“Christmas” looks to earn the most weeks at No. 1 of any Buble album, as it will eclipse the two-week chart-topping run of “Crazy Love” in 2009. “Christmas” will also mark the longest consecutive-week reign at the top for any album since early June, when Adele’s “21″ wrapped a five-week run at No. 1 (of its 13 total weeks at No. 1).

On Nielsen SoundScan’s Building chart below — a precursor to the final Billboard 200 ranking — reflecting the first four days (Monday through Thursday) of SoundScan’s tracking week as ...]]> As we reported on Thursday (Dec. 8), Michael Buble’s “Christmas” album is on its way to a third straight week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, so say industry prognosticators. The album may sell well over 400,000 copies by the end of the tracking week on Sunday, Dec. 11.

“Christmas” looks to earn the most weeks at No. 1 of any Buble album, as it will eclipse the two-week chart-topping run of “Crazy Love” in 2009. “Christmas” will also mark the longest consecutive-week reign at the top for any album since early June, when Adele’s “21″ wrapped a five-week run at No. 1 (of its 13 total weeks at No. 1).

On Nielsen SoundScan’s Building chart below — a precursor to the final Billboard 200 ranking — reflecting the first four days (Monday through Thursday) of SoundScan’s tracking week as reported by six major merchants. Buble is unsurprisingly at No. 1 on the tally, while the Black Keys’ new “El Camino” is sitting pretty at No. 2.

The latter should start with at least 150,000 sold, but will likely move even more — perhaps 170,000 to 180,000. Even if it sells only 150,000, that will easily notch the rock act’s best sales week yet. Their last album, “Brothers,” set their previous best week, when it landed at No. 3 with 73,000 in May of 2010.

Adele’s “21″ — recently crowned the No. 1 Billboard 200 album of the year — is in the No. 3 spot, followed by Justin Bieber’s former No. 1, “Under the Mistletoe,” at No. 4.

Amy Winehouse’s posthumous album “Lioness: Hidden Treasures,” is No. 5 on the Building Chart, Drake’s “Take Care” is No. 6 and “Glee, the Music: Season Three Volume 7″ album is No. 7.

Winehouse’s effort might start with 90,000 to 110,000, while the latest “Glee” set is looking to bow in the 50,000 to 60,000 range.

Korn’s new “Path of Totality” is No. 8 on the Building tally, while Nickelback’s “Here and Now” takes the No. 9 slot. Closing out the preview chart is Andrea Bocelli’s “Concerto” set at No. 10. Korn’s new effort may launch with a 50,000 start.

A redesign is supposed to make Twitter easier to navigate. It offers more accessible features that customize the experience for each user. The service is also expanding users’ profile pages to accommodate more detailed information about brands in text, photos and video as Twitter tries to convert more companies into advertisers.

Twitter’s tweaks debuted in a Thursday update to its software for smartphones and tablet computers. The new look will be gradually rolled out on its website during the next few weeks.

The revisions aren’t a matter of desperation for Twitter, which entrepreneur Jack Dorsey invented within another startup in 2006. Twitter has ...]]> SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Twitter is changing to address a paradox about a service that revolves around messages limited to just 140 characters. As simple as it sounds, the concept remains too confusing and frustrating for a lot of people.

A redesign is supposed to make Twitter easier to navigate. It offers more accessible features that customize the experience for each user. The service is also expanding users’ profile pages to accommodate more detailed information about brands in text, photos and video as Twitter tries to convert more companies into advertisers.

Twitter’s tweaks debuted in a Thursday update to its software for smartphones and tablet computers. The new look will be gradually rolled out on its website during the next few weeks.

The revisions aren’t a matter of desperation for Twitter, which entrepreneur Jack Dorsey invented within another startup in 2006. Twitter has become a vital communications tool and a virtual water cooler for discussing the topics of day, be it sports, entertainment or an overthrow of a Middle East regime.

Twitter now has more than 100 million active users who post an average of 250 million messages, or “tweets,” a day. The company says the growth in new accounts has increased by 25 percent since October, when Twitter became a feature in the operating system that runs Apple Inc.’s latest iPhones and iPads.

Even so, Twitter executives concluded they needed to make the service even simpler to use and understand to reach its long-term goal of exceeding 1 billion active users.

The facelift is an attempt to “bridge the gap between the awareness of Twitter and the engagement on Twitter,” company CEO Dick Costolo said.

Dorsey, who was cast aside as Twitter’s CEO in 2008 only to return as executive chairman this year, played an instrumental role in the makeover. He appeared alongside Costolo on Thursday at a media event to celebrate the changes.

