Kristin Hersh saves the music industry from itself

Congrats to Kristin Hersh, one of my long-time favorite musicians, for pioneering a new independent artist coalition, CASH Music. Who knew that in addition to being an incredibly talented singer and songwriter, she is full of smart things to say on copyright, “read-write” culture, and new business models for musicians.

CASH is an acronym — it stands for the Coalition of Artists & Stake Holders. The name indicates just what we’re all hoping to build here — a coalition through which we blur the line that’s traditionally stood between creators of content and the consumers of that content.
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We’re all stake holders here. We all stand to gain from a productive relationship. Maybe it will help to think of this relationship as a conversation. For instance, I start the conversation by writing and recording a song every month, like the one I’m posting here this month, “Slippershell”. You respond by listening & sharing “Slippershell” with others.

Sharing is encouraged, I license my work through Creative Commons. If you’re unfamiliar with Creative Commons, do yourself a favor and check out the licenses I use. They’re in plain English and provide better, more realistic and rational copyright protection.

Go download Kristin’s latest song and consider a donation or subscription to support a new business model for indie musicians!

(via the newly full-time waxy)

DRM disappears, my money quickly follows

I’ve been on a digital music buying spree this week — purchasing and downloading three new albums online. Despite being a voracious consumer of new music, mostly from mp3 blogs that highlight and share new tracks, I have never purchased music from the iTunes store. And I still haven’t — I purchased two albums from Amazon’s mp3 store, and one directly from the band (Radiohead).

What pushed me over the edge? Music files with no restrictions on use: no codes to key in, no limits on how many people I can share it with, or how many computers I can play them from. I have had too many bad experiences trying to play a track in iTunes that a friend gave me, only to find that I need their username and password to play it — even if they are happy to give it to me, it’s an extra step, and it reminds me that by my listening to “their” music I may be restricting them from listening to it on other computers or iPods, or sharing with other friends.

iTunes is on the right track now, offering DRM-free mp3s, but their selection is still fairly low, and I don’t enjoy the process of sifting through a lot of great (but DRM-limited and thus undesirable) music to find the unrestricted mp3s. Amazon offers a much more pleasant user experience — I know what I’m going to get: everything is unrestricted.

I didn’t realize how much of a hindrance DRM and a poor user experience had been for me — the unpleasantness of emailing friends for a password to re-activate the music they shared with you a couple months ago, the heartbreak (ok, annoyance) of finding a great album on iTunes but realizing it’s only available in DRM-protected format and so having to continue the search elsewhere — these factors just added friction to the whole music-buying process. Once those issues were resolved, I was surprised to see how quickly my wallet flew open: $30 on DRM-free digital music in one week; that’s literally more than I’ve spent in the past year.

The bounty:

Trojan Originals

The New Pornographers: Challengers

Radiohead: In Rainbows