Down With The Man | Part 6
How music got its groove back. Welcome to the Down With The Man issue: Part 6.
DANCING IN THE STREET
Lately, we’ve been focusing on the music industry a lot, what with all the massive tectonic shifts it’s undergoing. Artists big and small are sticking it to the Big Label Man, anyone from big-leaguers like Madonna and Radiohead to indie mavericks like Ghost Away and Jill Sobule.
The latest shaker: cult British 90’s trip-hop getup Portishead just released their first album in 11 years, Third, exclusively on Last.fm on April 21, where it could be streamed for free until its official release today. (You may also recall our fervent raves about Last.fm and our early predictions of its revolution potential.)
PORTISHEAD – Hunter
It’s the very first exclusive for the social networking music site. But even more interestingly, Portishead was also the very first artist to join Last.fm’s catalog, with their track Cowboys as the first one to ever be played on Last.fm when the site went live in 2002.
And here’s the fascinating thing: traditionally, the music industry has employed an event-based model with album launches, where the launch is heavily promoted and positioned as an object of anticipation by sending the album out to music critics and reviewers well in advance, building up solid media hype. Then, that the record label and retailer can monetize this by pricing the anticipated new release much higher than other stuff.
Recently, in an excellent piece for Wired, the Talking Heads’ David Byrne and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke tackled the current business model, probing the capacity for change. And we think this Portishead/Last.fm move is tell-tale sign of days to come, where artists use new media and the power of the social web to promote, publish and eventually distribute their work, creating a loop of self-sufficiency that not only puts the fans first, but also completely circumvents the red tape of the Big Labels model.
- Music Spotlight: This Must Be The Place Great electro-pop cover of The Talking Heads’ This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody) by Miles Fisher, in the video for which he recreates scenes from iconic film American Psycho....
- It Happened Today David Byrne and Brian Eno bring Everything That Happens Will Happen Today like there's no tomorrow. ...
- Superhero Superdose Superheroes are timeless products of our collective imagination. Below the flashy, cartoonish surface, these cultural icons reveal a rich world of art and social ideology. ...
- Behind the Scenes of Project N.A.S.A. Behind the scenes of the incredible N.A.S.A. collaborative project, featuring some of today's most iconic musicians and animators....
- The Year in Ideas: 8 Best of 2008 8 things that shaped the year’s innovation footprint, or what Buckminster Fuller has to do with tap water and Michael Phelps. This being an indiscriminate ideas blog, we’ve put together a selection of the year’s best ideas — big and small, spanning a multitude of categories, and held together by...
Yikes.
When did David Byrne start looking like the old farmer in American Gothic? (With more hair, I mean…)
Ah, but an old farmer who can flip the whole big music industry the bird, and that’s worth a whole lot more than raising chickens.
[...] And that’s a tune we’ve been singing for quite some time. [...]
[...] long been singing the same old song about how the music industry’s business model is undergoing massive [...]