Music is free, and so are we.
David Byrne thinks musicians are doomed by streaming music. More music is being made and listened to with greater frequency, diversity and depth than ever before in human history. But musicians are doomed. Here are my issues with Byrne’s flimsy refutations of “counter-arguments” to building a business around free access to music: “1. Recorded music…
Imagine a world in which there is only bottled water. Then, quite rapidly, changes in technology connect every household to a municipal water line so they can have tap water. Suddenly, you don’t have to pay for water every time you want to drink it. And even though you’re paying a small monthly fee for…
At last year’s Rethink Music conference, I peppered Spotify CEO Daniel Ek with questions about their failure to be transparent about artist payments. I saw the makings of what would be a PR nightmare for the company in 2013, just as the now-infamous artist payment infographic started making the rounds. Spotify must be finally listening…
I am beyond pumped to be headed down to Washington, DC next week for the Future of Music Summit. The Summit is 2-day conference for music industry professionals and musicians, and is organized by the Future of Music Coalition. The FMC is a non-profit that advocates for musicians’ rights, and helps educate musicians on issues…
A small but growing number of formerly well-compensated musicians are rallying around a new empty catch phrase: “ad-sponsored piracy”. As far as I can tell, this idea gestated in the bitter womb of The Trichordist, an echo chamber for musicians who are too scared of changes in technology to discuss solutions. Instead, they spew dangerous…
Hang out for a few minutes and I’ll tell you why Grooveshark may be more ethical than Spotify. Brief History Lesson By suing Napster and its kin out of existence, the music industry elite created a “soft landing” for its multi-billion dollar business of selling access to recorded music. They couldn’t kill so-called music “piracy”…
It is difficult to name a court decision that has had a greater negative impact on recorded music than Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Film. The de minimis doctrine, with respect to digital sampling of sound recordings, effectively disappeared after the court’s decision, summarized as: “Get a license or do not sample. We do not…
Today I’m excited to announce the culmination of over two months of round-the-clock production work to answer the common musician question: “How do I make money from my music? I proudly present Musician as Entrepreneur, Band as Business, an online course offered by Artists House Music on the Udemy eLearning platform. Watch the promo video…
When you can’t sample something, you can’t discover you like it, and you won’t buy it. Like many suburban white kids, my first exposure to hip hop was when Run-D.M.C. teamed up with Aerosmith on “Walk This Way”. That collaboration was not just how I discovered Run-D.M.C., it was how I discovered the whole genre…
Copyright is good at protecting creative work… too good. Traditional copyright prevents people from sharing and remixing your work. But with a Creative Commons license, your fans are free to copy, share, distribute, remix or build upon your music or other creative work. It has safeguards built in to prevent others from failing to attribute…
A scant two months in, 2013 has already been a sobering year for the copyright reform movement. The suicide of one of our leaders, Aaron Swartz, shocked and outraged us. It brought old icons back into the fray and incited a growing legal and political thrust to action that is playing out as we speak….
Free song sharing is this generation’s VCR. Twenty years from now everyone in the music industry will look back at the plummeting price of access to recordings and shake our heads much the same way the movie industry looks back at its attempts to outlaw the VCR. How could anyone rationally think otherwise? And yet…
