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“In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that’s nuts. It’s partly due to the fact that EMI wasn’t giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff,” Thom Yorke Read more | digg story

Former Talking Head’s frontman gives his take on how emerging artists should look at the music industry situation.read more | digg story

Music industry - the lesson is not that free will always win. EASY will always win. I could rip this track for free by breaking the DRM and converting to an MP3, but that’s 10 minutes of my day I can spend doing something else (like blogging about it). That would be free, but I want easy. I value my time more than my money, because I can always make money, but my lifespan is finite and irreplaceable. Read Article

You can’t stop digital copies! When will they learn?? OPENhulu, a ripoff site that looks a lot like Hulu, features much of the same video content, and doesn’t require an invitation. The concept is pretty simple. Since Hulu lets registered users embed videos on their own web sites, why not grab all the embeddable content from Hulu and post it on an open site?read more | digg story

Not that I like to defend the RIAA, but this clears up the claim that the RIAA said ripped CD’s are “unauthorized.” Despite what some websites are reporting, the RIAA is NOT saying that ripping CDs into MP3s is illegal.Read Article 

The beleaguered music industry is beginning to show more enthusiasm for free, advertising-supported business models. More FREE and LEGAL MUSIC!  read more | Digg This

No matter how much money is coughed up in fines or how many kids get made into examples, the downloading will continue … just not on my machine.  Read More…

It could be a Zen koan, or a fragment of a Fifth Dimension lyric: The value of music is what the listener will pay. But as of Oct. 10, it became a viable business model. That was the day Radiohead made its seventh studio album, “In Rainbows,” available for download online. Customers were invited to pay whatever they wished. Clicking on the question mark on the Radiohead site led to a screen that read, “It’s up to you.” Clicking on that led to another message: “No, really. It’s up to you.”

According to early estimates, 1.2 million downloaded the record in the first two days, earning the band somewhere between $1 million and $5 million. Soon after, the withered husk of the recording industry gently commenced to collapse on itself.

Or possibly not. For while there was joy among Radiohead fans and those eager to get on with the post-scarcity economy, it remains unclear whether a new paradigm has been established. According to Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, Radiohead’s experiment isn’t likely to succeed with just any artist. “Radiohead fans are a partisan group,” Cowen says. “It’s very easy to get donations from them.” Moreover, an e-commerce survey claims that more than 60 percent of “In Rainbows”

downloaders paid nothing; Radiohead disputed the findings. The exact numbers, however, remain known only to Radiohead.

But it’s a bit unrealistic to expect five dour introverts from Oxfordshire to come up with a universal fix to save the record industry. The Radiohead payment scheme, whatever the final tally, worked for Radiohead. (It may be portable; Paste, a magazine devoted to indie rock, ran a monthlong pay-what-you-want subscription deal in the wake of “In Rainbows.”) And yet at least some aspects of the old model may still prove useful. The CD of “In Rainbows” — an actual, tactile, old-economy product — will be available in record stores on Jan. 1. And EMI, the band’s spurned label, has proved resourceful itself, quickly assembling a Radiohead boxed set in time for the holidays, happily riding on publicity it didn’

t pay a thing to create. 

Original NY Times Article  

“You can’t force people to follow directions they deem arbitrary”.

Image and Caption thanks to Michael Salamon

The Songwriters Association of Canada SAC proposes that each Internet-using Canadian citizen be charged a minimal $5 monthly fee directly by their ISPs. This collective monthly license fee would then be split among artists and content owners, generating new revenues and allowing former pirates to sleep better at night now that they can legally trade music for a nominal fee. Read More…