TeledyN

via coreysmith.com

What caught everyone's attention was that this totally independent musician, with no record label, no radio play, no massive publicity campaign had grossed about $4 million in 2008. Now, of course, tour grosses (which made up the lion's share of that amount) are a bit misleading, as the venues take a cut of that, and there are certainly other expenses to be paid, but as a starting number it's still really impressive. Luckily, Corey is now sharing some more details about his path to success.

Corey recently did a fantastic podcast with CDBaby where he details how he went about building up a fan base and building up support, and it basically involved exactly what we discussed before: good music, a real connection with the fans, hard work through touring and careful targeting. While he jokes about the $4 million gross touring number, he does admit that his "corporation" (as he now has a support staff) netted over $2 million last year. Frankly, that's more impressive than the $4 million gross numbers. He notes, of course, that there are still expenses on top of that, including staff (manager, accountant, full-time salaried musicians who play with him, recording expenses and touring expenses -- especially in support of new markets, where the return isn't guaranteed). But, even with all that, bringing in over $2 million in topline revenue is really impressive for a musician without any additional outside backing.

One of the things that he discusses in the podcast is that what really got him started down this road was realizing that it could be done. He read Dave Kusek and Gerd Leonhard's excellent The Future of Music, and it made him realize "hey, this is possible." And that, alone, made a huge difference. It's amazing what you can do once you realize that something is possible -- and one of the great things we've seen in writing about Corey and numerous other musicians and their success stories is that they, in turn, inspire many other musicians who realize that it really is possible to do quite well despite the naysayers and the doom and gloom.

what we think, we become.

via keithlim.com

People were asking about what business models are working for musicians, and I started listing out some examples, and a loud gentleman in the front row yelled out that the business model that had to be at the center was selling music. I responded with what I thought was an important question: "Why?" and again people started yelling. Of course, no one answered the question, and then the panel shifted gears to another topic.

But, the reaction from the crowd on that question cemented for me one of the biggest reasons why some in the industry have struggled to grasp new business models. As I discussed in my NARM presentation a few months ago, selling music is just not a good business model, but it doesn't mean there aren't good, very profitable, music business models. It's just that selling music isn't a very good one. Instead, you need to learn to use the music (which still needs to be good, and is still the central reason why these other business models work) to sell something else -- something scarce, which can't easily be copied.

Some of you long-time TeledyN readers will remember all those many posts about the One-Track Universe where music was your vector, your broadcast channel communications wave connector straight to the heart of your fans and how it made no sense whatsoever to charge people to pick up the phone because you wanted to tell them about something important, or because you wanted to heal them, or lead them to dance together in joyeous celebration of their community of inter-life as humans. The vast majority, of course, thought me crazy, a handful did support the idea, some more tentatively than others.

Today the idea is mainstream Rock-Press fodder, the bread and butter of more artists than I can track. More and more have caught on to what I said about Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire and the sure fire way to totally obliterate the DRM issue by stepping beyond the copyright of the copy-able. Today we are on the edge of a world where live music generates more actual in their pocket revenue for artists than does the dead shadow of sound etched in billions of non-recyclable plastic disks.

So while I didn't get to be a direct part of the new music economy, I am delighted to see it playing out precisely to my plan, and delighted to see not only the new young and nothing to lose artists embracing a free-share mp3 business model, but also now among some name acts, even one or two household names, the idea doesn't just make sense, it is simply and factually the way it is.

While the major record labels were dragging file-sharers and BitTorrent sites to court for copyright infringement, they were themselves being sued by a conglomerate of artists for exactly the same offenses. Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal face up to $60 billion in damages for pirating a massive 300,000 tracks.

It is no secret that the major record labels have a double standard when it comes to copyright. On the one hand they try to put operators of BitTorrent sites in jail and ruin the lives of single mothers and students by demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and on the other they sell CDs containing music for which they haven’t obtained copyright permission.

