Branching off of Dan’s recent entry re: Coldplay’s videos, it seems to me that this has been the sad standard for some time now. The more artists that leave record labels to galvanize their own fan bases however they see fit, the more that the task of the music video falls into the hands of a friend or assistant who records some blandly candid backstage footage, which more often than not winds up buried in the band’s MySpace page. And even when the suits do throw a little Thanks-For-Not-Doing-Heroin-This-Era money at their bands, the videos just look like the same low-budjy turds, only polished. Shake the camera a lot to cover up the lack of a set, overexpose to cover up the lack of a set, pack the thing with tight close-up shots of the singer’s face to cover up the…well, you get it.

What’s it worth anyway, when these days the largest window you’ll ever see the video play on is about the size of a burrito?

But it’s not just the money disappearing or the format changing. The faith has been lost, if only temporarily, in the power of a music video to brand a new artist or transform an established one’s perception. Maybe people collectively think of music as a barrage of emotion-information, instantly available and meant to be processed at speeds approaching ADHD, but that’s a little cynical. My guess is that, now, always and forever, people only get out of music what they put into it: They can tire of a hit single after digesting the catchy hook enough times and move on quick, but should they choose to really apply what a group’s saying to their life experiences, they connect with it more and start looking up show dates or blow all $25 of their remaining retirement savings on the hoodie.

See, it used to be enough to buy the record on the release date and throw a listening party with your like-minded friends. But I think the era of the more passive listener now has to share room with the new breed of consumer, who wants to vote for the next American Idol, who wants to download the song on Guitar Hero and interact with the chords, who wants to chop and screw their own versions of the song/video and put it online for their friends/one guy in Michigan who hates it/family to see.

As expected, the next wave of artists, bred to appeal to the next wave of young fans, are establishing that kind of interactive presence. Soulja Boy is a self-made man and Paramore lent their name to promotional segments for the Rock Band launch – as seen, coincidentally, on TRL, a once-humongous music video show soon to be cancelled. (Unfortunately, Paramore, your rock advice to video-game band Carrie Me Home was in vain! Muahaha.) Bang Camaro, in a daring bastardization of the last bastion of musical integrity, invites members of the audience to come onstage and sing all the lyrics to their songs, the clearest synthesis of Artist and Consumer there is. Of course, that kind of sharing has been going on since Green Day was first putting their fans on bass in packed stadiums, but never before has the presence of the audience been invited to overtake the identity of the band with oppressive gang vocals.

Remember when bands used to get pissed at your for stealing the spotlight by stage-diving? Not anymore. They really need you to like them these days.

Twenty-somethings see hardly any of the bands they grew up with getting promoted (except maybe Weezer, which continues to produce the sound of an empty pistol clicking against their collective temple, album after album). The reason: We had our chance to absolve a long time ago when the labels successfully ass-punished Napster. Instead we retreated into the untold glories of Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire, and other P2Ps, because we seriously, seriously thought music should be free all of a sudden. So with radio all but dead and the industry moving on to new, youth-skewing forms of promotion, we’re left to our own devices and the blogs of many a well-meaning hipster to figure out what the hell we want to listen to next – oh, and this new bone we’re getting thrown in the form of iTunes’ Genius App and Pandora. Not sure how those will work or evolve yet.

Point is, it’s all about the next demo now, and the next demo doesn’t care about music videos. They only knew them as Disney Channel commercials, or as locations for singers’ boyfriends to hang out and wind up in the gossip pages of OK! Their relevance has diminished because the community that once touted videos as art (that’s us if you’re not keeping track) dove into torrents and ditched the support of artists to save cash on their albums – and visionaries like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry gotta eat too, so any ambitious, creative voices simply traded up for film or went home.

Those and similar video directors’ collected works stand, in my opinion, as the last great gasp of music videos, an important series of artifacts that occupy the screen at dorm room parties as a reminder of how we used to process the identities of bands we liked and how, even in the act of commerce, they could excel at art. It’ll take a lot more than the next set of fresh video ideas to bring it back; we’re going to need to come to the conclusion as a generation that we ourselves are not nearly as clever or talented at interpreting music for ourselves as we currently think we are, and that we need both the help of the directing wunderkinds to do it and the labels to put it in front of our faces enough times.

So essentially, we’d have to get over ourselves and spend money doing it. Yeeeah. That’ll happen.

Anyways, the guys from Coldplay are holding a fan-music music video contest. This makes me rather happy, because not only is it an example of one of the biggest bands in the world jumping into social media, but perhaps it’s also an acknowledgment that their music videos for “Violet Hill” and “Viva La Vida” were not very good. Or at least that’s what I thought. These days, it takes a lot to get me to enjoy a music video, and for whatever reason, Coldplay’s have definitely not come through for me. I love their music, but I just don’t feel their music videos have been good lately.

