This video captures Michael Masnick’s Learning From What’s Working: Success Stories From The Music Commerce Frontier.

Masnick is the founder of TechDirt – a technology blog that has been a vocal critic of the music industry’s approach to technology, especially DRM and its opposition to P2P file sharing.

You can safely skip the first 2 1/2 minutes – but the rest is must-view material for musicians.

Masnick relies way too much on the example of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and other musicians that were established by the traditional music industry.

More interesting are Masnick’s examples of the creative and bizarre ways musicians are connecting with fan.

Give it a view and leave a comment with your thoughts!

Moby reacted to the nearly $2 million judgment against Jammie Thomas-Rasset of Minnesota for file sharing 24 songs yesterday, calling for the RIAA to be disbanded:

argh. what utter nonsense. this is how the record companies want to protect themselves? suing suburban moms for listening to music? charging $80,000 per song?

punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business. maybe the record companies have adopted the ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ approach to dealing with music fans. i don’t know, but ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ doesn’t seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice. how about a new model of ‘it’s better to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers great records at reasonable prices’?

i’m so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music.

the riaa needs to be disbanded.

$2 million for sharing three albums worth of songs is clearly insanity.

Using your public user ID to share music illegally, covering up your tracks by replacing your computer’s hard drive, lying about it and then not settling out of court when you’ve got no case is insane, too.

There are going to be a lot of musicians that say they don’t want to be any part of this insanity.

If Moby really wants to make the RIAA irrelevant, though, he should follow the example of Nine Inch Nails, whose free albums releases and Creative Commons licensing have led to huge sales.

SoundCloud – a free file sharing service for musicians – has added a Creative Commons option, so you can share music in ways that let others freely copy it:

The CC license support on SoundCloud is pretty straight-forward. You can pick a license when you upload a track, and you can set a default license in your settings.

There are three main modes; All Rights Reserved, Some Rights Reserved, and No Rights Reserved. The default is All Rights Reserved, which means you own all rights to the works you upload.

Shareaza has long been respected as a high-end multi-network file-sharing client with no banner ads or spyware. Shareaza Version 2.0 is being released with some cool new features, better performance, and a sleek new theme – but the biggest and most important change is that it’s now offered under the GPL, an open source license.

The Shareaza 2.0 codebase is currently available for immediate download at the Shareaza site.

For those who are less interested in code hacking and more interested in file-sharing, there are new features and important performance improvements:

• A new comprehensive “remote web access” feature allows full remote control of Shareaza’s searches, downloads, uploads and networks from any web browser.
• Helpful new “firewalled” warning message and link to router configuration tips
• Performance improvements on all supported networks
• Some sleek new “2.0” graphics.

Shareaza is available as a free download.

Bittorrent is a P2P file-sharing tool that is generating a lot of interest. Here is what you need to know to download and install the latest version of it.

Bittorrent is a P2P application designed to solve the problem of distributing large files over limited bandwidth. It communicates with other Bittorrent clients and works with them to allow you to download large files, even if the network is unreliable.

The application was developed by Bram Cohen, who calls himself a “Practitioner of evolutionary design”. He’s developed the BitTorrent application, a free program that runs on OS X, Windows, and Linux/Unix.

Downloading and Installing Bittorrent

The application can be downloaded from his site.

1. Save the installer to your disk, when prompted. Open the installer, and it automatically run itself. You’ll know it done when you get an alert that says “BitTorrent has been successfully installed!”.
2. Once you’ve got it loaded, just go to a site that has a torrent link and click it. This will open a save dialog box:

   

3. Click OK, and save the file:

   

4. Once you save the file, Bittorrent will open and connect to peers in order to download the file.

   

5. Once your download is complete, you may need to uncompress the file prior to using it.

If you have problems working with BitTorrent, a detailed FAQ is maintained by MXDomain.