In the past we’ve covered many disputes between artists and labels, where the latter is being accused or even sued for using songs without permission. Just a few months ago Latin America’s biggest artist, Alejandro Fernández, sent the police to a Sony Music office to confiscate over 6,000 CDs that the label refused to return, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The labels have made a habit of using songs from a wide variety of artists for compilation CDs without securing the rights. They simply use the recording and make note of it on “pending list” so they can deal with it later. This has been going on since the 1980s and since then the list of unpaid tracks (or copyright infringements) has grown to 300,000.

Growing tired of the label’s piracy, a group of artists have filed a class-action lawsuit in Canada against four major labels connected to the CRIA, the local equivalent of the RIAA. In October last year Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music and Universal Music were sued for illegal use of thousands of tracks and at present the case is still underway.

How and why this blatant copyright infringement could go on for years is a mystery, but the label’s double standard has been picked up by the plaintiffs as well. “The conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers,” the artists argue in their claim for damages.

The suit is still ongoing but already the labels have admitted to owing at least $50 million for infringing the rights of artists, and this figure could grow as high as 60 billion. So who are the real pirates here?
(torrentfreak)

I mean, y'know, now and then, in moments of weakness, I do really try to see their point of view in these matters and show a little sympathy to their cause and all they've done to for us over the years, and then along comes something like this.

In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls, and developed with contributions from users.

The videos can be played simultaneously -- the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.

Learn more in the FAQ.

Contact!

Brill score!

"Hopefully, this analysis - and there’s more on the nuts and bolts of our method below - sheds some factual light on the claims and counter-claims that are paranoically sweeping across the music industry establishment, not least that put forward by the singer Lily Allen in this paper recently - and the BPI - that artists are losing out as a result of the fall in sales of recorded of music."

Say it again. Louder.

City Telecom's 400,000 customers pay $13 a month for 100 megabit synchronous broadband. And they get a money-back guarantee: If they don't clock 80% of the promised speed, the company pays them twice their monthly fee.

"We have a big hairy audacious goal," says Lai, referring to the term popularized by "Good to Great" author Jim Collins. "We want to be the largest IP service provider in Hong Kong by 2016. And three years into our strategy, we're well on our way to doing it."

If you live within coverage area of Verizon's FiOS service (VZ), you pay as much as $150 a month for up to 50 megs downstream and 20 upstream.

How can City Telecom possibly offer service that's more than twice as fast at less than 10% of the price?

All that success, Lia adds, is a result of having a Big Hairy Audacious Goal and doing everything possible to achieve it.

The demand for more environmentally-friendly building materials and techniques is at an all-time high and will, in all likelihood, only continue to increase. Since buildings account for 38% of the total carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., it’s obviously time for us to take a step back and rethink the way our buildings affect the environment. Among the new, greener building materials and techniques is a material that’s not so much new as it is rethought: hemp.

It’s one of the oldest known cultivated crops, and it can be used for everything from textiles to paper to food and beyond. It’s also extremely renewable, with crops maturing after just 14 weeks. And now, you can make buildings out of it. Tradical Hemcrete is hemp held together with a lime-based binder. It’s durable, strong, just as easy to use as conventional building materials, and actually good for the environment: it’s actually carbon negative. Even when combined with the lime binder, the overall product takes more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it puts into it. When a Hemcrete building is torn down, the remnants can be used as fertilizer and the material is fireproof, waterproof, a great insulator, and resistant to rotting (as long as it’s above ground)

Unfortunately, Hemcrete is also illegal

I won't say a word about the impact any widespread use of this material might have on the recruitment to volunteer firefighter brigades; I'll leave that one up to Wayne to answer :)

In one of his first patents, R. Buckminster Fuller invented a technique using straw mixed with lime to create low-weight constructions blocks every bit as strong as the solid-concrete counterparts; because the fibre creates a matrix of bubbles that are surrounded by a geodesic network of non-bubbles, the redundant material not involved in the tensional-compressive strength of the material can be omitted without compromising the material's construction properties. Presumably the same would be true of blocks made with other easily grown but otherwise problematic agricultural waste fibre such as corn stalks, so I'm not precisely certain how much of this press-release on Hemcrete really requires the banned crop.

years ago I also toured a sculptor's shop where she had perfected a technique of infusing concrete with small air bubbles to create the void-space bubble matrics without any need to introduce space-occupying plant fibre.