MADE

AOL bought Bebo in 2008 for $850 million. After that happened, British musician Billy Bragg blasted Bebo in a New York Times article for refusing to pay out royalties to all the musicians who uploaded music to the site. According to him, they were just as much investors in Bebo as the people who put [...]

There’s a cool paper about file sharing that was written by economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf this past summer.  The conclusion of the paper is that file sharing benefits society. One of the pieces of evidence for that is that less restrictive copyright laws have encouraged greater numbers of creative people to create. [...]

I was looking at music sales for the week of 1/3/10. Susan Boyle’s “I Dreamed a Dream” was on its sixth week and sold 3, 103, 828 copies. Mega-selling records like this are becoming an anomaly, but I think there’ll continue to be a place for them in our culture because people still like a [...]

I was involved with a group of guys several years ago trying to start up a record label. There were four of us. We had world-class production talent and managed to recruit two very talented hip hop and pop artists. All we wanted was to sign a distribution deal with a major label. The quality [...]

Steve Knopper is a reporter at Rolling Stone. He published a book this year called Appetite for Self Destruction about the meteoric rise and fall of the music industry.
I’ve posted a link below to a fascinating interview he did with NPR where he gives a grand sweep of the music industry from the advent [...]

The other day a reader asked how one goes about dominating a niche market in order to make the money that would make it worthwhile to make music.
It’s an honest question, but it’s based on the faulty assumption that you have to dominate a market to make money. The reason that the whole market domination [...]

Revolutions on the level of the one brought about by the Internet happen rarely. At most, once or twice a century. This one’s a big one. Few industries have been untouched. And it’s just getting started. Perhaps no industry has seen the degree of upheaval that the music industry has.
We’re going to see a [...]