Is Givenchy's fame craze over?

Compared to all the other blogs this one will gear more towards the fashion side of things. There is a huge craze going on with all the celebrities about a specific clothing line called Givenchy. They are a French based clothing line that has all departments covered when it comes to fashion such as jewelry, shoes, handbags, perfume, cologne and cosmetics. In today's fashion you will see almost every celebrity wearing this particular brand. Hubert De Givenchy is the creator of the Givenchy brand. He was born into wealth and had a great passion for fashion. In his past he has worked with some of the top designers of today such as Christian Dior Lucien Lelong and many more. In 1952 he opened the House of Givenchy. He gained popularity but helping Hollywood movie stars. In 1988 he sold his business to Moet Hennessey- Louis Vuitton due to finical reasons. There clothing style is very unique and different from all the others. In 1993 the company achieved a total sales worth of $176 million. Now you can only imagine what it is making today in sales. The spring/Summer collection just dropped and all the fashionable celebrities are all over it. The Givenchy Birds of Paradise Gabardine Blazer is one of the new clothing from this season’s line has a price tag of $4,350. Most of the hip-hop rappers and singers are seen wearing the clothes. The material looks so simple but yet unique at the same time. The question of the day is why do they set the prices so high with crew neck t-shirts running for $785? The next question is will Givenchy stay popular or is their time almost over with? One would think if they made the prices more reasonable and the availability better the company’s income form sales revenue would sky rocket. 

Understand a Ted Talk: The Power of Power of the Pentatonic Scale

For the Ted Talk I decided to go with a man by the name of Bobby McFerrin. In his Ted Talk he was using the audience to demonstrate the power of the brain with the Pentatonic scale in music.  The Pentatonic Scale is made of two scales the Major pentatonic and minor pentatonic scale. The major scale consist of the 1^st, 2nd, 3^rd, 5^th, and 6^th notes of a major scale. The Minor Scale consist of the same five notes of a Major pentatonic scales but it’s Tonic. Bobby is known as the world’s best-known vocal innovators and improvisers according to TED.COM. His credits are well known and have sold more than 20 million copies. For example Don’t Worry Be Happy, and collabs with yo-yo ma, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, The Vienna Philharmonic, and many more. His inspired the audience by including them and not just telling them about how our brains are weird when it comes to the Pentatonic Scale, but also showing them. He shows them by making them sing along as he moved around the stage. He overcame the diversity by not singling anyone out. He first built trust with the audience by first showing them what he was doing by first standing in a spot and humming a note from the scale. Then he moved to the left and it was perceived as him moving up on the pentatonic scale so the note would get higher in pitch. Then when he moved to the right it was perceived that he was going down on the scale so his pitch would get lower. Then once he explained it to the audience and as he moved left to right he allowed them to hum the scale as he sung a melody. Bobby definitely gave the audience a deeper understanding of how our brains function and allow us to finish a pentatonic scale.

Recording Industry Association of America

     As you all know that the Recording Industry Association of America. RIAA is a trade organization that helps promote the creative and financial problems of the major music companies.  The RIAA helps protect intellectual property and the First Amendment rights of artist and music labels. According to the RIAA its members create, manufacture, and distribute about 85 percent of all the legit-recorded music that is produced and sold in the United States. The RIAA is the organization that hands out the certificates for Gold, Platinum, Multi-Platinum and Diamond Sales. The RIAA collect and compiles information on both shipment and buying trends of the recorded music in the United States.

The RIAA main goal is to help the major labels artist the acknowledgment and money they deserve. On of the ways they do that is by keeping track of intellectual property. Intellectual property is basically creations of the mind, such as artistic works, symbols, inventions, literary works, names, images, and designs that are used in commerce. They also pursue in filling suits against people who participate in peer-to-peer file sharing. They are basically the major record labels backbone and helps out with the things the labels don’t usually have time for or won’t do.   

The RIAA is very important to the music industry without them it wouldn’t be any say so when it comes to illegally downloading music. They play a big role in the artist or producers would not have a voice. In a sense the RIAA acts like a lawyer the help go after the people who refuse to pay for individual songs or albums. The association also in a sense helps award the artist on their accomplishments with their record sales, by giving them certificates for the number units they sold on the album. They provide people to access two years shipment data for free. They recently created a new shipment subscription service the gives an interactive database where users can view, compare, and export historical year-end U.S. shipment stats that can date all the way back to 1973. 

Bye Bye Cd's...Hello Digital World

Will there eventually be no more physical CD’s to buy? Most likely the way things have been looking over the past few years the answer is yes. People are now turning to iTunes to buy their music. With this the sales for physical CD’s has drastically declined along with album sales. According to Rolling Stone Music digital music sales added up to 50.3 percent of all music sales in 2011. The Nielsen SoundScan Billboard report that’s released every year stated that digital sales were up by 8.4 percent from 2011 and physical album sales were down by 5 percent from last year. It was the first time digital sales beat physical copies. Adele reportedly sold 1,801,000 digital copies of her album 21. According to Rolling Stone Music Rock and alternative music genres total about 38 million digital downloads by users. While R&B is the third most popular genre for digital album downloads. With digital music being available to the public worldwide it puts a big hurting on the music industry. They music industry has pushed for iTunes to raise their prices so they could make a little bit more profit. So iTunes recently raised their prices on singles to $1.29 for more popular songs 99cents for less popular songs and 69cents for old non-popular songs. In other words they are going to make it impossible to find songs for 69cents. Most consumers only buy single nowadays, that also hurts record labels too. In all actuality the artist will probably never get to see any of the price increase. It is also unfair to the producers and songwriters. With the sale of digital singles and album’s you don’t get to see the producer credits for each song. Give it about another year or two it will be impossible to find your favorite artist physical CD.   

