baby

Don't take my word for it that the major labels and the system that propped them up for so many years are dead. John Mellencamp, who sang a string of rock hits back in the 1980s and '90s, thinks the business is dead as well. In an articulate and passionate essay on the Huffington Post, he argues that the long slide started well before the rise of file sharing, back to when the business started relying on SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems (BDS).

With SoundScan, instead of relying on surveys from record stores, the labels could see exactly how … Read more

What should bands pay for? Can art and marketing coexist? Has the digital world made do-it-yourself recording, marketing, and distribution easier, or do musicians still need the old-fashioned triumvirate of booking agent, record label, and radio airplay to thrive?

If you're interested in such questions, and you're heading to the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, this year, check out a panel discussion in which I'll be participating called The Artist as Entrepreneur at 1:30 p.m Wednesday. Most of the people on the panel are in the business of helping musicians use the … Read more

Jango CEO Dan Kaufman posted a long response to my post criticizing Jango Artist Airplay as a pay-for-play scheme that artists should avoid. (He also e-mailed me with contact info, so I'm fairly sure it's him, although the usual caveats apply.) It's a thoughtful comment, and Dan comes across as a serious businessperson, not a fly-by-night scam artist.

To summarize, Jango is trying to maintain a quality experience for listeners by making sure they're not inundated with Airplay artists they're not going to like. Rather than playing Airplay artists based strictly on how much money … Read more

I've been invited by Sonicbids CEO Panos Panay to speak on a panel at SXSW later this month entitled "Artist as Entrepreneur," and as I've been thinking about the subject, my attention was drawn to this recent post on CD Baby's bulletin boards (it was first posted elsewhere). Katie Taylor, the artistic director of Opera Theater Oregon, is worried about the rising perception that art--particularly music--should be available for a very low price or free.

To change this perception, she argues, artists need to convince the general public that there's a fundamental difference between … Read more

Last week, I blogged about digital distributor RouteNote and did a brief comparison with CD Baby and Tunecore, two better-known services that help independent artists place their songs in online music stores such as iTunes and Amazon MP3.

Now RouteNote has one-upped me on its own blog and run a detailed--and very helpful--mathematical comparison of itself versus CD Baby, Tunecore, The Orchard, and Musicadium.

You can check out a direct comparison of up-front charges and ongoing revenue splits, as well as a chart showing how much money the artist will earn after selling specific numbers of songs.

RouteNote acknowledges when … Read more

So, in Florida they're taping magnets to crocodiles heads to keep them from moving back to suburbia. It's also last call for Vista, with SP2 released to developers. And we talk about good sex and how it shouldn't be filtered in Australia. Oh, and flying cars. Of course.

Nintendo needs help with piracy http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/26/1118217 http://kotaku.com/5160062/what-countries-made-nintendos-rampant-piracy-list-this-year

Australian Internet censorship plan torpedoed http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/26/1344207

U.S. antitrust judge … Read more

Cheap tools to help independent musicians sell their music online are proliferating like mushrooms after a rainstorm: last month I wrote about Audiolife, which gives bands an online store to sell CDs and merchandise with absolutely no up-front costs (they take a cut of sales as you make them). Since then, Audiolife was kind enough to send me a sample CD and t-shirts, and they look and sound adequately professional--certainly fine for independent musicians on a limited budget, although nobody's going to confuse them with the deluxe version of the latest U2 album.

But Audiolife's download store is … Read more

From Urban Baby, Brooke Showell joins us on the show today to teach us where babies come from and how to take care of them. Along the way, Wilson learns that babies don't come from the stork or out of a trash can. Apparently, urban babies don't sell drugs either. Brooke says kids are learning how to use BlackBerrys before they can poop by themselves. This causes Jeff to reconsider having kids in his life. One last props for Ms. Showell: She brought us cupcakes! With bacon bits (not really, but Justin got really excited)!

We don't … Read more

Today marks a very strange day for The 404. If this is your first time listening to The 404, you picked a good one because this is something of a milestone. Recently it's come to our attention that the show is becoming more tabloidy and less anecdotal...which is bad. So check out this show baby- tons of personal stories about statewide bagging competitions, DTV delays, voluntary amputation, wikipedia editing, and the best place to spend spring break. If you're a veteran listener, prepare yourself for total domination...wait, was that a video game reference or a quote … Read more