A Song A Day

Steve Albini turned up in poker forum last week, ready to answer any questions the community might have about the record industry, engineering, Nirvana and how shit Urge Overkill were. As usual, Albini has some great insights on the workings of the industry, making the thread a must-read for any aspiring DIY musician.

Downloading and […]

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Check out this hilarious piece by Steven Adams from the Broken Family Band about why he’s proud to be a ‘weekend rockstar’ while holding down a day job. Actually quite sobering stuff for all of us dreaming of one day making music full time. I especially like the the line, “I wouldn’t let Johnny Borrell […]

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Victor Keegan provides an astute-as-ever analysis of Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur in the Guardian Technology pages today. Keen’s book has been causing a fair bit of heated debate in the blogosphere as it attempts to assert that the huge overload of user-gen content that’s flooded the web over the past two years […]

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Aah, I go away for a week and all hell breaks loose at London Calling. Former Island Records MD Tim Clark declaimed about the, er, “fucked” state of the industry, as reported at The Register.
What’s interesting about that post is a comment at the bottom, which is so succinct in its analysis I think […]

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A Song A Day is on holiday this week. Back next Tuesday!

FakeSensations - Isaac
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It’s Glastonbury. It’s raining. The NME are camped opposite Pete Doherty… The summer festivals continue to thrive, with more and more weekenders, beanos and shindigs cropping up every year - another sign that music is healthy, even if the recorded music industry is in bad shape. Long may Glastonbury rain…er, reign.

Björk – Hunter
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As discussed yesterday, it’s not for the RIAA to sit on their pedestal and rage about people getting laid off, session musicians not getting paid, and songwriters suffering because of illegal file-sharing. We know this is happening, but righteously suing people is not the solution to anyone’s problems – and I say that as a […]

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Rolling Stone’s article on the decline of the record industry doesn’t really throw up any surprises – shock! It was Napster’s fault! – but there are some telling comments at the end from RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol.
“A great American sector has been damaged enormously,” says the RIAA’s Bainwol, who blames piracy, “from songwriters to […]

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More evidence that the suits in the music industry are getting increasingly desperate in these times of file-sharing and free downloads: here we find one trying to bully a blogger into deleting a link he posted to a story about heavy-handed RIAA tactics.
I have to thank said industry suit, however, for helping me discover New […]

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There’s a buzz around about how to monetize P2P, as the music industry begins to realise that the Pandora’s box of illegal downloading that Napster opened in 2000 is never going to be closed – not even by those nice, reasonable folk at the RIAA. The belief of the new generation is that music is […]

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