crashroots

theindiedigest.com has a great summery on why to give your music away for free. Free music on the internet is nothing to be scared of or feel threatened by. In fact as you will no doubt discover it can be incredibly valuable for all involved. We have reached a pivotal point where the cost of music distribution has fallen to a stage where we can effectively consider it to be free. That is to say, it costs me and you nothing to ‘listen’ to a song I want to hear. Recording a song still costs money, but listening to it no longer does. As with any industry that undergoes a rapid transformation where scarcely controlled goods (CD’s, Tapes, etc) become infinitely available goods (music downloads), in order to gain a strong foothold you need to stay ahead of the curve and adapt as soon as possible.

1. Maximises The Possibility Of Discovery

2. Builds Attention

3. Builds Your Brand

4. Helps You Make Money

read full post at theindiedigest.com

webdistortion.com has a great blog post about emerging opensource music sites. Here´s a summery:

“hopefully this compilation of free open source and creative commons licensed music will help you to find the tunes you need to compliment your project. Large artists are starting to go down that route, Nine inch nails and more recently Portishead after freeing from their record label have started looking towards creative commons licensing models. Read the full post here.

Archive.org  Open Source Audio http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_audio
OpSound http://opsound.org/music
BradSucks http://www.bradsucks.net/
Josh Woodward http://www.joshwoodward.com/music/
Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts http://ghosts.nin.com/
Jamendo http://www.jamendo.com/en/
Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/audio/
CCMixter http://ccmixter.org/
SectionZ http://www.sectionz.com/cc.asp
Audionautix http://www.audionautix.com/html/free_music.html
FreePD http://freepd.com/
SoundClick http://www.soundclick.com/business/license_list.cfm
Magnatune http://www.magnatune.com/

via createdigitalmusic

“Increasingly I think the digital divide is less about access to technology and more about the difference between those who know how and those who don’t know how,” says author Howard Rheingold, speaking in front of King’s College at Cambridge University. “The ability to know has suddenly become the ability to search and the ability to sift” and discern.

Earlier in the week Howard gave the keynote address at Reboot Britain, and he recounts some of them here. Among the Essential Literacies he cites are:

• Attention
• Participation
• Collaboration
• Critical consumption (which includes “crap detection” — we live in an age when you can get the answer to anything out of the air, but how do you know what to trust?)

Here is the 40 minute version of the talk about 21st century literacies. Found this via Smart Mobs

Business models are a tricky subject. There is an old saying among entrepreneurs that there is no real value to writing down your business model, as it will have changed by the time you commit it to paper. The joke has truth to it; I can personally attest to its veracity. But there is something brewing in the larger world of Internet business models that has wide implications: freemium.

Fred Wilson, famed VC and blogger, originally came up with the general concept of freemium, which he explained this way:

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

This concept, building an audience, then implementing paid features as later expansions, is slowly becoming the de facto model for online companies. Of course, there are many successful Internet companies today that avoid it entirely. However, they all seem to lose money. Digg, Twitter, and the other media darlings of the Web 2.0 world still live in red ink, even after scaling to mass market size. Read more at bulding43.com

The technical conditions of communication and information processing are enabling the emergence of new social and economic practices of information and knowledge production.

You may have read Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks, where he discusses Wikipedia as an example of commons-based peer-production. Did you know that you can see this relatively new model of knowledge and economic production live, in real-time? The video below is just one minute of Wikipedia edits recorded from the live changes on the irc.wikimedia.org #en.wikipedia channel. Using the IRC channel, you can watch Wikipedia being created as it happens, which means you can see the incremental production of collective knowledge as it happens. Read more at ../learninglab/joss

Great Australian advertising campaign against Internet Censorship. Just say NO to any kind of censorship!

Checke out this great blog post over at Mediafuturist.com about Music 2.0. Read more…

http://www.ted.com At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?

5 Experience Pulse is a browser-based synthesizer. You can get a free iPhone synth version of this, too!

Via Syntopia