Amanda Palmer is Not Afraid to Take Your Money

Please read her blog post on this, and there is a link below to discuss it. However, I would also like to relate what happened to me this week. I was moving to another house in the Boston area, and we hired a moving company to help us. 3 of the 4 guys who showed up were musicians. Two are in "indie" bands that are currently active and fairly well-known (one of them recently performed on Conan and Jimmy Kimmel) and the other was in a band that was, until recently, on a major label. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that.

blog « amanda palmer

Discussion on the blog post

Lily Allen Speaks Out on File Sharing

Last week, British recording artist Lily Allen posted a blog entry on her MySpace page in reaction to a recent article about the Featured Artists Coalition, in the UK Times Online. I think this quote from Pink Floyd's Nick Mason offended her the most: "File sharing means a new generation of fans for us."

Allen's response to this is thought-provoking: "Last week in an article in the Times these guys from huge bands said file sharing music is fine. It probably is fine for them. They do sell-out arena tours and have the biggest Ferrari collections in the world. For new talent though, file sharing is a disaster as it's making it harder and harder for new acts to emerge." Later on comes my favorite quote: "the more difficult it is for new artists to make it, the less new artists you'll see and the more British music will be nothing but puppets paid for by Simon Cowell."

See the whole controversy unfold:

Original Times Online article

Lily Allen's Myspace blog post

Lily Allen's blog "It's Not Alright" created to discuss the issue further.

Response by the Featured Artists Coalition

Radiohead's Ed O'Brien agrees with Lily Allen

More New Songs, and Another Option for Indies

In case you've been curious as to why I haven't blogged much lately, I've got a whole batch of new songs recorded. I am also trying out a new service called "Gimmesound" (www.gimmesound.com.) Fans can download songs for free, and artists share in ad revenue. It's an intriguing model, and I'm interested in seeing how it pans out. I will let my faithful readers know!

You can find my page at http://www.gimmesound.com/MichaelJJohnson. Take a listen, and download what you like!

There is a batch of new songs, as well as higher-bitrate versions of songs I did earlier in the year. The last seven songs on the player are a series of prepared guitar pieces I recorded. I am still mixing several more, and will probably have them posted by next week.

I have decided to collectively call this new batch of songs "Manifesto," after the "Artist 2.0 Manifesto" I posted several months ago. All the files are high quality VBR mp3's, which means a bit longer download times.

I've always been curious as to the effectiveness of an ad-supported model. We'll see.

Live on the Web: Matthew Ebel

My Twitter friend and fellow Massachusetts resident Matthew Ebel has been performing a weekly live web concert for some time now, and has been quite successful with it. As further proof of this success, NPR recently did a piece on him, which is a must-read:

wbur.org » News » Live From The Basement: Geek Rock!

Conventional wisdom might tell us that an unsigned artist couldn't possibly garner an audience this way, much less make any money. Kudos to Matthew for proving the conventional wisdom to be wrong!