Grokster Loses
I think I just heard brains exploding at Downhill Battle. More posts as we try to comprehend what this actually means for working musicians.
News
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CDBaby’s Derek Sivers gets “Love” from LA Weekly
Derek reminisces about how a clerk at CDNow inadvertently reshaped online music distribution for thousands of working musicians. He also talks about the dual-tracking trend (where folks play music but don’t want to give up a day job) and how…
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Michael Jackson Verdict
Apparently, the judge will read out the verdict in the Michael Jackson case at 4:30pm ET. When my clients and I have discussed this case over the last few months, I’ve always held that this is the extreme example of…
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Tupperware Parties for Musicians
Our friend Abnu from WordLab points out a quick MSNBC piece on the way that listening parties can make or break your record release.
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Sanctuary Records Up for Sale
Sanctuary Records, one of the few large labels that has figured out how to really make money by partnering with artists, may be up for sale, or at least readying an offering. Ever since Warner managed to make some money…
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Music Critics Have Had Enough of Major Label Listening Parties
Send a CD, or expect no column inches from the New Yorker. And I won’t be surprised if more publications follow suit. Could be a great opportunity for independent musicians to score some reviews if the majors don’t wise up.
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What’s the difference between gross and net? About $4 million.
Trent Reznor wins his lawsuit.
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When will your band start its own 401K?
Widespread Panic is a $14 million-per year corporation, and staffers receive health, dental, and retirement benefits. Also, Steve Miller knows where every penny of his royalties have gone…
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And you thought house concerts were just for folkies…
Destiny’s Child Performs at $7.4M Bar Mitzvah
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Music Is Finished In The Audience
Jeff Tweedy and Larry Lessig discuss the challenges of creating art in a vacuum.
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Heebie Jeebies
If Mark Cuban buys CBGB’s, he could start by cleaning the bathroom.
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Put your pinky finger to your lips and say it with me… “One Hundred MEEEEEELLLLLION Dollars!”
Simon Fuller cashes out.
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SXSW, Day 2
David Hooper finally eats something, and encounters strange bedfellows in Austin…
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It could be worse…
The next time you kick your own butt for making a boneheaded mistake while promoting your music, remember that it could be worse. You could have paid somebody to screw it up even more, and they could have a trail…
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Crispy Keyboard. Or would that just make it Cajun?
We work in the only industry where incinerating and beating (Goodfellas-style) a piece of equipment is a legitimate part of a product demo.
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Record labels want to send their business your way…
…or so you’d think, since they’re trying to strongarm iTunes and other online music stores into raising their prices. Remember that you can jump into the paid-download game pretty easily by using a third-party distributor like CDBaby, or by adding…
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Comeback singer owes big bucks…
Later this week, I’ve got a podcast about structuring your personal business in a way that shield you from lawsuits and allows you to appropriately open up a part of your business to outside investors. Here’s a cautionary tale of…
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Filling the buckets…
Sounds like Andy Lack is wondering if he should have stayed over at NBC…
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Five Ways The Music Industry Is Changing In Seattle (and everywhere else…)
Rafat points us at a stellar article in Seattle Weekly which chronicles five events that have a ripple effect on your career, even if you’re not in Seattle: Starbucks is taking over the record industry. Paul Allen is pulling out…
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Indie 103.1 in Deep…
Everyone’s favorite commercial radio experiment is rumored to be on the outs, only because a government cap on ownership and "joint sales agreements" may force Clear Channel out of their partnership with the frequency’s owner.
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Dance Dance (DRM-Free) Revolution
From BoingBoing: With all the buzz about whether to lock up your MP3 downloads, one reader points out that dance labels have been thriving thanks to paid downloads of unlocked MP3’s.
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Grammy Goes to Direct Patronage!
Lots of my clients and other webloggers have been going nuts about the Grammy that was awarded to a download-only release. That, in itself, is great news. What excites me even more about the winning project is that it was…
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NYC Club Business Back to Pre-Smoking Ban Levels
By most accounts, clubs in New York City are back to the same level of business they enjoyed before the city enacted its smoking ban. This shows me even more that when bans like this get introduced in other cities,…
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Tonic In Trouble
More evidence of the pressure live venues are under… Tonic in NYC presents avant-garde and experimental work, not usually the most profitable business to be in. But they’re one of the few "curatorial" clubs I talk about in seminars, one…
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Radio Killed The Radio Promoter
I’ve been telling our clients and conference call listeners for some time now that the payola scandal fallout would actually make it harder to get attention for emerging artists at commercial radio — already an "eye of the needle" situation.…
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Universal wants a cut of VOD
Universal’s actually going to pull it’s artists’ videos from any on-demand service that doesn’t pay it a new royalty fee (above the fees already paid out to the PROs and to SoundExchange, which eventually get to artists). So let me…
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Patronage Pays Again
Remember last year when I did a set of ta;ls about how we’re moving back toward a patronage-based music culture, much like we experienced from the Renaissance on through the late 19th century? Here’s some more evidence: commissioned songwriting is…
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Using the big words…
Here’s a great idea: vocabulary-rich hip-hop compilations distributed by a leading test prep center. What kinds of alternative sales channels can you think of today?
