pampelmoose Dave Allen of Gang of Four’s Music and Media Blog

Simple user interface, giant database of videos, easy search that works…and all built on the back of free content handed to them by the recording industry. Ha!
MTV Music

I’m always interested in what Sasha Frere-Jones has to say about music, especially hip hop, as he has a great knack at being clear and concise in his overviews. I recently read his take on Lil Wayne’s single A Milli. That’s the link to the whole piece but here’s the relevant clip -

“Lil [...]

I’m certainly not alone in understanding that independent music of all stripes and shades is a huge part of the overall music business economy. One of the biggest reasons this blog exists is because of my passion for independent music. I may occasionally get cranky about this particular chunk of the long tail [see Coldplay [...]

Starting today, Rhapsody launches a new DRM-free, MP3 downloading service and they’ve also partnered with iLike, MTV Networks and Yahoo. The new service obviously challenges Apple’s iTunes service as Apple sticks to its allegiance to DRM on behalf of the record companies. And given that you can preview an entire MP3 file before you buy [...]

Portland band, Hockey, in a social networking environment.
I have some homework for those of you who like to read. Having been on many conference panels in my time, attempting to inform musicians and others about the value of using the Internet for marketing, my research led me to notice how the online social networks and [...]

Shaky Hands at the Crystal Ballroom
I wrote last week about Insound and its creative attempts to stay alive in the world of music retailing as it seems that retailers are going the way of the Dodo. Matt Wishnow who runs Insound wrote to tell me that Insounds‘ sales are not only up but growing.
From Matt: [...]

Portland band, Hockey, prepare to blast the Bay Area
As we noted in the Wal-Mart/Handelman story below, music sales are still in decline and haven’t quite found the bottom yet. Meanwhile retailers are getting creative at least. Insound.com is an online music retailer that focuses on alternative music mostly, if not exclusively, but I admit I [...]

Muxtape ran into what they called “the prefect storm” yesterday but to their credit they have been open and honest about what went wrong and how difficult it’s been to fix it -
Update #3
“We’ve narrowed down the issue, but we’re triple-checking everything to make sure it doesn’t happen again before we bring the site [...]