Regardless, I’m glad to see them giving their fans a shot.

TrueAnthem is a relatively new company that believes music should be free to download, artists should still get paid for it, and that advertising is the way to allow both of these things to happen. While I tend to agree with most of that in theory, the way it worked in practice left me wishing I could just pay my $9.99 to get the album on iTunes.

In order to download the Ultraviolet Sound album, I first had to register for an account, which is annoying all by itself. (Take a lesson from Radiohead: Because it’s free doesn’t mean people will come running.) Once I did this and logged into their somewhat-buggy MySpace widget, I attempted to download the album. It was hardly seamless. You are forced to download every single track separately, and it asks you for the download destination each and every time. It took several minutes to actually acquire the entire album.

They also weren’t kidding about bringing in advertisers.

Each MP3 on the album begins with an advertisement for Adidas Originals, with the exception of one track on the album, which isn’t a song at all, but a giant ad in MP3 form. Annoying? Yes.

Furthermore, the MP3’s themselves are encoded in low-quality 128kbit, and also lack album art or complete metadata. I don’t get that part. It’s super easy to encode music in a higher-quality format. If TrueAnthem really wants to compete with paid music by providing a similar experience at less cost, they need to at least give us decent-quality music.

Perhaps the worst part about working with TrueAnthem is that you need to sign an exclusive contract with them. For a period of about a year, you cannot sell or distribute your music in any other fashion than through TrueAnthem. No CD’s, no Amazon, no iTunes. Regardless of how forward-thinking TrueAnthem thinks they are being by providing music totally free of charge, exclusivity undermines the spirit of music distribution on the internet, which is about choice. Consumers of music have the option right now to buy music on CD in stores, or from whatever online music store they prefer.

In fact, the whole reason why the music business is in the mess that they are is because of exclusivity. Rather than giving consumers the power to choose how they wanted their music, the business forced it upon them until the consumers revolted. It’s 2008, and this does not fly.

While I have to applaud TrueAnthem for finding a way to get paid while giving music away for free, listening to an album of low-quality MP3’s with an ad at the beginning of each one is annoying, and I would much rather have paid $10 for the same album with no ads and higher quality.

Would most people? Perhaps not the majority, but many people would — which is why you shouldn’t be forcing the artists into exclusive contracts.

TrueAnthem is attempting to infuse traditional label business practices into a new distribution method, rather than recognizing that this is a whole new ball game. The rules have changed — not just the players. They also are providing a record label experience without providing their bands with much marketing assistance, which is the one thing that traditional labels still excel at. In addition, there are various technical hurdles with their MySpace widget and the resulting files that make it even harder to use their distribution system. They are a record label in sheep’s clothing, and while I admire their intentions, I hope to see them change their ways.

If not, then I await the day their contract with Ultraviolet Sound expires so I can pick up their album elsewhere.

According to statistics from BigChampagne, In Rainbows was traded via torrents over 2.3 million times within one month of the album’s internet release. While the actual number of legal downloads of the album from Radiohead’s website are not public, it is still generally believed that in the end, the album was still pirated more times than it was legally acquired.

Especially interesting is the fact that these numbers — 400,000 downloads on the first day and 2.3 million over the first month — completely dwarf illegal downloads of albums by huge artists such as Gnarls Barkley and Panic at the Disco, even though they weren’t giving away their music and thus piracy was to be expected.

Believe it or not, though, this all makes sense, and I will break this down for you now.

When something is free, more people hear it, and more people share it. Giving away your music is generally accepted as a way to get it out to more people, even if that means you can’t profit directly off the sale. We must remember that when something shows up on the torrent trackers, it had to start from somewhere. Someone, somewhere had to buy, steal, or leak the original CD in order to digitize it and get it onto the torrent trackers. In this case, since anyone could go download it, essentially anyone could also be the “seeder.” Thousands of people were downloading and creating their own torrents of it, resulting in not only the most blazingly fast download ever, but also the fact that you couldn’t go onto any torrent tracker without seeing it. It was everywhere.

The bigger issue at hand here, though, is that the torrent platform has done for piracy what iTunes has done for music sales — created a well-known and respected brand that is also incredibly easy to use. It’s pretty easy to download files from the torrent trackers. You just go somewhere like The Pirate Bay, search for what you want, and click a single button. Done. It’s easy. In order to legally get the album from Radiohead, you were required to give them your email address, navigate an overloaded server, etc. It could take several minutes and required too many steps.

This is exactly why iTunes is so successful. Even though you can get the exact same music with better quality and no copy protection at lower prices at Amazon, iTunes still wins. It’s easy, it’s a brand, it’s respected.

