That is so cool, seems obvious really, yet new bands are still running round worrying about things like recording a demo and getting a record deal. The only arguments I can think of for record companies existing are: Its nice to have someone else sort out the legal/business/distribution stuff, but hey, you can get a manager, lawyer and an accountant right? Actually scratch that, ditch the manager, its just one more person to rip you off, the lawyer and accountant can do that well enough already. The idea that artistic works need to be published tends to be a filter for the dross. Take books, before the internet, you had to get published to get written works out there, nowadays everybody and their mum has a blog on the web about their boring little lives. Unfortunately record companies haven't done the filtering thing to well either. So er.. I can't really see a reason for record companies to exist at all. Besides sticking MP3s on the web, its nice to get CDs out there too. Theres a brilliant site called CD Baby www.cdbaby.com where you can sell your CDs online. It can even be a CD-R as long as you package it nice. You can start with a stock as small as 5 CDs and CD Baby will sell them and they will even put samples of the tracks online for you. You get a much bigger cut of the CD sales price and customers get cheap CDs too.

That generates hope, but didnt they obtain the loyal fanbase through the industry as it existed? (therefore making it slightly easier to get people to go to their toilet gigs in the first place...) jack l had been tryin the net for along time, didnt happen like that for him...just musing here. How many people would pay inflated price for a CD by a new band in order for them to afford the PR etc,... If nothing else it's certainly a great kick up the backside for an ethics free industry.

Yeah, I see your point Lucera. How do you get attention in the first place? Thats a pretty difficult one. Theres loads of bands out there and anytime someone posts a "hey check out my band!" post to a board like this most people ignore it or even treat it with hostility, seing it it as spam. Well maybe take a leaf out of similar non-commercial communities, like the open source software and scientific community which relies on peer review. It all comes down to the filtering thing again. No ones really that interested in downloading MP3s from the website of some band they know nothing about. However when theres a hub for a community that acts as a filter for the good stuff and weeds out the dross or at least gives you an idea of what your getting, you're gonna go there. Myself, I find most new music through epitonic.com, because you get an idea of what your downloading. If I'm looking for bootlegs and mash-ups (I can never seem to get enough), I go to culturedeluxe.com, boomselection.net or GYBO forums (get your boot on). Sadly the wonderfully named bastardpop.co.uk is now almost defunct, but you can still download old bootlegs. I think there is a lot that can be learned from the bootleg/mashup community, because it really is a community. Often someone comes up with a theme, an idea or a challenge and loads of people make their own bootlegs based on that. People comment on other peoples bootlegs in GYBO forum so you get an idea if you want to download it or not. A similar thing can be done with ordinary songwriting. Ever heard of songfight? the idea is someone comes up with a title and everyone has a limited time to write a song and submits it, then people can vote for their favourite. A lot of the songs tend to be a bit goofy and throwaway. But hey, its good clean fun and infinitely preferable to overbearing seriousness. I should also clarify my earlier comments by stating that when I refer to record companies, I mean as they exist now, like Sony, AOL time warner, EMI, etc. There will still be a music industry in the sense that there will always be a need for promotion and the duplication/distribution of media, be it physical media (CDs, vinyl, DVD etc.) or online (web server hosting).

That's really awesome. Anyone heard of distributing music though "weeds"? Check this out: http://www.endino.com/weed/ http://www.weedshare.com/index.html Fans can actually make money as well as artists.

Had a quick look at the weed website. It looks like its just Windows Media Audio DRM (Digital Rights Management), which is nothing new. Microsoft have been implementing it for ages and Apple does something similar with iTunes. The interesting thing however is how the file is distributed and that you get rewarded for hosting the file as opposed to the centralised model of services like Napster 2.0, pressplay, iTunes etc where a single commercial host has control. I don't know if it will really catch on in a big way, the thing holding it back is the fact you have to download the weed software. This really seems to be a backward step and isn't really exploiting the built in capability of DRM. Then again DRM was designed with the big players in mind. The other thing thats a bit dodgy is that it looks suspiciously like a pyramid marketing scheme,

Seems like a smart idea alright. Eoghan aren't Franz F on domino, who wouldn't be termed a major label?

