Music is free, and so are we.
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…
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…
Listen to the interview I did with the Music Manumit podcast on all things Dead Unicorn and my quest to empower musicians and spread the good news of the golden digital age of music! The hour-long podcast is a marathon of interesting topics punctuated with humor — just the way I like it. Hosts Doug…
Rabbit Rabbit is getting all sorts of attention for its recent write-up in the New York Times discussing the band’s very own subscription-based fan service, Rabbit Rabbit Radio. It’s grassroots crowdfunding at its best and most sustainable. Fans get a bundle of high-quality original content every month, in exchange for a low pay-what-you-want monthly fee….
Why do we continue to power 41% of the world with coal power — a non-renewable, environmentally destructive cancer-on-wheels? Why are we causing earthquakes and destroying natural resources to switch from coal to natural gas? Why do we insist on basing our country’s economy around endless war, Orwellian surveillance, imprisonment and obesity-inducing diets? Why are we growing…
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”…
Here’s a brief reprieve from all the editorializing: two recently discovered videos that changed the way I thought about music. The first is not a single video but a Harvard lecture series by classical music icon Leonard Bernstein entitled “The Unanswered Question” from 1973. It is without a doubt the best 40+ year old video…
“We are the music while the music lasts.” – T.S. Eliot In modern-day song sharing — what we think of as “music” — there are three participants: musicians, listeners and industry. When music first originated, there was little if any separation between musician and listener. Certainly, there was no business of music upon which to…
I’ve been a huge Douglas Rushkoff fan ever since he predicted the future of viral media in his influential 1995 book Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. I was just a teenager then, trying to figure out whether I was Gen X, Gen Y, or whether it even mattered. As I grew up reading…
This is a long comment I made in response to this Trust Me, I Am A Scientist blog post which was Facebook-shared by friend and record producer extraordinaire John Naclerio at Nada Studios. I lump the ‘Scientist’ blog in with the Trichordist folks who basically try to complain the old music industry back into existence….
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…