It is also comparable to a band trying to run their own website rather than use MySpace. While you have more control, the sad fact is that in order to sell things to the masses, you must now to go where the masses congregate — they will no longer come to you, in most cases even if the content is compelling. And right now, those masses congregate on MySpace, iTunes, and The Pirate Bay. It is therefore interesting, but not surprising to me, that Radiohead’s album was pirated more than it was legally acquired despite being free.

But in the end, the band still wins. They still made a good amount of money from the pay-what-you-want approach and for the special edition versions of the album. Their concerts will sell out. They won the public opinion, and made themselves a beacon to the rest of the music industry.

The big winners in the music distribution space are always going to be the ones that balance price with ease. And when the price is $0.00, so much the better.

The easiest way to buy music online can also be a massive headache if you’re one of the people out there who care about DRM. We already know that music purchased through iTunes is riddled with it, but what many people don’t know is that iTunes Plus — Apple’s pricier alternative to their DRM’d music — has a dirty little secret: Your personal information.

Since iTunes Plus is labeled as “DRM-free,” one would think it would not retain any of the purchaser’s information, but alas this is not correct. While the files are in excellent 256kbit AAC format with no copy protection, you will notice that if you Get Info on the track within iTunes, the purchaser’s full name and email address are fully intact. Furthermore, you cannot remove them by editing the ID3 tags. In fact, you cannot remove them at all from within iTunes.

But you can with an excellent program called Fission. This application is unique in that it can open, edit, and save compressed audio files (such as MP3 or AAC) without losing any quality. It does this by not decompressing the file in the first place as most audio editing applications do.

In order to strip your personal data from the iTunes Plus track, you simply need to open it in Fission and then immediately do a File > Save Audio. The resulting file will not have lost any data or quality, but your personal information will be gone!

The only downside of this is that, at the time of this writing, Fission can only open one file at a time. Since I have over 300 iTunes Plus files, the process of stripping my personal information from them could be quite time-consuming.

Of course, the bigger problem is why Apple is doing this in the first place. We all know that it’s largely the fault of the labels that so little of their music is available DRM-free, but I have my doubts about their involvement in burning your personal information into the iTunes Plus tracks.

So what gives, Apple?

Recent statistics show Amazon’s music store gaining in market share. It’s not anywhere at all close to iTunes’ yet, but hopefully the existence of some real competition will entice Apple to continue improving their own store.

First off, let’s look at the way they try to get you to buy them. Most of the time, the artist attempting to sell you a CD hands it to you, implying that it is free, perhaps a sampler or something. Only once you take the disc handed to you (and why wouldn’t you, if you were a tourist or did not know any better) does the artist then ask for his $5-10. It is misleading, annoying, and dishonest.

(As a side note, if the musician were to actually be handing out a free CD with a couple tracks and perhaps a link to his MySpace page where you could buy the rest, that would actually work rather well.)

But beyond all that, why are they out here peddling CD’s in the first place when they can put their music up online for free, and build up an audience that way?

Yes, I know, building an audience is never easy. But online, the costs are lower, the stakes are lower, and the potential is way, way, way higher.

Last night, I uploaded about 13 images to Flickr. Before I had even given them names and descriptions, they had already gotten a handful of views, solely because they were just uploaded and Flickr shows users the most recently uploaded photos. Just by putting something online, you are probably guaranteed more eyes or ears per day than you would if you were sitting on Hollywood Blvd with a stack of CD-R’s.

And then we get to the issue of targeting. If you are simply handing your album to anyone who walks by, just the probability of merely finding someone into your genre of music is low. When your stuff is online, tagged and categorized for all, it is very likely that your listeners enjoy your music, or at least are interested in your style or genre, rather than random.

I’m not even going to cover all the different social sharing aspects of putting your work online, because those have been beaten to death already. Suffice to say, there are many rewards to be had for putting your art on the internet.

Lastly, there is the issue of time. Putting your music on MySpace takes almost no time at all, and you only have to do the hard work once. As long as you update it every once in a while, maintain a presence, and be good about keeping in contact with fans or people who send you message, you’re probably doing the best job you can at getting noticed. Or at the very least, it will still exceed any attempts you might make attempting to peddle the discs you popped out of your MacBook last night on the busy streets of Los Angeles.

The bottom line: There is absolutely no situation I can imagine where sitting outside trying to sell your CD-R’s is a better way to market your music, in terms of efficiency, time, money, audience, or any other measure of success by which you wish to judge your marketing attempts. There could be some creative ways to do both (such as my idea at the beginning, about giving away free CD samplers with links to the rest of your music) but by itself, CD peddling is no longer effective.

But then again, was it ever even very effective, even before the internet?

