"Fan-funded" recording: The next wave?

We've had the file sharing wars, the Radiohead experiment, and just lately the Mudvayne twist, where buying an album gets you the full fan-club-exclusives package as well. Another growing trend in the ever-evolving music industry business model is so-called "fan-funded" recording -- projects whose recording budget is funded not by a label, but by donations from a group's fans.

The model has proven viable enough that there are actually several Web sites devoted to it now -- think Sellaband and SliceThePie and ArtistShare and CASH Music -- but equally as intriguing are acts who choose to go directly to their fans. The Brian Travis Band of LA is $5,500 into a $7,000 fundraising effort to finish off the mastering and duplication of their latest record. And D.C.-based rock band Shane Hines and the Trance have raised $30,000 of a projected $40,000 recording budget for their new album via their TeamTrance site, including raising $13,000 in the first week of their fundraising drive.

Drummer/author Jake Slichter of Semisonic famously characterized the band as "rock and roll sharecroppers," making music as debt-burdened indentured servants to their label. In the future will we call them rock and roll panhandlers? Or is the better comparison to the PBS "viewer supported" model? Finally, is this progress, or just another odd twist along the road to a destination that isn't yet in sight?

Tuesday item-fest: Little Feat and friends, Obama-Springsteen, Radiohead live

Items galore this Tuesday:

• Little Feat's new album features a slew of guest stars taking over the frontman slot once held by Lowell George and reinterpreting classics from the band's rich catalogue. Any album with Vince Gill -- who tackles the immortal "Dixie Chicken" -- Dave Matthews, Bob Seger, Brooks & Dunn, Brad Paisley, Jimmy Buffett and Emmylou Harris all singing on it has got to be worth a listen...
  
  
• Speaking of presidential candidates' relations with the music world, the Rocky Mountain News reports that Barack Obama's acceptance speech at Invesco Field in Denver will be bracketed by performances from Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. Now that's some Jersey love right there...
  
  
• There have been hundreds of reviews of Radiohead concerts published in the past decade. We've even published one or two ourselves. This one from the LA Times was good enough to make me -- who doesn't even like the band -- curious about seeing them live. Nice job.
  

Rolling Stones get what they want from Universal

Big news in the world of corporate labeldom today as erstwhile world's biggest band The Rolling Stones announced they have left EMI and moved over to Universal. This is an unwelcome development for both EMI -- which recently lost both Radiohead and Paul McCartney -- and Live Nation, which had been lobbying hard to sign the Stones. In an industry in the midst of a wrenching transition in both business model and product delivery systems, it's a sign that there is still money to be made making and selling music.

Radiohead v. Prince

The Purple One is at it again, and this time the absurd lengths to which the man continues to go to punish his own fans has sparked a dispute with none other than Radiohead. It seems that The Artist Formerly Known As Rational performed a Radiohead song ("Creep") at the recent Coachella Music Festival. Video of which performance someone promptly YouTubed (duh), which video was promptly taken down after Symbol-dude sicced his unholy army of attorneys on them. Ironically, this also blocked Radiohead themselves from seeing the clip, prompting frontman Thom Yorke to reply "Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our ... song."

When I Was 22, It Was A Very Good Year....

All things considered, 2007 was a fairly normal year for the music business. CD and Retail sales continued to drop, while digital sales continue their outstanding growth, as they did in 06. However, as we approach the end of the calendar, there's one event that could easily become one of the most important decisions made by the industry in quite some time. We're talking, boys and girls, about DRM.

If you read my Best Of 2007 list , you'll see I alluded to this event but didn't expound upon it. Well, that's why the Vault has a blog!

The whole issue of DRM is much too expansive for me to completely cover here, suffice it to say it has become one of the cornerstones of the arguments for Digital Music. For the uninitiated, DRM is what record labels and online stores use to ensure that the music downloaded from them has restricted usage. For example, anyone who is reading this probably has an iPod, and odds are some of you have downloaded a song from the iTunes store. That song contains a DRM technology created by Apple called FairPlay. That technology only allows your purchased music to be played on 5 different computers, selected by you.

On cursory glance, that wouldn't seem to impact your normal music listening habits, but to others, it is the principle of the matter. When you buy a product, it's yours. By all rights, you should be able to do what you want with it, as long as it does not infringe on the personal rights of others. You purchase a car, and decide to fix it up yourself, adding custom parts. No one sees a problem with that, yet there is a stigma with people wanting to share their music with others. Recently, in a Peer-to-Peer Sharing Trial, an RIAA executive stated that even just ripping music from CDs is a copyright infringement. (This involves the whole notion of copyright laws and art, and that's an argument for a whole other day. I will say that I, unequivocally, have never met anyone who has stolen music.)

This year, however, the tide has started to turn for the better. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs wrote a letter early in the year decrying the use of DRM, and stating Apple would support any record labels that would remove it from their product. Shortly thereafter, EMI announced it would start selling DRM-free music across the Web, and they made good of their promise in May. Apple at that time launched their iTunes Plus portion of their store, in which the consumer is able to choose is they want the DRM-free, higher quality tracks or the standard FairPlay files. Over the past few months, other labels such as Universal have engaged in implementing similar strategies. Amazon launched their own Mp3 Download store, with every song DRM-free (As a sidenote, before you go to iTunes, check to see if Amazon has the album first. Their service is terrific, the quality of the files is better, and each has artwork imbedded in it).

However, quite possibly the biggest step forward came with the release of In Rainbows by Radiohead. They completely bypassed the record labels, releasing their album on their own online. What's more, the consumer could choose how much they wanted to pay for the album, which had zero DRM. The results? Radiohead made more off the digital sales from the album than they had with all the other albums put together, according to Thom Yorke himself. Radiohead may claim that their reasoning for the release was based on practicality, however they fail to understand just what it means from this point moving forward.

To the average consumer, this may not sound like exciting news. However, I assure you, it is important. For the first time in a very long while, the record labels are responding to consumer interests, and taking a positive step forward, instead of maintaining archaic policies that do not reflect the times. Within the next year, I would find it difficult to imagine DRM existing in any relevant fashion at all. Music Lovers 1, Labels 0.