Saul Williams releases his album with several payment options: $0.00 gets you 192k mp3s, and 5 bucks buys your choice of 192k or 300k mp3s, or FLAC. All DRM free of course. Trent Reznor, who was recently sighted complaining about the insane prices for his last album in new zealand, is to blame. Need a taster? Saul and Trent have leaked a track on pirate bay.
posted by fleetmouse on Oct 29, 2007 - 17 comments

Five ways the music industry can prevent its own demise.
posted by Terminal Verbosity on Oct 18, 2007 - 52 comments

Before the Music Dies Documentary of the current state of the music industry now on DVD. Perhaps not much we don't know, but certainly some insight and perspective by those entrenched. And it's got a nice marketing technique to it. Reminds me of the Wilco doc screenings I attended in Brooklyn warehouses.
posted by adamms222 on Feb 16, 2007 - 31 comments

A Korn video that definately gets the message across about the music industry. (direct link to windows media, nsfw i believe)
posted by spidre on Mar 13, 2004 - 49 comments

What busking could teach the music industry An intelligent essay on how the music industry should adapt to the new digital realities, drawn from the author's experiences as a street (well, subway) musician. No one who could learn from it will read it, of course.
posted by mojohand on Jan 8, 2004 - 41 comments

From Sheet Music to MP3: Music through the 20th Century Among the current notices of legal online music stores finally coming of age across the 'Net, this is a lengthy but quite deep and interesting analysis (deepest I've seen so far) on how the music industry ended up being what it is today, how "pop" music came to be, and more. If anything, it shows how corporate greed and shady business practices are far from being a recent happening in the industry everybody loves to hate. The study ends with the state of the industry circa 1999, but that makes it no less valuable.
posted by betobeto on May 22, 2003 - 2 comments

The NY Times reports that music companies are considering some new anti-piracy measures of questionable legality. The ideas include a program to lock up user's computers, another to find and delete illegally downloaded files, and what amounts to a DoS attack on user's computers. There are some supporters of these possibly extralegal measures. Representative Howard Berman (D-CA) introduced a bill last year to provide the music industry with a "safe harbor from liability" when pursuing P2P traders. Should media companies be allowed to operate outside the law in their efforts to stop illegal downloads of their music?
posted by punishinglemur on May 3, 2003 - 23 comments

The 2003 Winter Music Conference is now one month away. During the conference you will be able to attend the main conference, the 2003 DanceStar USA awards show, the huge ULTRA 5 Music Festival, and countless other parties during the week. Everyone influential having anything to do with dance music will be there for 5 days of endless pool parties, late night clubbing, networking, and general debauchery. If you need to know what will be going on, you should already be on the Miami Master List, the definitive guide.
posted by cmicali on Feb 17, 2003 - 12 comments

Hating Hilary. We've certainly heard a bit from Hilary Rosen, CEO of the RIAA. Love her, hate her or hate her more, this particular interview reveals (to me at least) a very different Hilary, a woman who is perhaps not the beast that her bosses expect her to be and the immovable technophobic distribution system and business model she represents forces her to be.

In fact, Rosen tried to steer the labels toward the online future long before they saw it coming. In the mid-'90s, Rosen brought [Esther] Dyson to a conference of music executives to brief them on how technology would transform their business. Dyson described for them the inevitability of digital delivery, an eventuality Rosen says she had begun to understand but wanted her bosses to hear from an outsider. But as Dyson spoke, the label executives became defensive, then furious. By all accounts, the meeting devolved into a shouting match.

the picture of her with an iPod says it all

"I finally convince the idiot record companies that they have to offer a product to compete with pirates, and now the publishers won't make a deal," she said, throwing up her hands. priceless.
posted by 11235813 on Jan 23, 2003 - 39 comments

Michael Jackson: the music industry is racist.
The erstwhile Agent M made some interesting claims about the record industry as a whole while in the midst of a dispute with his record label, Sony. He mentioned such paupers as Little Richard, Mariah Carey and Sammy Davis, Jr. as "vistims of the industry," and singled out Sony Music chairman Tommy Mottola. In other news, Al Sharpton and Johnny Cochran have formed a coalition to investigate financial profiteering off black recording artists.
posted by me3dia on Jul 8, 2002 - 43 comments

The anti-Napster or Napster's future?... File sharing as perceived by the music industry. I wonder if there isn't a deal with Napster already. But what are they going to do with all the Napster clones?
posted by talos on Apr 2, 2001 - 15 comments

Say you want a revolution? Well you know, we all want to change the world..
posted by ZachsMind on Jul 25, 2000 - 3 comments

my.MP3.com Loses to RIAA In case you didn't see it on Slashdot and everywhere else.
posted by fil! on Apr 28, 2000 - 7 comments