Reader James Kirsch responded recently to a quote I posted on posted from Bob Lefsetz on the myth of the ‘long tail’ – the idea that the Internet makes it easy for niche musicians to find an audience. Lefsetz has a pretty pessimistic view of musicians’ prospects. “Almost no one wins making music,” writes Lefsetz. “The odds are… Read More Lessons Learned From Producing Free Music
The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog has an interesting post about Mike Skinner of The Streets, and how he’s giving away music on social networking site Twitter: He’s giving away new songs using Twitter because, he writes, “all this trying to sell you music … wastes valuable time.” A new study out of Norway suggests… Read More Selling Music Is A Waste Of Time
Techdirt’s Michael Masnick discusses why Nine Inch Nails is the future of the music business: Since completing his earlier major record label contract, musician Trent Reznor has been experimenting with a variety of new and unique business models for Nine Inch Nails to reach and connect with fans. This case study explores Reznor’s experiments, examining… Read More The Trent Reznor Case Study: NIN Is The Future Of The Music Business
Solipsistic Nation, a podcast that covers all genres of electronic music, sent word about an upcoming show focusing on electronic musicians on Twitter. Here are the details: If you’d like to participate in the Twitter mix here’s what I’m looking for: Your best track. The duration or the genre of electronic music is not important.… Read More Get Your Music Heard Via Twitter
Need a reminder that the Internet has changed the economics of music? Nine Inch Nails‘ Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV, which was released as a free download, is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store. Despite the fact that you could download Ghosts legally from file-sharing networks, and despite the fact… Read More Free Album From Nine Inch Nails The Best Selling Album Of 2008
Last week, I mentioned that I’m checking out the new music sharing site SoundCloud. I asked readers to share some tracks via the service. The tracks been coming in ever since, from Synthtopia readers around the world. One of the options that you can set within SoundCloud is whether or not you want your music to… Read More Free Music From Synthtopia Readers
I’m testing out SoundCloud – a music sharing and distribution service – and I’d like to see if it could be a useful tool for letting Synthtopia readers get their music heard. If you haven’t tried out SoundCloud, it’s a site that lets you upload your tracks and then share them via websites, blogs, email,… Read More Get Your Music Heard
NIN has released another interesting bit of Internet media for its most recent release, The Slip (our review). They plotted the downloads of the album onto Google Earth, so you can browse interactively and see where the Nine Inch Nails fans are: We’ve had just over 1,400,000 people download The Slip from our site since… Read More The Slip Download Map On Google Earth
Anybody looking on tips on promoting their music via the Internet need look no further than NIN. Their latest Internet media trick is to plot their tour out on Google Earth: On the nin.com tour page, you’ll find links and instructions for subscribing to NIN tour dates via a variety of methods, including Facebook, MySpace, iCal,… Read More NIN Works The Internet Hard!
