His Career Is In Your Hands. Musician / Producer Butch Walker (formerly of Marvelous 3) had a rough autumn in 2007. He was renting a home from a Chili Pepper, a home into which he had moved all of his personal and professional belongings. Unfortunately, Flea's Malibu rental property was directly in the path of California's November batch of wildfires. Tough break indeed. So how does an artist recover from such a devastating loss? He gives away his newest live double-album for free. Or $5.99. The choice is yours. Why? The domain name says it all.
posted by grabbingsand on Feb 15, 2008 - 18 comments

David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars Where there was one, now there are six: Six possible music distribution models, ranging from one in which the artist is pretty much hands-off to one where the artist does nearly everything. [more inside]
posted by psmealey on Dec 20, 2007 - 36 comments

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails plans to join Radiohead in the self-distribution game. Reznor's public feud with Interscope records reached its head recently; the musician was forced to finance the alternate reality game promotion of Year Zero himself and was shocked at the record label's pricing in Australia. With the release of Year Zero Remixed, Reznor will be free to go his own way.
posted by beaucoupkevin on Oct 9, 2007 - 59 comments

An impressive array of anti-RIAA articles, mostly from people within the music industry.
posted by Dr. Wu on Apr 24, 2007 - 13 comments

We know Magnatune aren't evil, but as web record labels go, are Beatpick less evil still? In his response to a post at the Creative Commons blog, Beatpick's David D'Atri sets out their philosophy, and highlights some differences.
posted by nthdegx on Mar 7, 2006 - 10 comments

Best RIAA-vs-mp3 quote so far? Here's my candidate. I think it'll take five aces to beat it but don't hesitate to try!

As Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, puts it, "Is the RIAA and its friends doing some kind of technology surveillance? Yes. Is it going to work? No. It's really dumb. It's another serious mistake by an industry going out of business in the stupidest way, bumping its head on the steps on the way down, because the record industry was always a bunch of thugs and that's what they still are."
posted by jfuller on Mar 28, 2001 - 24 comments

Mp3.com to charge artists to get paid. Though only a handful of artists have made a lot of money from this exposure, it was a good place to start out and the model was intriguing. But this smells like record company tactics, and probably spells the end of an era.

Some kind of file-sharing forum for new artists will spring up I guess. Where the money/remuneration fits in , I don't know.
posted by aflakete on Mar 23, 2001 - 3 comments