With the overhaul, Twitter hopes to attract more of the technology neophytes that have flocked to Facebook – a social network with 800 million worldwide users – from digital wizards to the Auntie Ems of the world.

Twitter wants to reach its goal with fewer bells and whistles than Facebook, which offers new things to do and more ways to do them every few months.

“We are going to offer simplicity in a world of complexity,” Costolo said.

By avoiding clutter, Twitter believes it will have a better chance to remain accessible in remote parts of the world, where Internet connections might be clunky and devices might not be as sophisticated.

The streamlined approach is also meant to ensure Twitter runs quickly. The company says its latest adjustments will make the messaging service about five times faster.

As with any significant tinkering to a widely used service, Twitter risks alienating faithful users who liked the status quo. Facebook, for instance, has frequently been excoriated by its users for a variety of revisions during the past few years. Despite the griping, relatively few people have kicked their Facebook habits.

Most of Twitter’s key changes will be found on a new navigation bar at the top of a user’s page.

A new “Connect” section there will make it quicker for users to see what is being said about them in other tweets. This area will also provide a quick way to find people and brands under their Twitter account handles. Currently, users sometimes have to sift through multiple search results before finding the person or brand that they want to follow.

Another section called “Discover” makes it easier to browse through subjects denoted by hash tags and, over time, see information customized to each user’s personal interests. Twitter will pick out the information and topics to highlight in this section, based on what accounts users follow and the kind of things they tweet about.

The expanded space for users’ profiles can be used by any account holder, although this feature appears aimed primarily at companies that want to showcase their brands.

Twitter already has enlisted more than 20 companies to expand their profiles to demonstrate the new possibilities. The list of initial participants includes American Express Co., Coca-Cola Co. and Walt Disney Co.’s Pixar animation studio.

There’s no fee for the expanded profile pages. But it may help Twitter become more valuable to potential advertisers as it tries to make more money off its growing audience. Twitter is trying to increase its revenue as it builds toward an initial public offering of stock. The company isn’t in a rush for an IPO as it raised $400 million from venture capitalists earlier this year.

Although Twitter didn’t even allow advertising until last year, it is now getting more aggressive, partly because there hasn’t been a major backlash to the marketing messages that have been showing up within users’ feeds during the past few months.

The research firm eMarketer estimates that Twitter’s ad revenue will approach $140 million this year and rise to $260 million next year. As a privately held company, Twitter doesn’t disclose its revenue.

Twitter’s new headquarters, located in an old furniture market in a hardscrabble neighborhood, is a testament to the company’s ambitions. Costolo already has leased 220,000 square feet of the building and has an option to add more – enough to accommodate several thousand workers. Twitter currently has about 700 employees, most of whom will make the two-mile move from the company’s current San Francisco office next summer.

BMI licenses TV networks so that shows airing on these channels can air music during programs. When TV shows air music, producers are tasked with keeping track of the names of songs, how the music is used, and for how long in “cue sheets” given to BMI. These sheets are the ...]]> Deyon Davis is a songwriter and the head of a business that claims responsibility for representing hundreds of songwriters in placing their music in films and on hit TV shows like “American Idol,” “So You Think You Can Dance” and “Jersey Shore.” A year ago, Davis was sued by BMI, the performance royalty collection society, for submitting falsified “cue-sheets,” allegedly obstructing the organization’s calculation of royalties. Last week, Davis struck back with a counterclaim that alleges that BMI has engaged in a broad scheme to rip off songwriters and publishers.

BMI licenses TV networks so that shows airing on these channels can air music during programs. When TV shows air music, producers are tasked with keeping track of the names of songs, how the music is used, and for how long in “cue sheets” given to BMI. These sheets are the primary way that performance rights organizations keep track of music on television and apportion their licensing revenue to songwriters.

In its lawsuit against Davis last December, BMI accused him of submitting falsified cue sheets that allegedly made it difficult to track song usage and calculate proper royalties. After allegedly discovering anomalies, BMI approached various TV producers in an investigation and says it found that Davis was overpaid by $1.5 million and others were overpaid by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The court documents say that Davis approached one of his songwriters, Max Golay — who worked for a company hired by the producers of “So You Think You Can Dance” and “Superstars Of Dance” to prepare cue sheets — to revise the cue sheets so that it contains false information about the music used during the show.

According to the amended complaint, Davis approached Golay and told him he was experiencing financial difficulty and convinced Golay to change the cue sheets. The falsified cue sheets labeled background instrumental as background vocal music; and also increased the duration of the cues, in order to obtain a higher rate, according to the court documents. Moreover, the revised cue sheets also added new cues of music during what appeared to be commercial breaks.

“The overall result of these changes was substantially higher royalty payments,” BMI alleged.

