Anyway, it’s good to see the boundaries changing. Too bad Radiohead stopped making good music years ago. NIN is the most exciting of the 3. Live Nation is said to be hoping to make a similiar deal with U2, and for any major artists they may swap up in the coming years, I hope cutting cd prices is ideal for them. Imagine Madonna’s next album going for a flate rate of $6.00 at Amazon.

RE Radiohead as usual with this band they are the essential “Emperors New Clothes” idea put into practice. The whole download their new album for your choice of price was just the usual cynical sad promotional stunt as any teenyboper boy band.Why? The very album that was available for exclusive download is now going to be given a full priced physical conventional release after all the promotion via media hype from the novelty of the download… :rollseyes:

@94 Ti Piace . Excuse me but what has your opinion about Madonna as a singer got to do with this thread?

Touring is NOT the answer for many - I HATE touring! Studio work is where the creation occurs and studio work is what needs to be economically supported in the life of independent artists, or there wont be any except for the already independently wealthy. Music becomes a great hobby for the rich.

Any obsession with who is desparately exchanging one multi-million corporate deal for another is irrelevant to the main cultural problem at hand - HOW CAN WE SUPPORT THE PRODUCTION AND ENCOURAGEMENT OF NEW, INDEPENDENT, AND UNKNOWN MUSIC WHEN THE RESULTS ARE NOT BEING PAID FOR?

The Internet has miraculously solved half the problem (the potential for independent distrtiuubution) but the situation is only half baked to date. Voluntary donations simply don’t cut it because the vast majority of consumers simply wont do it. Try it and see. We desparately need new ideas on how to get efficiently paid on line for making music. Itunes’ pennies per track can only actually benefit those already mega-famous artists who can sell several hundreds of thousands of tracks there. For emerging unknowns and the experimental, a few sales on Itunes wont even pay for the electricity used to make the work.

I yearn for a more useful discussion here and everywhere concerning how to actually set up the Net to support the economic viability of an individual’s independent music.

Here’s one idea: The Net can be made to track anything. All music put up on line might be registered with a new ASCAP/BMI type Internet royalty organization. When every computer user pays their server fee, a miniscule “art usage” tax is included. All music downloads on line are free, but the net tracks ALL registered music downloads (only that a track has been downloaded, not who does it) and the server “art usage” tax is distributed to those who have been downloaded according to these individually tracked download numbers. Very similar to what BMI now does for radio play (now accomplished with far less accurate radio play tracking than the Net could do for downloading). A tiny tax on all worldwide server users would be a huge amount of money to distribute for the “use” of all music on line, and pay per track could be significantly more than pennies.

One remaining problem if we attempt to keep the downloading privacy of the user: How do you prevent an artist from downloading his/her own work a million times?

Time is wasting. More actual ideas and less rich celebrity gawking, please!

They think they’re going to be able to take on Ticketmaster in a year or two (when their ticketing deal with TM expires) but it took them over a year to implement user registration and profiles. What a joke!

On the other hand, Live Nation ticketing and promotions own a bunch of venues so that side of the business will remain profitable.

The interesting idea from this discussion is that Record Labels still have a role in marketing new music. While that may be so, it will be a very different, more difficult and less profitable business than the old one.

We all seem to believe this is the begining of the end, made all the more delicious by the fact that, at least on the surface, the labels have been caught napping on this issue and will now reap the consequences.

But the truth is, the labels have most definately not been napping. Instead they have been simply fortifying the areas of music where this new movement will have very little impact… namely hip hop (or rap or whatever you may want to term it).

You see, for acts markets such as this, where image is just as important as musical content (in some cases even more!) the record industry is still an all important and feared god. In these genres, the labels act as more of a bank or credit facility to the artist. Take 50 cent, without his exotic cars, giant houses, pimped out tastes and impossibly prosthetic bimbos attached what is he? Nothing! And where does all this finery come from? You cant seriously believe that, whilst he may make a fairly decent pay day from royalties, he could afford even half of all the accoutrements we constantly see surrounding him. No, he doesnt own jack! The label does (or in this case the parent label of the label that owns his own label, confused?).

So, bearing this in mind tell me, how do you remove the labels from one of the most popular forms of music worldwide and still maintain the image that has brought it to this position in the first place? The “bling” would dry up pretty damn fast!

Recording labels are ready for this, as much as we are ready to tear them down (and rightfully so!) it cannot be said that the end is nigh. Just a slight change in course for a few well established rock monsters.