"Now is a better time to be a musician, or a fan of music, than any other time in all of human history." Last Friday, the NPR Planet Money podcast featured musician Jonathan Coulton, whose online success prompted one host to compare the man (or his brand) to the blanket-with-arms Snuggie, i.e. "we didn't know we wanted it, and then all of a sudden we did." Coulton responds with his own thoughts on new business models for musicians in the Internet/file-sharing age.
posted by mrgrimm on May 26, 2011 - 48 comments

As Amazon and the RIAA go head to head over the Amazon Cloud Player (esentially Dropbox with streaming) it seems like a good time to recap the turbulent history of the humble MP3, upender of the music industry business model.
posted by Artw on Apr 4, 2011 - 83 comments

i have let paypal go. old-fashioned wheezy paranoid beast. and i can’t find a simple enough new solution. so, all music is pay-it-forward. [more inside]
posted by tapesonthefloor on May 18, 2010 - 36 comments

Your dreams of rapping superstardom are stymied by your Scottish sound, so what do you do? Simple: reinvent yourself as a West Coast wild boy, with American accent and history to match. Keeping it real might be murder, but even when it all falls apart, at least you got to tour with Eminem and D12 – and you can salvage something by writing a book about it all.
posted by Len on Apr 18, 2010 - 67 comments

Toronto band Fucked Up was everywhere at the South By Southwest music festival this year--playing at official and unofficial showcases, even once on the street, but often at unofficial massive advertising areas by, say, Pepsi or Levis. Some might think: How can a hardcore band justify their position in these marketing schemes? The answer, posted on the band blog by Mike the Guitarist, is simply titled: SXSW WHY? [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue on Mar 26, 2010 - 47 comments

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

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