Yeah it does seem a bit like a pyramid scheme but I suppose the upside is you actually have a worthwhile product (depending on whether you like what you downloaded - but then u get to try it! ) at the end of the day. ?? I wonder what the prices start at etc ?

I only heard of Franz Ferdinand through the good work their record company did. Take Me Out is a classic British single. Godd will always out. I've read the Marillion article. They have been fashioning an online identity for themselves for many years. But, as correctly pointed out above, they have a faifhful army of fans and we perfectly happy when they were hitting the top of the charts in the 80s. I find this whole idea of getting your fans to buy 4 copies of a single to get it into the top 10 rather repulsive. It's a rip off and it makes me feel that the achievement is undeserved. I would suggest that the Marillion song should be banned from the charts. There will be a music industry. They adapted to the CD revolution and have made a fortune out of me (and, I suspect, many of you!). They will adapt to this - the first major change I foresee is that the singles chart will be based on airplay, not sales (as in the USA).

Maybe these points will not be representative of alot of people, but ...I actually like having a collection of CD's. It's similar to the fact that many people have their "mini" libraries of books in hallways, living rooms whatever. It's a tangible element of the artist that can help shape the perspective on what is heard by the fan/listener. For this reason I will always buy CD's or the next great format improvement. Secondly, I use a PC and the internet all day on my job, as do many people irrespective of the industry these days. Once I leave work in the evening, the very last thing I want to use or even see is a PC! I just wonder how many other people feel that way, do the record companies know, and is if so then maybe this is why they do not seem to be pushing internet purchases onto the market as heavy as, say the travel industry, the banking industry and even supermarkets are. The guys and girls that run these places all have the same degress as those that run any other multinational. Euro/Dollar/Pound etc is king, end justifies the means blah blah blah. If an industry as rich as this one really wanted an internet friendly format, I think it wuold be here and we'd be paying for it. Thoughts on this?

i just wonder how much of the record/cd buying public have internet access? all very heavily reliant on the web franz ferdinand are on domino, who defo wouldnt be classed as a major, bu t they have alot more cash backing than an independent artist

Lucera was saying how he actually likes having a collection of CDs. I think any regular on this board could only agree with such sentiment. The sense of attachment to one's music collection and its PHYSICAL presence in your gaff can indeed be pretty powerful, sad and all as that may sound to more balanced people who actually have a life. But what I'm wondering is, how might that sense of attachment change or evolve with the arrival of new technologies? Hear me out on this a sec. After a (huge) amount of reflection and sussing out of iPods and iRivers and other hard disk-based MP3 players out there on the market, I last week drew a deep breath and splashed out a little fortune for a 40GB iRiver MP3 player (iHP-140 model to be precise). It hasn’t arrived in the post yet but I’ve wasted no time in starting to convert my CD collection to a digital format to load on to the player when it arrives (other geeks out there may or may not be interested to hear that I went with using the WMA ‘Variable bit rate’ encoding format (with the DMR turned off of course) over MP3 as I think WMA offers the best compression:quality ratio out there, at least to my ears. And yes, yes, yes, I know it’s Microsoft but – credit where credit is due - I think this WMA VBR is a very good format that has the edge over MP3 at a 128kbs bit rate – and if anyone wants to debate of the merits of WMA versus MP3 I suggest starting a new thread…). Anyway back to what I was on about. To date I have converted over 2000 songs from CDs in my collection. And even so the iRiver player will still only be ¼ full when I transfer them to it. So here’s the deal: what will it be like when that player - bursting at the seams with my CD collection - is simply sitting in my shirt pocket? How will that sense of attachment to music evolve (or mutate?) knowing you have your ENTIRE music collection, the one to which you have lived your music-listening life, sitting in the palm of your hand? It’s a potential mind-f**k. It’s a music-listening experience Jim, but not as we know it. What it boils down to I think is this: What will be more powerful? The attachment to your PHYSICAL musical collection sitting on the shelves back in your gaff? Or the attachment to having your ENTIRE music collection digitised and with you wherever you go? If the latter turns out to be more powerful an attachment for 21st century music lovers – and I suspect it will – the music industry is in trouble. I’m not saying the music industry won’t find a way out of such a tight corner. They are after all, despite some Luddite elements within the industry, a smart bunch. But the whole attachment question (which, let’s face, has been key to extracting significant sums of money from music lovers over the years) could be about to change. And radically so. Exciting times, eh? eoghan PS - my oversight earlier in not pointing out taht Franz Ferdinand were on Domino who are not owned by one of the majors. The oversight however does not change the thrust of the posting or the thread that followed.