Why won’t the record labels die? Well, one good reason is that bands like a lot of the things labels do. Consumer advocacy groups, pirates, lawyers, and other sorts of interesting people have brought a lot of attention towards the fact that the record labels do many evil things. But at the same time, they do a lot of things that bands can’t easily live without.

Musicians want to make music, and most of the time, it really is that simple. That is what they want to do. They do not generally want to also be their own managers, negotiators, producers, web developers, graphic designers, audio engineers, merchandisers and accountants. This is where the record labels come in. They handle all that stuff and let the artist be the artist.

Do the record labels need to change? Yes. Of course. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. There are a lot of things the labels do that artists need.

And that brings me to my theory, one that I am personally betting in, as I am considering getting into this market myself. I call this article one future of record labels because in the future, there are going to be many different options for artists to choose from. But I predict that this will be one of them. I predict that a new sort of marketing agency is going to emerge to handle all of the things a record label currently handles for artists, but while conducting business differently.

This new sort of marketing agency would have the resources and talent to produce records, book shows, design and sell merchandise, and handle all the business stuff. But unlike the current balance of power, the marketing agency would be hired by the band in exchange for some percentage of the band’s income. Maybe something like 20%.

In the end, this could change the whole industry for the better. Bands would no longer be screwed out of money in record contracts. They could still provide creative input for how they would like their records/websites/artwork to turn out. (In fact, they could fire the marketing agency if they did not do a good enough job.) Yet, they’ll still end up with quality results, as the work will have been done by creative professionals who specialize in what they do.

In fact, I would bet the quality would be higher than what comes out of record labels currently, because there would be more of an incentive to do well once their commission was determined by how well the band does in the marketplace.

Furthermore, this could be a very profitable endeavor for the marketing agencies. Taking a commission could seem like risky business, but in fact, if you worked with enough artists, the money would be more than enough to turn a nice profit… especially if you do a good job.

So that’s my theory. Time will tell whether or not I am right.

I think that in the traditional sense of spending tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars on stereotypical music videos that air on television almost certainly is a dead market. It isn’t cost-effective, people don’t like them, and nobody wants to watch short-subject material on cable television, anyway.

This is probably not too thrilling for MTV and similar avenues. Although MTV largely abandoned the music video arena years ago in favor of idiotic television shows, they have been trying to make a comeback with their new FNMTV label, a Pete Wentz-hosted show designed to debut music videos to the public. (The show thus far has not done very well.)

But the concept of a band using a video of one of their songs is not dead at all. In fact, that’s a hugely growing market. The difference is that we are replacing famous directors with fans and friends of the artists, and we’re replacing MTV and VH1 with YouTube, MySpace, and the bands’ own web properties.

I think there is definitely still a market for professionally-produced videos provided that they are unique and well-done. Artists like Red Hot Chili Peppers have done very well with their music videos because, although produced and distributed traditionally, they have always been very original, creative, and memorable.

The distribution method will still be changing, but I personally feel that even in the generation of social media and the “everyone can make a movie” mentality, there will always be a market for well-done, professional content.

In the meantime, it will be very exciting to what R.E.M. and other artists come up.

Despite my relatively positive opinion on eMusic, I have cancelled my membership. It’s not that the service wasn’t good, but rather, it is unnecessary. The biggest problem is that it is not a strong enough store on its own to replace iTunes or Amazon, and at the same time, it does not really complement either of them very well, either.

We already know that eMusic’s library of music is limited. The trouble is that, whereas they used to be known for having all the independent music that iTunes did not carry, this is no longer the case. Very few things are exclusive to eMusic, and so there is really no immediate need to be a subscriber. Although eMusic is much cheaper than iTunes, I find that the frustration of having to check both eMusic and iTunes before I make a purchase is just not worth it. I like having a one-stop shop, what can I say?

An interesting psychological factor I’ve noticed is the price. With a $20/month subscription, I can only download a limited amount of songs. Because of this, I have noticed that I have been more conservative about the songs I choose to download for fear of running out of credits. This way of thinking is totally illogical since I would’ve ended up paying way more on iTunes anyway, but nevertheless this is how the mind works when you have been given a limit.

Lastly, there is the issue of what you’re actually getting. eMusic provides all their songs as MP3’s with no DRM (very cool) but they’re not always in high enough bitrates (not as cool). Many of their songs are in 256kbit but many others I’ve seen as low as 180kbit. And the worst part… you don’t know until you’ve purchased and downloaded the song.

In addition, there is no cover art included, but luckily iTunes goes and grabs that on its own. Yet another reason why eMusic does not stand by itself. I am pleased with the music I have gotten from eMusic, but in the end, I missed iTunes’ quality, catalog, and ease of use. Buying music online should be a simple and enjoyable process. Or at least that is what Apple has brainwashed me to believe. I’ll take it.