Last summer I enjoyed Mexican food and beers while Roy Christopher threw some questions at me. Upon reading the result of that discussion now it doesn’t feel so much as an interview as it is two friends discussing the state of “things” over a drink. As Roy writes “Dave’s ideas about the state of the [...]

Portland bands have to pay a third party, Sonicbids, to apply for a slot at this year’s MusicFestNW [this may have been the case last year too.] You’d think after the debacle with the CMJ conference where folks paid Sonicbids to enter the lottery and apparently no one from CMJ bothered to listen to the [...]

Richard Nash from Soft Skull Press sent out a link to this speech by Mike Shatzkin on “The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers,” calling it “dead-on.” There are certainly some key insights here: the vertical arrangement of publishing online (as opposed to the horizontality of old-school publishing), acknowledgment of the file as the [...]

Starbucks continues to struggle and is now looking to “examine all aspects of our business that are not directly related to our core” according to this article. This means that the first decision was to let go of Ken Lombard, the unpopular head of Starbuck’s entertainment division. That wasn’t unexpected, I covered this earlier this [...]

Chuck Klosterman weighs in on the decline of the music business but more interestingly chooses to focus on where did the money go - as in if the music biz is down $4 bil who is spending how much on what?
Even if you know nothing about the music industry, you probably know this: People don’t [...]

Stop stealing music motherf*^%#er. Will Ferrell and Heidi Klum as imagined in the movie Music Fans vs The Music Industry.
I wasn’t inclined to pitch in about the story of EMI hiring an ex-Google exec to overhaul its global digital strategy. I figured it was a non-story - record labels are in trouble, have been for [...]

No Starch Press, publisher of geeky but in-depth books (including the best-selling Hacking: The Art of Exploitation), recently posted torrent versions of a couple of its best-selling backlist tech volumes with 11,000 combined downloads in the first week:
Recognizing that the book business is changing and that books end up on file-sharing sites within days of [...]

But will the punk and indie bands get their fair share? No Age at SXSW - photo © Nilina Mason Campbell
I’ve often remarked that the best way to get money back into the hands of musicians would be through a “feels free” program. For instance, you purchase an iPod, it comes loaded with 2gbs of [...]