I think, though, that these bands are going to get more than they bargained for. They’re freeing themselves from the RIAA and the labels - that’s a good thing. The BAD thing is, they’re making life a lot harder for themselves. We customers can now vote for what songs are good and what songs are dreary, and not have to pay $14.99 for two good tracks and 10 pieces of crap. Instead, we can pay $.79 a pop for the hits, and let the remaining tracks rot. This is going to put a lot of pressure on individual bands not to churn out dreck.

Ultimately, that enhanced competition is a good thing for consumers. But it’s going to make life hellish for artists who have been riding the coattails of mediocrity left dangling off of the coat of the traditional music industry.

That said, I do have a view inside the bubble, and since I’m originally from New England, I have a curmudgeonly distrust of all things large and who think they’re in charge. Usually that means the government or Big Business, and in this case, I’m talking about the collusive record labels.

Will there be some cataclysmic changing of the guard where every band joins up with a new RIAA (Recording Independents Association of Anarchists?) and goes Free Agent Nation on the former RIAA’s ass? Will all bands start giving away their music for free? Or better yet, seeding copies of their albums to the BitTorrent networks themselves? I doubt it.

BUT, what is important here is that Radiohead, NIN and the others are walking up from their somnambulant stupor and realizing, in Harrison Bergeron fashion, that they do indeed have free will and can take risks (instead of just pot shots) with their own careers if they so choose.

And since the actualization of choice is tantamount to establishing that one has free will, marketing-driven or not, the fact is, their model will become an inspiration for entire generation who won’t just assume that the only way to make it is through signing away your life and becoming a slave to the economics you decried in your post, but instead that they can consider alternative routes to success and satisfaction and more importantly, more genuine or original ways to create and be involved with music, less as a Business, and more as an Art.

I do agree that the ground is shifting under us but whether it will make any difference in the larger picture of society is highly debatable. In this bubble we call the early adopterism of all things cool we seem to suffer from a myopic view that people outside of the bubble will see things the same way.

With music as much as folks who look at the current happenings hope that this will indeed foreshadow a larder trend outside of the bubble that will result in more bands being able to get out from under the thumb of music labels and become successful the fact is I think for the larger Internet world it will only see the word FREE.

As for not disagreeing on points in discussions we have had in the past I think my next post today; which again was sparked by one of yours, may see us definitely at opposite ends LOL

Thanks for taking time and being a part of my contributions to the conversation chain

In any case, I wouldn’t look at this as so much a warm and fuzzy revolution, but rather the kind of circumstance that made the coming of Firefox so exciting… the ground is beginning to shift and the landscape is taking on new forms. If Firefox didn’t come around, who knows when Microsoft would have been forced to update its browser…! The same thing is true for music now with bands advocating for fans to “steal their music” (as Trent Reznor proclaimed, genius marketing if you ask me) or advocating against the use of DRM (since it effectively reduces the number of people who can experience a band’s music, limiting their potential viral spread — which is where bands get their volume from!).

Anyway, I see the commerce side of this. This isn’t just a “Free The Music From the Evil Tyrants” thing. This is changing the way that money is made and how it flows. An Open Media Web is about recirculation, redistribution and greater freedom of choice. Personally I hope this change (more openness and choice) brings about a Darwinian evolution where the crap begins to wane and bands are forced to actually crank out top shelf A-Sides in order to make it.

We’re still a long way off, but I’m not sure, as was the case in the last post we exchanged words on, we really disagree.