Golay admitted his role in revising the cue sheets and repaid BMI more than $121,000 in July 2010, the documents state. Moreover, Dance Nation and Masters of Dance subsequently submitted corrected sheets to BMI. But in an answer to the initial BMI complaint, Davis denies the allegations in the BMI complaint “that purports to describe conduct undertaken by him.”

He counter claims that Golay concocted the scheme to produce inflated payments for his own benefit, and did it for others songwriters so it would be harder to detect his fraud.

But BMI says in the documents that this isn’t the first time the company has detected revised cue sheets with Davis’ involvement. In September 2008, a company called Rocket TV Entertainment submitted revised cue sheets for some MTV Networks programming including “The Real World,” “Battle of the Sexes,” and “Punkd.”

The documents say BMI was unable to confirm the legitimacy of Rocket TV and that “Davis subsequently confirmed that he had submitted the revised cue sheets to BMI as Rocket TV in order to make it appear to BMI as thought the cue sheets were being submitted by a production company and thereby circumvent BMI’s general policy against accepting cue sheets from its affiliated writers.” But Davis denies that allegation in his answer to the BMI complaint.

Last Friday, Davis lashed out against BMI with a counterclaim, which begins: “Metaphorically speaking, BMI is a bully. BMI deceptively lures unsuspecting songwriters and publishers into its playground (BMI’s performing rights licensing and royalty system) with the promise of fun (the fair calculation and payments of royalties) and then spends the day bossing them around, beating them up and taking their toys.”

Davis goes on to claim that BMI “deliberately employs an unclear royalty calculation system for tracking public performances in order to decrease the amount of royalties it must pay to its affiliates.”

BMI is then charged with “serving as its own judge and executioner.”

After BMI filed the lawsuit against Davis, it allegedly withheld payments from him. Davis says he hasn’t received anything in a year and a half, which he argues is tantamount to rendering any defense of BMI’s claims to be pointless. He’s countersuing for breach of contract, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, conversion, negligent misrepresentation, negligence, and more, demanding nearly $400,000 in compensatory damages and an order that would enjoin BMI from “utilizing misleading statements in advertisements and promotional material regarding its ability to accurately track public performances of its affiliates’ copyrighted works on television shows.”

In its complaint, BMI noted that its standard practices are published in its “Royalty Information Booklet” and specifically provide that, with respect to royalties paid in error, the affiliate may be expected to repay on request the balance of an overpayment that remains unrecouped.” It further alleged that the defendants had unilaterally and fraudulently” accepted more consideration than was agreed upon.”

BMI declined to comment on the situation.

McGraw is now free to record for another label-or on his own-without Curb, which has been his only label home throughout his career. A trial for the damage portion of the suit is set for July. The status of “Emotional Traffic,” the latest McGraw album delivered to Curb that the artist presumed to be his final one of the label, is unclear.

On May 13, Curb Records filed a breach of contract suit in Davidson County Chancery Court against McGraw in relation to McGraw’s recording agreement with label. McGraw filed a counter suit against Curb Records on May 24 seeking advance payment and recording-fund reimbursement, unspecified damages, and a jury trial.

The counter-suit also asked that ...]]> A Nashville judge has ruled in favor of Tim McGraw and against Curb Records in an ongoing legal dispute between the two, according to the Nashville Tennessean.

McGraw is now free to record for another label-or on his own-without Curb, which has been his only label home throughout his career. A trial for the damage portion of the suit is set for July. The status of “Emotional Traffic,” the latest McGraw album delivered to Curb that the artist presumed to be his final one of the label, is unclear.

On May 13, Curb Records filed a breach of contract suit in Davidson County Chancery Court against McGraw in relation to McGraw’s recording agreement with label. McGraw filed a counter suit against Curb Records on May 24 seeking advance payment and recording-fund reimbursement, unspecified damages, and a jury trial.

The counter-suit also asked that McGraw’s “Emotional Traffic” record be deemed McGraw’s last album due the label and for McGraw to be “free to begin recording for himself or any other party as of July 23, 2011.”

Curb alleged in the May 13 complaint that McGraw’s “Traffic” tracks were recorded too early prior to its delivery “in a transparent tactic to attempt to fulfill his contractual recording commitment to Curb prematurely in breach of the recording agreement.”

Tim McGraw: ‘After 13 Albums, It’s Time For a Change’

Curb’s position in the suit was that McGraw’s recordings should be “topical and new” and that the artist had agreed that each new album be recorded “no earlier than 12 months and no later than 18 months” following the delivery of the previous album. The suit alleged McGraw began recording “Emotional Traffic” tracks “in 2008 or before,” prior to the allowable period under contract, according to Curb. Curb’s suit sought undisclosed damages and a sixth “option period” record, as well as “injunctive relief preventing him from agreeing to provide, or providing, his personal services as a recording artist for the benefit of parties other than Curb Records until he has fulfilled his duties and obligations under the Recording Agreement.”

