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 [...]
Pharrell at the Fader Mag Party, SXSW 2008. Photo Nilina Mason-Campbell
I didn’t need to attend any of the music panels at SXSW this year to feel the malaise that is sweeping the music business. One five minute trek through the trade show proved to me everything that I already know - the cornerstone of this [...]
February is the month 49 years ago when Island Records began and in 2009 Island Records will be 50 years old. Unfortunately Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, who started the label in Jamaica in 1959 sold the storied company to Polygram/Universal Records in 1999 and it has become a shell of its former self under [...]
“When you see them pull a carton of something out of the refrigerator, it reminds me I’m paying $5 for a squirt of liquid and milk,” said Hannah Boyd, 16, who lives on the Upper East Side.
I would suggest that is not music to the ears of Starbuck’s chief, Howard Schultz. The New York [...]
Law professor Lawrence Lessig’s pioneering book on copyright law and intellectual property rights, The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001), is now appropriately, freely available online: “After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, they’ve agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. You can download [...]
Paul McGuiness, the manager of U2, turned up at MIDEM in Cannes to give us all a scolding and by “all” I mean the record labels and any of you who have ever downloaded a music file. His list of core agitators, people he considers to have let the side down in the fight against [...]