Downhill Battle

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There will be a quiz later… To commemorate the RIAA’s renewed efforts towards “let’s save our market by sueing our customers”, maybe it’s time to review just what all is wrong with the music industry as it stands—artists not making money of CDs (or pay-for-download sites, for that matter); narrowing diversity by pay-for-play radio, the marginalization of independent artists, etc… Fortunately, Downhill Battle has done a dandy job of pulling a lot of this together, along with some very tasty and darkly humorous resources for educating the “just don’t get it” crowd. Go. Read. Enjoy. -----...


Hilary Rosen Inconvenienced by DRMWow -- they've been around a whole day, and already The Huffington Press has put out the funniest post I've seen this month. It turns out Hilary Rosen, former head of the RIAA, finds Apple's Fairplay DRM inconvenient. The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD’s. But those other music sites have lots of music that you can’t get at the iTunes store. So, if you have an iPod, you are out of luck. If you are really a geek, you can figure out how to strip the songs you might have bought from another on-line store of all...


Half a loafXeni Jardin writes in Wired about Wilco’s “suprising” success.  It’s becoming a fairly common story—artist gets shat upon by label, artist says “screw it” and puts out a solid representative sample of their music online, artist finds later commercial releases gobbled up by fans.  In this case, they even raised $15K for charity from people who still wanted to pay for the material they released for free. What a concept—let people hear some of the band’s good stuff (not just some not-ready-for-album samples) for free, and they’re more willing to buy stuff.  Nothing new here, mind you—it just used to be called “radio play”. Except of course that several whole species of moneygrubbers evolved to carefully control who got radio...


Promoting Music on the CheapAs long as I'm on about low budget music promotion (or promotion of low budget music, for that matter), it's worth mentioning Digital Music News' "Bubbling Up" chart. The "Bubbling Up" chart is a list of songs that are seeing increased demand on P2P networks, despite little or no radio airplay (and hey, you don't get much less radio airplay than most of the groups I listen to). Their point is that this is a "free" groundswell of interest, and should also result in increased sales of CDs with little or no promotion (other than the songs being available on P2P.) While I'm sure that this concept will slice little cheese with the RIAA (ummm... do the math -- if...


Free Music Works for WilcoXeni Jardin writes in Wired about Wilco's "suprising" success. It's becoming a fairly common story -- artist gets shat upon by label, artist says "screw it" and puts out a solid representative sample of their music online, artist finds later commercial releases gobbled up by fans. In this case, they even raised $15K for charity from people who still wanted to pay for the material they released for free. What a concept -- let people hear some of the band's good stuff (not just some not-ready-for-album samples) for free, and they're more willing to buy stuff. Nothing new here, mind you -- it just used to be called "radio play". Except of course that several whole species of moneygrubbers evolved...