In McGraw’s expansive response, the artist stated that the material for “Traffic” was recorded and mastered in early 2009-2010 and Curb was holding the album “hostage from country music fans for the purpose of compelling Tim McGraw to serve perpetually under a contract that he has already fully and faithfully completed.” The suit added that Curb’s “repeated serial releases of what it characterizes as greatest hits albums is obviously a naked attempt to create a perpetual recording contract, forcing Tim McGraw into a repressive environment of indefinite duration.”

Between 2006 and 2010, Curb put out six compilations or variations on hits packages, the latest being “Number One Hits” last November. Curb has released a total of seven compilations on McGraw.

Let’s look at it from another angle. If I remember my basic statistics correctly, and songwriting talent follows a normal distribution, ...]]> Every organization related to pro audio has been affected by the democratization of content creation. New, powerful tools that aid songwriting, music creation/production and audio recording have opened the doors to many, many more individuals, whether in music, sound design or post. To illustrate the macro effects of this type of explosive growth, let’s look at the recent experience of ASCAP. According to an article on The Huffington Post by Paul Williams, president and Chairman of the Board for ASCAP, 600 people sign up with the organization every week, which “equals more than 30,000 self-declared, career-minded songwriters per year.” The issue is whether the people who want to make songwriting their career can actually do so given the today’s realities.

Let’s look at it from another angle. If I remember my basic statistics correctly, and songwriting talent follows a normal distribution, then those outside three standard deviations, the outliers, make up 0.3 percent of the total group. Focusing on just the exceptional ones, it becomes half of that. So if the group size is 30,000 songwriters, you can expect 45 exceptional writers to emerge. With 1 million, you get 1,500 potential superstars. As group size increases, so does the number of exceptional songwriters; perhaps they have a chance of being discovered.

Similar things could be said about musicians. Just scan MySpace and Facebook, and you can see that there are thousands and thousands of bands vying for attention. Audio engineers, who work closely with many of them on a daily basis, have a unique vantage point where we see more of the artist than just about anybody. We should look at ourselves as enablers and as catalysts to those who are truly talented and deserve a wider audience.

The same can be said about people dabbling in recording. We should be happy that so many people have taken an interest in what we do. Let’s show them how to do things right at every opportunity that presents itself and bring everybody’s level up, raising the overall bar.

That is what I think stewardship is about: looking to the next generation to see that our craft is preserved and that it is built upon, especially as the number of practitioners has skyrocketed.

- by Kirk Imamura

But, as it prepares to announce a “new direction” Wednesday, how has the music service fared so far?

I researched disclosures since Spotify’s 2008 inception to present this four-year chart illustrating its growth to date.

One can clearly see how Spotify caught on like wildfire in 2009, prompting the company to introduce limitations like a UK invite-only system just to manage the server load.

Within the base of total users, premium subscription growth has been steady and less pronounced, but has doubled in the last year, to 2.5 million.

The company has not specified a U.S. subscriber count but, viewed here, the subscriber growth has mostly occurred on the trajectory Spotify was already ploughing.

Spotify is not giving us an update on its total registered users ...]]> Spotify is getting its systems in order to support a planned 100 million users in the future, job openings suggest.

But, as it prepares to announce a “new direction” Wednesday, how has the music service fared so far?

I researched disclosures since Spotify’s 2008 inception to present this four-year chart illustrating its growth to date.

One can clearly see how Spotify caught on like wildfire in 2009, prompting the company to introduce limitations like a UK invite-only system just to manage the server load.

Within the base of total users, premium subscription growth has been steady and less pronounced, but has doubled in the last year, to 2.5 million.

The company has not specified a U.S. subscriber count but, viewed here, the subscriber growth has mostly occurred on the trajectory Spotify was already ploughing.

Spotify is not giving us an update on its total registered users base beyond the 10 million it gave a year ago. Particularly with a new audience coming through Facebook, this number has likely exploded to the point where it would make Spotify’s premium conversion rate look very small.

So, this spring, Spotify changed to expressing its subscriber count within a count of monthly active users — a more meaningful approach.

Having secured funding to go global, Spotify and its rivals are now racing each other in markets like East Asia, Australasia, central Europe and Latin America.

A rumored expansion of Spotify’s API, allowing countless online services to leverage Spotify’s music to paying subscribers, could make it the kind of broad platform capable of achieving the 100 million users it is targeting.