Like a fox, maybeWired is running a couple of stories involving well-known musician David Byrne. The first is an interview with Thom Yorke from Radiohead, where he confirms what a huge success the "name your own price" offering was, contrary to CNN's editors calling it dumb. According to Yorke: "In terms of digital income, we've made more money out ( Read more... )

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Infinite Storage for MusicLast week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds ( Read more... )

Rick Rubin - Recording Industry - Rock Music - New York Times Rubin [the new head of Columbia Records] has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid ( Read more... )

Techdirt: Musicians Realizing That Access Is A Key Selling Point While I've been writing this series of posts about the economic models involving non-scarce things like content and ideas, a key element of understanding the business models that come out of this is recognizing that a key, scarce component is access to the musician. Clive Thompson has ( Read more... )

Big labels are f*cked, and DRM is dead - Peter Jenner | The RegisterInterview Few people know the music industry better than Peter Jenner. Pink Floyd's first manager, who subsequently managed Syd Barrett's solo career, Jenner has also looked after T.Rex, The Clash, Ian Dury, Disposable Heroes and Billy Bragg - who he manages today. He's also ( Read more... )

Techdirt: More And More Musicians Seem To Get It
One of the encouraging things over the past couple of years has been the increasing number of artists who do seem to get digital technologies, and figure out ways to embrace them. From Maria Schneider to Pearl Jam to the String Cheese Incident we've tried to highlight artists who have learned to ( Read more... )

Weird Al Yankovic Says Digital Is a Raw Deal For Some Artists - The Digital Music Weblog

King of comic rock, Weird Al Yankovic says digital is a raw deal for artists like himself. When asked by a fan whether purchasing a conventional CD or buying a digital file via iTunes would net Yankovic more pocket money the artist answered on his website.

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OK, I already knew I'm an idiot -- I don't have to be reminded. As it turns out, my copy of The Folksinger's Guitar Guide (long out of ( Read more... )

Sony's DRM-enforcing rootkit apparently includes the LAME MP3 library, which is published under the LGPL. (A blog article can be found here) So not only do their CDs illegally trespass on your PC, but they violate LAME's copyright at the same time (by failing to make the source available)!

In the face of well-deserved adverse publicity over its DRM rootkit, Sony is offering a patch that reveals the hidden files. Of course, you still break your CD drivers if you try to remove it. Here's a reasonably well-balanced article (from the Washington Post).

In response to criticisms that intruders could take such advantage ( Read more... )