  

Will Fashion save the Music Industry???

The Music industry is doing okay but it will never hit its prime again like it did back in late 90’s. Now in order for them to make money they are leaning towards fashion to save them. Fashion and music of all genres go hand and hand. For example Nicki Minaj is a very stylish woman when it comes to fashion, she even has her own nail polish line. Some might even call her and other big name recording artist fashion Icons. The fans might even want to dress like them because they inspire the fans so much. Since the sale of physical CD’s dropped record labels rely on the sales of merchandise to keep them afloat, if they don’t try to go crazy with the idea and overprice the merchandise. The use of Apples “iTunes” is really hurting the industry. Not only are people not buying physical CD’s anymore but they also are only buying singles instead of the whole album. Justin Bieber is a prime example they sell his name/brand on things such as toothbrushes, pillows, Barbie dolls, Christmas ornaments and many other things. Universal Music Group signed a deal with Tommy Hilfiger on May 26^th of 2011. UMG made it clear that they will not be partnering with the “Tommy Hilfiger” brand, but the deal was to create a rock-‘n’-roll-inspired clothing line for high-end boutiques and department stores. Their plan is to get with artist and bands to create ideas to have there branded merchandise that would be sold to stores. This wouldn’t be Universal’s first time experiencing with fashion. In 2007 they bought Bravado a United Kingdom merchandising company. Bravado reported sales in excess of $300million in 2010 and seen a 28% increase in sales in mid 2011. Music and Fashion will always go hand-in-hand just fashion week in New York. Whether the world is ready to start paying for it is a different story. 

Adam A7x monitor v.s. JBL LSR 4328P

There are so many studio monitors out there to choose from when it comes to the mixing stage. How do you know which one is right for you and the genre of music you’re working with? Well I have two different monitors I like a lot from a personal opinion. The first pair is the Adam A7X Monitors. To me personally these monitors are not very bright but they are very clear for the highs and Mids. I would say these would be great for music geared toward rock and other genres that aren’t big on hearing a lot of the low end. A great spec on this particular brand of monitors is that it uses the ribbon technology. The ribbon tweeter uses a thin diaphragm that supports a planar coil. They are known for reproducing high frequencies. One of the many great specs that make this a great monitor is that it has the X-ART tweeter and advanced version of the ribbon tweeter. The X is just basically representing eXtended frequency response from flat all the way up to 50kHz. In the back of the monitor there is a ¼ unbalanced TRS jack connectors, there is also a balanced female XLR with a high gain (± 4dB). Finally each driver has its own specific amplifier. The 50W A/B amp is responsible for the X-ART tweeter. To this date these speakers have a total of four awards. Next monitor is the JBL LSR 4328P Studio Monitor. Theses monitors are great for RnB, Hip-Hop, Rap, and Dub Step. They are really for any genre that uses a lot of bass or low end in the songs. One of the great features about this particular monitor is that it can calibrate itself to whatever room your in that way it will sound good. There wont be any dead spaces due to all the low end getting trapped in the corners of your room. You would have nice sounding reflections. They are self powered so you don’t need an external amplifier. It has 150 watts of power for the woofer and 70 watts for the high Frequency transducer. The front panel meters show the output levels of the dBFS(decibels Full Scale) when measured at the mix position. Not only does it include a calibration microphone and mic clip but it also has a infrared wireless remote control and a LSR4300 Control Center Software. It has magnetically shielded transducers that minimize interference when used in close proximity to video monitors. Another great feature is the RMC (Room Control Correction) that provides electronic control of room modes.  They have silk dome transducer with Elliptical Oblate Spheroidal Waveguide for precise pattern control. In conclusion I would personally lean toward the JBL monitors because the music I mix uses the bass a lot. Overall these are my top two monitors that I feel sound good there are many other name brands to choose from suck as Mackie, Tannoy, KRK Rokit, Focal, and Yamaha active or passive monitors.

Thank you,

Asia Jones

Is the Music Business getting on it's feet again

Lately the Music industry has been suffering in sales due to peer-to-peer file sharing (illegal downloading), leaking albums, and many other factors. With technology steadily increasing and people finding more ways to leak music or get music for free the music industries sales were dropping drastically. According to money.cnn.com in 1999 the sales at the end of the year were around $14.6 billion now fast forward to 2009 they dropped to $6.3 billion. It also has been reported from the RIAA that from 2004 through 2009 roughly 30 billions songs were illegally downloaded, and only 37 percent of music was paid for. Now even though sales are not doing as well as the did years ago there was a little sign of hope. Since 2004 the overall music sales increased Nielsen SoundScan annual report stated that album sales ended up 1.4% to 330.57 million units from 326.15 million in 2010. Personally I think that the music industry needs to do away with the form of Cd's. Now everyone has gone digital. Most of the time people only like a few songs off the CD and only want to buy that certain song. Now the digital sales of single songs are going up even more by 8.5% to a record 1.27 billion, which is up from 1.17 billion last year. Even though it would be hard the music industry needs to find a way to crack down on how the artist albums are getting leaked. There was a big change on  YouTube last year with copyright infringement. Now if you try to upload a song that you don’t have the rights to it gets taken off to avoid copyright infringement. I feel that there are still true die hard fans out there that will support and buy their favorite artists music. With all the new talent coming into the industry and that little jump of improvement I will be excited to see what the sales be at the start of next year.