I pretty much only buy cds directly from bands (when I see them play) or used via half.com or local used cd stores. There are a few exceptions but mostly, I don't buy anything that's going to put money in the hand of the music labels. Mainly because I'm poor, and I'd rather give the bands money directly, for gas in their tour van.

On the whole the question of attachment to a tangible collection of CDs, yeah I like having my CDs on my shelf. Friends can browse, admire my good taste or more likely make fun of me for my complete lack of taste. Theres a nice kind of social element to it, but that isn't the reason I will miss CDs when they are finally replaced completely by digital downloads. What I think the end of the CD will mean is the death of the album. Without the space limitations of a physical medium, an album becomes an artificial thing. Sure you can group songs together using playlists, but it isn't the same. In addition to my CD collection, I also have my PC wired up to my stereo (no tinny PC speakers here) and I find that my listening habbits change when I'm listening to CDs to when I'm listening to MP3s. With a CD I'm more likely to just let an album play through and take it in as a whole. With MP3s, I'm like a kid with ADHD skipping tracks I get the tiniest bit bored with. CDs force you to appreciate the album as whole. Having a big collection of MP3s somehow makes music feel more disposable (I tend to just delete stuff if I don't like it after 2 or 3 listens), but at the same time more fun. I'm not saying the change is bad, just that its a change really, thats all. You lose the album, you gain a huge fun jukebox. As for the people that don't like sitting in front of their PC to play MP3s, you don't have to, as well as the portable MP3 players, there is new Hi-Fi kit on the market. Its like a seperates unit but it uses a Wi-Fi network connection to play the MP3s stored on your PC and you can program/skip tracks with a remote control. Soon you will also be able to buy broadband radios too that allow you to listen to streaming radio stations on the web as well as the normal FM radio stations without having to touch your PC. Obviously you still need a broadband internet connection.

(adopt old cranky voice) all these new things seem to be doing a few things. First off, you need spare cash, broadband and PC/Internet knowledge and ability. This is bad for music. Alot of people are alienated. Also, I'm sure companies dont want their already shrinking markets deteriorated any further either. Now I realise that CD players and CD are also costly goods, but they are bought in the hope/knowledge that these formats will be around for the forseeable future. Secondly, some albums took me and some of my fellow music lovers months to get into. MBV Loveless did not make sense to me for ages. (That probably marks me out as some sort of idiot, thats ok I became aware of my idiocy a while ago.) I'm currently getting into some Melvins stuff and the last Fantoma's record (if you could call it that). If I hadnt bought it, I most likely would have deleted it after two or three listens as you said. But I could potentially be missing something great.(in the case of the Fantomas, I'm not sure at all.) While I detest the activities of record companies raking in a fortune off the hard work and passion of sincere artists and from the pockets of already overcharged concert goers and music lovers,I equally do not like the thoughts of having a good variety of music becoming the preserve of those of us lucky enough to have a good education and a bit of extra spending power. And yes, the view from the fence I'm sitting on is nice. heheh.

Lucera, if it puts your mind at ease, if you buy a CD, devices capable of playing CDs will be around for the foreseeable future. All the devices that can play the newer data/music formats such as CD-ROM, DVD, DVD-ROM, SACD, DVD-Audio, DVD-R, Playstation etc. are generally all compatible with music CDs. I totally agree that music should not be the preserve of the elite, however digital music does not end with PCs. Someone made a good point about ringtones being a way for artists to earn money. I'd take that one step further, by about 2008 GPRS mobile phones are expected to be commonplace. Far more people could be downloading and listening to "real" tunes (as opposed to a crappy polyphonic ringtone) on their phone in the next few years. Everybody seems to have a mobile phone these days and I reckon more is spent by teenagers on phones these days than CDs.

im not a fan of polyphonics, ive a 200euro phone with that nokia tune from trigger happy tv. someone once excitedly played me jimi hendrix's version of all along the watchtower on their new mobile phone... they were out of hospital in a matter of days in fairness. walks a bit like john wayne now.