The RIAA – They Can’t Be Serious

Noticed that the top e-mailed story from the entire Washington Post site the other today was regular radio columnist Marc Fisher’s latest Report from the RIAA front, containing this loaded handgun of a paragraph:
Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather [...]

Read Full Post »

ASCAP & BMI – Mining the WV Mountains for Royalties

So there I was minding my own business in an afternoon session of the Create WV conference, listening attentively at a panel called “Creating Places to Hang Out.” The premise is simple enough: How to create so-called “third places:”
“The places we spend our time away from work and home are [...]

Read Full Post »

EMI & Radiohead: "Sticking It" to The Fans?

Yesterday’s entry was about the news of a majority of fans deciding that the right price for Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want experiment was zero, although now the band is disputing those figures.
So, if zero is sublime for fans, what’s ridiculous? A poster to Wired’s Listening Post music blog the other day got it right: [...]

Read Full Post »

Somewhere, At the End of "In Rainbows…."

….didn’t lie a pot of gold for Radiohead’s “pay what you like” strategy. Give them props for trying, but as Digital Music News reported yesterday, 62% of the downloaders of the English progrock band’s seventh album (only available via Radiohead’s website) paid nada for it.
Bubkus.
Zilch.
On the other hand, that means that 38% DID [...]

Read Full Post »

Required Reading – The Well-Tempered Web

In the Oct. 22 issue of the New Yorker you’ll find
a Critic At Large piece called “The Well-Tempered Web” – in essence, a Postcard from the Brave New Media World, written by Alex Ross. There’s a reason Ross is at the top of the list on my blogroll….this is one of the best, [...]

Read Full Post »

The Madonna Model or the Radiohead Revolution?

So Madonna has given Warner Brothers the boot in favor of concert promoter Live Nation, while at the same time Radiohead has devised a pay-what-you’d-like scheme for their latest self-produced, self-distributed release, thumbing their noses at long-time label EMI. All in the space of a few days. [...]

Read Full Post »

Sunday Funnies

Okay, let’s resume our normal breathing. What I intended to write about today (okay, two days ago, actually…the RoeDeo travel schedule has put me behind on the blogs again) was a lot more mundane, but not unrelated to the previous post. I’m an inveterate reader of comic strips. Even the most boring, [...]

Read Full Post »

The Empire Strikes Back

The latest positioning tag line from The Globe (the new “Green” radio format in DC I wrote about a while back) is a little closer to the mark: “Corporately Owned, Listener Monkeyed-Around With.” Bad grammar aside, I’d argue that at least half that statement is factual – and it’s the corporate owners who have [...]

Read Full Post »

The Power of the Users

A friend turned me on to a new blogger today – Buzzmachine, from the mind/pen of Jeff Jarvis. He’s got a great commentary today about the silliness of Viacom (and the Oscars) demanding their video clips be pulled from YouTube. (uh, oh, is the RoeDeo in trouble? Just where did that photo of The Three [...]

Read Full Post »