Vincent James & Keep Music Alive!

Happy Monday ALL!

Its been a whopping 4 ½ months since my last blog posting wow that’s pretty sad. Well to make it up to you starting this week I’ll be doing 5 blog postings per week Monday-Friday with new info and opinions posted each day. I figure if I can’t do once a week then maybe if I do once/day I’ll get into a rhythm (ha rhythm it’s a musical thing :)). Okay here goes:

Today we’re gonna talk about American Idol and ITunes Price hike that starts April 1st (that’s no joke).

American Idol – I’ve been watching AI pretty closely this year and have been very impressed with the quality of the contestants that made it into the Final 12. Alhough I wasn't surpised to see Michael Sarver go this past week, I was surprised to see Alexis grace go the week before. It seemed the only thing she was guilty of was the dreadful song choice ("Jolene") and then having to sing that same song in an emotional sing or bye bye event at the end of that night. Definitely didn’t feel it was her time to go but hey plenty of good ones left. Right now I’ll stake out my two favorites for the finals and say it will be Adam Lambert and Allison Iraheta. Adam has a voice that is not to be believed and has the stage presence and artistry to go along with it. Give him the right songs and he will sell millions and millions of CDs without a doubt. Allison is also an amazing talent and to think she is only 16 is mind boggling. If she can keep hitting us with smart song choices and the same quality of performance she has been doing you just might see Adam vs. Allison in the finals in a battle of the A’s :)

ITunes Price Hike – After selling tunes for 99 cents since its inception I’m amazed to see Itunes raising the price to 1.29 for the most popular songs. I know this is being driven by the record labels and again the labels are making a big mistake in my opinion. Its easier in the consumer’s mind to know that all tunes are 0.99 instead of 0.69 to 1.29 . This change will just serve to confuse and alienate the consumer who will switch to Amazon or other places to get their legal MP3’s. Of course Apple Itunes will now give us MP3’s without the DRM Copy protection but that is long long overdue. If Apple is not careful they will see their market share of the MP3 market slowly decline. As far as the general price of MP3 downloads is concerned even 0.99 is probably more than it should be. A physical album used to cost $ 10-$15 which would be $1 - $1.50 per track..but in that was included the cost of packaging (now gone) and the payments due the record stores and distributors (now goes to Apple but hey NO PHYSICAL INVENTORY costs). So in my opinion selling any MP3 downlaods for more than 0.60-0.70 cents per song never ever made sense.

Okay that’s my rant for today..please stop back tomorrow to see whats new in the world of Love, Songs, Love Songs and Music :)

~Vincent James @ LoveSongs.com