Music News: Roger Waters 2010 Tour, Supergrass Breaks Up, Lilith Fair Sched Complete, CD Baby & MySpace Connect, No Cream Reunion, More

* Former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters will tour in 2010 to perform the band's album "The Wall" live in its entirety. You'll find Roger Waters tour dates here.

* U.K. pop group Supergrass is breaking up after almost two decades together. They produced six studio albums, according to the linked article, including the anthemic "Alright."

* Online music retailer CD Baby is partnering with MySpace Music to sell tunes from CD Baby artists on the widely used social-networking site. Though MySpace has lost momentum to Facebook and Twitter as a go-to social-networking destination, it's still a potent force for musicians and fans to reach each other.

* Lilith Fair has announced its complete list of 2010 tour dates. The all-women touring festival, begun by Sarah McLachlan a decade ago, returns this summer. McLachlan is once again headlining every event on the tour, which otherwise has a different line-up of 11 performers at each date.

* Jack Bruce, best known as the bassist for 1960s supergroup Cream (with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker) and West, Bruce, & Laing, has confirmed that Cream will never reunite again. Which makes me very glad that I saw them in 2005 at Madison Square Garden. Even though that ticket was the most money I've ever spend for a concert ticket, it was well worth it.

* And finally, the highly influential Malcolm McLaren died last week, and KCRW music librarian Eric J. Lawrence offers a brief remembrance here. McLaren is best know for managing the Sex Pistols, but he also recorded his own albums and had a hand in fashion and cinema. 

CD Sales Down... How Accurate are Those Numbers?

We've all heard the statistics over over the last few about CD sales plummeting, largely due to music downloading (mostly illegal ones). Everyone seems to assume those stats are accurate and that the sale of recorded music is a business permanently in decline.

But I heard an podcast recently that made me question these stats and some of the assumptions behind them. Namely, who conducted the research, what channels of CD sales did they measure (and which did they not cover), and how much of recorded music sales do they actually cover?

The LiveWire podcast from Portland, Oregon featured an interview with Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, the successful online seller of indie artist CDs. I first heard of CD Baby about eight years ago when I noticed that a number of my favorite folk/Americana artists were selling their albums there.

Sivers said that contrary to the doom and gloom figures about declining CD sales, sales of independent music CD were actually up 60% or so over the last few years, I believe. So are the doom-and-gloom figures reported over the last few years only measuring CDs from major labels and not indie outfits? Do they cover only major bricks-and-mortar outlets and big online sellers like Wal-Mart and Amazon.com?

The discrepancy between the much-quoted stats and Sivers's figures make me wonder. After all, music sales charts rely on SoundScan, which is known to count sales from certain outlets and is accepted to exclude other channels.