On the eve of MESH & a host of other busy-busy things this week, I thought I’d throw up a post of random thoughts from the past coupla days. The whirlwindweekend hasn’t caught up to me yet & I can’t believe that it’ll already be mid-week tomorrow. Apologies to buds that have suffered my burst of cancellations, I am making some preemptive strikes to make up for time spent MESHing during work hours & my social life is paying the price - sorry!
Top of mind, after the weekend’s transcendental Feist concert and a music-filled Santa Cruz is all the rehashing of industry trends - prompted by the NY Times article that ran yesterday. Find it here. It’s a decent enough summary of what a long strange trip it’s been and the puzzling lack of long-term staying power/traction that any new albums have had in the market for a looong tail…I mean looong while. You get it. Anyway, when industry navel-gazing gets the best of you, turn to Mr. Cuban for some perspective (& ego). The no-brainer suggestion to allow consumers to purchase music outside of their homes in the format they prefer (overwhelmingly Mp3) seems like a, well, no-brainer. So let’s get on that.
The scariest takeaway from the Times piece, IMHO, is hearing that companies like Warner are considering branching out into management, and are now vultures hovering over bastions like Sanctuary….if you were an indie artist considering signing to a label, would the prospect of having a guaranteed COI by combining in-house management to your contract sound appealing? Yikes.
In good online monetization news, PayPlay has launched & already features some fantastic progressive artists on its growing roster…PayPlay is kickass because it mashes up two of music geeks favourite online features - legal Mp3 downloads & referral services like Last FM & MOG. Ethical music geeks appreciate (besides that whole non-pirated thing, ugh…) the fact that PayPlay artists will recieve significantly more payment from downloads than industry-dominator iTunes pays out ($0.59 compared to $0.07 on iTunes - BRUTAL).
The next couple of days I might try to live-blog the workshops & conference panels…but I am sure that I will fail miserably. Gotta love Seth’s take on liveblogging attempts - it’s pretty accurate. Llooking back on SXSW uploads - 80% of that stuff was pretty raw & unreadable & certainly not-processed for casual consumption. That said, I will be jotting down quotable quotes and brainwaves - but I’m not promising a g.d. wiki or anything.
Anywhoo, running early tomorrow so I should sign off. & oh, I listened to the title line’s album (check it out here) 
at least six times today whilst in that zombie-state of intense under-grad-writing-mode (for a four pager, how sad - I used to be able to churn those things out!)
peace
meegs
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