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!

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.

It’s been a bad week for music industry lawyers trying to put the thumbscrews on filesharers everywhere.

Dec 19th, the Dutch supreme court threw out an attempt by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) to limit the use of the Kazaa file-sharing network. The decision means that Kazaa can’t be held liable for how individuals use its software.

This is a major blow to the major labels’ current legal attacks. It means that it’s going to be harder than ever for them to try and shut down file-sharing networks like Kazaa. Instead, they may have to step up their unpopular tactics of targeting individuals.

The IFPI is a music industry trade group that represents BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the RIAA could not issue subpoenas to identify and sue users of file-sharing networks. The court found that copyright law did not allow the use of subpoenas to identify file-sharers.

This puts into questions the legality of the lawsuits that have already been filed against file-sharing software users.