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Dance musician Moby has launched a Web site that gives his music away — to the right people, of course. He is licensing his music for free via mobygratis.com to help out indie and student filmmakers. “I was a philosophy major and I had a minor in film,” he says. “Ever since then, I’ve had a lot of friends in the world of independent and nonprofit film production. Their recurring complaint is that it’s really difficult to license music for movies that have no budgets, so I thought I would start this Web site which very simply provides free music… Read more »

Relationships in the entertainment world can be famously fraught. And few are more so these days than the one between Steve Jobs and Universal Music chief Doug Morris. You may recall that Morris recently refused to re-up a multi-year contract to put his company’s music on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. That’s because Jobs wouldn’t ease his stringent terms, which limit how record companies can market their music. Now, Morris is going on the offensive. The world’s most powerful music executive aims to join forces with other record companies to launch an industry-owned subscription service. BusinessWeek has learned that Morris has… Read more »

Johnny Earle’s inspiration to start his own business hit very close to home. “Growing up, I’d see my mom come home miserable from her 9-to-5 job, and I think that’s what made me an entrepreneur,” he said.For 23 years, Lorraine Earle commuted from the Earle home in this seaside town to a law office located about 20 miles north in downtown Boston. The three-hour commute took its toll on Lorraine and provided the impetus for her son Johnny to become his own boss. The longest commute Lorraine has nowadays is to the Hull store that serves as Johnny Cupcakes HQ… Read more »

Recently, Maureen Callahan wrote a piece for the New York Post about Crush Management, the NYC cadre that shepherds the careers of Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, the Academy Is … , Boys Like Girls and Armor for Sleep (or, as Callahan puts it, “basically any band that a 13-year-old girl with a blog and a Hot Topic habit obsesses over”). Aside from providing readers with some genuinely bananas quotes from songwriter/ rock-and-roll vampire Butch Walker about credibility (especially considering this is on his résumé), the article is excellent primarily because it floats the hypothesis that the artists… Read more »

From the creative well of Kris Anaya comes An Angle’s third offering, The Truth Is That You Are Alive, out June 12th on Drive-Thru Records. An Angle has two previous full-lengths on Drive-Thru, We Can Breathe Under Alcohol (2005) and …And Take It With A Grain of Salt (2004). Anaya and An Angle have gone through several sonic transformations and the journey continues with The Truth, a rock album with pop influxes like the catchy bounce of “I’m Alright” and the lead single and forthcoming video, “Oh! Oh! Oh! Trouble!” Anaya gets gritty in the sexy blues bump of “C’mon… Read more »

Ten years ago, as the Internet began to mushroom in popularity and emerging technologies enabled consumers to make nearly perfect copies of digital content, the recording industry embarked on a two-pronged strategy in response to the changing business environment. First, it emphasized copy-control technologies, often referred to as digital rights management (DRM), that many in the industry believed would allow it re-assert control over music copying. Second, it lobbied the Canadian government for a private copying levy to compensate for the music copying that it could not control. While the industry’s approach proved successful on the legal front — the… Read more »

“We have been wrestling with the issues around interoperability for some years and have concluded that it is not so much a technology problem as a business problem,” wrote the consortium to Jobs. No kidding? And all along the world at large thought downloading DRM-free MP3 files presented huge technical issues. Seriously though, late last year Apple itself gave a few of us media folk a glimpse of why record companies fear the computer turned consumer electronics company. At the Apple Australia Christmas party in Sydney, a young band treated us all to a couple of songs. They were pretty… Read more »

With Sting’s simple “Ladies and gentlemen, we are the Police,” one of the most iconic bands of the last 30 years ended a long absence from live performing to launch the 49th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday night. Blasting off with the unmistakable, reggae-fied “Roxanne” riff from guitarist Andy Summers and the hard jazz drumming of Stewart Copeland, the Police lived up to their top billing on the show, providing a spirited kickoff to one of the most anticipated reunions in a year full of get-backs. With a buff-if-balding Sting in fine form and voice, the trio’s homage to a… Read more »

After toiling away for seven years and building a rabid fan base in the Christian market, Relient K broke through to mainstream success with the 2004 release “Mmhmm.” The band’s career illustrates that sometimes the least calculated of efforts reap the most rewards. “Our band’s philosophy is we do what we do and whatever happens around us, happens around us,” lead vocalist/songwriter Matt Thiessen says. “We write the songs we want to write and try to have fun with the band. It’s not like we went into the record saying, ‘This would be a great radio song.”‘ Relient K’s fifth… Read more »

In a rare open letter from CEO Steve Jobs on Tuesday, Apple urged record companies to abandon digital rights management technologies. The letter, posted on Apple’s Web site and titled “Thoughts on Music,” is a long examination of Apple’s iTunes and what the future may hold for the online distribution of copy-protected music. In the letter, Jobs says Apple was forced to create a DRM system to get the world’s four largest record companies on board with the iTunes Store. But there are alternatives, Jobs wrote. Apple and the rest of the online music distributors could continue down a DRM… Read more »