U2's manager on the state of the music industry

‘The Online Bonanza: Who is making all the money and why aren’t they sharing it?’
U2's long-time manager, Paul McGuinness, gave a speech to the MIDEM's music industry conference in Cannes. While I'm normally pretty cynical when I hear people in the music industry talking about the sad state of affairs, I have a lot of respect for U2 and their manager.

It turns out that "free music" is not an idea that satisfies everyone. If you're curious about the future of music (or more specifically, the business of music), some of the answers might come from the ideas that Mr. McGuinness presents here.

12 Great Music Mashup Sites

It's Music Tuesday at Linkjockey HQ, and today we have a collection of mash-up links.

Mashups are a musical genre where unrelated songs are remixed together in new ways, often without the permission of the original artists. While music fans are growing increasingly frustrated with major labels, and the bland offerings on commercial radio, edgy mashups are pushing boundaries and generating excitement by breathing new life into old songs.

Here are 12 music mashup sites with free downloads.

General
The Hood Internet
Great Mashup artist that posts awesome new tracks every few days. Highlights include R.Kelly and Broken Social Scene, Justice and Destiny’s Child, and Ghostface Killah (from Wu Tang Clan) and Spoon.

Splice Music
A DIY community formed around mashups for artists, with sample exchanges, forums and finished remixes. Go, go remix culture!

Get Your Bootleg On
A forum with recommendations and links to mashups, compilations and DJ mixes. Registration required.

good blimey
Streaming audio site, with over 2,700 mashups available for listening and free download.

Danger Mouse – The Grey Album
Before he was Crazy in Gnarls Barkley, DJ Danger Mouse was creating a firestorm by “illegally” remixing the Beatles and Jay-Z in the Grey Album.

Q-Unit
Mashup of 50 Cent with operatic hair-rockers, Queen, repeating the successful theme of mixing current hiphop lyrics with classic rock instrumentation.

Mashup Town
A blog that tracks the latest mash-ups, big and small, with links to free downloads.


Mash-up artists
Party Ben
Mash-up artist, featuring The Police vs Snow Patrol in “Every Car You Chase”.

CCC mashups

DJ Earworm
Featuring Stairway to Bootleg Heaven.


The Godfathers of Mashups
Negativland
Negativland got banned and sued for their classic mashup of U2 with Casey Kasem.

John Oswald
Before Negativland, there was Canadian, John Oswald, who made Plunderphonics, which are really intricate mashup albums with bits of tape.

Today’s Link source: Metafilter

Top 100 chart for indie cds

RIAA Radar Charts: RIAA Radar Indie 100

RIAA Radar Indie 100 is the music chart of the top 100 most popular, non-RIAA cds on amazon.com, and it's updated daily.

Regular readers of Linkjockey (Hi Jake!) might know that I love music, but I'm not a fan of the Record Labels' mega consortium. I've made a personal choice not to purchase any music this year from the major labels because of their dirty tactics. Instead, I'm downloading music legally for free on the net, and supporting independent musicians and labels wherever I can. Today's link will help me in this quest.

Today's Link source: Reddit

Documentary about the State of Music in America

Before The Music Dies

Before The Music Dies is a new documentary about the state of music and the music industry in America. Through interviews with musicians, industry insiders, music critics, and fans, and performances by artists from The Dave Matthews Band and Erykah Badu to Seattle street performers and Mississippi gospel singers, the filmmakers try to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong with music.

Focusing on grassroots, word-of-mouth advertising, the filmmakers are promoting their movie by encouraging people to host a screening party. By giving away dvds to people wanting to host a screening party, the want to get hardcore music fans and their friends together to discuss the music, the industry, and the politics of it all, and hopefully, to inspire them to get involved.

Go to a screening of Before The Music Dies in your area, or host one yourself. Or send me an email, and watch Before The Music Dies with me this weekend.

How I Became A Music Pirate

How I Became A Music Pirate - Consumerist

Bonus Link: Yet another new story about how the RIAA is mistreating and abusing the people who could be their biggest customers and supporters. This time the problem is their Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that cripples how people can listen to the music that they legally bought. This guy goes out of his way to buy some music online that he chose not to get for free, and then he can't even listen to it on his ipod or cd player. Lame.

RIAA is killing music

The fate of indie music as we know it Salon News

NPR Starts A War Medialoper

The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America, which is an association of the major record labels in the USA.

CD sales have declined in recent years, and the RIAA is trying to find new ways to make money; such as shutting down Napster, trying to ban mp3 players, taxing blank cds and mp3 players in Canada, and getting lists of customers from internet providers and universities and extorting money from mp3 downloaders.

The RIAA don't seem to acknowledge or address their other problems, namely that the music they've been promoting stinks. Their marketing tool (radio) is stale. After downloading mp3s, people don't want to buy a full album of filler to hear the 1 or 2 hits, and they don't need a shiny plastic disc to listen to music. With the tactics the RIAA is using, in the end they wind up punching themselves in the face by alienating and attacking the biggest music fans.

This week, with the help of US regulators, they will begin charging more money in royalties from internet radio stations than from broadcast radio stations. I don't think anyone is making much money from internet radio, and if this change is enforced, it will force public radio, not-for-profit hobby stations, as well as the legal, for-profit stations, off of the internet. Goodbye internet radio! Too bad for music fans! No new music for you. Im glad the NPR is fighting the good fight to stop these tyrants from destroying music completely.

I've made a personal decision to not purchase any music from RIAA labels this year. I've spent thousands of dollars on music, but I've decided not to support the music mafia any more. That's why I've made Tuesdays at Linkjockey about music; it's to help you find new music and to convince you that good music still exists. End of rant.

A Linkjockey shout out to Vancouver's Spirit of the West for putting on a spectacular St. Patrick's day show at Vancouver's best concert venue, the Commodore Ballroom. They're a Celt-rock and folk-rock institution in this city.