Since posting it, I’ve had lots of tweets from friends whose music is on it, so let’s start a directory of entries – post a link to your bandcamp page in the comments, with a little bit of info about you and your connection to me (just so it doesn’t become a music-spam-fest – there’s no special criteria for being included, other than some kind of link – twitter-friends, gig buddies, blog readers etc… all are fine ) and I’ll grab the embed code from your site and add it here, creating a little online shop

here are my 3 bandcamp albums so far:

and here are the first of the embeds from the comments:

(while all this has been going on, I’ve uploaded my first album to bandcamp as well: )

Why? Because she asked us to.

(*spoiler-alert* – it’s effing amazing)

And now you can pre-order the CD or download here – http://www.imogenheap.com/preorder/

"go buy her album, OK?"

While it claims to be “the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Its mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members’ creative and financial vitality” the reality is – as is clear from its list of directors – that it represents the interests of a handful of millionaire corporate executives who are, frankly, shitting themselves at the collapse of the industry they’ve built around the distribution of physical music product.

So the RIAA – rather than looking at new models for distribution, or acknowledging the benefits of downloading for artists getting the word out – now prosecutes college kids to the tune of $22 THOUSAND… per track!

Since when was a single MP3 worth £22K? What percentage of single songs online have made $22K total, let alone can be proven to have LOST that much through downloading? Had Joel made anything from this? nope. Has anyone been damaged? Nope.

It’s pure greedy, nasty, anti-music legislative BS.

So, I’m making 3 of my albums available for free on last.fm. I was going to make them all available over the weekend, but CDBaby administers a few of my albums on there, thanks to last.fm being one of their ‘digital partners’ – maybe I’ll find some other way of giving away more music.

Whatever, the RIAA are scum. Filth. Pondlife. If I was signed to record label that were represented by them, I’d be turning up at their offices with a NOT IN MY NAME banner.

The major labels are dying. They age of charging $15 for a CD, paying 50c of it to the musicians, and keeping them in debt are over. It’s the age of the indie. So fuck the RIAA. Give some music away this weekend.

Here’ s the links to the 3 albums:

Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt 1
Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt 2
Lessons Learned From The Fairly Aged Felines.

Q: How nuts is that? $600,000 for downloading? Is there a single comparable area of legislation where the punishment is so insanely out of proportion to any impact the action may have had?

I’m not sure it’s ever been ‘bad’ at all, to be honest… CD sales are declining, but digital music costs so much less to manufacture and distribute that the crossover point between lower sales but increased profits will hit eventually. Hard copies are still a desired way of ’showing allegiance’ to a band, over just downloading. Merch is doing well, gigs are doing well, and the potential for new acts finding an audience without gambling a fortune is marvellous.

It also seems to me that the decline in bit torrent traffic for music may actually be that a lot of the early adoptors have filled in their catalogue with all the stuff they wanted to start with… Anyone wanting to ‘replace’ their vinyl collection may well have downloaded gigabytes if not terabytes of music to get all the Led Zep, Queen, MJ, Abba and Beatles they ever need – check out last.fm’s charts for more on how much music listening is ‘legacy’ based…

So, there are a whole range of ways that people find music, replace music, download music, pay for music things. They’re all happening, it’s mostly good news, and we can stop worrying, yes?

But, there’s no indie stuff there, largely because none of us manage our own catalogues on there, so can’t change prices at will – CDBaby or ReverbNation or whoever did the deal, and we don’t get the vary it, generally.

However, we do on bandcamp, on cdbaby itself or on our own self-hosted MP3 sites.

SO!

This thread is for the posting of links to indie MP3 albums, which have to be under £3 UK or $5 US.

Here are the rules – read them or I’ll delete it. This is not a thread for FREE DOWNLOADS. It’s a sale-bin. If you’re on bandcamp and have pay-what-you-like or whatever, that’s fine, but if it’s just free, it doesn’t qualify… for now.

Add the link, a small description, then go and pimp the thread, so we all benefit. Hurrah!

I’ll kick things off with my 2004 album, Grace And Gratitude – it’s lots of people’s favourite album of mine, and is currently only $3.50 on CDbaby.

Click here to head over there and download Grace And Gratitude for £3.50.

Now it’s your turn… (after you’ve bought G+G )

“Virgin and Universal have signed a deal that will give the ISP’s customers access to “unlimited” music.

For a monthly fee, Virgin’s broadband customers will be able to download or stream as many MP3 files as they want.

As part of the deal, Virgin has pledged to aggressively police usage to stop the MP3 tracks turning up on file-sharing networks. ”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8100394.stm

So we pay a flat fee if we want to download music & that goes to the record company who, I’m sure, will pass it on to the musicians, presumably like subscription radio.

I can see a few problems with this, especially as artists are using the big companies less & partly because downloads aren’t exclusively saleable content but it might be a way forward.