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Music, Flowing Like Water
Bob Baker’s finally lending his considerable experience to the blogosphere, and he weighs in on the debate that the Future of Music book is stirring up — imagine a world where new music downloads flow as easily as… tap water?
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Quote of the day…
Even though it’s about film, it applies to all entertainment… "It’s a huge, huge learning curve with a lot of human wreckage behind." – Steven Soderbergh, in the New York Times.
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The Long Tail
Wired’s Chris Anderson is expanding his theory of the "Long Tail" to book form, and is blogging the process. Read the original article to see why it’s an important theory for you to be thinking about.
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Someone’s gonna find a fan club president under the bumper of an SUV…
Lots of buzz about the Chely Wright situation. We’re shocked, shocked to hear that someone in the fan club encouraged folks to pose as military family members to encourage jocks to play the single. Of course, this has been going…
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Even Orrin Hatch Gets Mailbox Money
Our IndieBiz.com members participated in a great conversation about songwriting royalties the other day. Here’s an example I wish we could have discussed — did you know that Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, one of the folks who legislates issues affecting…
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“The public has been street teamed to death.”
Seth Godin spent a few days in the room with record industry executives who wanted to rediscover what it is they’re actually selling. The Smoking Gun Lefsetz is there…
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We really are locking the doors over at IndieBiz.com
David is really serious about this, folks. He puts a lot of energy into telling new members about the service, but we both agreed that we can help folks better by putting as much energy as possible into helping the…
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My Backend is on Fire!
I keep nudging you about unusual merch opportunities: here’s what Joe Perry’s up to…
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Pew Round II
Apparently, the half of pool of musicians who told the Pew Survey that they don’t want their audiences sharing music is about to beat down the half of the pool of musicians that do. Sigh. Come on, kids. There’s plenty…
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P2P at Pew
The Pew Research Center has released results from its study of musicians’ attitudes towards file sharing, and the numbers don’t surprise. Artists are split between folks (like Don Henley and Metallica) who believe file swapping needs to be stopped now,…
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CD Baby’s Partnership with Mperia Provides New Networking and Distribution Channels
CD Baby announced yesterday that they are teaming up with Bitpass to make the 300,000+ tracks in CD Baby’s digital distribution library available at BitPass’ online music store, Mperia. This partnership brings increased revenue opportunities and valuable new exposure for…
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Copyright Bill Backs Down
Wired covers the "kinder, gentler" copyright bill on its way to the House.
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Is it still a street date if nothing actually hits the street?
Universal’s new digital skunk works releases some online-only titles today. [via PaidContent]
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MSN Music + GarageBand
Remember those songs you used to have posted at MP3.com? They’re ba…ack…
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“He Shared Songs? Throw the iPod at Him!”
Just when you thought the holiday season would be safe from goofy new legislation, the guv’mint wants to keep you from skipping commercials on your TiVo and put your audience in pound-ya-in-the-a** prison for three to ten years for sharing…
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“I don’t believe every download is a lost sale.” – Jeff Tweedy
Wilco’s frontman talks to Wired News about how leaking Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on P2P networks (after their label refused to release it) saved their career. Oh yeah, their new album? At number 8 on Billboard.
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Granian and the Grey Lady
Congrats to TCM Client Granian on a superb review in the New York Times! Yes, that’s right. That New York Times. For everyone who’s going to send me an e-mail asking how an independent artist got some column inches in…
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The line starts here.
What are you doing today that will someday get folks to wait in line for you?
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MTV is so over Europe
Is this an unfortunate publicist’s typo, or are the MTV Europe Music Awards really being shown in North America on… MuchMusic?
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The Economist takes a long view…
From the European perspective, The Economist pegs the failure of major labels on their inability to focus on anything longer term than #1 on TRL. It also looks at ways managers are staking a claim for their clients, to keep…
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Ten Million Reasons
Last week, while I wasn’t looking, Derek Sivers and the CDBaby crew crossed the threshold of $10 Millon in checks cut to working musicians. Woo!
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John Peel, RIP
Another broadcasting legened signed off today. John Peel is another of that breed of disc jockey who took an almost pathological interest in making sure new music got represented on the airwaves. We can only pray to hear the likes…