Have We The Devil To Thank?

Perhaps Wal-Mart spreads evil across the land? Perhaps they’re just a clever, seemingly invincible, business juggernaut? Whichever side you find yourself on, you’ll have them to thank for pushing CD list prices below ten dollars. (Which, again, may be a…

E-Mail Still Rules, 11% of the time.

From usability guru Jakob Nielsen: E-newsletters that are informative, convenient, and timely are often preferred over other media. However, a new study found that only 11% of newsletters were read thoroughly, so layout and content scannability is paramount.

Square One

A campus newspaper from Seattle reminds us that every big name band started out in some local club somewhere…

Your Favorite DJs Call YOU For A Change

Streaming radio over cell phones was the holy grail for small broadcasters even when I helped launch xpn.org back in the late ’90s. With cheaper-every-week access and tools like mobile ShoutCast, if you don’t like your local stations, you can…

Non-Comm Stations Among Top Streamers

Sometimes, market forces work in your favor. When AFTRA, the union that includes most voice-over announcers, forced stations to pay extra to use their talent on streaming audio, it pretty much eliminated the benefits of streaming for commercial radio. Non-comms…

Indie Retail Survives and Thrives

Whether it’s our own Schoolkids Records here in Athens, or other indie retail success stories, there’s lots of proof now that a tightly focused, fun independent record store can survive the same dismal market that caused the mighty Tower Records…

Data Loss

I’m suffering a little short-term data/e-mail loss… if you e-mailed me in the past few days and didn’t get a response, kindly resend. Thanks!

Goodbye, Corporate Pop?!

Andre Grey from DEMO has posted one of the most concise, coherent explanations of the current state of music commerce. I don’t know that I agree with him about how swiftly this will happen (I think it will take a…

Lo-Fi Living

On a total tangent, I invite you to visit “Lo-Fi Living,” our sister blog about living a transcendent life on a shoestring budget. We’ve been posting for a few days and it’s starting to feel ripe. (The good kind of…